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Thunderbird Supernova Preview: The New Calendar Design

CamouflagedKiwi 4y ago
This would look a lot better with 'real' event titles. The top level picture has "Event title" repeated about a million times, so everything looks the same; in practice events are much more distinct. The later ones are slightly better, at least.
boplicity 4y ago
My number one feature request for Thunberbird is the automatic display of all conversations from a contact, when I'm reading an email message from them. Lack of this feature is the primary reason I've switched to an alternative email tool. I suspect it would be quite a lot of work to implement, though. Wish I knew even the basics of the Thunderbird codebase, but it is very far outside of my basic hacking ability.
- jer0me 4y ago
  What email tool do you use now?
  - boplicity 4y ago
    I've tried a few with this feature, not totally happy with any of them. Em Client Missive Mailspring
adipginting 4y ago
Will it connect with Gnome Online Accounts by default?
jacooper 4y ago
Finally, a much needed redesign for Thunderbird. I cant wait to switch from Geary
oblib 4y ago
I started using Thunderbird when my old Mac's "Mail" app basically croaked. I bought a newer used Mac a couple months ago and got the latest version of both Thunderbird and Apple's Mail app. Both of them were much easier to set up, and Apple's Mail app is a lot better now in that regard so I used both of them for a few weeks and Thunderbird won me over. Fair to say that after using it for so long it was more familiar but it's noticeably faster and the latest version has updated the UI and it's very clean and compact. I don't use the calendar, but I do think the new design is a big improvement and it's great to see they've been working on it.
rubatuga 4y ago
Looks like there might be a bug with the calendar, it is showing the date for Saturday as March 6 instead of March 5.
dotancohen 4y ago
It seems that Supernova is the name of "the new Thunderbird UI". Oh please not. I'm so jaded regarding updates to core functionality software. Is there a list of actual problems with the old Thunderbird UI? Ones that could not be resolved without a rewrite? Otherwise, what is the goal of updating this extremely functional UI?
Makobado1 4y ago
globular-toast 4y ago
Why on earth does "month" view still exist in digital calendars? Even worse, many (e.g. Google, Microsoft) don't even have an option for anything better (Thunderbird has "multiweek" which is far more useful). Can anyone think of another relic from paper-based systems that we still cling to for unknown reasons? Imagine if the web could only be viewed in whole "pages". But pages don't even negatively affect reading prose that much. Calendars, on the other hand, are all about context. On the first of the month I get the context of the next few following weeks. Useful. But at the end of the month I get the few preceding weeks?! What good is that? Why would my needs change depending on the time of the month? I either need the context or I don't. Month view makes absolutely no sense.
IshKebab 4y ago
Why can literally nobody get calendar month views right? It should be a continuously scrollable list of weeks. Not a book with each month on a different page. It's not paper. Grrr. Actually once upon a time the Android calendar did work like that... but then they changed it back to the traditional idiotic design.
- brimwats 4y ago
  CalenGoo does it like that and it's the one feature of CalenGoo i wish I could turn off! I like the book pages. I guess there really is a preference for everyone
  - IshKebab 4y ago
    Doesn't it annoy you when events span the month boundaries and you have to keep flipping back and forth between them and finding the corresponding days? I might have to try CalenGoo!
cobbaut 4y ago
I seem to be the only one here who really does not want a calendar in an e-mail application. They are different things, and should imho be separate programs. Same for chat and tasks.
xiekomb 4y ago
I hope sync with apple calendars will work out of the box. It’s just a pain right now (events disappearing randomly without any way to debug)
awill 4y ago
This looks very good, but it's still a long way away.....
gespadas 4y ago
I can't wait !!!
darkwater 4y ago
Wow, super neat! I use TB as my daily driver but for calendar I resort to the GCal webview because is almost unusable, especially the "view event" window which is also an "edit event" window and that is very visually cluttered. Can't wait to test this on my laptop!
nvrspyx 4y ago
> By default, getting to this event preview screen requires only 1 click. And it’s 2 clicks to open the edit view (which you can do either in a new tab or a separate floating window). Phew. I was a bit worried that tab support was going away because the UI in the screenshots with the giant search bar in the top toolbar doesn't seem conducive for it. I'm curious to see how tabs look/work with the new UI.
