16 ms·
Bringing Exchange Support to Thunderbird
- superkuh 2y ago>in the entire 20 year lifetime of the Thunderbird project, no one has added support for a new mail protocol before. Technically true but also every megacorp's OAuth2 out-of-band authentication implementation needs it's own special configuration (read workaround) per email client and Thunderbird has collected quite a few. These are not normal mail protocols: they're over HTTPS not IMAP or POP3 or SMTP. This proclamation "no one has added support for a new mail protocol" is a good thing and this change is not good. Supporting proprietary setups is pragmatic and understandable but it's not good. This is only going to briefly mitigate the problems of email splintering into dozens of per-corporation variations while encouraging people to be okay with them in the long run.
- fabrice_d 2y agoEmployees have no choice when it comes to their corporate email provider, and this is not a hill to die on for 99.99999% of them. On the other hand, being able to use Thunderbird as a client is a net win and a pragmatic move.
- Ringz 2y agoThe sad fact is: Most employees aren’t able or allowed to install an alternative email client. And most employees don’t care.
- kbenson 2y agoAlthough, I would assume of those that can run what they want and do care they are already aware of and possibly use Thunderbird. Not every initiative has to just be about new users. Sometimes it's important to retain the ones you have. Making Thunderbird more useful and viable for those that use it already isn't a bad thing.
- memco 2y agoYears ago I worked for a place used exhange and third party tools were heavily discouraged but not banned. Web access wasn’t supported either so we were almost forced to have to use Outlook on a Windows machine. But I found DAVmail[0] allowed me to use the apps I wanted without being locked in and without mail clients supporting it directly. Nice to see more options here. Hopefully those of us who do care can continue to make the choices to use the tools we like. [0] https://davmail.sourceforge.net/ https://davmail.sourceforge.net/
- wolverine876 2y ago> every megacorp's It's not just one of every megacorp, it's by far the most commonly used email in business, Microsoft's Exchange and especially Exchange online.
- superkuh 2y agoI was talking about proprietary OAuth2 authentication protocol implementations in that statement. Like how the Thunderbird OAuth2 protocol for gmail is incompatible with the one for yahoo email, and so on. Which is different from normal protocols like imap/pop3 where the implementations are compatible across companies. I was not speaking in the context of exchange but in the more general sense of new HTTPS based protocol flavors being added to Thunderbird regularly.
- sir 2y agoWhat makes you say the protocol is different for each provider? I maintain a proxy that transparently adds support for OAuth 2.0 support to IMAP/POP/SMTP clients (https://github.com/simonrob/email-oauth2-proxy https://github.com/simonrob/email-oauth2-proxy), and for normal use it doesn’t need to know anything about which service it is connecting to. Apart from advanced features such as CCG or ROPCG which are mostly O365 only, what is different?
- wkat4242 2y agoIt's also cheaper per head than Google's business offering so it makes sense even for small business.
- Ringz 2y agoThis is good news and I'm looking forward to Thunderbird natively supporting XChange. But everything I read about it triggers my inner voice: „Do a parallel rewrite of the whole damn 20 year old codebase in Rust! It’s faster, cheaper and cleaner. Do it right now. Don’t discuss it in mailing lists. Take 12 competent software developers and let them rebuild everything.“
- robertlagrant 2y agoFaster and cheaper to write an email client from scratch? Including HTML rendering? Are you sure?
- Dalewyn 2y agoWhen all you have is Rust, everything looks like magic.
- Ringz 2y agoReally? Good to know! Because I don't know anything about Rust yet. Only C++ and Python. But I think that if you know a programming language sufficiently, everything looks like magic, or is that not the case with you?
- Ringz 2y agoNo. Leave the html rendering to Firefox. Edit: As it has already been handled by Thunderbird in the past.
- prima-facie 2y agoActually leave html rendering to Servo https://servo.org/ https://servo.org/
- lousken 2y agowhy implementing ews when it is already deprecated and will be removed in two years? https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/retirement-of-exchange-web-services-in-exchange-online/ba-p/3924440 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/re...
- shamiln 2y agoNot everyone is using Exchange Online.
- lousken 2y agoonly like vast majority, yes, i know
- ocdtrekkie 2y agoWe'll see how long that remains the case when Microsoft can't keep the Chinese government out of its cloud.
- coryrc 2y agoYou think outsourced point-and-click administrators of company on-prem servers could do better?
- ocdtrekkie 2y agoYes. Managing Exchange is not that hard. Having everyone's eggs in one basket though is just dumb.
- ruszki 2y agoNot that hard for you. I think, you’re overestimating the average employee. At my current company, the maintainers absolutely don’t have a clue how it works, and they are completely unusable when there is a problem with it. They don’t know even the basic things, they just blindly follow transcripts from Microsoft, like telecallers.
