[HN Gopher] The Future of Thunderbird
___________________________________________________________________
The Future of Thunderbird
Author : TangerineDream
Score : 412 points
Date : 2023-02-09 14:40 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.thunderbird.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.thunderbird.net)
| Liquidor wrote:
| 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| outdated, which sucks because I like it (although it is kinda old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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| masterof0 wrote:
| 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.
| einpoklum wrote:
| 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.
| mcjiggerlog wrote:
| 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
|
| [1] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/11/thunderbird-
| supernova-p...
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| 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.
| asmor wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _that didn 't consume the entire screen real estate._
|
| If you want something really small, perhaps _mutt_ in a
| terminal could work. :)
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Not everyone has a 16:9 monitor, so super wide views don't
| work for me._
|
| And even if we do, having an interface that can work as a
| square, or a rectangle _but vertical_ (for screens that can
| rotation 90@), is also useful.
|
| Not all of us run our apps in full screen (which seems to be
| quite prevalent in the Windows world), but rather 'tiled' or
| stacked, sometimes with different windows of different apps
| overlapping (handy on laptops).
| mrpotato wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, I hadn't seen these.
|
| With all the negative comments in the thread I had expected
| some kind of massive changes but it basically looks the same.
| Sure, nitpick about this or that but in the end the overall
| look remains nearly identical (for calendar, again, havent seen
| the other screens).
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| The design doesn't look too bad to me, with exception to that
| big empty top bar. It feels really awkward.
| [deleted]
| ape4 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dbcooper wrote:
| 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.
| redeeman wrote:
| i hope they will make it better, though I expect they will make
| it worse. much worse.
| Tschayba wrote:
| 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.
| 01ce8c91872dd6d wrote:
| 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
| O1111OOO wrote:
| 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.
| tlamponi wrote:
| 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 :-(
| codalan wrote:
| 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.
| josefresco wrote:
| 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.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| 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.
| alerighi wrote:
| 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).
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| oblib wrote:
| 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.
| hknmtt wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| There's plenty of standards bodies just awaiting new proposals
| -- you've got your work cut out for you -- thanks for
| volunteering!
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| Out of scope.
| FpUser wrote:
| 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
| gorgoiler wrote:
| 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.
| w4rh4wk5 wrote:
| 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.
| hackerbrother wrote:
| I think non-webmail has been more trouble than it's worth for
| some time now.
| somebehemoth wrote:
| I think webmail is not worth the effort and loss of end user
| control and I prefer local mail clients.
| nocman wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Webmail is not great when you're juggling several addresses and
| I don't see that changing soon.
| vlod wrote:
| 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
|
| [1] https://github.com/iced-rs/iced
| devmunchies wrote:
| I read "A cross-platform GUI library for Rust" but never saw
| any specifics. Is this targeting MacOS, Windows, Linux?
| vlod wrote:
| From [1] https://github.com/iced-rs/iced it says:
|
| "Cross-platform support (Windows, macOS, Linux, and the Web)"
| andix wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| OK.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| 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
| nxoxn wrote:
| Neat, I'm looking forward to it.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| plus ca change: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-
| you-should-...
| brightball wrote:
| 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.
| autoexec wrote:
| > I should probably publish this document at some point
|
| I'd be interested in seeing it. It sounds like a pretty good
| idea. It's incredible to me how effective even the worst
| phishing email/sites are and to me that's an indication that
| not enough is being done to point out clear warning signs to
| users.
|
| > 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.
|
| The URL shorteners can be the worst. They don't seem to care
| who creates a link to something, and don't do even basic
| checking of whats at the other end. You'd think a person
| creating a link to yet another URL shortener would set off
| major flags, but they don't seem to care.
|
| Same with survey/form sites that keep being hijacked for
| phishing purposes. They don't bother with even basic checking
| for scams either. If someone creates a form with a password
| field that'd be easy to flag for review, but it doesn't happen.
| I can report a bunch of identical phishing sites that were
| created with URLs like:
| random_form_builder_site.com/targetcompanyname001
|
| random_form_builder_site.com/targetcompanyname002
|
| random_form_builder_site.com/targetcompanyname003
|
| and while they'll generally take them down, they'll do nothing
| to prevent:
|
| random_form_builder_site.com/targetcompanyname004
|
| random_form_builder_site.com/targetcompanyname005
|
| random_form_builder_site.com/targetcompanyname006
|
| from being created. Not checking for targetcompanyname in the
| url of new forms/surveys, and not bothering to check to see if
| the 12 new sites someone just created are identical to the last
| 12 they were asked to disable.
|
| Anything that can be done to help make those sites less
| attractive to users before they even click the link in the
| email they got would really help.
