10 ms·

> One of the core philosophies behind the development of Thunderbird 102 was doing more with less. > ...you’ll find out-of-box support for the popular, decentr

> One of the core philosophies behind the development of Thunderbird 102 was doing more with less. > ...you’ll find out-of-box support for the popular, decentralized chat protocol Matrix in Thunderbird 102 Personally, I see these two statements as being directly contradictory. I'm glad to see Thunderbird's maintenance continuing well, but I want it to be a focused app. On the other hand, I have been glad to have out of the box Lightning integration, so perhaps I will come to enjoy the Matrix addition as well.

Closi 4y ago
Ah yes, Matrix support added before Exchange support!
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  Honest question: is exchange support still relevant nowadays? A lot of companies seem to have switched to Office365 which is not the same thing and most of the one I have worked with block third-party clients in their security policies.
  - nvr219 4y ago
    I've always used Exchange support to include Exchange Online support and yes that's very important. I would switch to Thunderbird the day they announced full Exchange support.
  - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
    Office365 is pretty much just Exchange underneath. And tons of larger orgs still use on-prem Exchange. Microsoft just announced the next version of on-premise Exchange for launch in 2024. As cloud costs ratchet up and the weaknesses become more apparent, I suspect you'll see orgs start migrating back away from the cloud.
  - gpanders 4y ago
    Unfortunately yes. Some organizations (like mine) use Office365 and disable IMAP/SMTP, so the only way to interface to the mail server is via Exchange :(
  - Arn_Thor 4y ago
    You'd be surprised. In certain sectors, companies prefer to keep as little as possible of their sensitive information in the cloud, emails included. Running their own exchange server is a common way to do that.
- addicted 4y ago
  Exchange support is probably ridiculously hard because I can’t imagine there’s all that many open source implementations for it. Matrix support is probably a ton easier. Besides, matrix is designed to be implemented by multiple parties. Exchange isn’t. In fact, exchange is almost certainly the opposite.
  - digisign 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Evolution Believe there are libraries available as well.
    - jeroenhd 4y ago
      The exchange support for Evolution never worked well for me. There was always something that didn't sync, didn't get detected, or wasn't supported. I don't blame the devs, Exchange is a proprietary standard so you can't expect it to work well. It's like the reverse-engineered drivers for hardware the manufacturer doesn't bother to write Linux support or sufficient documentation for: it doesn't work great, but that's despite the devs' best effort, not because of it.
      - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
        > The exchange support for Evolution never worked well for me. it has been working beautifully for me in the past 6-7 years including calendar and contacts > the manufacturer doesn't bother to write Linux support or sufficient documentation for you mean documentation, like this? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/client-developer/web-service-reference/ews-reference-for-exchange https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/client-developer/w... Microsoft has many flaws, but not writing documentation it's not usually one of them.
  - plus 4y ago
    In addition to Evolution mentioned in another reply, KDE's KMail supports exchange (through Akonadi), and it seems to work quite well for me.
  - 4y ago
- dizzant 4y ago
  This. I've been looking for a new Exchange client since Outlook Web stopped properly supporting Firefox. I reached immediately for Thunderbird, but switched away quickly because of the need to pay for (somewhat clumsy) Exchange integration. If Owl were free, I wouldn't mind the long delays or weird synchronization issues. As a subscription service, I'll take my business elsewhere.
  - _emacsomancer_ 4y ago
    There's DavMail ( http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ ) - which you can use with Thunderbird or any other client.
  - chrjxnandns 4y ago
    How is OWA not working for you on FF? (Genuinely curious)
    - dizzant 4y ago
      OWA has a known issue with Firefox on Linux where it incorrectly believes that Ctrl is pressed while typing an email. This results in frequent missed characters and spurious actions, including moving focus to the search bar, archiving messages, saving the current message as a draft and closing it, etc. This makes OWA extremely frustrating to use. Another issue with OWA is the unhelpful completions (which I've noted before on HN), which in my experience seem to be related to the spurious actions (more suggested completions = more spurious actions)
      - pure_simplicity 4y ago
        Finally, so this is what was happening.
  - fsiefken 4y ago
    What specific long delays or weird synchronization issues do you experience? I just bought the plugin but don't notice any yet with ~7000 mails. Did you find a good alternative? I read above that using DavMail as a proxy can also work.
- inferiorhuman 4y ago
  Matrix support while the editor itself is left to rot. I finally switched away from self-hosted to Proton. Buh bye thunderbird!
- Zardoz84 4y ago
  you not need that. Ask to enable SMTP on the exchange server, and use any email client with it.
cowtools 4y ago
To be fair, Matrix is a very email-like protocol. I think it makes sense to have it in an email client, especially if you're going to have RSS feeds as well.
- anotherevan 4y ago
  Agreed, we should take them both out. :-) To be honest though, I'm interested in how the Matrix support will look. While I think the Element client is nice, and certainly the best of the Matrix clients I've tried, I wouldn't mind not having to have that during work hours so much. For RSS, I'm sticking with Newsblur though!
  - abnercoimbre 4y ago
    Thank you for the tip with newsblur! I'm struggling to see pricing info. How much is the subscription?
    - anotherevan 4y ago
      It's about two thirds of the way down the page of https://newsblur.com/ https://newsblur.com/ (when you're not logged in). Paid account is US$36/year. You can sign up with a free try-before-you-buy account to give it a go first, though.
nirui 4y ago
> well, but I want it to be a focused app Best of the both worlds can be achieved, for example, with good extension support. That way, Thunderbird devs can focus on a set of core features, while the community handles the rest. Also, why not look Thunderbird as a Communication Software instead of just an Email Client? Let's just face the fact here: email is dying. Once it was one of the most important tools for communicating on the Internet, now days for majority of people, it's just something comes with a Google/Microsoft/Apple account. The protocols (POP3/SMTP/IMAP) are heavily outdated as well, and no one is seriously improving it in order to make them more fitting for today's needs (by improving, I mean to make it more real-time, more multi-media friendly, and more efficient so it can transmit a huge amount of data simultaneously at lighting speed). Just take look how many improvement has been done to HTTP as a comparison, it's sad that email protocols received so little loves. At this circumstances, I would say any optimization done to the ecosystem is welcome. Also, I like the new interface more, IMO it makes Thunderbird at least 10 years younger.
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  Well the solution to old email protocols is JMAP, which Fastmail supports. But it's going to probably take time until JMAP support really picks up with both mail providers and client developers.
  - nirui 4y ago
    Based on what I've read from RFC8620, their approach is quite smart. It's basically turning email protocol into a set of HTTP RPCs, thus shifts all the transport-related technical problems away. The downside is that, JSON codes creates redundancy, sometime the redundancy is bigger than the meaningful data itself. But on the other side, you can now host an email server behind a web CDN. I like the development overall.
  - tankenmate 4y ago
    JMAP was largely designed by Bron, the CEO of Fastmail, and his team.
- einpoklum 4y ago
uni_rule 4y ago
It makes sense in the context of the program being a spinoff of the Netscape suite (or early Mozilla suite) which had multiple parts including the browser. After all this program still has a NNTP client jammed in it, adding matrix is simply a matter of modernizing what was already there (the original IRC client).

