6 ms·

I love thunderbird, been using it since day 1, and it's the only mail client I use. But it's been going downhill at a disturbing pace. With every new version, I

by elric 5y ago

I love thunderbird, been using it since day 1, and it's the only mail client I use. But it's been going downhill at a disturbing pace. With every new version, I have to worry about what's going to be broken this time. The god awful new(ish) To/CC/BCC thing still bugs me. The number of bugs in the calender in particular is mind boggling. I tried tackling some of them myself, but their code base is not the easiest to penetrate. It might be a good idea for the TB team to work on developer experience in order to attract some more contributors.

mort96 5y ago
I've been in the exact same place as you. Just this week I decided to move to Evolution. So far, so good; I don't love everything about it, but at least it works and the calendar feels like an integrated part of it rather than a bolted on afterthought. Google calendar support out of the box too, which I need for work. It doesn't work on Wayland for me, but that seems to be a general WebKitGTK bug and might be related to something Ubuntu- or NVidia-specific.
- kevincox 5y ago
  I tried moving off thunderbird to just about every graphical open source client I could find but they were all missing some key threading functionality that I use heavily. Particularly either 1. Show the discussion tree in my inbox and 2. Pull up the entire thread for a message in my inbox (or search or any other folder). I've stuck with Thunderbird because it doesn't have an major flaws. But it is definitely slow and clunky.
- ghosty141 5y ago
  Evolution looks neat but for me a huge problem is the lack of crossplatform-ness. I use windows as my main desktop OS simply because I like to play a lot of games in my free time, but at the same time I use Linux for development (at work and at home), thus it's quite important that I can use certain programms on both machines. Thunderbird seems like the only cross-platform open-source mailcient that that is at least somewhat alive.
- jhoechtl 5y ago
  I was a Thunderbird user for maybe 15 years. Switched to Evolution, imported Thunderbird and was happy from day one. No issues. Sorry that you are using Nvidia and therefore have Wayland issues. Using Wayland since 2 years and ditto no issues.
tiffanyh 5y ago
> But it's been going downhill at a disturbing pace. Mozilla announced 10 years ago (2012) that they were halting major development of Thunderbird. This is probably why. https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2012/7/6/3142046/mozilla-halt-further-development-thunderbird https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2012/7/6/3142046/mozil...
- laurent123456 5y ago
  If only they actually halted major development that would be great. The problem is that there are Mozilla developers who appear to randomly poke at the codebase and "change" stuff. One recent example is how they've changed the calendar event edit dialog. Now instead of being able to edit the event directly, you have to click on an intermediate button (so first you have a read-only dialog, then the actual edit dialog). When I've searched why they would do that, I found that it was because one developer thought that "it's probably how it should be". They've changed something that's been that way for more than 10 years with no UX study, no discussion with users - just one guy who thought that it'd be nice to change this.
  - tiffanyh 5y ago
    What you described sounds like a symptom of not having someone in charge leading execution of a consistent vision. And that’s what exactly happened 10 years ago. Mozilla handing Thunderbird over to the Community to manage. So I don’t disagree with your frustration, but am simply saying that the issue is caused by lack of centralized ownership … which Mozilla communicated a decade ago they would no longer own.
javitury 5y ago
I also love and hate Thunderbird. Feature-wise it's king but the biggest pain for me is lost folders. It happens once every couple of years but it's very frustrating, especially if the lost local folder is the only archive left from an old email account. What I've learned is that the mbox format used by Thunderbird is not reliable for long term email storage. If something seems wrong with a mailbox in Thunderbird (e.g. a few lost or corrupted emails), do NOT compact it, or you will lose your email forever. The alternative storage format, maildir, is in my experience much more reliable. I've used maildir and TUI email clients for 7 years without incidents, the only downside is the steep learning curve. Thunderbird has support for maildir but it's still experimental and I wouldn't advice anyone using Thunderbird+maildir for storing emails long term.
- basilgohar 5y ago
  Thunderbird's "maildir-style" support is proprietary in the sense that it's not standard – it's open source, but not like other maildir. It's still file-per-email, but they adapted their implementation to, for starters, support Windows file systems, as the more general maildir format is not supported natively on Windows due to the use of certain characters in the filenames. So, you can use it in Thunderbird, but not share that with other applications that also support maildir, they won't be compatible.
- knighthack 5y ago
  I really wish that they would agregate to a tested storage format, like SQLite.
dotancohen 5y ago
> With every new version, I have to worry about what's going to be broken this time. We used to be able to force IDO-8601 dates with `LC_TIME=en_DE.utf-8` but now Thunderbird ignores even that. I love Thunderbird, but with the MM-DD-YYYY date format (yes, neither little- nor big- endian but rather the day is in the fucking middle) I absolutely cannot use it.
- mbeex 5y ago
  Will this https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customize-date-time-formats-thunderbird https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customize-date-time-for... work?
  - dotancohen 5y ago
    Thank you, but that page is not current. The intl.date_time config options have been removed. And just last Friday I tried to change the Language & Appearance > Date and Time Formatting with no positive results. I assume that option is no longer read, even though it exists in the UI.
throw276543 5y ago
I use Thunderbird primarily for the offline Calendar. I wish there was a simple offline Calendar app that is isn’t bundled with email. Too bad Sunbird isn’t active anymore.
- ognarb 5y ago
  If you use Linux, you might want to try Kalendar: https://claudiocambra.com/2022/02/12/kalendar-1-0-is-out/ https://claudiocambra.com/2022/02/12/kalendar-1-0-is-out/ (there is also some experimental work to have it work on Windows) Disclaimer: I'm one of the core developer of Kalendar
iso1210 5y ago
All software goes back. Until recently I used apple maps on carplay, I could press the big direction button in the corner to toggle the audio announcement on and off Recently this updated, that function went away, it's now press the screen, wait, press a tiny icon, wait, press another tiny icon, wait UX designers always have to fiddle and make things worse
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  I wouldn’t throw one profession under the bus, probably a team effort, designers are rarely in charge
  - tommica 5y ago
    True, you need to throw a team under the bus

