25 ms·

The Future of Thunderbird

• ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  > “Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?” If it works...
  • fsh 4y ago
    For me it doesn't really work. Searching any large folder completely stalls the UI for a few seconds. How can it be so slow to go through a bit of text?
    • ajsnigrutin 4y ago
      I never had that issue... and my .thunderbird folder is ~15gb. Sorting the email (eg. by size) takes a few seconds though, but i don't do that often. Compared to eg. gmail (web interface), i find the speeds comparable, with the added benefit of having my emails offline (too).
    • timbit42 4y ago
      That's nothing to do with how it looks or why the UI stalls. That's a problem with the search. Just fix the search.
    • pmontra 4y ago
      The filter on a single folder is not slow and never stalls the UI. Caveats: I'm on Linux, maybe my large folders are not so large, if it stalls for you it's probably stalling for many more people with similar setups.
• ape4 4y ago
  The UI doesn't look that old fashioned to me. It doesn't look like a website - it looks like an application (which is appropriate).
  • einpoklum 4y ago
    A big part of the problem is that the people in charge of TB UI are basically anti-application, and want everything to look like a pretentious web page or a mobile phone app page. A lot of TB's usable UI has already been spoiled by such changes.
• Aleksdev 4y ago
  “Thunderbird is literally a bunch of code running on top of Firefox. All the tabs and sections you see in our applications are just browser tabs with a custom user interface.” Interesting, I have been using it this whole time and I never noticed this.
• Aleksdev 4y ago
  Thunderbird has been one of my go-to email clients for years now. Its open-source nature allows for a lot of customization options, and the addition of extensions has made it even more versatile. I especially love its user-friendly interface and how it integrates well with other tools like calendars and to-do lists. The recent updates to Thunderbird have also been impressive, particularly the improved security features and performance enhancements. Overall, I believe it's a fantastic alternative to proprietary email clients, and I highly recommend giving it a try if you haven't already.
• mikestaub 4y ago
  We should pay very close attention to https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr as I think the future of app development is letting multiple clients implement their own custom UI layers on top of a shared core.
• Tagbert 4y ago
  New article on Ars Technica about plans for a new UI in Thunderbird. “Mozilla plans ground-up UI redesign for Thunderbird email client this July” https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/mozilla-plans-ground-up-ui-redesign-for-thunderbird-email-client-this-july/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/mozilla-plans-ground...
• autophagian 4y ago
  > Thunderbird is literally a bunch of code running on top of Firefox. All the tabs and sections you see in our applications are just browser tabs with a custom user interface. There's no such thing as applications. There's just us, and browsers. That's it!
  • s3p 4y ago
    I'll take this over an Electron app any day :) love FF
    • 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
      I thought that Thunderbird was a native application for quite a long time. For some reason it never had the same icky feeling I get from any Electron application (even supposedly "high quality" ones) and worked fast on crappy machines (which is what I've typically used throughout the life). Of course, performance went a bit downhill since they abandoned XUL in favor of pure HTML, but still.
    • layer8 4y ago
      Reading the article, I was expecting the dreaded “and we’re rebuilding it on Electron” (because apparently that’s the only way anyone knows to build a desktop app nowadays), but apparently they don’t plan to move to an entirely different technical base, just to rewrite stuff.
      • jeltz 4y ago
        No, because they have already done that (except on Firefox instead of Chromium).
        • layer8 4y ago
          Do they use JavaScript outside the UI?
          • tredre3 4y ago
• formerly_proven 4y ago
  > “Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?” ~ A notable percentage of Thunderbird users Honestly this doesn't seem like the main issue with Thunderbird; the main issue is that the UI is very slow, it tends to use a lot of CPU and memory just sitting there and a lot of operations block the UI. This got a lot worse with 102. 102 unfortunately is so low in responsiveness that it's literally quicker for me to open a new tab, load Google Mail (the slowest webmail I'm using) find and(!) read the mail there than switching to the already running Thunderbird and waiting for it to load the new message. It also tends to take pretty long to "boot", so most days I just avoid using it entirely now, as leaving it running in the background substantially decreases battery life.
  • asdajksah2123 4y ago
    The issue is indeed "Why Thunderbird takes so long to change" (the visual representation of this development problem is it's old looking UI). If Thunderbird was easy to develop and modify then all the performance issues you're talking about would be resolved. The problem is that Thunderbird's legacy code base makes making changes extremely difficult, slow and risky. And that's Thunderbird's fundamental problem as the article describes well.
  • npigrounet 4y ago
    [dead]
  • jahsome 4y ago
    You drastically overestimate the general software consumer. Thunderbird is really only used by performance obsessed nerds, and that's largely in part because performance obsessed nerds all but prefer hideously outdated UI. But for any normies, they're gonna load it up and feel their skin crawl, along with the overwhelming sense someone might turn the corner to their cubicle and begin shouting "NERD!"
    • rjzzleep 4y ago
      In one of the previous threads someone suggested betterbird and I've been using it ever since[1]. It doesn't fix the age old default search output, but it works comparably well for my taste. It also doesn't fix the idle CPU usage unfortunately. [1] https://www.betterbird.eu/#featuretable https://www.betterbird.eu/#featuretable
• imcdona 4y ago
  No mention of JMAP support. https://jmap.io/ https://jmap.io/
  • voakbasda 4y ago
    If I had to guess, I would say that they mentioned it indirectly, by way of saying they need to first eliminate a fair bit of technical debt. They don't want to build new things on a crumbling foundation, so such features are too far away to announce directly.
  • eduction 4y ago
    Is JMAP really enough of an improvement over the standards it is trying to replace to warrant throwing out old, working code built to the old standards? Apple Mail on my iPhone uses IMAP and seems plenty fast for me. Is it the best use of Thunderbird's limited resources to support a new standard, and adding correspondingly fewer other improvements in the meantime? I can understand why they might decide "no."
  • favaq 4y ago
    JMAP failed, let it go already.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• magnat 4y ago
  As a sole maintainer of a TB add-on, I can't wait for it to completely stop working until rewritten yet again when old TB API gets removed and new version goes live.
• mistrial9 4y ago
  Apple Mail on OSX 10.4 (originally NeXT) working well today fyi the industrial strength, bullet proof, complex but profoundly reliable engineering within Apple Mail shows itself to have stability over decades. Why is this Thunderbird rewrite going to succeed ? A glossy sales pitch makes it less convincing, not more. This is a years' long project with no guranteed outcomes.. in fact, I would suspect that noveau security trappings and trend-based GUI embellishments would almost guarantee a "mayfly life" at great expense, contrasted to the Oak trees of original Internet standards. cynical? perhaps.. prove it wrong
  • officeplant 4y ago
    Meanwhile the current Apple Mail app can be very slow & crash prone in my experience.
  • DwnVoteHoneyPot 4y ago
    I think Apple Mail was unusable around that time for me. I think it mangled attachments to/from Windows, font sizing was off (i forget if it was previews or when writing). Search didn't work.
    • flomo 4y ago
      Yeah, old versions of Apple Mail used some weird 'RTF' format and IIRC security issues around attachments. I use the modern version, but NextMail was a different thing and legacy bits hung around for a while.
      • mistrial9 4y ago
        > some weird 'RTF' format and IIRC security issues unlike the reliable and standards-based clients on Windows, you mean?
  • endlessvoid94 4y ago
    I had an issue with Apple Mail taking too much disk space, since it used to download....a lot of mail. Has this been fixed?
• Tschayba 4y ago
  The only email client that I acknowledge. Used it since the day one. I think that this refactoring is going to be a huge undertake. I hope that they will make it.