INeedMoreRam 4y ago
I use Thunderbird exclusively for personal accounts and Outlook for my employer. Very excited to see Thunderbird calendar being modernized since I feel like it’s always been a step behind Outlook’s.
w4rh4wk5 4y ago
While it looks nice, can I please not have another problematic Thunderbird update, please. I am still on 91.13.1 because 102 is causing various issues, most (maybe all) of them already reported.
- p4bl0 4y ago
  Yes, the v102 upgrade was a nightmare for many users. I actually had an exchange about that with the person behind Thunderbird's Twitter account after their announcement of Supernova: > Neat. Please do test this thoroughly before release to avoid the v102 fiasco :). It made things difficult for both users and evangelists who take time to help others in using Thunderbird. [1] > We hear you. Which is why we're doing this for Supernova: [2] >> In the roadmap for Thunderbird Supernova (v. 115) you'll notice our goal is to complete most features by Q4 2022. That's because we're entering"feature-freeze" by end of 2022, then spending several months on polish. We want it to exceed your expectations! [1] https://twitter.com/p4bl0/status/1590400298517864448 https://twitter.com/p4bl0/status/1590400298517864448 [2] https://twitter.com/mozthunderbird/status/1590402413155844097 https://twitter.com/mozthunderbird/status/159040241315584409...
  - rhaway84773 4y ago
    Who would have thought civil exchanges about an issue was possible on the internet. And that too on Twitter! Well done to you and the Thunderbird Twitter manager, along with the Thunderbird team that took action on trying to rectify the mistakes they made with their past release.
- INeedMoreRam 4y ago
  I upgraded to v102 and have had zero issues. In fact, it runs perfectly on my Kubuntu machine.
  - squidbeak 4y ago
    Which experience does nothing to help the poster you're replying to.
extr0pian 4y ago
I've been using Thunderbird for both work email and personal email (via Protonmail Bridge) for a few years now. I'm really stoked to see it's getting the attention it deserves.
- RachelF 4y ago
  Yes, it is great. I have to use Outlook 365 and am surprised how much better Thunderbird is than Microsoft's offering.
beanaroo 4y ago
This looks great! One minor thing I'd like to see, and I don't know if this is to do with the underlying calendaring spec, is the differentiation of physical location and online meeting. Some events may have both and I have found the "Join" buttons on desktop notifications for Outlook/Teams to be pretty convenient.
lavventura 4y ago
In future it would be cool to see integration of Emacs's org-mode agenda
- rayiner 4y ago
  Drive both from the same CalDAV calendar: https://github.com/jackkamm/org-caldav/tree/fix-tests https://github.com/jackkamm/org-caldav/tree/fix-tests. Todo sync works pretty well too.
- coolwulf 4y ago
  In principal, you could syn your org-mode agenda with Google calendar then view it in Thunderbird https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-google-sync.html https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-google-sync.html
Night_Thastus 4y ago
Since I already have Thunderbird, I'm starting to wonder if I should swap off VueMinder for Thunderbird's calendar. Anyone used both and thoughts?
zerr 4y ago
Are they using vanilla JavaScript?
PaulKeeble 4y ago
This doesn't look all that different to the existing calendar really. They have moved the events section to the side instead of at the top and changed some of the sectioning going for the material view where the distinction between elements is just replaced with background coloured space. I am largely indifferent to this change, it doesn't look like its big or important or functionally impressive in any way. I am not going to collapse the weekends and it seems to be the only other new feature being offered is messing with colours for categories. I suspect most people use calendars for categories already, this may be an improvement for some people but its really not worth trying to merge calendars for this purpose as an existing user unless they make that easy (which there is no suggestion they will). Change for fashion sake and nothing that users have been asking for, sums up all development out of Mozilla at the moment.
- krick 4y ago
  Yeah. Honestly, I guess I cannot speak as a Thunderbird calendar user anymore, but precisely for that reason: it sucked so much compared to ubiqotuos Google Calendar, that I somehow couldn't justify using it anymore. Then I stopped using Google too, but I use desktop email client much less anyways now. I'm not sure what really changed here. Maybe I should try and see it, but... really, I wish they'd just copied Google Calendar UI completely, making it an offline copy. Surely it's not perfect, but it was so, so much more fluent the last I tried. I mean, for me, it kinda did everything I wanted to, the only problem I ever had with it was that it's Google.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Accacin 4y ago