- packetlost 2y agoWe're desperately in need of SMTP/2 + IMAP5 or something
- f_devd 2y agoJMAP exists
- jcranmer 2y agoIMAPv4r2 came out relatively recently, in 2021: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9051/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9051/ (The big differences are IMAPv4r2 mandates a lot of necessary new features, like UID or UTF-8 support, and actually deprecated silly old stuff like MUTF7 mailbox names.)
- packetlost 2y agoDoes it support 2FA yet?
- gtech1 2y agonobody supports 2fa on every mail request, that's just silly. Even MS's MFA is nothing more than a token that gets stored locally ( aka, a password ) and which can be stolen and be used elsewhere ( like a password! ) by hackers. https://mrd0x.com/stealing-tokens-from-office-applications/ https://mrd0x.com/stealing-tokens-from-office-applications/
- barfard 2y ago[dead]
- hnarn 2y agoStrategically this makes sense if the goal is just to get people to use Thunderbird, but ideologically JMAP support would be a lot nicer in my opinion.
- ocdtrekkie 2y agoI imagine most of the work they accomplished here will be key in adding JMAP support in the future as well.
- SV_BubbleTime 2y agoThis post gives me extremely little hope. One one hand… ok, let’s say it’s an engineering post written by devs for devs. OKAY, talk about Rust if you like. Devs might be more interested in the cause than the effect. On the other hand… is this written for devs? Seems written for users. And I for one don’t give one half of one shit what language you use as a customer. It’s a post about Exchange, I don’t want to hear about new fangled language. I don’t pay you use a specific language, I pay you to deliver a specific feature… now obviously I don’t pay them in anything but time, donation, and reputation. But I think the point applies. No one but Rust Evangelicals care about doing something over in Rust. There isn’t a single end feature that you can deliver in Rust but not C. It reads to me like the developers are nerding out on a detail while being slightly uncommitted to the thing they “are paid to make”. I have to agree with the other users that MS has already set an EOL on the feature that TB is planning to use. So… woohoo Rust?
- diarrhea 2y ago> There isn’t a single end feature that you can deliver in Rust but not C. There are! Namely, when it’s open source with volunteer-ish developers, who cannot be arsed to not use Rust, as it’s simply that much more pleasant to be spending your time with. So in some sense, it’s either done in Rust because the implementers want to for one reason or another, or just not at all, as no one can be forced.
- SV_BubbleTime 2y agoThat isn’t even remotely a counter to what I said. There is not end feature you can do in Rust that you cannot do in C. End of story. Cool, it’s popular among enthusiasts. That’s fine.
- small_scombrus 2y ago> There is not end feature you can do in Rust that you cannot do in C. Sure, but you could create the whole thing in brainfuck if you really wanted to. Having something be nice to work with or extend is genuinely a feature
- avidphantasm 2y agoHate Exchange but glad they are doing this. Now maybe I can successfully send plaintext mail on Exchange when confined to Windows.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y agoYeah, and have your email appear significantly worse on a bunch of email clients all in the name of tech purism / nostalgia for ‘the old days’. After I saw how usual it was for plain text email to be rendered in a fixed-width font, instead or something more sane, there’s no way I could justify doing it just because “HTML email is an abomination” or whatever.
- tjohns 2y agoMost clients allow you to pick which font your plain text email is rendered in. Plain text gives the recipient control over how the content is rendered - as opposed to HTML which forces your choices on the reader.
- jbaber 2y agoReaders don't know this. They just know your e-mails always look weird and quote other e-mails weirdly. I say this as a daily mutt user.
- zelphirkalt 2y agoLet illiterates wonder, one day they might set out to find out the reason and learn something on the way.
- avidphantasm 2y agoI am most against HTML email for security and privacy reasons. Plain text (or hell even RTF) are simply safer. Also, most HTML email is used for marketing, which we don’t need to be making easier/better. Really Markdown email would be a happy medium, anything but whatever non-standard abominations Outlook/Exchange inject (don’t get me started on .eml files).
- bachmeier 2y agoNot sure why the headline was changed. This is an article about Rust programming. "Bringing Exchange Support to Thunderbird" implies it's about Thunderbird and it's support for Exchange - something you won't learn from the article.
- Zhyl 2y agoWhat are you talking about, fam? Exchange support for Thunderbird is the entire second half of the article.
- bachmeier 2y ago> Exchange support for Thunderbird is the entire second half of the article. Sure, for Thunderbird developers. Regular users don't care about any of that, if they even understand what it says.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pquki4 2y agoBased on the first paragraph of the article which focuses on Exchange rather than language, I'd say the feature itself is more important than the implementation, and that's also what most users care about.
- Beldin 2y agoI dunno. I've been using Thunderbird for years with exchange - first onprem and now O365. I might've missed it in the article or misremember the difficulty of setting it up (low), but errrrr.... it just works?