• brightball 4y ago
  There's one area where I've always thought Thunderbird should be a cross platform leader and example to everyone: setting Email Client Standards. I spent a lot of time in the anti-phishing/anti-fraud world. During a stint at dmarcian I wrote up an entire proposal that I titled A.P.E.C.S. - Anti-Phishing Email Client Standards. I should probably publish this document at some point since it looks like they've since taken it down and IMO, it still needs to happen. When you dive hard into the email security problem you quickly discover that there are layers to how end users are exploited. - Sending Mail Servers - Receiving Mail Servers - Information presented to users in the mail client - Links and attachments in the emails themselves - The phishing sites they link to Each layer of this process needs to be addressed. DMARC let's sending mail servers verify that they are actually allowed to send email on behalf of the domain. That alone is a huge scope of the problem and puts the domain owner in charge of preventing abuse from their own domain. Receiving mail servers have a number of factors that they use to verify inbound emails and DMARC makes that process a lot easier, but you still have to have spam filters, virus scans, IP and sender reputation management, reverse DNS lookups. The tools supporting users here are always getting better but they won't ever be perfect. The mail client itself is critical though. We know the filters aren't perfect and typically have to err on the side of deliverability, which means that users are going to see messages that the mail server thought were questionable. You're already seeing warning messages in Google for things like this, but the factors here can absolutely be standardized around a number of factors. Users don't respond to "you can trust this" indicators (studies show, don't have them handy) but they do respond to warnings as long as the warnings are very targeted and rare. If you get a warning about every message, it's going to get ignored. Links and attachments are also in the mail client scope. Attachment scans and link reputation absolutely need to be a part of the scope of this problem. There's an opportunity for link trust to be standardized in the same way as dmarc. Does the URL match the DMARC sender? Cool, that's a really good sign. Is the URL going through a shortener or other tracking system? In that case, there's probably a lot more risk involved. In order to bypass filters, shorteners will link to something safe and then change the redirect target after successful delivery. Reputation scores need to be tracked on shorteners based on immutability of links and responsiveness to abuse take downs. If they don't, then those services should generate a giant warning in the email client and potentially even have the link disabled in the message. Phishing sites themselves are all over the place and working with hosting abuse teams to take them down is a gargantuan task. Working with a shortener who's linking to it to take it down would prevent every recipient of the message from being duped. That's the high level. The standards are needed and should be applied across every email client vendor, from Thunderbird to Gmail to Outlook/365 to Fastmail to Apple. IMO Thunderbird has an opportunity to lead the charge here and become a force that protects people from phishing at the point of consumption, regardless of the rules on the mail server itself.
• thesausageking 4y ago
  I use Thunderbird as my main mail client and love it. I've tried a number of clients and always come back to it. The two big things for me are the search and the ecosystem of add-ons. I do hope the redesign considers add-on developers. A lot have been abandoned by their maintainers who become frustrated with keeping up with Thunderbird's changes. One thing I'd love to see is an easy way to send money to support add-on creators.
• Liquidor 4y ago
  I hope they focus and improve on search. It's probably the worst of all email clients we've tested at work and it made my bosses switch to a paid version of Outlook. Sometimes you can't find emails when searching for a name. It's so bad. There are other quirks and bugs too that definitely make it feel outdated, which sucks because I like it (although it is kinda old looking too as mentioned in the article hehe).
  • user3939382 4y ago
    It's crazy looking at their bugtracker, it's just years and years of accumulated issues. I ran into one the other day with a time zone setting on invites, and sure enough there is the bug report in their tracker buried in infinity.
  • Accacin 4y ago
    I also hate search. The other day someone gave me a tip though, which has helped quite a bit. The global search and the other search you get in your inbox suck so don't use them. The actual search that works "okay" if when you right click on a folder and select 'Search Messages'. Sorry if you know this already, but I didn't know and it's so much better searching through this interface as opposed to the other two.
    • Liquidor 4y ago
      I did not know that. Will try it out on Monday. Thanks :-)
• dbcooper 4y ago
  Thread Hijack: Is there a capable alternative to Microsoft's Outlook client, that has good translation of emails built in? This is for Windows. Outlook is so slow, and it opens a small side pane for translation. It has a horrible UI.
• 01ce8c91872dd6d 4y ago
  dear Mozilla, no matter what you do to the UI, it will not make the general population interested in your products. you're just pissing your Google cash away while also pissing off the only userbase you have - powerusers
• josefresco 4y ago
  I've used Thunderbird Portable for years to backup my Google Workspace email. Prior to that it was my primary email client. Really hope it survives and thrives, I could care less how it looks.
• jrochkind1 4y ago
  > The curse: coordinating efforts across a volunteer community was challenging… > …Since Thunderbird was being contributed to by many volunteer contributors with varying tastes, it resulted in an Inconsistent user interface without a coherent user experience. Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month" really never stops giving. You don't actually get more efficient by moving to a giant decentralized volunteer engineering workforce -- someone has to coordinate all that, or else what you're going to get is a mess, both under the hood and in what is visible. And coordinating all that is hard and resource-intensive, the more so the _more_ developers involved. Some open source projects manage to do that coordination with a decentralized volunteer coordinating staff (although in many cases, it's not truly "volunteer", it's people being paid by various employers collaborating across organizations/employers -- this was in fact most of original open source success stories). But it's not easy. And requires stability and tenure in that decentralized coordinating staff, to hold the vision, and to have the relationships to work together in a unified way. (A "benevolent dictator" is another way to do it). The hardest part of developing software that is too much for one person to do by themselves (and that one person never leaves), is always the inter-personal communication, coordination, and shared-mental-model-making-and-sharing, not the coding. So anyway, without being involved in Thunderbird at all, I totally believe this story, and that bringing it back into an organization of paid employees as a core was necessary to prevent complete disintegration (I mean, other organizational solutions are possible too, but they are all even more challenging, this is the simplest), because... that's how it works.
  • Spivak 4y ago
    One entity (person/group) with a strong product vision + a giant decentralized workforce is pretty much how everything gets built. The actual people putting hands to keyboard have the mythical man month thing going for them.
    • jrochkind1 4y ago
      The part of mythical man month I was thinking of, which I consider the most famous/useful take-away, is how adding people to a project will not necessarily make it go faster, because the more people, the more coordination work -- and Brooks paid a lot of attention to the fact that the "coordination work" isn't just, like, issuing orders and monitoring people, but involves building and sharing and maintaining "mental models", a vision for how it all goes together in a consistent and coherent way. i don't think that vision can be developed and maintained succesfully only by people who never get their hands dirty, it needs to be iteratively developed with constant feedback from the work itself and it's reception, if it is to be successful.
• vlod 4y ago
  If they are looking for paths going forward, I hope they investigate what PopOS is doing with rust (COSMIC) [0] and Iced [1] (cross platform ui library). [0] https://www.phoronix.com/news/COSMIC-Desktop-Iced-Toolkit https://www.phoronix.com/news/COSMIC-Desktop-Iced-Toolkit [1] https://github.com/iced-rs/iced https://github.com/iced-rs/iced
  • devmunchies 4y ago
    I read "A cross-platform GUI library for Rust" but never saw any specifics. Is this targeting MacOS, Windows, Linux?
    • vlod 4y ago
      From [1] https://github.com/iced-rs/iced https://github.com/iced-rs/iced it says: "Cross-platform support (Windows, macOS, Linux, and the Web)"
• superkuh 4y ago
  Uhg. This is the exact opposite of what direction I want from Thunderbird. I want it to remain stable. I want it to remain looking like an email client I run on my native OS. I do not want giant white-space webshit design and an entire rebuild that makes all my extensions and well trained spam detection .dat unusable. Please stop changing things just to change. Thunderbird works.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • jeltz 4y ago
    Yeah, they should work on fixing bugs, improving performance, fixing search and adding some features. The UI is fine, it is the best thing of Thunderbird.
    • xeromal 4y ago
      I read the article and sounds like the rewrite is mostly to do with large amounts of technical debt and being tied to firefox's development cycle. This should enable them to fix bugs if they don't have to fight code always coming from an alternative product.
      • jeltz 4y ago
        I read it too and I am not as hopefully as you given how previous changes have mostly made the performance worse than fixed anything. Hope I am wrong though.
  • progx 4y ago
    Extensions are not really a problem, cause Thunderbird have made it to scare off many over the years. They change rules, api, etc. many extension are not maintained, not compatible, whatever. I stopped installing and using Thunderbird extensions, it took me too much time and nerves on updates.
  • TheRealPomax 4y ago
    I believe you missed the part where the codebase has become impossible to work on. This isn't change "for change's sake", it's "because if we don't, this product is dead".
• sys42590 4y ago
  I'm a long time Thunderbird user. Once every one or two years I looked if there was a better free & libre alternative supporting Windows, having a GUI, and an integrated calendar. Each time I came to the conclusion that Thunderbird was still the top contender. This blog post fills me with hope that Thunderbird has a future.
• noisy_boy 4y ago
  After all those horror stories of people getting locked out of Google, I started using Thunderbird as my email backup. Took a while to get all my emails but now that they have been downloaded, I just run it as a backup tool to fetch the emails. If I had to ask, more than improving the UI (which is an initiative I have nothing against), improving the performance (mainly search) should be accorded high priority.
  • nfriedly 4y ago
    Yeah, same, except on my home file server (unraid) rather than my desktop. I use https://hub.docker.com/r/ich777/thunderbird https://hub.docker.com/r/ich777/thunderbird, which exposes the UI as a website with a javascript version of vnc. I log into it every once in a while to verify that it's still fetching updates.