Closi 4y ago

Ah yes, Matrix support added before Exchange support!

WastingMyTime89 4y ago
Honest question: is exchange support still relevant nowadays? A lot of companies seem to have switched to Office365 which is not the same thing and most of the one I have worked with block third-party clients in their security policies.
- nvr219 4y ago
  I've always used Exchange support to include Exchange Online support and yes that's very important. I would switch to Thunderbird the day they announced full Exchange support.
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  Office365 is pretty much just Exchange underneath. And tons of larger orgs still use on-prem Exchange. Microsoft just announced the next version of on-premise Exchange for launch in 2024. As cloud costs ratchet up and the weaknesses become more apparent, I suspect you'll see orgs start migrating back away from the cloud.
- gpanders 4y ago
  Unfortunately yes. Some organizations (like mine) use Office365 and disable IMAP/SMTP, so the only way to interface to the mail server is via Exchange :(
- Arn_Thor 4y ago
  You'd be surprised. In certain sectors, companies prefer to keep as little as possible of their sensitive information in the cloud, emails included. Running their own exchange server is a common way to do that.
addicted 4y ago
Exchange support is probably ridiculously hard because I can’t imagine there’s all that many open source implementations for it. Matrix support is probably a ton easier. Besides, matrix is designed to be implemented by multiple parties. Exchange isn’t. In fact, exchange is almost certainly the opposite.
- digisign 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Evolution Believe there are libraries available as well.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    The exchange support for Evolution never worked well for me. There was always something that didn't sync, didn't get detected, or wasn't supported. I don't blame the devs, Exchange is a proprietary standard so you can't expect it to work well. It's like the reverse-engineered drivers for hardware the manufacturer doesn't bother to write Linux support or sufficient documentation for: it doesn't work great, but that's despite the devs' best effort, not because of it.
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      > The exchange support for Evolution never worked well for me. it has been working beautifully for me in the past 6-7 years including calendar and contacts > the manufacturer doesn't bother to write Linux support or sufficient documentation for you mean documentation, like this? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/client-developer/web-service-reference/ews-reference-for-exchange https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/client-developer/w... Microsoft has many flaws, but not writing documentation it's not usually one of them.
- plus 4y ago
  In addition to Evolution mentioned in another reply, KDE's KMail supports exchange (through Akonadi), and it seems to work quite well for me.
- 4y ago
dizzant 4y ago
This. I've been looking for a new Exchange client since Outlook Web stopped properly supporting Firefox. I reached immediately for Thunderbird, but switched away quickly because of the need to pay for (somewhat clumsy) Exchange integration. If Owl were free, I wouldn't mind the long delays or weird synchronization issues. As a subscription service, I'll take my business elsewhere.
- _emacsomancer_ 4y ago
  There's DavMail ( http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ ) - which you can use with Thunderbird or any other client.
- chrjxnandns 4y ago
  How is OWA not working for you on FF? (Genuinely curious)
  - dizzant 4y ago
    OWA has a known issue with Firefox on Linux where it incorrectly believes that Ctrl is pressed while typing an email. This results in frequent missed characters and spurious actions, including moving focus to the search bar, archiving messages, saving the current message as a draft and closing it, etc. This makes OWA extremely frustrating to use. Another issue with OWA is the unhelpful completions (which I've noted before on HN), which in my experience seem to be related to the spurious actions (more suggested completions = more spurious actions)
    - pure_simplicity 4y ago
      Finally, so this is what was happening.
- fsiefken 4y ago
  What specific long delays or weird synchronization issues do you experience? I just bought the plugin but don't notice any yet with ~7000 mails. Did you find a good alternative? I read above that using DavMail as a proxy can also work.
inferiorhuman 4y ago
Matrix support while the editor itself is left to rot. I finally switched away from self-hosted to Proton. Buh bye thunderbird!
Zardoz84 4y ago
you not need that. Ask to enable SMTP on the exchange server, and use any email client with it.