| quicksilver03 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/ [1]
| https://packagist.org/packages/boressoft/ident_switch [2]
| https://cypht.org/
| quicksilver03 wrote:
| 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
| ginko wrote:
| As a longtime user of thunderbird an interface change is the
| absolute LAST thing I want.
| big_____country wrote:
| I find the way this guy says "rep-uh-ZIT-ur-ree" very mellifluous
| imcdona wrote:
| No mention of JMAP support.
|
| https://jmap.io/
| eduction wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| JMAP failed, let it go already.
| voakbasda wrote:
| 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.
| jesusofnazarath wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| carlosjobim wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| TheDesolate0 wrote:
| [dead]
| superkuh wrote:
| 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.
| aorth wrote:
| I'd understand if you just resisted the UI changes. In the
| video they discuss serious underlying technical debt.
| Thunderbird is twenty years old now and most of us have
| technical debt on projects that are a fraction of that age!
|
| I support the revived energy around the Thunderbird project and
| I trust that they will not betray old and loyal power users.
| Looking forward to future releases.
| david_draco wrote:
| Unfortunately the web keeps changing. Firefox is trying hard to
| remain relevant and needs to be flexible with their code-base.
| So Thunderbird does not live in a stable world.
| toomim wrote:
| Strange comment. Thunderbird is for email, not the web.
|
| Are the people who want it to change confused about the
| difference between smtp and http?
| mplanchard wrote:
| In TFA it says that Thunderbird is built on top of Firefox,
| which makes it difficult for them to keep up and causes a
| lot of churn and bugs. I imagine that's what the parent
| poster is referring to.
| jraph wrote:
| Yes, and today, to render mails, you need a web engine.
| Unless you only want to deal with text email but that
| comes from with its fair share of tradeoffs, including
| the occasional unreadable email in text... which you'll
| open in a web browser.
|
| And as a mail client you'd better follow the security
| fixes of the web engine you are using.
|
| I guess not everyone is willing to use an old web engine
| derived from an old version of Word and maintain this
| thing for the eternity.
| jeltz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| 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".
| nerdponx wrote:
| Thunderbird is absolutely due for a UX and feature set
| overhaul. But please please please don't follow current
| design trends: Thunderbird users are not and will probably
| never be people who appreciate the "everything is a mobile
| app" fad of the last few years. The term "webshit" absolutely
| feels apt here, and I would gladly triple my donation for the
| coming year if it meant that they committed to maintaining a
| traditional desktop look and feel in the rewrite.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I will probably need to look for alternatives, if I catch
| any sniff of "we are an electron app now" or similar. In
| that case I will probably only use the older version as a
| lookup program for past e-mails, if I cannot import them
| into something else. Or I stick with an old version of
| Thunderbird.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| I mean thunderbird is already running on an entire
| browser stack. Wouldn't electron be similar to what
| thunderbird is already using?
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I thought XUL had been removed?
| jraph wrote:
| XUL is still hiding in there I think, though most things
| in Firefox have been rewritten in regular HTML. Not sure
| about Thunderbird, though the new settings page
| suspiciously looks like the Firefox one, so if not
| everything has been migrated yet, some stuff definitely
| have.
|
| Either way, Gecko is what renders XUL and HTML, and
| therefore Thunderbird. It's essentially a big chunk of
| web stuff. It has always been this way.
|
| Though I think Gecko is a tad more memory efficient than
| Chromium / Electron, and a lot nicer to use than your
| average Electron app.
|
| And I'm pretty certain Thunderbird is staying this way.
| Becoming an Electron app would be a huge rewrite, and I
| think Thunderbird devs like Gecko. They say it in the
| blog post. It's not happening.
| renewiltord wrote:
| You can turn off auto-updates or build off a present revision.
| Those won't go away.
| superkuh wrote:
| Yeah, I did. I technically use a thunderbird fork. It'd be a
| shame if the extension ecosystem split though.
| ulkesh wrote:
| And I want a better design with better out-of-the-box, turn-key
| support for both Outlook/Exchange and GMail for contacts, mail
| (with proper conversations/threading), and calendaring. The
| extensions are clunky, and it always takes way too much time to
| get even remotely close to looking/acting correct.
| safety1st wrote:
| Thunderbird sucks, full send. I love free software and I've
| used TB for ten years because it's bundled with lots of Linux
| distros. But one paragraph into the post they are making
| excuses for how bad they are: "Why does Thunderbird look so
| old, and why does it take so long to change?"
|
| I'm definitely not complaining about the UI "looking old" - I
| like UIs that are old, they are simple! But Thunderbird is
| glitchy, sluggish, and plagued by idiotic design decisions (for
| example, why the fuck do they make it hard for me to include
| attachments in a reply? super obvious example of some cranky
| "principled" programmer who's happy to give the middle finger
| to Thunderbird's actual users).