  • codethief 4y ago
    If your concern are backups (only), I think there are better tools for that, such as offlineimap and mbsync.
    • tredre3 4y ago
      > If your concern are backups (only), I think there are better tools for that, such as offlineimap and mbsync. I used to use imapbackup but I wouldn't say they are better tools: - They rarely support OAUTH directly so it can be a pain to set up with gmail - You still need a viewer to navigate the backup when you need it (usually a full mail client though there are some lighter maildir frontends)
• rvz 4y ago
  The Future of Thunderbird can only be summarized as having no future with Mozilla. > Throughout the years, Mozilla’s focus shifted a lot, investing less and less resources into the development of Thunderbird. On July 6, 2012, the Mozilla Foundation announced that it would no longer be focused on innovations for Thunderbird, and that the future Thunderbird development would transition to a community-driven model. So it isn't a priority and isn't as interesting to Mozilla? As far as Mozilla is concerned; it is dead. This also happened to Servo and it ended up getting severed from Mozilla, since they see it as another cost they cannot maintain. > In 2023, Thunderbird is pretty well sustainable, with a healthy donation flow, more services in development to increase our revenue stream (stay tuned!) Thank you Google!
  • notRobot 4y ago
    Pretty sure these are user donations.
  • einpoklum 4y ago
    Mozilla is in close and tight control again these days - much tighter than you know.
• VyseofArcadia 4y ago
  > Why does Thunderbird look so old UI isn't a fashion show. I'd much rather have a UI that looks older but is comfortable to use than something trendy.
  • Veen 4y ago
    > UI isn't a fashion show. Yes, it is. At least, it is for UI designers.
    • squarefoot 4y ago
      Only for UI designers who put aesthetics before usability.
      • toss1 4y ago
        IOW, for most UI designers on current software products. Very few changes I see these days actually improve anything; they are merely change for the sake of providing evidence to justify the UI designers' salaries. If something already works, and we know how to use it, there had better be a damn good reason for changing it, because you are burdening thousands, millions, or even billions of people with yet another entirely unnecessary learning task in our already over-stressed lives. We are far past the time when the new version of X will be seen by orders of magnitude more users than the previous version, so it'll be only the minority that have to relearn, and the majority will enjoy the improved UI (assuming that the new stuff is actually an improvement; BIG assumption). Today, most of it will burden existing users. You want to make the colors prettier, add a dark/night mode, round the corners, highlight things a bit better? Wonderful. Just don't mess with the organization.
        • VyseofArcadia 4y ago
          > Just don't mess with the organization. And don't mess with discoverability and ergonomics. I hate buttons that don't look like buttons, controls littering the title bar so that I can't use it to move the window, etc etc
    • 4y ago
• codalan 4y ago
  It would be nice if they could work with Proton to get an integrated mail/calendar solution in place. Not a huge fan of the daemon I have to run to sync Thunderbird with Protonmail.
• hknmtt 4y ago
  email "protocol" is clunky and old AF. no need to build an email client for the 21st century when everything underneath it a donkey pulling a cart full of rotten fish. stmp/pop/imap and all the dkip.. is pure crap. we need to overhaul the entire email/messaging delivery system. not just the face of it.
  • toss1 4y ago
    There's plenty of standards bodies just awaiting new proposals — you've got your work cut out for you — thanks for volunteering!
  • JustSomeNobody 4y ago
    Out of scope.
• hackerbrother 4y ago
  I think non-webmail has been more trouble than it's worth for some time now.
  • somebehemoth 4y ago
    I think webmail is not worth the effort and loss of end user control and I prefer local mail clients.
  • nocman 4y ago
    Webmail is a nice option to have if you want it. Email should continue to be a separate set of protocols targeted at that one application. I'd much rather see webmail disappear as an option than standard email servers and clients.
  • kitsunesoba 4y ago
    Webmail is not great when you’re juggling several addresses and I don’t see that changing soon.
• quicksilver03 4y ago
  I'm dreading the redesign, even though at the moment I have no idea of how it will look like. What webmail can one use to read and write mail for multiple accounts? I will need to have a sort of unified inbox for at least 5-6 accounts, and to see the folders of all those accounts in the same window.
  • ajot 4y ago
    It seems Roundcube [0] has a 3rd pary plugin for that[1]. There's also cypht [2], I like it's modular concept but I think it's still in alpha state. [0] https://roundcube.net/about/ https://roundcube.net/about/ [1] https://packagist.org/packages/boressoft/ident_switch https://packagist.org/packages/boressoft/ident_switch [2] https://cypht.org/ https://cypht.org/
    • quicksilver03 4y ago
      The Roundcube plugin seems to implement a form of quick account switching, which isn't exactly what I'm after. Cypht looks more like it, and I've found that there's a paid version of AfterLogic Webmail [1] which claims to implement a unified inbox. [1] https://afterlogic.com/webmail-client https://afterlogic.com/webmail-client
• jesusofnazarath 4y ago
  [dead]
• boplicity 4y ago
  Unfortunately, at least for me, I've had to mostly switch away from Thunderbird. It has becoming rather frustratingly slow. For example, if I archive an email, it takes 10 to 15 seconds for this to be reflected in the interface. When I have 50 or so emails to deal with, this adds up to a surprising amount of time, and becomes rather frustrating. (I suspect having large volumes of email is part of the issue.) On the much needed feature side of things, other email clients have the very useful feature of showing the complete conversation history (across all accounts) in a sidebar. This alone has been a compelling reason to switch email clients, though, the real reason I switched was the extremely slow interface. I sincerely hope these changes will make Thunderbird usable for me again.
  • PopAlongKid 4y ago
    > the very useful feature of showing the complete conversation history (across all accounts) Isn't this the same as the unified inbox feature in Thunderbird? All your accounts can be displayed sorted and threaded together.
    • boplicity 4y ago
      Sorry for not being clear earlier; for the client I'm using, when you read an email from someone, there's a sidebar that lists all of your past emails to/from them. It's very useful to see past interactions with the person in one glance.
  • mauvehaus 4y ago
    Want to recommend one of those other email clients for Mac? The threading/conversation support is my biggest gripe apart from the slowness. I am also guilty of rarely deleting things. EDITED TO ADD: Using gmail and fastmail. 'nother edit: should deal gracefully with emailing files to myself. C.f the threading in fastmail's webmail, which is ... weird?
    • anamexis 4y ago
      If you're using Gmail, I can recommend Mimestream [1]. It's still in beta, but I've been using it for the better part of a year without issue. Fast, simple, clean. [1] https://mimestream.com/ https://mimestream.com/
• college_physics 4y ago
  I never gave up on thunderbird and hope it will rise again to represent "power, protection, and strength for the user". Thunderbird, in contrast with the sibling "browser" is still a desktop app that asks the user to have some agency and exercise it. Here are my two cents in hashtags and slogans for the future of thunderbird: embrace activitypub/fediverse, expand rss functionality, reinvent bookmarks, think about audio/podcasts, improve filtering and smart search. Leverage open source ecosystems and tools for next generation content management. In sum, become the local app where people spend quality time to organize their online life and experience the digital ocean. Yeah, you could improve on the looks. But keep in mind: "In architecture, functionalism is the principle that software[/buildings] should be designed based solely on their purpose and function". If the purpose and function are beautiful, people will think thunderbird is beautiful. On the other hand no amount of eye-candy can hide the lack of purpose.
  • PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    > Here are my two cents in hashtags and slogans for the future of thunderbird: embrace activitypub/fediverse, expand rss functionality, reinvent bookmarks, think about audio/podcasts, improve filtering and smart search. Leverage open source ecosystems and tools for next generation content management. In sum, become the local app where people spend quality time to organize their online life and experience the digital ocean. And i thought i just wanted a fast, snappy, powerful email client. Silly me.
• mr_machine 4y ago
  I've used Thunderbird exclusively for desktop mail for many years. To my knowledge, it still sucks less than any other free and open option, but that's not much of a bar. Over time, Thunderbird has become slower and less reliable, most notably in the area of search. While the advanced search tools are excellent, the results are lousy. Email that I know exists is often unfindable until I force Thunderbird to re-index my whole mailbox. Seeing F/OSS devs of (what I consider to be) a critical app like Thunderbird talk about "modernizing the interface" is the worst. The interface is fine and there are far bigger problems -- problems related to actual functionality as opposed to prettiness -- that desperately need work. And to echo others' comments: courting the "average user" is worse than a waste of resources, it's an active turning away from the core users and supporters.