by elric 5y ago

mort96 5y ago

I've been in the exact same place as you. Just this week I decided to move to Evolution. So far, so good; I don't love everything about it, but at least it works and the calendar feels like an integrated part of it rather than a bolted on afterthought. Google calendar support out of the box too, which I need for work. It doesn't work on Wayland for me, but that seems to be a general WebKitGTK bug and might be related to something Ubuntu- or NVidia-specific.

kevincox 5y ago
I tried moving off thunderbird to just about every graphical open source client I could find but they were all missing some key threading functionality that I use heavily. Particularly either 1. Show the discussion tree in my inbox and 2. Pull up the entire thread for a message in my inbox (or search or any other folder). I've stuck with Thunderbird because it doesn't have an major flaws. But it is definitely slow and clunky.
ghosty141 5y ago
Evolution looks neat but for me a huge problem is the lack of crossplatform-ness. I use windows as my main desktop OS simply because I like to play a lot of games in my free time, but at the same time I use Linux for development (at work and at home), thus it's quite important that I can use certain programms on both machines. Thunderbird seems like the only cross-platform open-source mailcient that that is at least somewhat alive.
jhoechtl 5y ago
I was a Thunderbird user for maybe 15 years. Switched to Evolution, imported Thunderbird and was happy from day one. No issues. Sorry that you are using Nvidia and therefore have Wayland issues. Using Wayland since 2 years and ditto no issues.

tiffanyh 5y ago

> But it's been going downhill at a disturbing pace. Mozilla announced 10 years ago (2012) that they were halting major development of Thunderbird. This is probably why. https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2012/7/6/3142046/mozilla-halt-further-development-thunderbird https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2012/7/6/3142046/mozil...

