9 ms·

...and still it looks and behaves like we are in 2002. Don't get me wrong, I like and use Thunderbird but sometimes I wish they would put more effort into impr

by bresc 12y ago

...and still it looks and behaves like we are in 2002. Don't get me wrong, I like and use Thunderbird but sometimes I wish they would put more effort into improving the UI

bane 12y ago
I use Thunderbird every day, and I agree with you. If they want to kill some low-hanging fruit, search is fundamentally broken. I've almost never found what I'm searching for -- it's reddit bad. It's usually better for me just to go log into that gmail account and search from there.
- heinrich5991 12y ago
  This is definitely true, I also experienced that problem. As a work-around, the quick filter search seemed to work better for me.
- e15ctr0n 12y ago
  Try the new message indexing and search system called "Gloda", short for "Global database". https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-search https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-search
- Bill_Dimm 12y ago
  Really? I don't remember having any major problems with search recently. Search is a few orders of magnitude better than the junk mail classification, at least for me. I don't know what algorithms they use for junk classification, but here are some observations: 1) I mark 100% of the emails from a particular sender or with a particular subject line as junk, yet the junk classifier still puts emails from that sender or with that subject in my inbox. This is the low-hanging fruit -- the stuff that is so obvious that it is spam that a human can figure it out without looking at the message body at all, yet Thunderbird can't seem to get it right no matter how much you train it. I can only guess that they are placing too much weight on the body content (which is easily padded with hidden text to con the algorithm) when a bad sender/subject should trump whatever is in the body. 2) Emails from people that I've emailed in the past sometimes end up in the junk folder. I thought they were supposed to be whitelisted automatically (by automatically being appended to some special section of your address book). 3) I've implemented message filters to detect certain words like our product name and move the incoming message to a high-priority folder, yet messages that should match the filter still end up in the junk folder on rare occasions (and, yes, I have it configured to run the filter before junk classification is applied -- I'm assuming that junk classification should not be applied if a filter moves the message out of the inbox). 4) It sometimes seems to just stop learning, so I have to reset and retrain the junk classifier or it gets to the point where the only emails that it recognizes as being junk are the ones in a foreign language.
  - qznc 12y ago
    My problems with search: 1) It shows me two search fields and irritatingly I need them both. One is the global search in the index. The other searches linearly per folder without an index. 2) If you disable local caching for IMAP, it does not index the emails, so the global search reports nothing. (if you enable caching it regularly goes out of sync with the server and behaves weird) 3) Linear search through an email folder in 2015? It is slow, for full text search. Altogether, no fast full text search in Thunderbird for me. Compare that to Gmail, where it works great.
    - e15ctr0n 12y ago
      You really should take advantage of the global search index feature of Thunderbird. It's possible that your index is corrupt, too large and so may not be functioning correctly. You can rebuild it by following the steps here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/rebuilding-global-database https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/rebuilding-global-datab...
  - bane 12y ago