  • Karellen 4y ago
    > To my knowledge, [Thunderbird] still sucks less than any other free and open option, Have you tried Claws Mail? It's a plain native traditional email client, and I find it really snappy. There is even a Windows port. Not sure how "native" people might consider that as it's still based on GTK for Windows, and I don't have personal experience with it, but might be worth giving a try? https://www.claws-mail.org/downloads.php https://www.claws-mail.org/downloads.php
    • tlamponi 4y ago
      Claws is really great, but it IME it lacked in getting the search results - I just never could find things as easily as in thunderbird; maybe I was not knowing how to "hold" it best yet, though. That said, I need to scan through a lot of mails for some specific things, thunderbird is barely getting a long with that anymore (the day I have to setup notmuch for real seems to be around the corner), so for most people Claws search may be easily good enough.
    • pfp 4y ago
      Holy crap, this is amazing. I had already lost hope of finding a civilized email client. This is what all software should look like. Thank you.
  • 4y ago
• pipeline_peak 4y ago
  Are there any companies using local, open source email clients, or just tech enthusiasts? It's not 2005 anymore, the world doesn't need your little message reader.
• casenmgreen 4y ago
  After ten years or so, I moved away from Thunderbird, a few months ago, on my new laptop. Thunderbird is to my eye becoming too much like a web-browser (I know the connection of course), rather than an email client. I don't want all that complexity in my email client. I'm now using Claws Mail, which is simple, text-only and what I'm looking for.
• ginko 4y ago
  As a longtime user of thunderbird an interface change is the absolute LAST thing I want.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• TheDesolate0 4y ago
  [dead]
• haunter 4y ago
  I wish Eudora was still around. The source code is available, my secret dream is to work on somtimes in the summer... https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-eudora-email-client-source-code/ https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-eudora-email-client-sou...
  • Mathnerd314 4y ago
    My parents still run Eudora 7, can't convince them to switch to anything else...
    • warrenski 4y ago
      For your future self: At some point they may ask you for some tech support to get their secure connection to mail servers working again. Start with the HermSSL package available here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/hermesmail/files/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/hermesmail/files/
  • ncphil 4y ago
    Was just thinking that the other day. But Eudora, like Tbird until a short time ago, had issues with HTML mail (_1997_ era HTML maiil). Still, if you ever do dive in I'm up for doing some beta testing!
  • warrenski 4y ago
    I'm still using Eudora because I can't bear to part with it! Yes, its poor HTML renderer and lack of UTF-8 support, amongst other things, have no place in 2023, but other modern mail clients still seem to fall short on the features Eudora just gets right. There's hope that the HERMES Mail project, which was formed after the Eudora source code was release, will one day be a viable replacement: https://sourceforge.net/projects/hermesmail/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/hermesmail/
  • rswail 4y ago
    Wow, there's a name I haven't seen since I was running a (pre-linux) Windows NT 4 box back in like 1996/7. I used that until I moved to Linux, and I used sylpheed on top of maildir. I've used Thunderbird now for years, but I also use fastmail as the mail server and use offlineimap for backing fastmail up locally. I've got email archives going back to 1998 (which is probably when I moved off Windows NT, come to think of it).
• XCSme 4y ago
  I skimmed the article and the video, but I couldn't find exactly where they mention what this new direction will be and what technologies will it use?
  • devmunchies 4y ago
    Yeah it seems like they're announcing their high-level aspirations, so not really note-worthy yet.
• evanwang0 4y ago
  I hope this will spawn an Electron alternative. Would be nice to see a break from Chrome monoculture.
  • tannhaeuser 4y ago
    I guess it's entirely on the table Thunderbird is, in fact, becoming an Electron app. Thunderbird the project has no ties financially to Mozilla anymore AIU, they're merely using gecko as embedded browser. From the comments in this thread, I get that Thunderbird is technically a hold-out from the XUL times, or even a large old-Firefox plugin of sorts more so than a standalone app. With Moz themselves having abandoned their platform over ten years ago, why would the Thunderbird team venture into creating an Electron-workalike based on Firefox when even Moz don't do so? Doesn't sound like something you'd want your mail client team to do considering initial and ongoing effort either (nor strategically, I'm afraid to add, given Moz's trajectory).
  • nocman 4y ago
    Seems odd to me to describe using a Chromium-based toolkit as a way to break the Chrome monoculture. Yeah, I know it is open source, but the ties are still obvious.
• kayson 4y ago
  Are there any reasonable alternatives (please, no outlook)? I love Thunderbird on principle but it's been years and the whole damn UI still freezes while it's downloading messages.
  • Endy 4y ago
    Interlink from Binary Outcast.
• freedude 4y ago
  I wanted Thunderbird to be the answer to the question I have been asking for years. "How to replace Outlook in the corporate environment?" Every time I investigate it, Thunderbird is a resounding no. Why? This is not the vision of the Development Team. But if it was a side goal it would afford them the development money to do all the other things.
  • clircle 4y ago
    Whats wrong With outlook in a corporate environment?
    • freedude 4y ago
      Like most MS products it is a bloated pig of a software package designed in many ways to facilitate vendor lock-in but not necessarily provide the most satisfying customer experience. It's security is abysmal and I use two products to protect it from the Internet. It requires a horrible license and the terms of use is borderline tyrannical. But Teams is worse.
• w4rh4wk5 4y ago
  I am still running TB 91.13.1 as there are too many issues with 102 (not just performance). I get annoyed every day by TB prompting me to upgrade (config switches did not help to suppress that). And now this?! Guess this really is the time to look for an alternative.
• smm11 4y ago
  Must adopt material design. Amiright?
• purpleblue 4y ago
  What I see in this thread is A LOT of people complaining about a free product, but I wonder how many of them have actually donated money to help with the development? I just donated $100 myself because of the current donation campaign, but I'm happy with what I get largely for free.
  • Endy 4y ago
    There's no way I would donate to Thunderbird in its present state. Why should I want to give money to people doing things I don't like? That's like paying money to Google!
• O1111OOO 4y ago
  When I saw the headline, I was worried they were going to close the project. I never take community-supported projects for granted. They've been here, providing an extremely important product, for decades. The biggest issue (from what I read) is technical debt. It's a huge, time consuming and possibly an explosive mess. They have about a dozen developers providing for the needs of millions of users worldwide. They are working on 20 years of (legacy) code. Even Mozilla had to scrap off the old DNA in favor of new. I am glad this core group remains excited about the project. Ecstatic that they are looking toward the future. Happy that they are taking the time to make their jobs (much) easier in the long run.
• FpUser 4y ago
  I do not care how it looks. It works just fine for me and the last thing I want is to start changing UI in Thunderbird
• whydoyoucare 4y ago
  Does Thunderbird even exist today? I moved away from it a long time ago, the sluggishness was a big turn off and it never improved. When I discovered sylpheed and then claws-mail, it was bye-bye TB. Of course now that I am old, mutt has become my preferred MUA. Does email pretty well, and keeps away from a lot of modern overhead.
• hbn 4y ago
  I have to assume with the talk of how hard it is to keep up with Firefox's upstream breaking changes, they'll be switching to essentially a Firefox version of an electron app. i.e. shipping Firefox as a wrapper around a webapp
• angst_ridden 4y ago
  I've found that keeping all my old mail--including from old dead accounts--in Thunderbird has been a big part of the performance problems I experienced. Having been using Thunderbird from the very earliest of days (after migrating from SeaMonkey), I had a lot of dreck from old POP accounts and newer IMAP accounts. I've switched to having it do full downloads of messages from IMAP, and run MailBackupX separately to ingest everything. Every month or so, I delete everything older than a month from Thunderbird, and rely on MailBackupX for my historical mail reference, searches, etc. Now Thunderbird is fast and responsive. My partner keeps hundreds of thousands of emails in Thunderbird from tens of email accounts, some active, some dead. Last time I looked, it was well over a terabyte of old email. The computer, a reasonably recent and fast Mac, can take several hours to start Thunderbird. That being said, I'm impressed it can handle that much cruft at all.
  • txdm 4y ago
    | after migrating from SeaMonkey Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long, long time.
    • angst_ridden 4y ago
      Yeah, well, being very old myself, stuff like Mosaic / Navigator / NetExplorer / SpyGlass still all seem sorta recent to me.
  • warkdarrior 4y ago
    So the solution to Thunderbird's problems is to move your email to a different piece of software?
    • angst_ridden 4y ago
      Well, the solution to search / archive. I could argue that those are two very different functions. I could also argue that with a new architecture, Thunderbird could satisfy both functions well. It just doesn't now.