|
| We're on TB for one reason - we're too busy to evaluate
| replacements. If/when we find the time to evaluate other
| clients we will absolutely replace it. The post stinks of
| hostility toward their users, which is unfortunately no
| surprise with Thunderbird.
| [deleted]
| progx wrote:
| 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.
| jraph wrote:
| I like that Thunderbird exactly looks like what it looked like
| when I started using it in 2005, 18 years ago (save for the OS
| theme in use).
|
| Though I would not mind some refresh. Many (younger? and as
| young as me, actually) people who are used to webmails and
| mobile apps find it ugly, and I can see that.
|
| The world is missing a fast and efficient desktop mail client
| that looks good and I'd be glad if Thunderbird were it.
|
| There's a world in which the Thunderbird team understands they
| have a huge number of long time users and they should be
| careful to keep it usable for them, where they will take
| feedback and in which they build something that doesn't suck
| for people who don't now it yet, and this world could be ours.
|
| Wait and see? I understand the concern and that many people are
| worried, I also don't quite like the trend of UIs with a lot of
| space lacking contrast everywhere, but I think a good outcome
| is actually likely.
| alerighi wrote:
| There are a ton of desktop email clients that have that
| design: Apple Mail, Windows 10/11 Mail application, Outlook,
| Mailspring, whatever.
|
| Of client that have the UI/UX of Thunderbird... well only
| Thunderbird remained. I get that if you use the email
| sporadically with only one account, you are better with a
| client like you described, but at that point you can as well
| use a webmail.
|
| Otherwise if you work with emails, and you manage tens or
| hundreds of email each day, Thunderbird interface is great,
| is compact, is essential, is functional. Not pretty, but
| works well, it's stable, it's reliable.
|
| Thunderbird is a work tool, and a work tool to me doesn't
| have to be pretty, it has to work.
| jraph wrote:
| You know what? Nothing needs to be pretty. Why stop at work
| tools? A home is there to let you cook, sleep and live
| efficiently. No need to be pretty. A city is there to allow
| you to go from A to B without any fuzz and to provide the
| essential services. Pretty cities are annoying.
|
| I have several accounts and thousands of mails. But I can't
| see how an efficient tool can't be pretty and how a pretty
| tool can't be efficient.
|
| I agree with the pros you find to the UI of Thunderbird and
| that's why I use it. But non-prettiness is not a feature.
| Prettiness is. For most people, it will be more enjoyable,
| more so if they spend hours each day using the tool, which
| is more likely in a work environment.
|
| If it's more enjoyable, more people will use it instead of
| all these non-free pieces of software you listed (and which
| I will not use as a consequence), which in turn might bring
| more funding, which might allow the Thunderbird team to
| make it even more reliable.
|
| Life is there to be enjoyed and this includes work. I also
| use thunderbird for my personal email account so it's not
| just work for me, like many people out there.
|
| Why are we even arguing for non-prettiness? This is
| madness.
|
| Again, the revamping we are talking about is being done for
| maintainability reasons, which is what you want for your
| tool to remain efficient, stable and reliable.
|
| I understand the concerns, UI rewrites are often upsetting,
| but the amount of resistance to change here is quite
| impressive.
|
| I don't see the point of not wanting improvements. Of
| course I won't be happy if Thunderbird becomes less
| reliable or less efficient but we are not there yet.
|
| I trust the Thunderbird team to do the right things. They
| have not failed me for almost 20 years. I can't use
| anything else because I'm too used to its UI, the keyboard
| shortcuts, everything. The first versions after the rewrite
| might not work very well and have bugs but we can always
| wait a bit before upgrading.
| mulmen wrote:
| My home needs to be pretty because fundamentally I am an
| irrational animal motivated by my emotions. When I sit on
| my leather couch and look at my house plants and art that
| makes me feel _good_. When I come home and find things
| out of place it makes me feel _bad_.
|
| A UI revamp is like coming home to a crime scene, or at
| least a messy kitchen.
| jraph wrote:
| Likewise, for many people, pretty tools make them feel
| better.
|
| Of course, a UI revamp needs to be done carefully, taking
| existing users in account. If done well, it will be like
| someone living in the same home having done some
| cleaning.
|
| Otherwise I agree, it's not good.
| mulmen wrote:
| No. If you want a "pretty" email client go make one and see
| how it does. Stability is the number one feature I want in a
| UI. The only other concern is responsiveness. Literally
| nothing else matters.
| jraph wrote:
| > go make one
|
| It's not like it's easy. It crossed my mind a few years
| ago, actually. But why should I when the email client I
| actually happen to use decided to actually rebuild its
| interface? I'm not the one who is unhappy, I'm happy either
| way actually, I could answer "go fork Thunderbird if you
| are not happy".
|
| There was an interesting talk at FOSDEM by OpenProject on
| how to handle UI revamps [1], there are ways to do it
| without breaking current users. I recommend it, I'm quite
| picky on presentations but this one was really good and I
| enjoyed it.