  It's easy to say that, but I've had friends and colleagues not want to use Thunderbird because of it's UI. Honestly I think this would be enough to make them take a second look. The fact that you are indifferent (as am I) is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.. They've made it more attractive to new users and also haven't alienated their existing user base.
  - 4y ago
tannhaeuser 4y ago
I really really like that Thunderbird is getting maintenance and new features even when I thought it had been abandoned by Mozilla years ago. Though I'm currently using Mail.app (and having used web mail before), I'm curious what happened, who are the developers, how the funding is going, what the relation to Moz is, and whether I should switch?
- randomluck040 4y ago
  I also use Mail.app privately but Thunderbird on any Windows or Linux machine I work with. Outlook might look nice, however, I can’t bring myself to spend time to figure out the calendar in Outlook. When Thunderbird was not available, I’ve defaulted to looking up my appointments on Google calendar in the browser because that’s what my team at work is using.
- rendx 4y ago
  https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/
vondur 4y ago
I'd really like it work with Office365 out of the box. I know there are add-ons that do it (Owl being one of them), but native support just like the support for Gmail accounts would be great.
- dotancohen 4y ago
  Another happy Owl user here. One thing that I actually like about Owl being paid (very inexpensive as it is) is that I trust it will be updated RIGHT NOW if Office 365 changes their non-API. As a business with paying customers, I expect that they are on top of these things.
- kdtsh 4y ago
  This is the only real downside of Thunderbird as far as I’m concerned, other things like aesthetics just being matters of taste where you can’t please everyone. It’s become an annoying downside for me lately because one of my email addresses now only supports the web client and Exchange; no more IMAPS. I really cannot find another email client on Linux that works as well as Thunderbird though, at least not one that also supports Exchange, so Thunderbird it is. The new UI in OP looks great too.
Animats 4y ago
Do not want mail program talking to some third party cloud service.
- rexreed 4y ago
  Such as an email server (POP, IMAP, SMTP)?
  - codeulike 4y ago
    Ouch
  - Animats 4y ago
    That's the second party. Some outside cloud provider connected to the mail client brings in a third party.
    - NoboruWataya 4y ago
      I thought the user was the second party. Anyway, assuming you're talking about Sync, I find it quite helpful for the browser so have no issues with it being extended to Thunderbird. It is, as I understand it, always optional, and I even believe it's possible to self-host it, though I haven't tried.
      - somat 4y ago
        every once in a while I look into what it takes to self host it and never get very far. The primary problem is that it is an internal tool used by mozilla and it shows, Don't get me wrong, I think it is great that mozilla provides the code but it does not have any of the polish that a tool intended for others to use get. I am sure I could get it going if I devoted a weekend to the effort. but have not yet been willing to put that much time into it. off my head, first you have to get the account service up and running then you can get the sync service going then you have to trick your firefox installation to use your services.
- Certhas 4y ago
_zamorano_ 4y ago
Everytime an application I use daily gets a redesign, my palms gets sweaty
- cassepipe 4y ago
  Same but I find the new recent design to be a betterment this time. Not hard considering Thunderbird had imho a terrible UI. The left panel looks really nice and make the app different functions more readable.
notesinthefield 4y ago
Do CardDAV and CalDAV work natively yet?
- RealStickman_ 4y ago
  I've been using both those features for a while with my own Nextcloud server
  - krolden 4y ago
    Yes but you need tbsync to use it with nextcloud cal/carddav no?
    - RealStickman_ 4y ago
      I don't have tbsync and I don't think any other extension I use added support for that. Simply select "On the Network" when adding a calendar, set a user name and enter the remote dav location. For address books use "Add CardDAV Address Book", also username and dav location.
- gespadas 4y ago
  They work already! When I add my email account, Thunderbird automatically configure my email, my calendar, my contacts, my tasks... all from my server. I even don't have to configure them each one manually.
  - notesinthefield 4y ago
    Really? Wow! Ive never been able to get everything from fastmail to come over correctly. My calendars were read only and I didnt get full contact info.