- ktosobcy 2y agoSubmitted earlier the same with full title but didn't get any traction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40095870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40095870
- Semaphor 2y agoI recently tried Thunderbird instead of Outlook. It had the same issue as FF did before the quantum update: It's too damn slow. Switching between different folders with hundreds or thousands of mails has noticable delays, while in Outlook it's essentially instant.
- eholk 2y agoIf you're using Windows, in my experience Thunderbird is essentially unusable until you add a Windows Defender exclusion for your Thunderbird profile.
- Semaphor 2y agoI am. Huh. I guess I'm going back to trying Thunderbird, thanks! I hope that was the issue, because the interface is just much better.
- Jap2-0 2y agoThe folder it's installed in, or the folder it keeps my mail in? Or both? (Also: what is the realistic security impact of this? As long as I don't do anything stupid, is it negligible?)
- janci 2y agoWhere the email is stored. I'd say there is little impact as when a malicious email ends on disk, it was processed and the potential damage has been done already. I trust the server-side filtering and thunderbird security more than file-access protection in defender
- currysausage 2y agoAs I understand it, before you open a (potentially dangerous) attachment in another app, it would be saved to your Temp or Downloads folder, where Defender would still have access. A carefully crafted email (or PDF attachment) that exploits vulnerabilities within Thunderbird's HTML or image rendering (or its PDF.js sandbox) might still pose a risk, but probably less so than any random web page that you open in Firefox, where JS (which should be disabled in Thunderbird by default) is the primary attack vector. Also, note that there is a setting called "Allow antivirus clients to quarantine individual incoming messages". With this enabled, "Thunderbird first stores each incoming message in a temporary file in the system temp folder" (where Defender would have access). "If the new message file still exists after being scanned by the antivirus software, then it is moved to your Thunderbird Inbox folder file." [1] If this is implemented correctly, it should only impact performance when receiving new emails. [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-panel-settings-in-thunderbird#w_antivirus https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-panel-settings-...
- counterpartyrsk 2y ago> it’s no surprise that there’s demand among Thunderbird users to support Exchange. Uh, I'm surprised. How many people actually love thunderbird? And to the extend it justified the development.
- DrewRWx 2y agoDo you have a use case you'd prefer they put their resources into implementing?
- wolverine876 2y agoAre you suggesting that no development is justified? I think we can expect that for any email client, there will be demand for one of the most popular email servers, and one that is required for most corporate use.
- promiseofbeans 2y agoEnough to raise >6m in donations in 2022: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving-our-2022-financial-report/#comment-3523 https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...
- ForHackernews 2y ago> How many people actually love thunderbird? I love Thunderbird and give them money every month. Name another good open source mail client.
- vedmed 2y agoThunderbird is paramount to my workflow and has been for over a decade. If I did not have thunderbird I would be upset. That said, loving a software requires a paradigm shift for me. I can't fathom loving something that is not alive. I do enjoy it, however.
- ForHackernews 2y ago> There was also no paid maintainership from about 2012 — when Mozilla divested and transferred ownership of Thunderbird to its community — until 2017, when Thunderbird rejoined the Mozilla Foundation. What a scandal this was. A prime example of Mozilla's backwards priorities.
- afavour 2y agoI disagree. The world moved to web/mobile app based mail. You’re allowed to not be happy about that (I’m not over the moon about it) but it’s the truth. It wasn’t worth Mozilla funding it.
- Scarbutt 2y agoIs thunderbird search on par with gmail's search?
- diarrhea 2y agoIt is the worst search I have ever used in any product.
- COGlory 2y agoIt is truly horrid. I routinely have to go into the web client to search
- hiepph 2y agoSadly, I have the same experience. It's one of the minus points of using Thunderbird, alongside the lack of the feature for shipping my configurations (e.g. filters) across machines.
- nanna 2y agoI'd say that's an exaggeration but it's not great. It would really help if you could default search queries to the 'show results as a list' and quickfilter view, but for some reason that's not an option. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1401708 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1401708
- promiseofbeans 2y agoIt's not bad - their time range narrowing graph thingy is really good, and I can normally find what I need. My main complaint is that my outlook calendars don't show up, so I can't search them for events.
- kevincox 2y agoMy biggest complaint is that there is a hardcoded result limit. And it searches for that whole limit, then renders the result. So if you have a lot of messages you can't use the date range thing to refine the results. And if you want one of the recent ones you still need to wait for the UI to lock up and return all of the results. The results themselves are good enough.
- jaylittle 2y agoWho the fuck cares? Exchange is dead. Office 365 is where its at. Move on Thunderbird team.
- gtech1 2y agoOffice 365 is dead too.