    Yeah, search is a huge mess. For example, I'm out looking for houses and I've gotten a bunch of notices in the past couple weeks for open houses. I search for "open house" and not a single result it presented was for any of the emails I've previously received. In fact none of the emails it returned seemed to have either "open" or "house" in them, I have no idea why it selected the emails it did. Actually, I've developed a theory that the search actually uses a stochastic method that randomly samples emails from my mailboxes in the hopes that some of them will match my search result.
    - e15ctr0n 12y ago
      Search for open+house or "open house". https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-search#w_examples https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-search#w_example...
    - asutherland 12y ago
      Assuming you're using the global search mechanism, a porter stemmer is used which means that the search engine sees all of "house", "houses", "housed", "housing", etc. the same. The search also biases the results based on recency and things like whether the message has been starred/flagged, whether it was authored by/involves contacts in your address book, etc. e15ctr0n is right that your best option is to use quotes to do a phrase search of "open house" in this situation, although you will still run afoul of the porter stemmer. (Unfortunately a post-pass filter if you realllly want "house" was never implemented. There is an open bug, however.)
- vacri 12y ago
  Ugh, the search is the one part I find lacking. I use the 'quick filter' instead, which behaves like I want search to behave - quickly, and in the same window - whereas the 'search' results are presented in some bizarre order that has yet to 'just land me' at the results I want.
detaro 12y ago
https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stability-and-community-innovation/ https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stabi... more or less maintenance only
- bane 12y ago
  "has come to the conclusion that on-going stability is the most important thing, and that continued innovation in Thunderbird is not a priority for Mozilla’s product efforts. " I absolutely agree with this. I really don't want my e-mail client to be innovative. I just want it to work, connect to as many of my accounts as possible and keep everything separate (I hate unified inboxes with a passion that could melt the heart of stars). I do wish it got a visual update every once in a while, and they fixed search. But other than that it does what I need it to do and it gets out of the way the rest of the time.
- bresc 12y ago
  I know that. My point is if it continues to grow why don't they invest more effort. Just a little bit to fix the search issue everybody is talking about?
user_0001 12y ago
NO NO NO. Thunderbird is an email client, it should look and work like an email client. Yes the functionality could be improved (as mentioned below search has some issues) but this isn't a UI issue. Why programs insist on an UI update every so often - well commerical programs to convince you to buy a new license. Tool makers don't go, every few years "hey we have this spanner, it looks like a spanner, works well as a spanner, lets redesign it so it no longer looks like a spanner, doesn't work as good as the old spanner but maybe we can convince people to buy it again"
redthrow 12y ago
Geary's UI is a lot better than Thunderbird.
e15ctr0n 12y ago
You can choose from hundreds of community-contributed add-ons to customize Thunderbird's UI, or you could write one yourself. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/complete-themes/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/complete-themes...
- bresc 12y ago
  Really? :) If TB looks like 2002 than the themes look like 1998
  - e15ctr0n 12y ago
    So write your own. :-) https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/Thunderbird https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/Thunderbird
pmontra 12y ago
The UI was fine for me in 2002 and is fine today. What would you change? The giant step in usability was the intrusion of a fast search engine. Outbound filters were another nice improvement but not as important. Not UI anyway.

