The Future Of Thunderbird (thunderbird.net) 153
Thunderbird blog: Before we really dig in, let's start with the future. We believe it's a bright one! With this year's release of Thunderbird 115 "Supernova," we're doing much more than just another yearly release. It's a modernized overhaul of the software, both visually and technically. Thunderbird is undergoing a massive rework from the ground up to get rid of all the technical and interface debt accumulated over the past 10 years. This is not an easy task, but it's necessary to guarantee the sustainability of the project for the next 20 years. Simply "adding stuff on top" of a crumbling architecture is not sustainable, and we can't keep ignoring it. Throughout the next 3 years, the Thunderbird project is aiming at these primary objectives:
1. Make the code base leaner and more reliable, rewrite ancient code, remove technical debt.
2. Rebuild the interface from scratch to create a consistent design system, as well as developing and maintaining an adaptable and extremely customizable user interface.
3. Switch to a monthly release schedule.
Inside those objectives there are hundreds of very large steps that need to happen, and achieving everything will require a lot of time and resources.
1. Make the code base leaner and more reliable, rewrite ancient code, remove technical debt.
2. Rebuild the interface from scratch to create a consistent design system, as well as developing and maintaining an adaptable and extremely customizable user interface.
3. Switch to a monthly release schedule.
Inside those objectives there are hundreds of very large steps that need to happen, and achieving everything will require a lot of time and resources.
start over (Score:2)
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isn't it easier to just start over
1. They don't have the resources to start over.
2. They have been letting it get worse over time (years and years of technical debt, crappy UI, etc) - what makes anyone sane think that the same people responsible for the current situation have the required competence to fix the shit they allowed to happen?
3. Web-based email (GMail) and programs like Microsoft Outlook Mail and Safari Mail are the go-tos for the vast majority of people. There is simply no demand for a warmed-over Thunderbird now; and even
Re:start over (Score:5, Interesting)
There is simply no demand for a warmed-over Thunderbird now; and even less 3 years from now, if they can even fix it in 3 years. Which they can't.
Well, there is some demand. I use it and like it. It's the best solution on Linux that I've found. This announcement makes me happy.
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I don't get the love for web-based email. And especially not the drab from Google. I have an account there, but I'll drop it without hesitation if they would prevent my local mail client to pick up mail from their servers.
Problem is also that when I delete mails using the Google web-interface, the mails disappear from view, yet the amount of storage spent on their servers does not go down. And yes, I have been known to throw away several thousands of messages at once. Not one iota of difference. I use MailS
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This is often a very bad idea. [joelonsoftware.com]
I love Thunderbird (Score:5, Insightful)
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It seems to me that despite all the energy you've spent grousing about someone else's project that you've never contributed to in any way, you're also unable to find the original XUL app that's still alive under the Interlink project [binaryoutcast.com].
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They're concentrating on the UI because it's obvious THEY CAN'T CODE FOR SHIT!. Otherwise, they wouldn't have so many years of technical debt. And any coders who might potentially help fix it have moved on to better fields.
This is one of those projects that you couldn't pay anyone competent to fix, because they already know what sort of problems they are going to run into with the rest of the team, and the product is dying.
Turns out that MSFS can use WASM, so I'll probably check it out in a few months
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That's fine. The world will go on if you use Outlook or whatever.
Oh, and after seeing your "website" we all know exactly how much credibility to give to your opinions with respect to technology. I wouldn't call attention to it if I were you.
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That website was designed NOT to use javascript or any spyware. Let's see you do better.
It's also not designed as a conventional site - trying to get page views. It's strictly for information about how to deal with low vision, mostly for service providers, and friends and family, looking for better solutions. Not making a penny off it, and no plans to.
What have YOU done that helps change people's lives?
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That website was designed NOT to use javascript or any spyware. Let's see you do better.
Oh, yes, I can very easily do better. I'm pretty sure that anyone could do better. It would be hard to do worse! I can't believe you'd actually promote that atrocity or that anyone who stumbled across it would take it seriously.