linker3000 4y ago
Just please please please fix the calendar so that online meeting links make it properly into the notes section of appointments.
clircle 4y ago
Really looking forward to the firefox sync integration!
java-man 4y ago
the grid lines seem too intense (dark). please make them the same intensity as the calendar border in the top left corner.
majkinetor 4y ago
Great update. Its awesome to see sync is getting implemented, that makes on-boarding on new machine trivial. Calendar needed this too.
defulmere 4y ago
The only new Thunderbird calendar feature I'd like to see it the ability to turn off calendaring in Thunderbird.
no_wizard 4y ago
Looks nice to me, granted I have not been following Thunderbird, as I believed it to be dead[0] over a decade ago. Its nice to see that the community has keep it alive! For Thunderbird users, do you find it interfaces well with Google Workspace Email (Gmail) and Calendar? I prefer native clients to their interface usually but Apple Mail isn't the greatest so I've been using the web interface and I don't particularly enjoy it. I use BusyCal for calendar and I like it, but I'd love to have it in a "suite" like this, just makes things easier. [0]: https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/6/3142046/mozilla-halt-further-development-thunderbird https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/6/3142046/mozilla-halt-furth...
- chromaton 4y ago
  The Calendar sync via the gdata-provider plugin is currently broken.
- gnull 4y ago
  It works fine, unless you want to use Google Calendar and a non-Gmail email together. Then it goes nuts and makes your Gmail send out calendar invites instead of the email you use.
  - mvdwoord 4y ago
    Oh god, I have some horrible memories when I set up a forwarder from employers Lotus Notes calendar to my Google Calendar. It turned out that Google was very aggressively parsing the body test and recipients of all events and re-sending invites. Also for that company all hands meeting I was invited to, in my first week. No way to disable this, so ended up having to write some custom parser for exported ics files, to strip out the email addresses.
    - gnull 4y ago
      Evolution is working fine with the setup I described, try it out if you need to do this again.
- tidbeck 4y ago
pachico 4y ago
This is an honest question from someone who didn't use nor install Thunderbird for over a decade. Is it better than Google calendar? I mean, am I missing a lot by using the Google apps as they are from a browser? I hope I am, to be honest, so I can give it a try.
- gombosg 4y ago
  One advantage is that it supports displaying events from multiple Google accounts at the same time. :)
  - robertlacok 4y ago
    You can always share your calendar from one account with another, and hide/show it in the right panel ;)
  - pachico 4y ago
    Weirdly enough, this is what happens in mobile too but not in desktop, for reasons that are unknown to me.
donatj 4y ago
What are the odds of this coming to a standalone Sunbird client? I've never really liked my email and calendar being in the same app. Especially not the same window, makes cross referencing a PITA. One of the things Apple gets right.
- muppetman 4y ago
  I understand this doesn't address your core complaint, but you can right click on the calender tab in Thunderbird and open it in a new window. It's not the same thing at all, but it's a workaround I use.
paxys 4y ago
Very relieved to see that the new calendar looks...like a calendar. It is definitely not an area that needs some radical redesign. Incremental quality changes are the way to go.
zahllos 4y ago
Be nice of them to fix outstanding bugs, like the nondeterministic turing machine that is doing anything with certificates in Thunderbird e.g. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1481969 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1481969 The javascript disaster that is the compose window refuses to find certificates that NSS finds, because... something to do with intermediate certificates. Signing messages is a feature thunderbird has had forever, yet is unstable and nobody is dealing with the obvious open issue in their bug tracker, open since v60 and ignored. Honestly what I want from an email client is this, plus cardbook (the default address book can't talk carddav, what century are we in), plus calendars. That's it. That's what I want a mail client to do.
- diarrhea 4y ago
  Thunderbird has had native CardDAV support for a while now. I’ve been able to ditch Cardbook (although the latter has more functionality).
kayson 4y ago
Really excited about the addition of FFSync, but man do I wish they would properly open source the backend so I can self-host it. (There is some code available online but it doesn't really work)
ajmarsh 4y ago
I wonder if it's some of the same work BetterBird is doing? https://www.betterbird.eu/ https://www.betterbird.eu/