|
| I agree that UI stability is important. UI stability is not
| the only important thing. Responsiveness indeed too. I hate
| slow UIs. Consistency with what users are used to (from the
| rest of the world) is very important too.
|
| What's more, I read in the blog post that they are
| rebuilding the UI from scratch, but what I don't read is
| that they decided to change everything.
|
| They can do it right. I can't say they will, but... again,
| let's see? I'm sure they'd be glad to receive feedback,
| questions and concerns.
|
| Am I the only one enthusiastic about some potential
| Thunderbird UI revamp here?
|
| I don't like many UI/UX choices on the current web, but I
| also like what KDE has been doing, and maybe Gnome too,
| there are places where UIs get better! Why not Thunderbird?
|
| [1] https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/practical_ux_at_
| openp...
| mulmen wrote:
| What if I decide to remap your keyboard every 12 months
| because I think I have a better layout? If you practice
| for an hour a day you'll adjust in a month! Of course
| that will go out the window 11 months later, but I will
| have my promo in by then. Apple literally does this with
| keyboard shortcuts and UI elements in MacOS. This is what
| I imagine when I hear someone wants to "revamp" a UI.
|
| In modern software "UI revamp" means turning muscle
| memory into papercuts.
|
| Mozilla can rebuild the UI without redesigning it. If
| they need to throw out underlying code to improve
| performance or maintainability that's fine. But changing
| UI elements is like renaming a boat. You just don't do
| it.
| jraph wrote:
| If you decide to turn my functional if bulky 70s office
| building into something a bit fresher I won't mind. Of
| course don't do it every month but Thunderbird hasn't
| changed for twenty years.
|
| Apart from the attach button that was put at the other
| side of the compose window. That was annoying.
|
| I fully expect the new UI to have a mode resembling the
| current one and the current keyboard shortcuts to still
| work. Now, if it's not the case I'll agree with you.
|
| I too am pretty pissed off by many UI revamps and modern
| web UIs in general, but I'm quite confident because
| Thunderbird is not your regular shitty web app powered by
| a horde of investors.
|
| We will see.
| mulmen wrote:
| > if you decide to turn my functional if bulky 70s office
| building into something a bit fresher I won't mind.
|
| I worked in one of these and it was the best office space
| ever. Built into a nature preserve. There were paths
| along the water between the buildings. Everyone had an
| office with a window and view of trees and water. It was
| dated but I had zero complaints. We got bought by a
| company in Silicon Valley and they moved us to an "open
| office" in what was essentially a warehouse. Fancy new
| furniture and desks, none of it better than what we
| already had. Attractive but uncomfortable. The
| development team was placed next to sales, which is about
| as loud as an elementary school at recess. It was
| horrible. The only view was of a retaining wall in the
| parking lot. Nothing about it was better. Even the HVAC
| was worse.
| jraph wrote:
| They didn't keep the features that mattered to you and
| implemented this badly on top of it. Of course it's bad.
|
| Okay, that's a tangent, but if done well, new buildings
| should be better because we improved on many plans.
|
| At the campus in which I studied, 70s building are mostly
| ugly and badly isolated (done quickly all at the same
| time because they were needed quickly, standards of back
| then, also fairly solid). Cold in winter, hot in summer,
| quite dark inside overall at least for the corridors.
|
| They did a decent job for the new buildings. Rooms still
| have the same number of people. Those buildings are
| rented for 30 years costing a lot to the university but
| they are better overall.
|
| So, yeah. In both cases, new stuff can be better but of
| course it needs to be well done, stuff that matter need
| to be there and users listened.
| bugmen0t wrote:
| Frankly, it's surprising how long they managed to drag it along
| given they build on top of a weird fork of Firefox ESR. Their
| foundation is crumbling for years and years. They really need
| to get off of it.
| jmount wrote:
| I remember (perhaps incorrectly) using Thunderbird and then
| reading it was no longer supported and to move away.
| boplicity wrote:
| 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.
| pja wrote:
| There must be something weird about your setup. I have 40k
| messages in my Inbox & everything is snappy: Mailbox operations
| complete immediately.
| onli wrote:
| 70K. The only thing a bit slow is search (but not slower than
| in other clients I tested).
| oblib wrote:
| I delete a lot of email so I don't have more than a few k
| messages in an email account, but I have 3 of accounts setup
| in T-Bird and it's always been very snappy.
| narag wrote:
| I don't know how your archive is, mine is a few tens of
| thousands of messages, many of them with attachments, it works
| OK, fast and no problems at all.
|
| After these news, I'm searching for an alternative right away.
| I won't touch a "rewriting from scratch" piece of software with
| a ten feet pole. Very disappointing.
|
| Suggestions very welcome.