You know that you don't need JavaScript to make a site look nice, right? HTML and CSS alone are more than adequate to create an attractive, responsive, and accessible website. Spyware, of course, is a choice you make, not a natural consequence of using JavaScript.
It's strictly for information about how to deal with low vision
Oh, please. You
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Most non-profits are scams. I should know - I volunteered at one for more than 6 years. Very little accountability.
The people who found non-profits often do so to create a job for themselves, because nobody would hire them in the business world.
They appoint their cronies as directors and ride the gravy train.
Show your work (you know, a link or two) or shut up.
And you're pretty stupid if you don't know that obvious ideas, such as the comb-over, HAVE been patented. Are you sure you have any sort of
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Most non-profits are scams. I should know - I volunteered at one
I guess we can add statistics to the things you completely fail at.
Show your work
I'm not going to give up my pseudo-anonymity to satisfy an ignorant troll like you. Get real.
And you're pretty stupid if you don't know that obvious ideas, such as the comb-over, HAVE been patented.
So you admit that your "ideas" are obvious. LOL! Are you still going to pretend that you're "helping people"? Get over yourself.
Oh, and you absolutely can't patent "using a big TV for a monitor". Get a clue.
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That's just it. All the service providers to people with low vision / blindness directly outside of primary medical care are still stuck in the 80s. It's why I'm pushing the simple 2023 solution - Big Motherf*cking Screens. I'm using a 100" video wall, which even legally blind people can work with. It might be a bit expensive, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than being stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide.
It's why I'm going to be going around to senior's organizations and push, push, push. Invi
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Rent Free.
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What do you use instead?
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I have to use Outlook for work, and you find it a better option than Thunderbird?
Maybe some of the integration and calendar stuff has more features in Outlook, but fit usability... Outlook is pain, and I hate everything about it.
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Huh, I thought that was killed off many years ago. I seem to recall it didn't make it to... Vista? Certainly not 7. Did they bring it back or are you running an old version?
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Uh oh... (Score:4, Informative)
>It's a modernized overhaul of the software, both visually......Rebuild the interface from scratch to create a consistent design system, as well as developing and maintaining an adaptable and extremely customizable user interface.
I can picture it now...lots of whitespace with light grey text on top...
Re:Uh oh... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a modernized overhaul of the software, both visually......
Uh-Oh, indeed. "Modernized" == Crap.
I had to switch back to an older version of Thunderbird because they've made too many stupid, pointless changes to the UI.
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That's nonsense. There are people like you that complain about every change the UI, no matter how good that change happens to be. Then you get used it, even start to like it, just in time for you to bitch and moan about the next change.
Do a quick GIS for "Netscape Navigator" or "Eudora Pro" if you need a trip down memory lane. We are a lot better of today than we were then, and those wretched things were a lot better than the crap that we had before that!
Yeah, not everything new is better, but that's jus
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A good UI can dramatically improve productivity.
Yeah, you'll slow down a bit while you learn something new, but that's a very short-sighted complaint. Given the choice, do you spend a few hours learning now so you can save hundreds of hours throughout the year, or do stick with the less-productive UI to save a few hours learning?
Also, if your job requires using email at a break-neck pace, I'd recommend finding a better job. It sounds like you work in a white-collar sweatshop.
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but that's a very short-sighted complaint.
Valid one none the less. Sure I could spend the time learning something new and take the chance of getting fired, or I can just continue on. Money is not an optional thing in my life.
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You're claiming that you'll risk getting fired if there is a tiny drop in email productivity caused by upgrading your mail client, but you not only have control over your mail client, but time to post on Slashdot in the middle of the day? I'm not buying it.
Do you have any real complaints?
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A good UI can dramatically improve productivity.
A good UI requires colour in order to provide more obvious differentation among elements. Without that, many things becomes less reflexive, and what should happen subconsciously suddenly requires conscious intervention. It's totally beyond me why today's UI designers have such a hate on for colour, and such a love of vast whitespaces that necessitate greater mouse movement and more scrolling.