• aaronbrethorst 4y ago
  plus ça change: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
• unethical_ban 4y ago
  Almost everyone in here has a complaint about thunderbird. The blog is about the struggle of maintaining it as-is, much less refactoring or adding features. They take the time to explain some background, some of the struggles and the "why" of their decision to do a rebuild. Reliance on other software, years of decentralized development, having a small team to do it. And yet everyone is just shitting on this piece as if the team has no idea what they're doing. I don't normally do metacommentary, but this conversation is mind boggling.
• psim1 4y ago
  I kind of hate Thunderbird because it is in every way worse than beloved Apple Mail.app, except for one: it can do the Microsoft 365 IMAP Oauth2 dance, but Mail.app can't. Mail.app's native Exchange functionality has broken for me before and caused me to lose mail so I will not trust it. I thought I had the right solution with an IMAP connection to O365 Exchange until they forced that to use Oauth2.
  • sir 4y ago
    If you use this proxy of mine then any IMAP (or POP/SMTP) client can be used with a “modern” email provider, regardless of whether it supports OAuth 2.0 natively: https://github.com/simonrob/email-oauth2-proxy https://github.com/simonrob/email-oauth2-proxy
• neilv 4y ago
  The highest priority IMHO is security. Given how a targeted email can reach someone wherever they are (and spam can conceal mass exploits), frequent security updates are the wrong mindset. The mindset of one necessary security update should be, OMG, we messed up badly, we need to fix and mitigate, and immediately figure out how never to need another security update, ever again. Web browsers, OTOH, are hopeless for security right now, due to monstrously big-moat standards. But email MUAs (with addressbook, calendar, and maybe chat) are a much-much simpler problem, also high-value, and maybe the place to set a good example. If someone objects "but we will always have constant stream of security vulns, because we need these 1,000 libraries, many of which are hopeless"... maybe that's not true. Implementing email is conceptually very easy, and you don't need all that much more than conceptual to get all the benefit that users actually want from email. (Even incoming HTML multipart content-types, which are often a nightmare of BS generated by some MS program, can be transformed to a vastly simpler and cleaned-up form, enabling a very simple and secure rendering/editing engine, with zero baggage from hopeless browser engines.)
  • cookiengineer 4y ago
    I wish we would have more intelligent email clients, that can be as "dumb" as remembering the email addresses and geolocation routes from their senders. It literally could be a simple ASN lookup, and you would prevent 99% of targeted phishing emails. Nobody in the world uses some random domain.trade to send emails as company.com ffs. Microsoft is kind of not giving a damn about security and I dont understand why they do not invest in Outlook security that much. To me this is straight up offensive how they behave. How can it be that a VBA exploit from 2003 can still compromise an updated system in 2023?
    • gnabgib 4y ago
      > Nobody in the world uses some random domain.trade to send emails as company.com ffs. Lots of emails come via mail delivery services.. random domains (sendgrid, amazonses, mailchimp) Many phishing attempts can be defeated by SPF[0] (the servers that are allowed to send email for this domain), DKIM[1] (proof that it was sent from a domain, and not tampered with), and DMARC[2] (what to do if the email fails SPF/DKIM). Many virus scanners, spam filters pay attention to these, but your mail service can filter mail by it too. The other piece is seeing `FROM` (just a mail header, spammers will set this to what they're pretending to be) vs `Reply-To` (if you reply this is the address the message will be sent to, for spam this is often unrelated to the content eg random1222@example.com) vs `Return-Path` (who sent the email). This is sort of like the `raw domain` vs `internationalized domain` (allowing UTF8 similar characters to spoof a domain) vs `hiding the URL` problem in the browser. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys_Identified_Mail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys_Identified_Mail [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMARC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMARC
• CodeWriter23 4y ago
  The Thunderbird Saga reminds of an old computer industry joke. The new CEO of a tech company shows up for day one. He meets his recently-fired predecessor as he enters his office. They shake hands and the outgoing guy says "I left three letters for you in the bottom drawer, use them as needed". First quarter for the new CEO, he hasn't much to put in the win column, having barely familiarized himself with staff and projects. But he has to provide a report to the Directors. Desperate, he pulls the first envelope, which reads "Blame your predecessor". Next quarter isn't much better. Again desperate to prepare for the Board Meeting, pulls the second letter which reads "Blame the economy". Third quarter he's just about to get some traction but still doesn't have anything earth shattering to report, he goes for the last letter, which reads "Write three letters".
  • LAC-Tech 4y ago
    I laughed a lot. After I finished one contract I told my team there (all permies) to remember to blame me after I'm gone.
• ulizzle 4y ago
  I still remember the glory days of Thunderbird, good times. I'm not holding my hopes up, internet history has proved that 2nd systems rarely make it, but as long as they don't change the badass logo, I wish 'em luck.
• carlosjobim 4y ago
  For a long time I wished for an e-mail client that shows a side-by-side view of the e-mail your composing and the e-mail you're replying to. I think the majority of people would like such a view, yet nobody offers it. Does anybody know any good solution in macOS?
  • autoexec 4y ago
    What's wrong with seeing the email you're replying to quoted in the message itself? It'd be redundant to see the message right next to you and also just below where you're typing.
    • carlosjobim 4y ago
      If you are answering long e-mails you have to keep scrolling up and down!
  • wackget 4y ago
    You could just open a copy of the email in a separate window and tile them side-by-side.
    • carlosjobim 4y ago
      I wish, but any open message window gets terminated and replaced when clicking the reply button. Edit: Found the work-around: You have to hold the Option key when clicking reply to be allowed two windows. Just Mac things, I guess...
  • helmholtz 4y ago
    My god, I absolutely agree. On Outlook, you can "Pop Out" the draft of your own email, leaving the original email intact in the background ready for side-by-side view, but that's the only solution I know of.
• anthk 4y ago
  GUI: Claws Mail/Sylpheed TUI: mbsync+msmtp+Mutt+Maildir
• masterof0 4y ago
  Thunderbird used to be a Native email client, that was awesome. I want an native email client, contacts and calendar. That's it. I dislike the browser tabs inside Thunderbird (I already use Firefox), either make a web version or keep the native version native. Most of the Thunderbird user base, are the ones that preferred the OG version. Not everything have to be a webview. Maybe they don't want users like me anymore. And that is fine. Is just feel sad, I miss the old Thunderbird.
  • seabrookmx 4y ago
    OG thunderbird may have been better but it wasn't technically native. It used XUL instead of HTML but both were rendered by Gecko.
• tlamponi 4y ago
  Thunderbird had already a good email UX, what it now doesn't really has (anymore!) is performance, this post makes me honestly worried that the project will go in the totally wrong direction, alienating all power users. Swapping out the C++ pop/imap/... implementation with a JS one is bogus IMO, yeah JS engines are fast nowadays, but still order of magnitude slower than compiled code. Not to go for the meme, but what I really don't get is why not go for rust if a rewrite is anyway planned and your share the codebase with the product that caused the invention of that language, and showed that its possible to integrate it for subsystems?! Fact is that my whole Thunderbird hangs and freezes completely ~15 times a day, on my 128 GiB DDR5, fast, PCIe 4 attached TLC NVMe storage and a Alder Lake top model i7 CPU. Look, a input text field, configured for plain text, just must not hang on such a machine, even not on a 15y old one - it's a god damn text input field, if that hangs you just make some things horribly wrongs, it's so irritating and just not healthy for anybodies blood pressure - save local in sync and save to drafts async. Then there are the crashes, resize some reply window while it loads something in the main one? boom, crashed. Mail is a big topic add work, for one we got a product that handles mail and for another we use mail in our development flow _a lot_, just like a lot of other Open Source projects. I know quite a few people that use, or well, used, Thunderbird as their mail reader, and more thanks to CalDav and Matrix implementation, ... basically only touching git send-email besides Thunderbird for mail related stuff. None, literally zero, of them complained about the UI or UX from a few years ago, like never. Well a few that tried out recent betas did about adding some odd side bars, hiding down menus, making a lot of things harder to find. To conclude my, already cut short, rant (sorry, this one was brewing since a bit): Now I got the aerc client set up, waiting on stand by for the final blow of sensless UI shuffle-around-and-make-unuseable-for-power-user updates; as then I'll have to say good bye to the (former) GOAT mail client - never thought this would happen :-(
• mcjiggerlog 4y ago
  So much negativity in this thread, jeez. I love current Thunderbird but it undeniably has its issues. Firstly, of course this is subjective, but its UI is starting to look dated. Lots of you are complaining about modern UIs, but I think the designs [0][1] look great and are much more readable than the current design, which looks straight out of Ubuntu 8.04. Then there are some major UX issues, the most obvious one being the lack of conversation view, which is how pretty much everybody expects an email client to work in 2023. Supernova implementing that is reason enough to be excited about the release. I can't wait to try it out - keep up the awesome work, team! [0] https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap [1] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/11/thunderbird-supernova-preview-the-new-calendar-design/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/11/thunderbird-supernova-p...