| behringer wrote:
| I would just wait for the inevitable fork.
| jraph wrote:
| My suggestion would be to wait and see.
|
| They know they have a huge user base, including enterprise
| users. They can do it right and modernize the UI without
| breaking your workflow. Maybe they will propose compact views
| and everything. They already have such options.
|
| I've been using Thunderbird for 2005 and like it as is, but I
| wouldn't mind some fresh air. I'd also love being able to
| convince my younger relatives to adopt Thunderbird but that
| somewhat cannot happen in its current state.
|
| Thunderbird is also not Firefox and I would expect them not
| handle UI/UX changes differently. Worst case, it will remain
| customizable. I'm not quite happy with the current Firefox
| UI, but luckily, someone built the Lepton theme [1] which is
| perfect for me. Thunderbird will still be based on Gecko for
| the UI, and I'm sure it'll remain at least as customizable as
| Firefox, even if it involves some hackery.
|
| If Thunderbird works well for you, just wait. Maybe you'll
| like the changes after all?
|
| As for the suggestions I could suggest KMail, it seems good,
| and would integrate perfectly with my KDE Plasma desktop
| environment, though I have been trapped in Thunderbird for
| more than a decade now.
|
| [1] https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/
| narag wrote:
| Thank you, also to behringer, for the suggestions. I used
| KMail when Linux was my primary system at home, years ago,
| nice to know it's still alive and kicking. I'm planning
| going back to Linux so it's a logical move.
|
| Not sure changes will be good or bad, but rewriting implies
| some things stop working. My workflow is mostly fetch mail,
| read mail, done. Nothing fancy. If they want to write a new
| client, just do it and replace the old one only when
| they're on par functionally. But they never do that :(
| autoexec wrote:
| > My suggestion would be to wait and see.
|
| This is what I'm going with. We use Thunderbird for work
| and as long they don't kill of functionality and disrupt
| what we're doing I don't really care what Thunderbird looks
| like.
|
| I'm a little worried about a bunch of new bugs, especially
| ones that result in data loss though. As things change I
| may be pushing back on updates for a while just to make
| sure things are stable.
|
| If things go bad, I'll have to look for forks or set up
| something else that can reasonably handle IMAP and supports
| MBOX
| freedsoftware wrote:
| Slowness and memory bloat is the main problem of Thunderbird. I
| don't know what the cause is, but it is frustrating that there
| are no full-featured open-source mail apps that have decent
| performance.
|
| Kmail's UI can be fast, but its IMAP support is so horribly
| slow and buggy at least for me.
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| qzw wrote:
| If you're on Windows, certain antivirus, including Defender,
| can absolutely kill Thunderbird's performance. There seems to
| be some kind of lock contention going on, and the result is
| Thunderbird taking a long time to do common tasks. Excluding
| the profile folder from antivirus would solve the issue, with
| the caveat that any incoming attachments would no longer be
| automatically scanned.
| magnat wrote:
| > For example, if I archive an email, it takes 10 to 15 seconds
| for this to be reflected in the interface
|
| Have you tried changing local storage format from default mbox
| (one big linear file per folder) to maildir (each message in
| its own file)?
| winrid wrote:
| This is a great example of the kinds of problems they're
| trying to tackle. This shouldn't be an issue. Just use sqlite
| or similar.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| At least on Linux, I think the mbox vs maildir is an
| interoperability thing. I can access folders created by
| thunderbird, or existing user local ones in any local mail
| client or remotely through IMAP.
|
| It may be they don't want to break those external tools.
| derefr wrote:
| So have a checkbox for "also persist mailbox in an
| interoperable format", that then lets you choose mbox or
| maildir; where it's going to save the data _for its own
| use_ in SQLite either way; only save in that
| "interoperable format" asynchronously in the background,
| and on quit (just like e.g. a Redis RDB file); and, if
| enabled, also scan the interoperable backing store for
| changes made on startup, to apply them to the internal,
| canonical store.
|
| FYI, iTunes.app (or whatever it's called now) for a long
| time had a legacy XML-file representation of the music
| library "for interoperability", that you could enable to
| be persisted to disk alongside its newer, binary DB file;
| when enabled, it worked exactly like this.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| Maildir is fairly performant and Thunderbird does have
| its own index dbs for performance in mbox and maildir
| formats already. It's why the compact option exists for
| mbox since delete only removes the index key until you
| trigger a compact.
|
| Making the sqlite db the primary would mean that unless
| there was constant synchronisation I would be missing
| emails in the other clients.
|
| I feel like just switching to maildir across the board is
| a pretty good solution performance wise. Although, I do
| understand that folders with large numbers of files is a
| problem under Windows (many projects had to rework their
| design for this). So perhaps a sqlite solution for
| Windows would be a good idea.. or just a maildir with
| more nested folders to reduce size, linked to the
| thunderbird indexing.