by bresc 12y ago

...and still it looks and behaves like we are in 2002. Don't get me wrong, I like and use Thunderbird but sometimes I wish they would put more effort into improving the UI

bane 12y ago

I use Thunderbird every day, and I agree with you. If they want to kill some low-hanging fruit, search is fundamentally broken. I've almost never found what I'm searching for -- it's reddit bad. It's usually better for me just to go log into that gmail account and search from there.

heinrich5991 12y ago
This is definitely true, I also experienced that problem. As a work-around, the quick filter search seemed to work better for me.
e15ctr0n 12y ago
Try the new message indexing and search system called "Gloda", short for "Global database". https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-search https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-search
Bill_Dimm 12y ago
Really? I don't remember having any major problems with search recently. Search is a few orders of magnitude better than the junk mail classification, at least for me. I don't know what algorithms they use for junk classification, but here are some observations: 1) I mark 100% of the emails from a particular sender or with a particular subject line as junk, yet the junk classifier still puts emails from that sender or with that subject in my inbox. This is the low-hanging fruit -- the stuff that is so obvious that it is spam that a human can figure it out without looking at the message body at all, yet Thunderbird can't seem to get it right no matter how much you train it. I can only guess that they are placing too much weight on the body content (which is easily padded with hidden text to con the algorithm) when a bad sender/subject should trump whatever is in the body. 2) Emails from people that I've emailed in the past sometimes end up in the junk folder. I thought they were supposed to be whitelisted automatically (by automatically being appended to some special section of your address book). 3) I've implemented message filters to detect certain words like our product name and move the incoming message to a high-priority folder, yet messages that should match the filter still end up in the junk folder on rare occasions (and, yes, I have it configured to run the filter before junk classification is applied -- I'm assuming that junk classification should not be applied if a filter moves the message out of the inbox). 4) It sometimes seems to just stop learning, so I have to reset and retrain the junk classifier or it gets to the point where the only emails that it recognizes as being junk are the ones in a foreign language.
- qznc 12y ago
  My problems with search: 1) It shows me two search fields and irritatingly I need them both. One is the global search in the index. The other searches linearly per folder without an index. 2) If you disable local caching for IMAP, it does not index the emails, so the global search reports nothing. (if you enable caching it regularly goes out of sync with the server and behaves weird) 3) Linear search through an email folder in 2015? It is slow, for full text search. Altogether, no fast full text search in Thunderbird for me. Compare that to Gmail, where it works great.
  - e15ctr0n 12y ago
    You really should take advantage of the global search index feature of Thunderbird. It's possible that your index is corrupt, too large and so may not be functioning correctly. You can rebuild it by following the steps here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/rebuilding-global-database https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/rebuilding-global-datab...
- bane 12y ago
  Yeah, search is a huge mess. For example, I'm out looking for houses and I've gotten a bunch of notices in the past couple weeks for open houses. I search for "open house" and not a single result it presented was for any of the emails I've previously received. In fact none of the emails it returned seemed to have either "open" or "house" in them, I have no idea why it selected the emails it did. Actually, I've developed a theory that the search actually uses a stochastic method that randomly samples emails from my mailboxes in the hopes that some of them will match my search result.
  - e15ctr0n 12y ago
    Search for open+house or "open house". https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-search#w_examples https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-search#w_example...
  - asutherland 12y ago
    Assuming you're using the global search mechanism, a porter stemmer is used which means that the search engine sees all of "house", "houses", "housed", "housing", etc. the same. The search also biases the results based on recency and things like whether the message has been starred/flagged, whether it was authored by/involves contacts in your address book, etc. e15ctr0n is right that your best option is to use quotes to do a phrase search of "open house" in this situation, although you will still run afoul of the porter stemmer. (Unfortunately a post-pass filter if you realllly want "house" was never implemented. There is an open bug, however.)
vacri 12y ago
Ugh, the search is the one part I find lacking. I use the 'quick filter' instead, which behaves like I want search to behave - quickly, and in the same window - whereas the 'search' results are presented in some bizarre order that has yet to 'just land me' at the results I want.

detaro 12y ago

https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stability-and-community-innovation/ https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stabi... more or less maintenance only

bane 12y ago
"has come to the conclusion that on-going stability is the most important thing, and that continued innovation in Thunderbird is not a priority for Mozilla’s product efforts. " I absolutely agree with this. I really don't want my e-mail client to be innovative. I just want it to work, connect to as many of my accounts as possible and keep everything separate (I hate unified inboxes with a passion that could melt the heart of stars). I do wish it got a visual update every once in a while, and they fixed search. But other than that it does what I need it to do and it gets out of the way the rest of the time.
bresc 12y ago
I know that. My point is if it continues to grow why don't they invest more effort. Just a little bit to fix the search issue everybody is talking about?

user_0001 12y ago

NO NO NO. Thunderbird is an email client, it should look and work like an email client. Yes the functionality could be improved (as mentioned below search has some issues) but this isn't a UI issue. Why programs insist on an UI update every so often - well commerical programs to convince you to buy a new license. Tool makers don't go, every few years "hey we have this spanner, it looks like a spanner, works well as a spanner, lets redesign it so it no longer looks like a spanner, doesn't work as good as the old spanner but maybe we can convince people to buy it again"

redthrow 12y ago

Geary's UI is a lot better than Thunderbird.

e15ctr0n 12y ago

You can choose from hundreds of community-contributed add-ons to customize Thunderbird's UI, or you could write one yourself. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/complete-themes/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/complete-themes...

bresc 12y ago
Really? :) If TB looks like 2002 than the themes look like 1998
- e15ctr0n 12y ago
  So write your own. :-) https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/Thunderbird https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/Thunderbird

pmontra 12y ago

The UI was fine for me in 2002 and is fine today. What would you change? The giant step in usability was the intrusion of a fast search engine. Outbound filters were another nice improvement but not as important. Not UI anyway.