This would look a lot better with 'real' event titles. The top level picture has "Event title" repeated about a million times, so everything looks the same; in practice events are much more distinct. The later ones are slightly better, at least.

boplicity 4y ago

My number one feature request for Thunberbird is the automatic display of all conversations from a contact, when I'm reading an email message from them. Lack of this feature is the primary reason I've switched to an alternative email tool. I suspect it would be quite a lot of work to implement, though. Wish I knew even the basics of the Thunderbird codebase, but it is very far outside of my basic hacking ability.

jer0me 4y ago
What email tool do you use now?
- boplicity 4y ago
  I've tried a few with this feature, not totally happy with any of them. Em Client Missive Mailspring

adipginting 4y ago

Will it connect with Gnome Online Accounts by default?

jacooper 4y ago

Finally, a much needed redesign for Thunderbird. I cant wait to switch from Geary

oblib 4y ago

I started using Thunderbird when my old Mac's "Mail" app basically croaked. I bought a newer used Mac a couple months ago and got the latest version of both Thunderbird and Apple's Mail app. Both of them were much easier to set up, and Apple's Mail app is a lot better now in that regard so I used both of them for a few weeks and Thunderbird won me over. Fair to say that after using it for so long it was more familiar but it's noticeably faster and the latest version has updated the UI and it's very clean and compact. I don't use the calendar, but I do think the new design is a big improvement and it's great to see they've been working on it.

rubatuga 4y ago

Looks like there might be a bug with the calendar, it is showing the date for Saturday as March 6 instead of March 5.

dotancohen 4y ago

It seems that Supernova is the name of "the new Thunderbird UI". Oh please not. I'm so jaded regarding updates to core functionality software. Is there a list of actual problems with the old Thunderbird UI? Ones that could not be resolved without a rewrite? Otherwise, what is the goal of updating this extremely functional UI?

Makobado1 4y ago

globular-toast 4y ago

Why on earth does "month" view still exist in digital calendars? Even worse, many (e.g. Google, Microsoft) don't even have an option for anything better (Thunderbird has "multiweek" which is far more useful). Can anyone think of another relic from paper-based systems that we still cling to for unknown reasons? Imagine if the web could only be viewed in whole "pages". But pages don't even negatively affect reading prose that much. Calendars, on the other hand, are all about context. On the first of the month I get the context of the next few following weeks. Useful. But at the end of the month I get the few preceding weeks?! What good is that? Why would my needs change depending on the time of the month? I either need the context or I don't. Month view makes absolutely no sense.

IshKebab 4y ago

Why can literally nobody get calendar month views right? It should be a continuously scrollable list of weeks. Not a book with each month on a different page. It's not paper. Grrr. Actually once upon a time the Android calendar did work like that... but then they changed it back to the traditional idiotic design.

brimwats 4y ago
CalenGoo does it like that and it's the one feature of CalenGoo i wish I could turn off! I like the book pages. I guess there really is a preference for everyone
- IshKebab 4y ago
  Doesn't it annoy you when events span the month boundaries and you have to keep flipping back and forth between them and finding the corresponding days? I might have to try CalenGoo!

cobbaut 4y ago

I seem to be the only one here who really does not want a calendar in an e-mail application. They are different things, and should imho be separate programs. Same for chat and tasks.

xiekomb 4y ago

I hope sync with apple calendars will work out of the box. It’s just a pain right now (events disappearing randomly without any way to debug)

awill 4y ago

This looks very good, but it's still a long way away.....

gespadas 4y ago

I can't wait !!!

darkwater 4y ago

Wow, super neat! I use TB as my daily driver but for calendar I resort to the GCal webview because is almost unusable, especially the "view event" window which is also an "edit event" window and that is very visually cluttered. Can't wait to test this on my laptop!

nvrspyx 4y ago

> By default, getting to this event preview screen requires only 1 click. And it’s 2 clicks to open the edit view (which you can do either in a new tab or a separate floating window). Phew. I was a bit worried that tab support was going away because the UI in the screenshots with the giant search bar in the top toolbar doesn't seem conducive for it. I'm curious to see how tabs look/work with the new UI.