| naasking wrote:
| > Making the sqlite db the primary would mean that unless
| there was constant synchronisation I would be missing
| emails in the other clients.
|
| This is a perfect example of complicating what should be
| a simple thing to support a very, very niche use case.
| Thunderbird should just use sqlite so all normal
| operations including search are fast across all
| platforms, and if _you_ have a use case like wanting to
| synchronize with other mail clients using maildir, then
| write a plugin that will duplicate the sqlite db to a
| user-specified maildir.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Modern NTFS doesn't have as much of a problem with
| folders full of files as its reputation states. Though
| File Explorer always still seems to make it seem
| slower/worse than it is. (Most of that is still things
| like populating thumbnail caches and stuff, though, more
| than actual disk performance.)
|
| The bigger issue with the Maildir standard on Windows is
| that the Maildir standard uses colons in filenames which
| is not allowed on Windows.
|
| (ETA: The obvious idea here to me would be to do
| something like a bare git repo as a Maildir-like with
| content-addressed storage.)
| capitainenemo wrote:
| Hm.. Not sure how modern that NTFS would have to be.
| Firefox and Minecraft had to do modifications to avoid
| the issue of slow file access and slow reads of folders
| full of small files. Hedgewars too.
|
| I feel these weren't the only cases. And none of those
| had anything to do with Explorer.
|
| But, it might have improved, and might be "good enough"
| for email.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| So much depends on the specific APIs, of course, and how
| many versions of Windows you are expecting to support,
| and what your seek patterns and locking
| expectations/behavior are. (In my experience, it has been
| misunderstandings of the Windows file lock model/ACL
| lookups that seem more often the problem than directory
| size, but obviously everyone's benchmarks are different.
| File locks are super "slow", especially if you are not
| opting out of locks you don't need.)
|
| I'm not suggesting that architecting with lots of small
| files in a single folder is yet the _best_ architecture
| on Windows, just that for Maildir specifically on Windows
| it is among the least of the problems.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| 'k. take your word for it. Esp in relation to Maildir. I
| know very little about Windows development.
|
| But... just, FWIW, this particular subject has come up a
| lot on HN over the years with various explanations.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18783525 and many
| many others easily searchable on hn.algolia.com
|
| My fav comment was by an MS dev: "NTFS code is a purple
| opium-fueled Victorian horror novel that uses global
| recursive locks and SEH for flow control."
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I definitely understand it gets talked about a lot,
| endlessly. It's not an unearned reputation. I just think
| that, especially in light of things like that last
| comment you like, so much of that reputation at this
| point is folklore more than benchmarks. People take
| "Windows is bad at lots of files in a single folder" as
| faith from some bible of Operating Systems Allegories
| rather than something they've worked with directly or
| seen tested themselves first-hand.
|
| Part of what certainly doesn't help is that most of the
| "lots of files in a single folder" applications make
| other POSIX-based assumptions (such as locks and
| consistency with respect to concurrency are generally
| much more opt-in and eventually consistent by default in
| POSIX rather than opt-out and aggressively consistent by
| default in Windows). If you are trying to use POSIX-based
| assumptions on Windows it doesn't matter what you are
| doing, including "lots of files in a single folder", you
| are going to have a bad time. I can easily presume that
| is what happened in most of your anecdotal counter-
| examples (Java Minecraft, Firefox, Hedgewars, will all
| have different, plausible POSIX biases), though I can't
| know for certain without benchmarks and performance data
| in front of me, and none of those are currently my job.
| "Lots of files in a single folder" at that point, under
| that presumption, is a _symptom_ , rather than the root
| cause. It's very easy to blame the symptom sometimes,
| especially when that sort of performance debugging/fixing
| is getting in the way of your real goals and that symptom
| is sometimes such an easy fix (use more folders, bundle
| more zips, what have you).
|
| Again, I can't say that with too much certainty without
| specific performance data, it's just I do think people
| need to question the "Orthodoxy" of "well, Windows is
| just bad at that" more than they do sometimes.
| winrid wrote:
| You can asynchronously generate the mbox/maildir data.
| ruuda wrote:
| Thunderbird does store emails in SQLite databases.
| ncphil wrote:
| Damn. I _knew_ there was something I forgot to do setting up
| Tbird this time!
| bbarnett wrote:
| _It has becoming rather frustratingly slow._
|
| You can bet the "rewrite" aka "make it look modern" jazz won't
| make this better.
|
| Probably worse.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Compact the folders. If still slow, vacuum the sqlites. Still
| slow? Do a FS checkup, may have corruption.
| autoexec wrote:
| Compacting folders is something I hope that they fix. I tell
| Thunderbird to download/sync all accounts and immediately it
| prompts me to compact and if I let it, it will only fail with
| an error because it's still in the middle of doing what I
| just asked it to. A little more intelligence in when it
| prompts for compacting would be nice.