Re: Uh oh... (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems to me modern UI designers are just arts grads who know nothing about interface design. They make cute, not practical.
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I don't care if you use it or not. Though you should keep your weird fetishes to yourself.
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Re:Uh oh... (Score:5, Interesting)
What better Solutions? Outlook? Windows Mail? Mac Mail? Web clients (any of them?)... pff....
I'll give the folks who like Evolution on Linux a tip of the hat.. .but Thunderbird is *way* better any any of those others mentioned.
Full End to End Encryption solution out of the box.
Easy to move profiles whole and intact between computers, even between operating systems.
Can handle 100 of GB of e-mail without issue.
Functional and easy to train spam filtering.
All told, It's a great product,, and I would say, more important now than ever before. (For the Encryption feature.)
Re: Uh oh... (Score:2)
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I can picture it now...lots of whitespace with light grey text on top...
Nope ... completely wrong!
It's going to be a 'dark' theme by default with a hidden option to switch to a light theme that won't work as well as the current one.
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I can picture it now...lots of whitespace with light grey text on top...
And no colours. Not anywhere, not ever. Because colour provides NO help in quickly and reflexively identifying and differentiating among UI elements and controls. /sarc
Re:Uh oh... (Score:5, Insightful)
UI "modernization" use to mean more features, functionality, and overall general & measurable improvement; now it means to copy Google/Apple/MS/social media's crappy unintuitive unconfigurable designs and "do what everyone else is doing". UI design has turned into a fashion show where all the fashions are the same ridiculous fashion.
Besides, they already "modernized" the UI five or more years ago by:
-removing all color from the UI
-adding a hamburger menu which has no place on Desktop applications
-replace colorful, meaningful, and distinctive icons with ambiguious monochrome wireframe icons
-making older extensions incompatible
-removing any easy way to change the font size of any pane without having to write 300 lines of css.
I shudder to think what is in store for the upcoming "modernized" Thunderbird.
My hopes (Score:5, Interesting)
While I am happy to see that Thunderbird is still being worked on, and I continue to use it, I hope that the interface doesn't change too much. I like it just as it is.
I will have to keep an eye out for alternatives if things get too unusable for my taste, I guess.
I might take another look... (Score:3)
If/when they complete this project, I might look at Thunderbird again, but I left it quite a while ago for Claws Mail. More lightweight with proper support for an external editor.
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Why would you need an external editor to type an email?
This isn't source code.
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You mean why not use a web browser and webmail?
They lack many features but to each their own. For me, the killer feature of Thunderbird is to be able to hit the reply button and that the "from" email address is the email address the message was actually sent to. And being able to edit the "from" field on the fly.
Webmails (and most email clients like Outlook) will just use a pre-defined identity (name + email address), at best from a list of identities, and at worst won't even pick the correct one or will us
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Yes, Claws intelligently picks the From: address (and lets you edit it) too. It is indeed a killer feature.
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Because my editor has a lot of useful features that I like, and a bunch of keybindings that I am used to. If I want to pull a snippet of a file into my email, it's dead easy. If I want to reflow paragraphs, dead easy. Etc...
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Can't get more lightweight than mutt + vim...
Thunderbird is solid (Score:5, Insightful)
If they need to do some refactoring, or clean up some technical debt, that's great. I'm skeptical about a new interface. It's nice having a simple, low-bling interface.
A monthly release schedule? Why? It means that features will be pushed out fast, with the users doing the final testing. There's nothing about a mail client that needs to move fast. Annual or semi-annual releases would be better.
Re:Thunderbird is solid (Score:5, Insightful)
"Agile as Religion" is killing a lot of software. Fail fast! Fail early! Fail late! Keep updating every damn time a user starts the software. If there's a bug, we'll add it to the backlog. Yay Yay Yay!
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If there's a bug, we'll add it to the backlog. Yay Yay Yay!
This is a serious process fail. You can tell which companies are doing well and which are doing poorly by looking at their bug tracker.
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Hey, "process"...