  • mixmastamyk 4y ago
    Not everyone has a 16:9 monitor, so super wide views don’t work for me. And that is the main problem, new designer shows up and doesn’t bother to implement the previous layout or workflow. Effectively hobbling the interface when all us real users wanted were bug fixes. Hopefully won’t happen this time.
    • _cenw 4y ago
      > Not everyone has a 16:9 monitor, so super wide views don’t work for me. I'd say that you're in a small enough minority that most people will design right past you, just like most websites have an acceptable minimum percentage of browser feature availability after which you can make that feature a requirement for functionality. Especially as screens tend to get wider, not thinner.
      • throwawayapples 4y ago
        I see what you're saying, but wouldn't it be also great if there was a mail app that didn't consume the entire screen real estate.
• nxoxn 4y ago
  Neat, I'm looking forward to it.
• ilyt 4y ago
  Oh please fuck not again. It's the only fucking client that works with O365 without fuckery ;/
• _a_a_a_ 4y ago
  The best I can say of thunderbird is it isn't entirely broken, but I'm still looking to move away from it very soon. I need a stable reliable tool, not what TB has become (realistically, what it's always been - not good). Suggestions welcome.
• mixmastamyk 4y ago
  Everyone complaining about performance should try this: Compact the folders. If still slow, vacuum the sqlites. Still slow? Do a FS checkup, may have corruption. I put this in my cleanup script. Don’t know why they don’t do it automatically after each upgrade to new version?
• big_____country 4y ago
  I find the way this guy says "rep-uh-ZIT-ur-ree" very mellifluous
• yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  > “Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?” > ~ A notable percentage of Thunderbird users What percentage is that, I wonder? A large number, or enough to kind of justify replacing the UI if you fudge the numbers?
  • ranger207 4y ago
    I'd expect it's a large number, because I'd expect that most of the people who like the old UI also turn off telemetry. When Ars Technica did a redesign a couple of years ago, they didn't launch with a dark mode because their telemetry didn't indicate that many people used it. There were a bunch of comments from users asking for dark mode, so they polled subscribers and the numbers who used dark mode were massively higher than the telemetry indicated. Turns out that the people who used dark mode were also the kinds of people who used strict ad blocker profiles which blocked the telemetry
    • autoexec 4y ago
      It seems more and more like telemetry is mostly good for seeing only what your most clueless users are doing. It's a problem when your userbase is largely technical and has no problem finding the "don't spy on me" checkbox. Projects with highly technical users would be better off listening to forums. It doesn't seem like the folks in /r/Thunderbird are overly concerned with the UI
      • ranger207 4y ago
        Forums have their own problems. Most turn into echo chambers where one particular opinion is dominant pretty quickly. There's plenty of topics where one subreddit will be broadly positive about a subject, and another subreddit will be broadly negative about the same subject. I'm not sure there's currently _any_ good way to get unbiased feedback from users. Ideally you should probably cross check a few different methods, but that's hard
• nektro 4y ago
  thunderbird looks and acts exactly like how I want it to
• planter 4y ago
  > What To Expect Going Forward > [...] And yes, absolutely: the constant addition of new features [...] Please don't.
• mbfg 4y ago
  i really can't think of anything that is a problem for me with the current thunderbird. Works stably for me, makes enough sense as to how it works, and has whatever features i need. Not sure what all the fuss is about.
• imiric 4y ago
  I'll add one more negative sentiment. > Using a solid base architecture like Firefox is the perfect starting point. No, but why? Why does an email client need a web browser to function, and why is that the "perfect starting point"? The only reason an email client might use a web _view_ for, is for reading HTML emails, and even then that web view should be a far more restricted and barebones version of a traditional browser tab. This approach simply inherits all the security issues from the insane complexity of modern browsers, just to reuse some common components that should've been extracted and separated from all the browser baggage. Hey, Mozilla, remember XUL? Before you decided to deprecate and remove it from Firefox, it was the unified UI framework that both a browser and an email client could use, without sharing any of their core dependencies. What a concept! I'm surprised Mozilla still has interest in maintaining Thunderbird. I'm curious to know what the userbase for it is, but I can't imagine desktop email clients have a mainstream audience anymore.
  • npigrounet 4y ago
    [dead]
  • nashashmi 4y ago
    Dropping XUL really broke so many extensions. I think everyone dumped FF then and started over with chrome.
    • Endy 4y ago
      Thank goodness for Pale Moon & the UXP.
      • nashashmi 4y ago
        This is awesome. Never heard of this before. Now I’m crying.
  • paulrouget 4y ago
    Ex Mozilla here. > Why does an email client need a web browser to function, and why is that the "perfect starting point"? I'm not saying using Firefox is the best thing, but there are arguments to be made: first, Firefox is multiplatform, and good at it, and that's something Thunderbird needs as well. Then, like you said, an email client needs to display web pages, so no matter what, a web engine is needed (and it's absolutely possible to re-use Firefox core without building and including all the HTML features regular Firefox comes with). And finally, the whole TB code base is already in JS/XPCom, which would make the transition much easier. > Hey, Mozilla, remember XUL? Before you decided to deprecate and remove it from Firefox, it was the unified UI framework that both a browser and an email client could use That's an unnecessary snarky. There are millions of reasons why it made sense to remove XUL. Yes, on paper XUL is great, but it was based on old UI ideas, we had to make tons of hacks to work around those old ideas, and performance was not on par with what overly-optimised HTML could achieve. XBL was way to limited, and tons of features were just useless (remember RDF and templates?). I would love to see XUL come back, but we need a modern version of it, and to be honest, this could just be an extension of HTML. > without sharing any of their core dependencies That's not true. > I'm surprised Mozilla still has interest in maintaining Thunderbird It's not Mozilla-Mozilla who's maintaining Thunderbird, but another entity.
• einpoklum 4y ago
  Many of us have tried to struggle against the gradual destruction of TB's UI, under the excuse of modernization. But all this gets you is derision and sanctions. This also reflects major problems in how the project is managed, which is a very sad tale way beyond the scope of an HN comment.
• alerighi 4y ago
  Nooooooooo Why change the UI? I mean, I like Thunderbird exactly since it's the only email client that didn't go into the direction of emulating GMail or Apple Mail or other mail interfaces that shows you the messages in a conversational manner. I like Thunderbird because it has more or less the same user experience of the old "Outlook" Windows application. Why change something that works??? At least I hope they will give users the possibility to remain with the classical interface, otherwise I think I will still remain on older versions (after all IMAP is relatively stable so I shouldn't have that much issues). The only thing I would like on Thunderbird is sync of the settings with a Mozilla account like Firefox does. Not that it's a big deal, I just copy around the profile directory (because reconfiguring 10 email accounts each time I change/format the PC takes almost 1 hour).
• nashashmi 4y ago
  They are most definitely changing the UI to be white space fancy and in-line with new users. It is a reset of features. That’s what they are doing with K9 too. Not the direction I was hoping they would go in. They should forget the rewrite. And forget the UI change. They should separate the UI stuff into a different module. And let others innovate on it. They should only focus on maintenance changes with Firefox. And then add new features. Like external linked attachment technology. Snoozing emails. Sorting emails based on content. Unsubscribe highlighting. Scraping incoming emails for patterns. Machine learning for Outgoing emails. And finally, they really need to get into the email server game. Innovation can’t only be happening in the client.
  • nashashmi 4y ago
    Filelink is an add on. They have added it.
• ubermonkey 4y ago
  I wish Tbird would become usable for me, but every time I try, it falls very very short in polish, in performance, and in capability. Mac's native Mail program works super super well for me and my enormous corpus of mail, search is nearly instant, and it talks to IMAP and Exchange with ease. It's also reasonably easy to look at. I get some folks don't care for it, and I absolutely concede that the old saw about "the worst one, except for all the others" still applies, but for me, Tbird is just one of "all the others."
• junon 4y ago
  Hopefully this is more than a UI improvement and also tackles pretty awful UX. I use catch all mailboxes to combat spam after moving away from Proton, and thunderbird makes me "subscribe" to each one. If I'm not expecting a new mailbox to be created, I simply don't see it. Plus, the subscription process takes 30+ second per mailbox. The entire UI just freezes. I also have to unsubscribe first, because the checkbox is already marked, and then re-subscribe. Perhaps this is some leftover of mail protocols that makes little sense anymore, but I digress. I'm ready for email to just die. I don't know what a good alternative is but email feels like the printers of software.