INeedMoreRam 4y ago

I use Thunderbird exclusively for personal accounts and Outlook for my employer. Very excited to see Thunderbird calendar being modernized since I feel like it’s always been a step behind Outlook’s.

w4rh4wk5 4y ago

While it looks nice, can I please not have another problematic Thunderbird update, please. I am still on 91.13.1 because 102 is causing various issues, most (maybe all) of them already reported.

p4bl0 4y ago
Yes, the v102 upgrade was a nightmare for many users. I actually had an exchange about that with the person behind Thunderbird's Twitter account after their announcement of Supernova: > Neat. Please do test this thoroughly before release to avoid the v102 fiasco :). It made things difficult for both users and evangelists who take time to help others in using Thunderbird. [1] > We hear you. Which is why we're doing this for Supernova: [2] >> In the roadmap for Thunderbird Supernova (v. 115) you'll notice our goal is to complete most features by Q4 2022. That's because we're entering"feature-freeze" by end of 2022, then spending several months on polish. We want it to exceed your expectations! [1] https://twitter.com/p4bl0/status/1590400298517864448 https://twitter.com/p4bl0/status/1590400298517864448 [2] https://twitter.com/mozthunderbird/status/1590402413155844097 https://twitter.com/mozthunderbird/status/159040241315584409...
- rhaway84773 4y ago
  Who would have thought civil exchanges about an issue was possible on the internet. And that too on Twitter! Well done to you and the Thunderbird Twitter manager, along with the Thunderbird team that took action on trying to rectify the mistakes they made with their past release.
INeedMoreRam 4y ago
I upgraded to v102 and have had zero issues. In fact, it runs perfectly on my Kubuntu machine.
- squidbeak 4y ago
  Which experience does nothing to help the poster you're replying to.

extr0pian 4y ago

I've been using Thunderbird for both work email and personal email (via Protonmail Bridge) for a few years now. I'm really stoked to see it's getting the attention it deserves.

RachelF 4y ago
Yes, it is great. I have to use Outlook 365 and am surprised how much better Thunderbird is than Microsoft's offering.

beanaroo 4y ago

This looks great! One minor thing I'd like to see, and I don't know if this is to do with the underlying calendaring spec, is the differentiation of physical location and online meeting. Some events may have both and I have found the "Join" buttons on desktop notifications for Outlook/Teams to be pretty convenient.

lavventura 4y ago

In future it would be cool to see integration of Emacs's org-mode agenda

rayiner 4y ago
Drive both from the same CalDAV calendar: https://github.com/jackkamm/org-caldav/tree/fix-tests https://github.com/jackkamm/org-caldav/tree/fix-tests. Todo sync works pretty well too.
coolwulf 4y ago
In principal, you could syn your org-mode agenda with Google calendar then view it in Thunderbird https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-google-sync.html https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-google-sync.html

Night_Thastus 4y ago

Since I already have Thunderbird, I'm starting to wonder if I should swap off VueMinder for Thunderbird's calendar. Anyone used both and thoughts?

zerr 4y ago

Are they using vanilla JavaScript?

PaulKeeble 4y ago

This doesn't look all that different to the existing calendar really. They have moved the events section to the side instead of at the top and changed some of the sectioning going for the material view where the distinction between elements is just replaced with background coloured space. I am largely indifferent to this change, it doesn't look like its big or important or functionally impressive in any way. I am not going to collapse the weekends and it seems to be the only other new feature being offered is messing with colours for categories. I suspect most people use calendars for categories already, this may be an improvement for some people but its really not worth trying to merge calendars for this purpose as an existing user unless they make that easy (which there is no suggestion they will). Change for fashion sake and nothing that users have been asking for, sums up all development out of Mozilla at the moment.