More like "We do agile every morning, we're agile!"
Suggest a change to that process and "Nope, that's how we've always done it"
If you can't get it past the resident control freak/pseudopsychologist, it don't happen.
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More like "We do agile every morning, we're agile!"
At least they don't sit down during their standup meetings.
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Ugh, the stupid standing up is so dumb. But then again I've worked remote for the last four years until this latest job. Just so damn stupid. We should get funny hats and do chants if we're going to treat it like a religion.
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I both agree and disagree. Going years without pushing any changes to users is also bad. It means nothing gets tested real-world before it's too late to undo.
They just don't have enough developers to back-port patches to an LTS release. There's nothing between "nightly build" and the current version that everyone else is on. Better to be able to choose at install time whether you only get feature updates rarely or monthly.
As far as the UI, it's ugly and functional. If it could be less ugly and still fu
Thunderbird developers have been deaf to users... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Thunderbird developers have been deaf to users (Score:2)
And meanwhile they still havenâ(TM)t completed maildir support. The meta bug that tracks this implementation is only 10 years old, and the web page that discusses it rather optimistically calls it the first pluggable mail storage! https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thund... [mozilla.org]
Thunderbird and other projects (Score:2)
Recently my Thunderbird install gave out with a "please donate" request.
Most of us use credit cards with "rewards" points. I'll observe that using your points for keeping the open source community running is painless if you are not other wise using those points actively. I'd suggest choosing how many of the total points you want to use for donations, and then on Febuary 1st (because nothing happens on that day, right?) going around with the points for donations. I believe PayPal and Venmo make this fairly p
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but... who uses a single device for anything anymore? Don't even the children of cattle-heard-following, horizontally nomadic tribesmen in the Kalahari have at LEAST a smartphone AND a tablet computer? What if a hypothetical child of a nomadic tribe downloaded a copy of an email message to Thunderbird on his or her One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) "XO" computer then needed to refer back to it from Thunderbird on an iPhone or Apple Watch? I mean, that kid would HAVE to have Thunderbird on BOTH devices configured to leave the message on the server so it's accessible from BOTH OF THEM, wouldn't he or she?!?
You a couple decades out of date. IMAP works fine and keeps the message on the server. It's actually the default. And when you mark an email as read on one device, guess what? It gets marked as read on the server.
Nobody willingly uses POP3 anymore, everybody switched to IMAP long ago, or non-standard protocols (mostly MS Exchange / office 365 / whatever it's called) with similar features.
You can use Thunderbird on your PC and the Gmail application on your phone just fine, with the same email account.
Re:What is it? (Score:4, Informative)
Nobody willingly uses POP3 anymore, everybody switched to IMAP long ago, or non-standard protocols (mostly MS Exchange / office 365 / whatever it's called) with similar features.
POP3 is a wonderful thing when your provider limits how much email can be stored on their email server. Yeah, I know you're going to say to change providers, but there's no need and that would be a LOT of hassle. Unless I'm on vacation and for some crazy reason need to look at email (it's happened but it's a rare thing) I only use email on my home computer and that's it; I don't use a lot of different devices. Simplicity has it's place.
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If you don't want to change provider and your provider doesn't allow mail forwarding, you could configure a new free account with decent storage (Gmail and others allow that) to fetch your old mails over POP3.
You could then configure your home computer to fetch your mails using IMAP and could even read your mail on other devices, such as when you are in vacation.
It would also have the added benefit of making you less reliant on crappy things like SMS or whatever you are using on your phone since you are obv
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I run my own IMAP server. It's not hard. And I don't want Google sniffing through all my email, so I won't host any personal stuff there.
I have archives of email dating back to 1991 (!!); total disk space used is about 30GB which is insignificant given the size of hard drives today.
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Re:What is it? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not bashing Thunderbird or dedicated email apps or trolling here. I am literally asking, what does Thunderbird (or any dedicated email app) have to offer as an inducement for why I or anyone should use that anymore instead of the web interface? I'm not trying to talk anyone out of using those, far be it from me to tell anyone what to do... (wink...) but it's a legitimate question in 2023.