|
| Better yet, they could do a better job handling it
| automatically so I don't need it to ask me.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| 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?
| mprovost wrote:
| Superhuman is incredibly fast, and has amazing keyboard
| support. It's the fastest thing for getting through a busy
| inbox. It's $$$ though. But also includes a great mobile
| client.
| nor-and-or-not wrote:
| MailMate (https://freron.com/)
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > Want to recommend one of those other email clients for Mac?
|
| ... is Mail not OK?
| mauvehaus wrote:
| You know, I've never tried it. I was looking for a cross-
| platform solution, but I haven't run anything but Mac for a
| couple of years now. Perhaps I should take a look.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I'd mostly used Macs for like a decade before I gave Mail
| a try. Just didn't occur to me. Takes a while to break
| the "first party and/or default is probably not
| acceptably-decent" mindset. I've found it entirely OK.
| Good enough it's not at all worth searching for something
| better (for me--email needs vary greatly, I'm sure)
|
| Kinda like getting used to drag-n-drop usually doing
| something sensible, rather than its fucking everything
| up, doing nothing, or causing a crash/state-corruption in
| the target program. I'd been trained by other platforms
| to just about never try to use it for anything except
| dragging files from directory to directory, and had to
| un-learn that.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Yeah, mail.app is performant, updated, and native.
|
| It ain't outlook if you need that level of Corp crap but it
| does well with my massive mess of email from 2002 onwards
| over various hosting and forwards and works well with
| gmail.
| pantulis wrote:
| I cannot understand why it does not allow to autocomplete
| the destination folder when one moves a message, you have
| to rely on the "predicted" folder or just use the mouse.
| themadturk wrote:
| Apple Mail on Mac and iOS/iPadOS works great. I'm using
| pobox.com (Fastmail's sibling) for forwarding.
| kevincox wrote:
| > The threading/conversation support is my biggest gripe
| apart from the slowness.
|
| I'm curious what gripes you have here. Compared to GMail
| linear threading based on subject I find the correct
| threading based on headers fantastic.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| I'm not sure if it's strictly Thunderbird's fault, or if
| it's because people sometimes reply to a random message
| with a bunch of people one it, change the subject, and
| things go downhill from there.
|
| The fact that I'm dealing with this in three different
| interfaces (Thunderbird, Gmail, Fastmail) is probably not
| helping my sanity.
| anamexis wrote:
| 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/
| donkeyd wrote:
| Have to say I dislike the fact that Mimestream will cost
| money, but they don't say how much yet. I don't want to get
| used to something that will then cost more than I can
| afford. I don't mind paying, at all, but if it's going to
| be a EUR5 a month subscription that'll be too much for me,
| for example.
| anamexis wrote:
| I agree, that is annoying. It seems as though they are
| preparing to release 1.0 soon, so we'll find out soon
| enough.
| metadaemon wrote:
| I second Mimestream, never had a problem until their most
| recent bug yesterday. They are fast on fixes though.
| bigbluedots wrote:
| Is it ported over to Rust yet?
| sys42590 wrote:
| 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.
| imiric wrote:
| 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.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Dropping XUL really broke so many extensions. I think everyone
| dumped FF then and started over with chrome.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| 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."
| neilv wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys_Identified_Mail
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMARC
| anthk wrote:
| GUI: Claws Mail/Sylpheed
|
| TUI: mbsync+msmtp+Mutt+Maildir
| junon wrote:
| 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.
| smm11 wrote:
| Must adopt material design. Amiright?
| nektro wrote:
| thunderbird looks and acts exactly like how I want it to
| noisy_boy wrote:
| 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.
| codethief wrote:
| If your concern are backups (only), I think there are better
| tools for that, such as offlineimap and mbsync.
| tredre3 wrote:
| > 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)
| nfriedly wrote:
| Yeah, same, except on my home file server (unraid) rather than
| my desktop.
|
| I use 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.
| rvz wrote:
| 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!
| einpoklum wrote:
| Mozilla is in close and tight control again these days - much
| tighter than you know.
| notRobot wrote:
| Pretty sure these are user donations.
| haunter wrote:
| 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-sou...
| warrenski wrote:
| 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/
| ncphil wrote:
| 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!
| Mathnerd314 wrote:
| My parents still run Eudora 7, can't convince them to switch to
| anything else...
| warrenski wrote:
| 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/
| autophagian wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I'll take this over an Electron app any day :) love FF
| layer8 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| No, because they have already done that (except on Firefox
| instead of Chromium).
| layer8 wrote:
| Do they use JavaScript outside the UI?
| tredre3 wrote:
| The SMTP client is now written in javascript and most of
| the IMAP client as well.
