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Native Exchange Support is coming to Thunderbird
- bberenberg 3y agoCan someone help me understand why rust was needed to accomplish this?
- kstrauser 3y agoI don’t think it’s that it required Rust, as that the people who wanted to implement that feature wanted to use Rust, and that motivated the Thunderbird gang to do the needful to make that an option.
- andy_ppp 3y agoSeeing as Rust came out of Mozilla I would think supporting it in their email client would be fairly reasonable even without this push!
- SushiHippie 3y agohttps://thunderbird.topicbox.com/groups/planning/Tb418f4ccd58dbb80-M25eb2d2ddee4b0921d37e122/thunderbird-a-born-again-crustacean https://thunderbird.topicbox.com/groups/planning/Tb418f4ccd5... They explain it here, but it is basically not needed though they wanted to take advantage of rusts features.
- afavour 3y agoI struggle to think of many scenarios where Rust is needed. But I can think of a great many scenarios where Rust is preferable.
- j45 3y agoMaybe rust can do for Thunderbird what rust did for Firefox. Outlook is a reality in the world. If people don’t have an option on the server they use, more people will be able to use Thunderbird.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoI use Linux and I’ll know I will be crucified for saying it… but Outlook’s base UI is just better and I might reconsider TB when I can make it look even remotely like Outlook. It’s not big things. It’s spacing, fonts, choice of pictograms and their locations. Some is opinion, and some is just functionally better. In fact, I stand by that if I were them, I would be pushing as hard as possible for an Outlook Theme for people just coming in or back. Office 365 is too common to ignore - considering the native Exchange support post here.
- xenophonf 3y agoOutlook has had the better mail UI since the late 90s at least, and I'm saying that as a committed (ding) Gnus user.
- brnt 3y agoWork forces me to use Outlook (2016), but for anything else you can pry Kmail from my cold dead hands.
- tilwidnk 3y agoI want Thunderbird to look like Thunderbird, not Outlook. There's nothing superior about Outlook. When Microsoft made the ridiculous decision to stuck the search text box in the Title Bar, it was clear they have no clue any more what they're doing. Then Thunderbird recently followed suit. Dumb and dumber. At least TB lets us fix it. Now they're focusing on Exchange support when the best email servers on the planet have nothing to do with Microsoft? Dumb and dumber redux. Time to look for a new email client on the Linux Desktop.
- tomsmeding 3y agoI get your sentiment, and while some may disagree (most of this is subjective, anyway), there will be many who agree with most of your points here. However: > Now they're focusing on Exchange support when the best email servers on the planet have nothing to do with Microsoft? People don't want Exchange because they like Exchange. For people who like Microsoft, the very last thing they care about is that their email client communicates with their server over Exchange. This feature is for the unfortunate Linux fans, like you, who are stuck with a job that requires them to interact with a Microsoft server. That's not dumb, that's a smart move on the TB side (well, lucky, perhaps, that people are willing to work on it, more than being smart) to allow users to use TB in the first place. If you don't use Exchange you won't mind the support (barring perhaps reduced development elsewhere), but it will let many people use TB where they otherwise _could not_ without plugins.
- jrm4 3y agoThis is excellent, frankly. Lately I haven't been super keen on Thunderbird's move away from plugins (seriously, different colored accounts should be trivially easy and apparently no.) But given the garbage pile experience that is "Outlook on the Web" (and the fact that I have been forced into it at work) -- yeah, if this works that'll be an easy donation.
- amluto 3y agoI’m not convinced that Outlook on the Web is worse than Outlook via Mail.app.
- biscuitech 3y agoBring me back to outlook desktop 2016 please
- ejdyksen 3y ago> facilitating the native support for the Exchange protocol There is not one single “Exchange Protocol”. There’s MAPI, EWS, ActiveSync, and more. Anyone know what this uses?
- quonn 3y agoApparently EWS which makes sense. ActiveSync is for mobile and EWS is newer compared to MAPI (which is an API technically), although there is a protocol that maps this to RPC for the Exchange case.
- p_l 3y agoEWS if I recall correctly is transposition of MAPI-RPC onto HTTPS connection
- ejdyksen 3y agoEWS is a SOAP-based web services protocol. Totally separate from MAPI. What you're thinking of is called RPC-over-HTTP or sometimes "Outlook Anywhere".
- p_l 3y agoAhh. I wonder how it deals with things like MAPI (which still forms internals of Outlook and Exchange) not actually supporting HTML email[1] despite having a message for it (and Outlook being infamous for pushing HTML email in minds of many) [1] If you include a HTML Email message part in a MAPI store, the MS MAPI library explodes and declares the store unreadable. You have to wrap HTML in RTF and include it in RTF message part... ¯ \ _ ಠ _ ಠ _ / ¯
- quonn 3y agoIt‘s not totally separate from MAPI because it inherits a large amount of the legacy baggage. A compliant implementation will need a very similar object model, in particular most of the properties, streams and encapsulated formats are also transported through EWS.
- anoopelias 3y agoSeems Cloudflare is not happy with me, I'm getting "Sorry, you have been blocked You are unable to access linuxiac.com" The same error even if I hit simply https://linuxiac.com/ https://linuxiac.com/ Is it only me?
- Operyl 3y agoIt’s likely that the blog owner has geolocation restrictions in place.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thunfisch 3y agoJust read everything from the source, instead of a third party blog post. https://blog.thunderbird.net/2024/01/thunderbird-monthly-development-digest-january-2024/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2024/01/thunderbird-monthly-dev...