Do people still USE email provided by someone who doesn't offer a web interface for email? And if the maintainers of Thunderbird or the program's boosters can't explain WHY anyone should use it, well... why use it?
Yep, I use Thunderbird all of the time. Use a Web interface? Those suck hard, as in hard to use. I can't have folders within folders (etc) to archive email. My provider limits how much email I can keep around and I have more than that. Sorting and searching and threading is SOOOOO much better in Thunderbird than what a web interface can do. There are no filtering rules in my providers web interface, but Thunderbird does that ... and offers tagging/categories and so much more the web interface just doesn't do, not even gmail's. Yep, I also have multiple email accounts and Thunderbird handles that nicely too while a web interface can't. And if I really have to, I can go into the mail dir and just "grep" for something, though I haven't had to do that in years, but it's there if I had to. It also makes it easy to backup email in the way I want to do it too. So no, I don't want to be forced to exclusively use a web interface for mail.
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I use the Gmail web interface sometimes, Gmail app on my phone, and Thunderbird on my laptop and desktop computers talking to Google's IMAP server. All with the same gmail account. So I'm not sure quite what you're going on about.
For you thunderbird offers very little. For me, Thunderbird offers a very comfortable, familiar, and powerful interface for managing mail. I can still use the web interface for Gmail if I want, but I find it very clunky compared to Thunderbird. Plus I like having email in its o
Re:What is it? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm one of the holdouts still using Thunderbird.
I work as a consultant so I got a bit of email accounts from various customers, plus personal accounts. Mostly GMail and Outlook but also one Yahoo. They all get read from one application. Even more, I can drag and drop emails from one inbox to the other, drag and drop attachments, reply from a different account.
I can also archive old emails on my local computer, just drag the folder and here's a backup copy of my email archive.
Threaded view is something you don't find in web interfaces. Helpful when you have a long tree of replies and forwards across multiple people from different organizations and you want to make sure that your reply goes to the right group.
The quick filter feature is fast, reliable and most important consistent - I get the same results every time. When I want to get all the emails from John in the past two years and make sure the real important one with the original contract details is not missed, I trust Thunderbird more than a web mail here.
This does not stop me using the web interface when it makes sense - mostly when doing search, calendar and address book integration. I can easily use both worlds.
Fear of change (Score:3)
I read a lot of fear of interface changes here, and some fear code changes which might render the existing addons incompatible. An uninvolved reader might ask themselves, why so much negativism? But the fact is that the user base has a long experience of exactly such changes happening in operating systems and applications, specifically including those coming from Mozilla. Senseless user interface changes which, in the best case, improve nothing but force people to relearn, and in the worst case reduce usability. And technical changes that cause incompatibilities and loss of functionality through the disappearing of addons.
I'd like to give the Thunderbird team the benefit of doubt, but I'll believe that this will end good only when I see it.
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.
For me, the changes done by Mozilla and Thunderbird developers do not seem to in response to users' requests, but more for the faddish whims of those developers. If the Thunderbird developers actually cared about what the users want, don't you think they would pay more attention to what
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Allow me. The 3 pane layout is basically a highly usable design pattern. The button layout expresses the main activities you want to do. Get mail, compose, forward, reply, reply all, etc. In reality there is no better way to do it. You cannot move the buttons, change their colour, font, etc, and make a valuable improvement.
So when a bunch of "designers" gets in a room, unsurprisingly, they re design everything. Designers gotta design. So they end up fixing what isn't broken.
And that
MailDir (Score:4, Insightful)
worrying (Score:3)
" 2. Rebuild the interface from scratch to create a consistent design system, as well as developing and maintaining an adaptable and extremely customizable user interface."
Will have to see what the result is, but it is always very worrying when interface designers might be involved in something.
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Hint - it will never be completed. We've seen this show before. These "we just had a "Come to Jeebus" moment - we really really REALLY need to fix all the crap we've let pile up over the last 2 decades (yep, the predecessor to Thunderbird was started 20 years ago) and the solution is obvious - a new interface!"