cowtools 4y ago

To be fair, Matrix is a very email-like protocol. I think it makes sense to have it in an email client, especially if you're going to have RSS feeds as well.

anotherevan 4y ago
Agreed, we should take them both out. :-) To be honest though, I'm interested in how the Matrix support will look. While I think the Element client is nice, and certainly the best of the Matrix clients I've tried, I wouldn't mind not having to have that during work hours so much. For RSS, I'm sticking with Newsblur though!
- abnercoimbre 4y ago
  Thank you for the tip with newsblur! I'm struggling to see pricing info. How much is the subscription?
  - anotherevan 4y ago
    It's about two thirds of the way down the page of https://newsblur.com/ https://newsblur.com/ (when you're not logged in). Paid account is US$36/year. You can sign up with a free try-before-you-buy account to give it a go first, though.

nirui 4y ago

> well, but I want it to be a focused app Best of the both worlds can be achieved, for example, with good extension support. That way, Thunderbird devs can focus on a set of core features, while the community handles the rest. Also, why not look Thunderbird as a Communication Software instead of just an Email Client? Let's just face the fact here: email is dying. Once it was one of the most important tools for communicating on the Internet, now days for majority of people, it's just something comes with a Google/Microsoft/Apple account. The protocols (POP3/SMTP/IMAP) are heavily outdated as well, and no one is seriously improving it in order to make them more fitting for today's needs (by improving, I mean to make it more real-time, more multi-media friendly, and more efficient so it can transmit a huge amount of data simultaneously at lighting speed). Just take look how many improvement has been done to HTTP as a comparison, it's sad that email protocols received so little loves. At this circumstances, I would say any optimization done to the ecosystem is welcome. Also, I like the new interface more, IMO it makes Thunderbird at least 10 years younger.

ocdtrekkie 4y ago
Well the solution to old email protocols is JMAP, which Fastmail supports. But it's going to probably take time until JMAP support really picks up with both mail providers and client developers.
- nirui 4y ago
  Based on what I've read from RFC8620, their approach is quite smart. It's basically turning email protocol into a set of HTTP RPCs, thus shifts all the transport-related technical problems away. The downside is that, JSON codes creates redundancy, sometime the redundancy is bigger than the meaningful data itself. But on the other side, you can now host an email server behind a web CDN. I like the development overall.
- tankenmate 4y ago
  JMAP was largely designed by Bron, the CEO of Fastmail, and his team.
einpoklum 4y ago

uni_rule 4y ago

It makes sense in the context of the program being a spinoff of the Netscape suite (or early Mozilla suite) which had multiple parts including the browser. After all this program still has a NNTP client jammed in it, adding matrix is simply a matter of modernizing what was already there (the original IRC client).