• redeeman 4y ago
  i hope they will make it better, though I expect they will make it worse. much worse.
• gorgoiler 4y ago
  The Thunderbird UI evolved to be everything for every use case, and therefore nothing to everyone. A coherent, opinionated subset of UI features (and keybindings) would be really welcome.
• oblib 4y ago
  T-Bird is still my primary email app on my Mac. Apple's "Mail" app fine too but it's great to see the T-Bird team is willing to modernize it with a complete rewrite. The last T-Bird update was really pretty good considering the old code they were working with so I'm excited to see them take this path.
• powersnail 4y ago
  Maybe the problem is IMAP/POP3/SMTP, but I feel like email clients in general are just slow. I have time to manually open every separate email account in the browser, and have all of them ready to read, before Thunderbird (or KMail, etc.) finishes loading new emails. And I don't even have a lot of new emails every day, like 5~10, so I'm not quite sure what exactly is taking so long to sync. I can download a 500MB video in the time TB syncs a few KBs of email. I've largely given up on desktop email clients at this point. It'd be nice to have a single place to manage emails, but the performance is too poor.
  • tguvot 4y ago
    do you have imap idle/push enabled on server/client ? i use kmail for past 20 years or so, and it's been just fine. thunderbird that my wife uses feels much slower in comparison to kmail
• andix 4y ago
  I really love emClient, but it’s proprietary, there are no plugins and no Linux version (only windows/mac). There is a free version though, that doesn’t come with a lot of restrictions.
  • gnuj3 4y ago
    OK.
• hermitcrab 4y ago
  I don't have any issue with the Thunderbird GUI. My main issue is that there is a nasty bug when when you click on an email the body of the email doesn't always match the subject. That is quite a nasty bug and it has been there for at least a year. Am I only the only person that gets this?
• LAC-Tech 4y ago
  I tried out a bunch of desktop email clients on linux, and found thunderbird easiest to use. Doesn't feel particularly slow to me. UI feels fine - but I last used desktop Outlook in 2019 or so.
• jmount 4y ago
  I remember (perhaps incorrectly) using Thunderbird and then reading it was no longer supported and to move away.
• hathawsh 4y ago
  I use Thunderbird and I like it, but I keep wondering: shouldn't there be a way to store all email in Postgres locally, instead of on the filesystem? It just seems like it would be a great idea. I can see lots of pros and cons, but I feel like the pros would easily outweigh the cons for someone who uses Postgres often.
  • kstrauser 4y ago
    If you're going that route, SQLite seems like the most appropriate candidate.
• arthurcolle 4y ago
  I started using Thunderbird with 4 or 5 mailboxes (split out via ProtonMail Bridge) and it is usable especially after I archived the bulk of my emails going back to maybe 2016, and I can't believe they are going to waste engineering cycles on something that sounds like a rewrite. Bonkers. Might have to take a look at the alternatives mentioned in this thread
  • tux2bsd 4y ago
    [dead]
• synergy20 4y ago
  Nowadays all my emails are from the browser(gmail,outlook,etc), I used to be a thunderbird user and liked it, just wonder if the 'traditional' email client user base will be further in decline? To me the browser is the thunderbird, not as powerful, but good enough for normal use.
• ttoinou 4y ago
  My biggest issue with Thunderbird is the Quick filter search I have thousands of emails in one folder and it can block the UI for a while when making a basic search :-( . And it's also not correct, it won't show all the results, so I have to resort to using the real search which is clunky to use on a daily basis. If only they could fix this ! The UI is great already, it doesn't need much work
• nipperkinfeet 4y ago
  Goodbye, Thunderbird. What options are still available that don't follow this "modern" path. Simply give me the old-fashioned interface and leave me alone.
  • Endy 4y ago
    Look into Interlink from Binary Outcast. It was originally based on Pale Moon in the same way Thunderbird is based on Firefox.
• pfp 4y ago
  Thunderbird still is pretty fast, though not as fast as before. And until the user-hostile changes (mandatory setup wizards) began creeping in a few years back, one of the venerable classics that you could still rely on. Pretty sure the new version is going to be a steaming pile of modern usability horrors; reduced features, cheeseburger menus, unreadable UI elements because it has to "look modern", all powered by Electron & co. Can't say I'm surprised though.
  • jeltz 4y ago
    Mandatory setup wizards was really horrible and a throwback to the UI design of the late 90s. So modern!
• j45 4y ago
  Long live Thunderbird
• mgaunard 4y ago
  Thunderbird 2 was nice. After that they just made it worse and worse.
• CamouflagedKiwi 4y ago
  If the whole thing is such a big, crumbling Lego tower, and it's going to take three years just to fix the problems it has now, this doesn't seem like a compelling argument to keep using it. Surely at some point it must be easier to abandon it and start over - obviously that won't just solve all problems, but there must be a line where the cost of maintaining the current thing outweighs the cost of a rewrite.
• wejick 4y ago
  I'm actually happy with this news, looking forward to see the first stable version. The new calendar looks neat, haven't see the inbox yet. Things that is not clear is how big the difference architecture wise and especially with the UI rebuild they have chance to implement new approach. I really expect this bring smoother interaction, hopefully the UX remains familiar.
• NoboruWataya 4y ago
  I have been using Thunderbird for years. Every now and again I get curious about what else is out there and I start looking into alternatives like Claws or Neomutt. But then inevitably I realise that these are simply solutions in search of a problem for me, that Thunderbird continues to work absolutely fine and there is really no reason to switch. I understand others will have a different use case to me but it always blows my mind to see people having so many problems with Thunderbird when it has been just a very consistent workhorse in my experience. I use Thunderbird for personal stuff and Outlook for work. I know it's probably not a fair comparison as my work laptop is slowed down by all the security stuff and general corporate spyware, but damn I only wish my work email could be half as snappy as my personal email. A tip for those complaining about search, particularly about its performance: if you can, try filtering instead. It's more limited (I think it only searches sender and subject line) but it is blazingly fast for me, filtering out several GB of emails in less than a second, always. Finally, for those wondering why an email client needs to be built on top of a web browser - this is because in 2023, most "normies" receive a lot of email that is heavy on HTML, so in order to be in any way useful to the majority of users, an email client needs to be really good at parsing HTML, which browsers are. Of course it seems like overkill if you only receive plaintext email.
  • HNAbusesUsers 4y ago
    After getting my parents new computers, setting them up from scratch, and finding that Windows is an even more depressing shitshow than ever and lacking any competent E-mail program... I installed Thunderbird for the first time in at least a decade and a half. And I was pleasantly surprised to find that it's better than I remember, and worked great for the 20,000 messages or so in each of their AOL In boxes. Sadly, I'm not kidding about those In boxes. For my accounts I rely on Apple Mail and SpamSieve, which works well. The dealbreaker for me when I tried Thunderbird years ago is that it lacked any way to export the filters you'd set up, so you could copy them to your other computers. Has this been addressed?
    • nobody9999 4y ago
      >For my accounts I rely on Apple Mail and SpamSieve, which works well. The dealbreaker for me when I tried Thunderbird years ago is that it lacked any way to export the filters you'd set up, so you could copy them to your other computers. Has this been addressed? No. You can't even copy them to other accounts on the same computer. I had to recreate dozens of rules last year for just that reason. If TB wasn't head and shoulders above other MUAs, I'd have dumped it. Then again, I have emails in TB accounts going back to 1996, so perhaps I'm biased in that regard.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• WalterBright 4y ago
  My complaint is it should store each email in its own file (like NNTP readers do). This makes it much more amenable to backups, search, and makes it a lot less susceptible to corruption. Instead, Tbird stores one folder in one gigantic file. One threading error, and poof! It's gone. Happened to me several times. Yes, I filed bug reports. No, it was never fixed (at least the Tbird developers denied this was a problem). Another minor thing I'd like to see is don't hide everything in multiple places. There's still no way to backup my account settings.
  • wankle 4y ago
    > One threading error, and poof! It's gone. Happened to me several times. In all the years I've used Thunderbird, it's never happened to me, several machine types. I like the way the file/folder structure is and do not want to see it changed.
    • WalterBright 4y ago
      You'll change your mind about liking it when it fails and you lose months/years of mail.
      • cmacleod4 4y ago
        Surely this is what regular backups are for.