krick 4y ago
Yeah. Honestly, I guess I cannot speak as a Thunderbird calendar user anymore, but precisely for that reason: it sucked so much compared to ubiqotuos Google Calendar, that I somehow couldn't justify using it anymore. Then I stopped using Google too, but I use desktop email client much less anyways now. I'm not sure what really changed here. Maybe I should try and see it, but... really, I wish they'd just copied Google Calendar UI completely, making it an offline copy. Surely it's not perfect, but it was so, so much more fluent the last I tried. I mean, for me, it kinda did everything I wanted to, the only problem I ever had with it was that it's Google.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Accacin 4y ago
It's easy to say that, but I've had friends and colleagues not want to use Thunderbird because of it's UI. Honestly I think this would be enough to make them take a second look. The fact that you are indifferent (as am I) is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.. They've made it more attractive to new users and also haven't alienated their existing user base.
- 4y ago

tannhaeuser 4y ago

I really really like that Thunderbird is getting maintenance and new features even when I thought it had been abandoned by Mozilla years ago. Though I'm currently using Mail.app (and having used web mail before), I'm curious what happened, who are the developers, how the funding is going, what the relation to Moz is, and whether I should switch?

randomluck040 4y ago
I also use Mail.app privately but Thunderbird on any Windows or Linux machine I work with. Outlook might look nice, however, I can’t bring myself to spend time to figure out the calendar in Outlook. When Thunderbird was not available, I’ve defaulted to looking up my appointments on Google calendar in the browser because that’s what my team at work is using.
rendx 4y ago
https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/

vondur 4y ago

I'd really like it work with Office365 out of the box. I know there are add-ons that do it (Owl being one of them), but native support just like the support for Gmail accounts would be great.

dotancohen 4y ago
Another happy Owl user here. One thing that I actually like about Owl being paid (very inexpensive as it is) is that I trust it will be updated RIGHT NOW if Office 365 changes their non-API. As a business with paying customers, I expect that they are on top of these things.
kdtsh 4y ago
This is the only real downside of Thunderbird as far as I’m concerned, other things like aesthetics just being matters of taste where you can’t please everyone. It’s become an annoying downside for me lately because one of my email addresses now only supports the web client and Exchange; no more IMAPS. I really cannot find another email client on Linux that works as well as Thunderbird though, at least not one that also supports Exchange, so Thunderbird it is. The new UI in OP looks great too.

Animats 4y ago

Do not want mail program talking to some third party cloud service.

rexreed 4y ago
Such as an email server (POP, IMAP, SMTP)?
- codeulike 4y ago
  Ouch
- Animats 4y ago
  That's the second party. Some outside cloud provider connected to the mail client brings in a third party.
  - NoboruWataya 4y ago
    I thought the user was the second party. Anyway, assuming you're talking about Sync, I find it quite helpful for the browser so have no issues with it being extended to Thunderbird. It is, as I understand it, always optional, and I even believe it's possible to self-host it, though I haven't tried.
    - somat 4y ago
      every once in a while I look into what it takes to self host it and never get very far. The primary problem is that it is an internal tool used by mozilla and it shows, Don't get me wrong, I think it is great that mozilla provides the code but it does not have any of the polish that a tool intended for others to use get. I am sure I could get it going if I devoted a weekend to the effort. but have not yet been willing to put that much time into it. off my head, first you have to get the account service up and running then you can get the sync service going then you have to trick your firefox installation to use your services.
Certhas 4y ago

_zamorano_ 4y ago

Everytime an application I use daily gets a redesign, my palms gets sweaty

cassepipe 4y ago
Same but I find the new recent design to be a betterment this time. Not hard considering Thunderbird had imho a terrible UI. The left panel looks really nice and make the app different functions more readable.

notesinthefield 4y ago

Do CardDAV and CalDAV work natively yet?

RealStickman_ 4y ago
I've been using both those features for a while with my own Nextcloud server
- krolden 4y ago
  Yes but you need tbsync to use it with nextcloud cal/carddav no?
  - RealStickman_ 4y ago
    I don't have tbsync and I don't think any other extension I use added support for that. Simply select "On the Network" when adding a calendar, set a user name and enter the remote dav location. For address books use "Add CardDAV Address Book", also username and dav location.
gespadas 4y ago
They work already! When I add my email account, Thunderbird automatically configure my email, my calendar, my contacts, my tasks... all from my server. I even don't have to configure them each one manually.
- notesinthefield 4y ago
  Really? Wow! Ive never been able to get everything from fastmail to come over correctly. My calendars were read only and I didnt get full contact info.