Why the emphasis on the UI? Because when you put a UI "designer" in charge of such a project, everything looks like a UI problem. If they were competent, they wouldn't be in the current situation.
Needs tweaks, but tweaks require remake? (Score:2)
The only UI tweak I think it needs is a multiline threadpane. The one line format takes up too much real estate, especially in the vertical layout. I'm not seeing the point of the sidebar they just added, which also limits that space, so there's room to screw up here.
The only substantive change I can see is going to conversation style threading like most other mail clients. That is, include the user's outgoing mails in a conversation thread. It's a missing element that I notice often, though all I have to d
Threading Only (Score:3)
Don't do anything else before you implement threading. Dedicate a whole release to it if needed.
Doing everything in the interface thread was insane in 2002 and it still is today. It was cool in the early 90's when developers generally adopted multithreadding.
It's absurd to be typing and have input stop for 30 seconds because Thunderbird decides to go update some indexes.
It's basically for a few extensions that I still use Thunderbird. And one of those got seriously hobbled with all the extension API churn.
Still worlds beter than Outlook Desktop (Score:3)
That being said, I think client-side email programs are dead. Webmail IMAP clients are simply way better for 95% of use cases. Be it paid for or self-hosted.
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That being said, I think client-side email programs are dead. Webmail IMAP clients are simply way better for 95% of use cases. Be it paid for or self-hosted.
hope not. Webmail is nice, except when it isn't, such as times when you have no internet and need to find an email or check mail. A client side email program enables access to received messages even when you can't get internet access.
New Thunderbird Violates Basic Encryption Security (Score:4, Interesting)
With Enigmail, as with any other sane implementation, private key passphrases exist only in the user's head and in dynamic ram long enough to be used before being purged. Private key passphrases are never stored on system drives.
The new Thunderbird team in their laudable zeal to make encryption easy to use, saves private key passphrases to the system drive so Thunderbird can automatically open and decrypt without user interaction. This is wrong wrong wrong! The development team will argue that it's protected. We can argue the dubious level of protection provided, but the primary point is it should not have ever been saved in the first place! I dropped Thunderbird for the unreliable and dangerous product it's become.
AnnoyingUI (Score:2)
I'm sure that as a part of their rework they are going to forego their current, simple-yet-efficient client identity and follow all the crappy trends other providers are following at the moment in their UIs, including needless elements, counterproductive enhancements, unavoidable telemetrics, "hey, checkout this feature" pop-ups and, most of all, advertising.
Am I the only one who really likes Thunderbird? (Score:2)
20 years (Score:2)
I use Thunderbird constantly. It's been my email client pretty much since it came out. I really like that it's easy to copy (and back up) a profile folder to another machine (the profile folder is even cross-platform) with a fresh tbird install and be up and running instantly. I have a few nitpicks and things I'd like to see updated: the biggest one being that there's no way to make it auto-mark an email as read when you reply to it. But other than that, and maybe a couple other little things, it works r
What's the word? (Score:2)
Seriously, I used TBird a long time ago but it's interface sorely lagged other programs and I switched from it.
What future? It doesn't even have a present (Score:2)
Honestly I don't know much about Thunderbird. Why? Because after 45min of fiddling with it I could not get it to accept the fact I have different credentials to log into an email server to receive mail vs the smtp server I use to send mail.
Has it been fixed now? Don't care. It had it's chance 3 months ago and it blew it. After wasting the majority of an hour on it I didn't even bother looking for something else and defaulted to the Windows Mail app. That is a true piece of shit, and a UI disaster. But it ac
Eudora 7 (Score:2)
Rearchitecting (Score:2)
When I was at Microsystems Software, the product had turned into spaghetti code, but it worked. There was even a comment from a programmer, that had left before I started that said, this code needs to be rewritten, but Dick wanted it done now, I will rework this code later.
Since we were doing a an NLM and Banyan Vines version, I wanted to redesign the code and fold that into the Windows, DOS, and Mac version. Instead, the code ended up being ported.
