5 ms·

> 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 foc

by 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 The protocols (POP3/SMTP/IMAP) are heavily outdated as well, and no one is seriously improving it in order to make them more fitting for today's needs (by improving, I mean to make it more real-time, more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
> with good extension support Except that Thunderbird has been actively holding back its own extension support, diverting people to the silly "WebExtensions" and making it more difficult to load and run regular extensions. (In Firefox it's even worse - it seems you can't load regular extensions at all these days.) > 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. It is not dying, but rather - powerful commercial interests are trying to assassinate it. These companies love to control your private data, analyze it, sell it, pass it on to the government (Snowden revelations), and use it to market stuff to you. We all need to make a concerted effort to change this state of affairs.
mgaunard 4y ago
The only "improvement" to HTTP I'm aware of is HTTP/2, which is just plain retarded. HTTP/3 is the same thing but implemented correctly, and is barely used at all. Both are overengineered systems designed to solve one thing only: establish multiple reliable transmissions streams between two endpoints while only doing the handshake once. It does very little that's actually useful in practice.
thesuitonym 4y ago
What do you mean by "more real-time"? Email is instant, unless you have a SEG in front of your server scanning everything. Do you want email to be chat? If so, I'd say maybe you don't really understand email.
wizofaus 4y ago
"Email is dying" - one of those statements folks keep making while the number of email messages sent/received each year continues to grow. There's a lot wrong with email protocols (it's still stupidly easy to craft very convincing phishing emails, and most junk filters are dangerously bad), but what's the alternative for the most common use cases? There's no other protocol where you can just hand over or publish your address in order to receive important/ structured/persistent information from another party. It doesn't require signing up to some single proprietary messaging platform and the fact it's existed for 50 years gives reasonable confidence it will still be around in another 50.

by nirui 4y ago

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

> with good extension support Except that Thunderbird has been actively holding back its own extension support, diverting people to the silly "WebExtensions" and making it more difficult to load and run regular extensions. (In Firefox it's even worse - it seems you can't load regular extensions at all these days.) > 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. It is not dying, but rather - powerful commercial interests are trying to assassinate it. These companies love to control your private data, analyze it, sell it, pass it on to the government (Snowden revelations), and use it to market stuff to you. We all need to make a concerted effort to change this state of affairs.

mgaunard 4y ago

The only "improvement" to HTTP I'm aware of is HTTP/2, which is just plain retarded. HTTP/3 is the same thing but implemented correctly, and is barely used at all. Both are overengineered systems designed to solve one thing only: establish multiple reliable transmissions streams between two endpoints while only doing the handshake once. It does very little that's actually useful in practice.

thesuitonym 4y ago

What do you mean by "more real-time"? Email is instant, unless you have a SEG in front of your server scanning everything. Do you want email to be chat? If so, I'd say maybe you don't really understand email.

wizofaus 4y ago

"Email is dying" - one of those statements folks keep making while the number of email messages sent/received each year continues to grow. There's a lot wrong with email protocols (it's still stupidly easy to craft very convincing phishing emails, and most junk filters are dangerously bad), but what's the alternative for the most common use cases? There's no other protocol where you can just hand over or publish your address in order to receive important/ structured/persistent information from another party. It doesn't require signing up to some single proprietary messaging platform and the fact it's existed for 50 years gives reasonable confidence it will still be around in another 50.