  • dreadnaut 4y ago
    > My complaint is it should store each email in its own file Thunderbird supports one-file-per-email (Maildir) accounts, see settings. It's still marked as "experimental" because of some edge cases, but I have not encountered issues in many years, and it makes for a snappier experience. - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/maildir-thunderbird https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/maildir-thunderbird > There's still no way to backup my account settings. Import / Export settings has ben around for a few versions: - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-export https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-export
• pc2g4d 4y ago
  I recently adopted Thunderbird as my email client (was using Gmail's web UI) and have really appreciated the power of it, enough that I donated to the project. NOT being like current designs has been part of the appeal. This development sounds high-risk, low-reward from my perspective. Could well end up nerfing the tool I just adopted. But c'est la vie, I guess. Probably the mistake was leaving Thunderbird without real governance back in 2012, so now as it's pulled from anarchy it's going to be painful watching "the law" of centralized development come down. I would prefer if it were a more democratic process.
• timnetworks 4y ago
  I read the last thing that made front page, didn't know that Thunderbird is developed by a dozen people, or that it's basically an add-on for Firefox. I get that they need to chase marketshare and audience and can't stop lest the big guys win forever. Still, I quite liked the old interface, the nested menus where everything is where it should be and doesn't take four 'steps' and an eventual search to find, the grey-on-darker-grey colorscheme, the hard corners that scream out 'this isn't the ephemeral interwebs, these are rock-solid time-stamped spf-checked emails. Thank you for an amazing software package, regardless of the Dr-Who-like metamorphosis it goes through.
• karavelov 4y ago
  I am a Linux user, and I gave on Thunderbird due to terrible Exchange support - now I use Evolution, it has its own problems but my calendar is synced. P.S. No my choice to use Exchange on the server side.
  • curt15 4y ago
    Have you tried Davmail? There's even a container image for it which worked pretty well for me a few years ago.
• Dalewyn 4y ago
  I'm still using Thunderbird v11.0 and I have no plans of upgrading my install or even installing anything newer for a fresh install. It's motherfucking email, for fuck's sake. That shit hasn't changed in the past 3 decades, let alone every fucking month. What the fuck is a Thunderbird 102 anyway? I don't need nor want a client that changes under my foot every god damn month, much less multiple UI redesigns that force me to relearn everything just to fucking read and fucking write my fucking emails. If or when Thunderbird stops running on some version of Windows in the farflung future, I will probably find some other client worth my time and migrate to that; not Thunderbird version 348719 or whatever it's up to at that point.
• Ono-Sendai 4y ago
  “Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?” Neither of those are a concern to me. I prefer functioning software, I don't care that much how it looks. And I don't care about the rate of change.
• sammy2255 4y ago
  Tip to Thunderbird: dont block the UI thread when doing net requests. I’ll waive the consulting fee for that one.
• nsonha 4y ago
  someone please tells me what is special about thunderbird as a mail client, other than nostalgia? Why does it keep showing up on HN?
• dreamcompiler 4y ago
  I hope the Thunderbird crew understand how incredibly important this software is and how much some of us depend on it. Good IMAP clients are hard to write and most civilians have become so used to crappy browser-based email that there's not much demand for IMAP clients except among people like the ones who frequent this website. Apple ruined their IMAP client ("Mail") a few years ago so now that world is basically Outlook and Thunderbird, and I'm sure I don't need to describe why Outlook is unacceptable.
  • newscracker 4y ago
    > Apple ruined their IMAP client ("Mail") a few years ago Please elaborate on this point. I’d like to know how it was before and how it is now. > so now that world is basically Outlook and Thunderbird, and I'm sure I don't need to describe why Outlook is unacceptable. Please also elaborate on why Outlook is unacceptable. I like hearing different perspectives. I personally don’t use Outlook and don’t like it because it pushed a lot of non-standard things (for want of a broader and better word), is actually slow and painful to use, and exists to satisfy Microsoft’s agenda to make everything proprietary (AFAIK Outlook365/Microsoft365/Exchange Server by default disables IMAP, SMTP and POP citing those as insecure even though they’re usable with OAuth2).
    • dreamcompiler 4y ago
      My problems with Apple Mail are twofold, and both happened in the last five years. 1. They changed the tabular UI in Mail such that the columns were no longer directly manipulable. For a while they had a setting that allowed you to continue to use the old UI, but that switch is now gone. The new UI is decidedly less functional for me. It reeks of "product manager urination syndrome" where a PM makes his mark by pissing on a good product and ruining it. 2. They introduced a bug that caused data loss on the IMAP server. An email client that destroys data on the server is a dealbreaker for me. I get the impression this has since been fixed, but Apple lost my trust with this one. I switched to Thunderbird. As for Outlook, you expressed the issues better than I could.
• nigrioid 4y ago
  It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the Electron again.
• skurtcastle 4y ago
  I'm excited for the rebuild, glad to hear things are moving well. Looking forward to checking out when available.
• bobse 4y ago
  >We’re Rebuilding The Thunderbird Interface From Scratch Again!? Make Thunderbird work with Outlook/Exchange without paid plugins ffs...
• rtpg 4y ago
  I actually started using Thunderbird recently again after not using it for 5 or so years… honestly they have cleaned up the UI a lot I found! I don’t really need changes at this point, and find the UI is a pretty good local optimum. Information density is nice!
• 10g1k 4y ago
  Seperate inner shenanigans (yes, I said shenanigans!) from presentation. Allows for skins, easier changes to appearance, etc.
• sciencesama 4y ago
  All i meed is a sort by latest and group by sender option !! Tried to get it in mutt but couldn’t figure it out !! So i can delete all the mail that comes out on top that is not useful !!
• rany_ 4y ago
  Actual Thunderbird users don't care about the UI. That made up quote probably applies to someone that just gave Thunderbird a try though and left disappointed.
  • zymhan 4y ago
    > Actual Thunderbird users don't care about the UI Because it runs so many potential users off. Obviously the only folks using it don't mind the antiquated UI. I think that's called a tautology?
• emodendroket 4y ago
  I welcome efforts to try and improve it. Frankly, between the Thunderbird search being bad and the inability to configure server-side Gmail filters in the client, I find myself using it less and less despite being a loyal user for I don't know how many years now.
• TheChaplain 4y ago
  I pray the UI will be modifiable so we can fix the for certain upcoming use of trends of mobile designs on desktop with margins wider than a football fields and useful functionality hidden/removed "because of simplicity".
• chefandy 4y ago
  People get mad about it but I haven't seen one open source project without paid designers and product managers at the helm that successfully incorporates non-technical users' needs well enough for them to compete with commercial offerings. Firefox? Android? Blender? Chromium? Signal? Mozilla is doing this right. They're doing this right. They have a simple mode to suit inexperienced users and a full mode for folks who don't need the simplified experience. If you really think this kind of work ruins applications, then fork it and surely other developers who are enamored with the clunkyness will help maintain it right?
• rswail 4y ago
  Been using Thunderbird since I don't remember, before that sylpheed etc. Use a Mac now and Thunderbird is using 0.1% CPU idle and 562MB. I use the "folders on the left, message list on the right top, selected message view underneath" view. Things that I require on Thunderbird (that I had to hack, muck around with): * Timestamps in ISO8601 * Either the ability to use a Solarized theme, or one that accurately uses the MacOS light/dark themes. * Larger (16-20pt) font sizes for all panes * Really good integration between a CardDAV server (I use fastmail) and accumulating email addresses automagically and not get confused with my local MacOS Contacts. I don't use the tasks/events/calendar integration because it gets confused between my CalDAV server (fastmail), and my local Mac OS calendar.
• solatic 4y ago
  Using Mimestream dramatically realigned my expectations of what a snappy UX feels like. Thunderbird is quite slow by comparison. I'm not sure that desktop software should attempt to align with casual users. Most casual users will stick to the first-party experience. What is supposed to draw a casual Gmail user away from the first-party webmail? What is supposed to draw a casual Google Calendar user away from the first-party web-calendar? What is going to be not 2x better but 10x better than the first-party interface? The desktop interface needs to put power-users first, or put resource-savings first, or put low-latency UI first. What other advantage can be built on the desktop above the first-party experience, one which is also built by professional designers and Product teams, who will always be a step ahead of you on the feature roadmap?
• fsckboy 4y ago
  it's not Thunderbird, but Seamonkey is like the old Netscape Communicator, with an integrated full "unixy" email client MUA. It's very old school.
• _bax 4y ago
  Outlook UI sucks, but searching feature is better. Long live Thunderbird
• hbossy 4y ago
  >A renewed attention to usability and accessibility is now part of our daily development process, guaranteeing easy discoverability of all the powerful features, as well as full compatibility with assistive technologies to make Thunderbird usable by everyone. ah yes, that logorrhea of corporate speak surely means the project is heading in right direction.