If it was Rearchitected, it would have reduced the code by
Pressure from Google Not to Work Un TB? (Score:2)
Thunderbird Best Mail Client (Score:2)
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I should give Evolution a try again. I last used it probably a decade or more ago when it was big, bloated, slow, and ran poorly on Windows (sadly I'm stuck into some cross-platforming, so I can't always use my favorite OSes), and needed half of Gnome to run at all. I've actually moved back to Thunderbird recentlyish because it ended up being pretty straightforward and basic compared to a lot of other clients. I'm an old-school Eudora fan so it doesn't take much for me.
Betterbird (Score:2)
It was Eudora back then for me as well, then TB on win and linux. After 8 years of running from the very same installation on Arch TB would freeze for minutes again and again to the point that it was simply unusable. So, with a sorry heart, I declared Thunderbird dead.
Then, searching for alternatives, I stumbled over BetterBird https://www.betterbird.eu/inde... [betterbird.eu] which does not freeze, supports my old plugins and simply runs like expected. Tested it on Linux and MacOs but it has downloads for win as well.
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In my case, the last straw was when GMail broke support for OAuth again. Granted that's not the distro's nor the GNOME dev's fault, but the inability to actually use Evolution for it's intended purpose (As
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Too late? WAYYYY too late. I deleted Thunderturd 2 days ago because it's a freaking memory hog, slow, buggy, the UI is crap (which this announcement actually acknowledges if you think about it).
Set up an email forwarder on my server to send emails to my phone and desktop mail applications, and switched over every account that I could - I'll have to notify people who emailed my server individually when I receive their emails.
After getting rid of Firefox and Thunderbird (both memory hogs with plenty of
Re:Too late (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait, how does an application that doesn't need to run on startup affect your computer's startup time? Everything else, sure but that sounds fishy.
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Same thing with Logitech mouse, keyboard, flight yoke and rudder pedal software (turns out you don't need it for MSFS anyway).
Same wit
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Then how come after I uninstalled those two shit programs (firefox and thunderbird), everything now runs great? Put the machine to sleep, wake it up, do some stuff, repeat ... no problems.
THEY were the 2 biggest pieces of malware. Along with crappy "drivers" that came with hardware that turns out aren't needed and just soak up resources (web cam drivers, mouse and keyboard drivers, drivers for flight yokes, quadrants, and rudders, crap from NVidia and Asus, etc.)
None of those "drivers" were needed. And
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...the UI is crap (which this announcement actually acknowledges if you think about it).
Yeah, the UI is not wonderful. But given the shit-show that is the Firefox UI, I'm VERY afraid of what the same crew is going to come up with for a new Thunderbird. At least I find Version 68 usable; given the ass-hats who create new versions of what can only laughably be called GUI's - I'm looking at you, Gnome 3 devs - I suspect the revamped T-Bird is going to be utter crap. I really hope I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.
Re: Too late (Score:4, Insightful)
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I believe the problem is that neither the Firefox nor the Thunderbird devs can do much testing on high-memory machines, and certainly can't test most configurations, and they fell for the whole "rust can't leak memory" bullshit. We know they've been extremely careless the last 3 years (even since before the mass layoffs). When firefox uses 3x the ram with no tabs open as either edge or chrome, something's wrong somewhere.
You didn't define what "high-memory" machines are. I've got about a hundred tabs open in Firefox now and it's using 2 GB. I've got 64 GB so I don't really care, it's not worth me paying attention to. This Firefox process has probably been open for a few weeks now. I'm sure it'll go down when I reboot, but I'm not in a rush to do that.
I don't think anyone other than you really cares how much RAM a browser uses with no tabs open. The bigger concern is how it scales with a bunch of tabs open. In that regard, F
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With today's story, it's really not surprising. They now admit their code is shit.
Alas, This Too Uses the New Thunderbird (Score:2)
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NGL at this point I thought they were talking about the British TV series
I thought of Wine. [drunkard.com]