laurent123456 5y ago
If only they actually halted major development that would be great. The problem is that there are Mozilla developers who appear to randomly poke at the codebase and "change" stuff. One recent example is how they've changed the calendar event edit dialog. Now instead of being able to edit the event directly, you have to click on an intermediate button (so first you have a read-only dialog, then the actual edit dialog). When I've searched why they would do that, I found that it was because one developer thought that "it's probably how it should be". They've changed something that's been that way for more than 10 years with no UX study, no discussion with users - just one guy who thought that it'd be nice to change this.
- tiffanyh 5y ago
  What you described sounds like a symptom of not having someone in charge leading execution of a consistent vision. And that’s what exactly happened 10 years ago. Mozilla handing Thunderbird over to the Community to manage. So I don’t disagree with your frustration, but am simply saying that the issue is caused by lack of centralized ownership … which Mozilla communicated a decade ago they would no longer own.

javitury 5y ago

I also love and hate Thunderbird. Feature-wise it's king but the biggest pain for me is lost folders. It happens once every couple of years but it's very frustrating, especially if the lost local folder is the only archive left from an old email account. What I've learned is that the mbox format used by Thunderbird is not reliable for long term email storage. If something seems wrong with a mailbox in Thunderbird (e.g. a few lost or corrupted emails), do NOT compact it, or you will lose your email forever. The alternative storage format, maildir, is in my experience much more reliable. I've used maildir and TUI email clients for 7 years without incidents, the only downside is the steep learning curve. Thunderbird has support for maildir but it's still experimental and I wouldn't advice anyone using Thunderbird+maildir for storing emails long term.

basilgohar 5y ago
Thunderbird's "maildir-style" support is proprietary in the sense that it's not standard – it's open source, but not like other maildir. It's still file-per-email, but they adapted their implementation to, for starters, support Windows file systems, as the more general maildir format is not supported natively on Windows due to the use of certain characters in the filenames. So, you can use it in Thunderbird, but not share that with other applications that also support maildir, they won't be compatible.
knighthack 5y ago
I really wish that they would agregate to a tested storage format, like SQLite.

dotancohen 5y ago

> With every new version, I have to worry about what's going to be broken this time. We used to be able to force IDO-8601 dates with `LC_TIME=en_DE.utf-8` but now Thunderbird ignores even that. I love Thunderbird, but with the MM-DD-YYYY date format (yes, neither little- nor big- endian but rather the day is in the fucking middle) I absolutely cannot use it.

mbeex 5y ago
Will this https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customize-date-time-formats-thunderbird https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customize-date-time-for... work?
- dotancohen 5y ago
  Thank you, but that page is not current. The intl.date_time config options have been removed. And just last Friday I tried to change the Language & Appearance > Date and Time Formatting with no positive results. I assume that option is no longer read, even though it exists in the UI.

throw276543 5y ago

I use Thunderbird primarily for the offline Calendar. I wish there was a simple offline Calendar app that is isn’t bundled with email. Too bad Sunbird isn’t active anymore.

ognarb 5y ago
If you use Linux, you might want to try Kalendar: https://claudiocambra.com/2022/02/12/kalendar-1-0-is-out/ https://claudiocambra.com/2022/02/12/kalendar-1-0-is-out/ (there is also some experimental work to have it work on Windows) Disclaimer: I'm one of the core developer of Kalendar

iso1210 5y ago

All software goes back. Until recently I used apple maps on carplay, I could press the big direction button in the corner to toggle the audio announcement on and off Recently this updated, that function went away, it's now press the screen, wait, press a tiny icon, wait, press another tiny icon, wait UX designers always have to fiddle and make things worse

micromacrofoot 5y ago
I wouldn’t throw one profession under the bus, probably a team effort, designers are rarely in charge
- tommica 5y ago
  True, you need to throw a team under the bus