linker3000 4y ago

Just please please please fix the calendar so that online meeting links make it properly into the notes section of appointments.

clircle 4y ago

Really looking forward to the firefox sync integration!

java-man 4y ago

the grid lines seem too intense (dark). please make them the same intensity as the calendar border in the top left corner.

majkinetor 4y ago

Great update. Its awesome to see sync is getting implemented, that makes on-boarding on new machine trivial. Calendar needed this too.

defulmere 4y ago

The only new Thunderbird calendar feature I'd like to see it the ability to turn off calendaring in Thunderbird.

no_wizard 4y ago

Looks nice to me, granted I have not been following Thunderbird, as I believed it to be dead[0] over a decade ago. Its nice to see that the community has keep it alive! For Thunderbird users, do you find it interfaces well with Google Workspace Email (Gmail) and Calendar? I prefer native clients to their interface usually but Apple Mail isn't the greatest so I've been using the web interface and I don't particularly enjoy it. I use BusyCal for calendar and I like it, but I'd love to have it in a "suite" like this, just makes things easier. [0]: https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/6/3142046/mozilla-halt-further-development-thunderbird https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/6/3142046/mozilla-halt-furth...

chromaton 4y ago
The Calendar sync via the gdata-provider plugin is currently broken.
gnull 4y ago
It works fine, unless you want to use Google Calendar and a non-Gmail email together. Then it goes nuts and makes your Gmail send out calendar invites instead of the email you use.
- mvdwoord 4y ago
  Oh god, I have some horrible memories when I set up a forwarder from employers Lotus Notes calendar to my Google Calendar. It turned out that Google was very aggressively parsing the body test and recipients of all events and re-sending invites. Also for that company all hands meeting I was invited to, in my first week. No way to disable this, so ended up having to write some custom parser for exported ics files, to strip out the email addresses.
  - gnull 4y ago
    Evolution is working fine with the setup I described, try it out if you need to do this again.
tidbeck 4y ago

pachico 4y ago

This is an honest question from someone who didn't use nor install Thunderbird for over a decade. Is it better than Google calendar? I mean, am I missing a lot by using the Google apps as they are from a browser? I hope I am, to be honest, so I can give it a try.

gombosg 4y ago
One advantage is that it supports displaying events from multiple Google accounts at the same time. :)
- robertlacok 4y ago
  You can always share your calendar from one account with another, and hide/show it in the right panel ;)
- pachico 4y ago
  Weirdly enough, this is what happens in mobile too but not in desktop, for reasons that are unknown to me.

donatj 4y ago

What are the odds of this coming to a standalone Sunbird client? I've never really liked my email and calendar being in the same app. Especially not the same window, makes cross referencing a PITA. One of the things Apple gets right.

muppetman 4y ago
I understand this doesn't address your core complaint, but you can right click on the calender tab in Thunderbird and open it in a new window. It's not the same thing at all, but it's a workaround I use.

paxys 4y ago

Very relieved to see that the new calendar looks...like a calendar. It is definitely not an area that needs some radical redesign. Incremental quality changes are the way to go.

zahllos 4y ago

Be nice of them to fix outstanding bugs, like the nondeterministic turing machine that is doing anything with certificates in Thunderbird e.g. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1481969 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1481969 The javascript disaster that is the compose window refuses to find certificates that NSS finds, because... something to do with intermediate certificates. Signing messages is a feature thunderbird has had forever, yet is unstable and nobody is dealing with the obvious open issue in their bug tracker, open since v60 and ignored. Honestly what I want from an email client is this, plus cardbook (the default address book can't talk carddav, what century are we in), plus calendars. That's it. That's what I want a mail client to do.

diarrhea 4y ago
Thunderbird has had native CardDAV support for a while now. I’ve been able to ditch Cardbook (although the latter has more functionality).

kayson 4y ago

Really excited about the addition of FFSync, but man do I wish they would properly open source the backend so I can self-host it. (There is some code available online but it doesn't really work)

ajmarsh 4y ago

I wonder if it's some of the same work BetterBird is doing? https://www.betterbird.eu/ https://www.betterbird.eu/