- wkat4242 2y agoNo it's still around: https://lazyadmin.nl/office-365/microsoft-365-e3-vs-office-365-e3/ https://lazyadmin.nl/office-365/microsoft-365-e3-vs-office-3... And it probably will be until Microsoft stops selling lifetime windows licenses because the biggest point of M365 is windows as a service. Even if you buy the other components like Intune and entra ID separately you're still way cheaper off with lifetime windows licenses. Which is what we do at work.
- florid 2y ago[dead]
- sega_sai 2y agoIt would be good to make Thunderbird a proper competitor to Gnome's Evolution when it comes to EWS.
- zozbot234 2y agoPlease include PST file import out of the box so that folks can seamlessly switch away from their Outlook installs without having to fiddle with Outlook itself. There is a free project for reading PST files, all it needs is integrating into the suite.
- DaiPlusPlus 2y agoPST export using the Exchange module for PowerShell has been a thing since Exchange 2010, see "New-MailboxExportRequest": https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/exchange/new-mailboxexportrequest?view=exchange-ps https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/exchange... EDIT: Oh, nvm - it's on-prem only - huh... that's asinine.
- SturgeonsLaw 2y agoPSTs can be exported from Exchange Online via eDiscovery, although I'm curious why you'd want to, since it will only include whatever's in the mailbox anyway, which can presumably be accessed directly from the cloud when the mail client signs in. What's the use case with PST import in Thunderbird? Outlook clients with an IMAP/POP3 mailbox storing a local archive of mail that's since been deleted from the server? This can be uploaded to the Exchange Online mailbox through Outlook which would be more resilient and less brittle than a local PST. What scenario am I missing?
- technion 2y agoJust noting that mail exported through ediscovery doesn't look like you'd expect - mail data is several folders deep. It's fine to say "just a few more clicks" but having inbox not be in an inbox folder is jarring breaks any idea of automated imports.
- pl4nty 2y agothe docs might be misleading - New-MailboxImportRequest is "only supported on-prem", but it's used by the PST import UI and works just fine with EXO
- rdl 2y agoThis will be nice; I've been stuck using OWL for this purpose (which I think is the main extension; IDK if there's anything else.)
- AnonC 2y agoAnything that doesn’t work well that you’ve seen with the Owl extension?
- rdl 2y agoTB is slow overall, mainly due to Defender. OWL also totally Broke last year when TB updated on a point release, fixed by OWL in days.
- zelphirkalt 2y agoAt some point I somehow got logged out and then was unable to use the OWA login inside TB, because it required some silly JS to run. That meant Owl could no longer fetch e-mail. I contacted them about it, but they did not care and basically shrugged and did not give any advice. At some point I was able to switch to using OAuth to get my e-mail, without Owl.
- Schnitz 2y agoWow! 20 years or so ago, I remember working in IT and only a few of us ran Linux in otherwise fully Microsoft shops. Exchange was always one of these things that it was tough to find a good client for. We would have been over the moon!
- anonzzzies 2y agoWe had the same issue however I took a different path; I got the company to dump exchange and sharepoint. Things were happier from then on.
- small_scombrus 2y agoI'm over the moon about it now! Using anything Microsoft on Linux is really painful, and they appear to be in the process of deprecating the web version of Teams if you're not specifically using Edge :(
- zelphirkalt 2y agoAfaik Teams never worked on Firefox. MS' engineering is incapable or unwilling to use standard APIs or compatibility layers to implement a tool that works on all modern browsers, while competitors in voice and video chat have this for a long time already.
- Animats 2y agoOh, Microsoft Exchange. I was thinking crypto support.
- Neil44 2y agoImagine if IMAP was slightly better and had a standard for calendar and contact objects.
- WhyNotHugo 2y agoI guess support for proprietary specifications is useful, but I really wish Mozilla would prioritise implementing standards like auto-discovery of email submission (SMTP) servers (rfc6186, 2011). Currently, users have to manually provide hostname and port of their SMTP server, which is likely fine for those of us on this website, but not at all friendly for the other 99.9% of the human population. The amount of effort require to implement all of Exchange is also probably orders of magnitude more than discovery of submission servers via DNS/SRV. I really don't get Mozilla's priorities.
- kwhitefoot 2y ago> Currently, users have to manually provide hostname and port of their SMTP server i don't think I had to do that when I added my Hotmail, Google, or Yahoo accounts to Thunderbird. I just used my email address at each of them. Are these treated as special cases?
- WhyNotHugo 2y agoMozilla keeps a centralised database with configuration for common providers. The ones you mention are likely in that database.
- CaptainZapp 2y agoI neither had to do that with a custom email. I entered the email addy and the password and Thunderbird congigured the account automatically. Snd that was a few years ago.
- globular-toast 2y agoI've been using thunderbird in exchange places for years. Yeah, it's shit, but that's exchange. I just try to limit my exposure. But I can see "invites" and that kind of stuff. What am I missing?