- thanksgiving 3y agoWorks perfectly for me. Perhaps share your ray id with Adam over email? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37051949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37051949 Meanwhile, does this load for you? https://archive.fo/OevXp https://archive.fo/OevXp
- anoopelias 3y agoThanks the archive works fine. I will share rayid with Cloudflare.
- spacechild1 3y agoYeah! Currently, I am paying for ExQuilla because my university does not provide e-mail access via IMAP. They literally told me that IMAP is too old and Exchange is "the future" sigh.
- zelphirkalt 3y agoIMAP is indeed old, but the question is, what implication of it being old they see as critical. If they worry about things needing to be encrypted better, then they could have PGP set up. It is quite common to have a more secure message exchange via a not secure channel in many protocols, so I don't see a big problem. Usually when someone claims some proprietary MS owned product is the future, they are either sorely uninformed, MS fanboy, or their income depends on sticking with proprietary tech. None of which one would want at a public institution, and least of all in institutions of the education system. I still remember, when some admin at some educational place I went to wrote messages to everyone on the whole system to warn them about MS office document macros. But of course people did not get it and then some malware spread over many people's systems, because they ran the code. And this happened multiple times within a year or so and even after I had graduated, but still received e-mail, it happened again. So funny to watch that story play out over and over again.
- gnabgib 3y agoHave you, perhaps, not run a mail server? The limitation of SMTP/IMAP is that they're built with the assumption the connecting party can be trusted and acting in good faith (like many of the original protocols). You can implement TCP rate limits on top, but that doesn't work when botnets and spammers (likely using "crowdsourced VPNs") rarely use the same IP twice. Further if you're running robust mail infrastructure (backup/fallback mail exchanges) communicating these limits/ reputations is left up to the operator (not supported by protocols, rarely supported by servers). I don't think MAPI/OWA/EWS is better, at all, especially not against open mail standards, but SMTP & IMAP don't cut it either. On a new server, it only takes a few hours before someone connects over IMAP and starts testing passwords against accounts (faster if the server is assigned to the MX or A of an existing domain, and valid emails might be known from hacks/cracks/dumps/leaks/people posting their email in their profile).
- 29athrowaway 3y agoWhen you installed Windows 95, you would get an icon on your desktop: The Microsoft Network. It was the villainous attempt to control the Internet from the start. Gladly, it never thrived. So then came Internet Explorer, which after decades of spreading evil via non-standard behavior, annoying popups and malware, is finally gone. Now it's the turn for Exchange to be erased from the collective memory of humankind.
- robin_reala 3y agoWow, Mork is still around? I thought it had all been removed 12 years ago: http://web.archive.org/web/20190108164525/https://twitter.com/chrisblizzard/status/88314721631076352 http://web.archive.org/web/20190108164525/https://twitter.co...
- jcranmer 3y agoIt was moved from mozilla-central to comm-central.
- kayson 3y agoI love Thunderbird. I really do. But man it sucks that after all these years, still, the interface freezes while its downloading messages.
- boplicity 3y agoI've long struggled with this. Another HN user pointed out that it could actually be Windows Defender causing the issue. I disabled it for Thunderbird, and things are now running much better. Hopefully this will work for you too!
- doubled112 3y agoThis explains why I've never seen behaviour like that. I'm one of seemingly five people running Linux on the desktop, avoiding Windows PCs.
- kayson 3y agoThank you!!! This made a huge difference!
- blacklion 3y agoToo bad they spent time to Microsoft's proprietary protocol and not to suppoert open protocols better. Native Sieve editor would be nice. Or really good feature: store per-folder settings (like reply-to, sorting direction, view mode, etc) on IMAP server. There is per-folder key-value storage on IMAP server, and it is supported at least by dovecot server. Now I need to configure all my 100+ folders with 5 identities and different column settings on each new Thunderbird installation. It is SUXXXX. If I need Exchange protocol I will use Outlook. Thank you.
- blacklion 3y agoOr at least decent text editor, which allows to have one physical line per paragraph in plain-text messages but wrap these long lines visually to size of the editor window. As simple as that. Or good quoting engine. Does somebody remember FIDO's editor GoldEd? It made perfect multi-level quotes int most complex situations without problem, re-wrap and re-format lines to fit it in 80 columns (without breaking quotes in process!), it was real pleasure to read long threads because you always know who wrote what. And if you see broken quotes in echoarea you know, it is from usenet user, received via gateway with their shitty news clients. Thunderbird is still shitty in this regard, 30 years later.
- mardifoufs 3y agoWhat does it have with it being proprietary? They are doing it because tons and tons of people who would actually use a full email client also use Exchange, for reasons that are usually beyond the users control. You'd rather have them support something that much less people use or need for... reasons? Remember, this is an email client. Supporting or not a certain protocol won't make email servers support said protocol, not in any meaningful way at least. It would just make the email client (again, more of a niche nowadays) more irrelevant.
- blacklion 3y agoExchange is not email server. It is groupware server. Thunderbird will not support all features of Exchange, ever, as it requires much more than e-mail (and even calendar) support. And, yes, Exchange supports IMAP for people who want to use it as bad and feature-limited email server ;-) I want Thunderbird to be best e-mail client, not mediocre groupware client.
- Vermyndax 3y agoBefore you all get too excited, please remember that Exchange admins can control which clients are allowed to connect to their service, and Microsoft actively advises them to shut out everything but recent versions of Microsoft clients. Source: me, at almost all of my jobs, after being told to lock people out for using third party clients.