|
| The whole calendaring system is written in javascript.
|
| The chat clients (irc, matrix, etc) are also written in
| javascript.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| 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.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| > 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.
| deckard1 wrote:
| I bet you can go on Slashdot and find a thread from a million
| years ago with people saying they will never switch to this
| trendy new Thunderbird and that you can pull their
| pine/elm/mutt from their cold dead hands. I remember a time
| when running X11 with twm and an xterm was considered too fancy
| iillexial wrote:
| It doesn't look old, it looks overloaded and inconvenient. HN
| UI looks old, but it's the most convenient UI to use.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| I will take overloaded any day of the week. I am _sick_ of
| the trend of removing all widgets for some sense of a clean
| interface. I am on a desktop machine with a ginormous amount
| of pixels and real-estate. Show me all the buttons.
| pmontra wrote:
| I think it's the UI an email client must have, no less, no
| more. I quote the post
|
| > A UI that looks and feels modern is getting initially
| implemented with version 115 in July, aiming at offering a
| simple and clean interface for "new" users, as well as the
| implementation of more customizable options with a flexible
| and adaptable interface to allow "old" users to maintain that
| familiarity they love.
|
| I don't understand why today's new users shouldn't be able to
| cope with an interface any old new user didn't have any
| problem using. However as long as they keep the promise not
| to take away the current convenient interface, they can do
| whatever they feel like to remove functionality for a dumb
| modern mode.
| andix wrote:
| HN is really bad on touch devices. Call me young and naive,
| but I mostly read HN on the couch on my tablet.
| pmontra wrote:
| I use HN half on my phone and half on my desktop. It's OK
| on both, I just have to zoom the upvote buttons sometimes
| before touching them.
| leodriesch wrote:
| I mostly read HN on my iPhone using the website with the
| zoom cranked up a little bit and I find it works better
| than the variety of native clients available.
| Gigachad wrote:
| It's better than the average news site but worse than if
| they just spent 10 minutes adding some mobile CSS. I
| constantly log out accidentally on mobile.
| andix wrote:
| True. There is even a media query that can detect touch
| devices: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/poin...
|
| So they could keep the good old HN alive for PCs.
| super256 wrote:
| I'm still on TB68 because Enigmail was *broken after, and I
| think the UI is convenient except adding new accounts and
| managing SMTP servers.
|
| *I send emails in plaintext, don't tell me about S/MIME.
| david_draco wrote:
| Enigmail functionality is now built-in, it's quite nice!
| super256 wrote:
| When TB78 was introduced, the only supported S/MIME and
| did not allow inline encryption in plaintext. Has this
| changed now?
| Veen wrote:
| > UI isn't a fashion show.
|
| Yes, it is. At least, it is for UI designers.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Ok, but whilst you wear your clothes out in front of people
| (a literal fashion show), few people parade their MUA's UI in
| front of their friends, do they? Like, get check the chrome
| in my mail program guys...??
| squarefoot wrote:
| Only for UI designers who put aesthetics before usability.
| toss1 wrote:
| 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 _ass_ umption). 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 wrote:
| > 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
| oaiey wrote:
| Also for the users. For my part, I appreciate if stuff looks
| modern. I understand the whitespace madness complaints, but a
| software which looks like 1999 is not something I want to
| work with.
|
| There is a degree of modern style needed because Thunderbird
| does not exist in a vacuum. Windows evolved, macOS evolved,
| iPhone/Android look different than 1997 Windows .. which
| Thunderbird looked like the last years.
| Lammy wrote:
| For anyone else who _likes_ 1997-Windows-style software and
| can tolerate shareware, try Becky! Internet Mail:
| http://www.rimarts.co.jp/becky.htm
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Meanwhile, the only major website my elderly dad, who
| didn't really start using the Web until something like
| 2015, can use unassisted with a fair amount of confidence,
| is Craigslist.
|
| I'm skeptical that normal, non-technical users actually
| benefit from or even prefer all this crap. Someone does,
| but I'm not convinced it's them.
| synergy20 wrote:
| 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.
| college_physics wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > "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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| mr_machine wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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
| tlamponi wrote:
| 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.
| donatzsky wrote:
| > The interface is fine and there are far bigger problems --
| problems related to actual functionality as opposed to
| prettiness -- that desperately need work.
|
| You may want to read the blog post again. This isn't just about
| a new UI, it's about overhauling the codebase in general, so
| that they can improve all aspects.
| mr_machine wrote:
| I get that, but they listed
|
| "Rebuild the interface from scratch..."
|
| as a separate bullet point from codebase issues, and later
| talked about
|
| "A UI that looks and feels modern is getting initially
| implemented...aiming at offering a simple and clean interface
| for "new" users..."
| wpietri wrote:
| > Email that I know exists is often unfindable until I force
| Thunderbird to re-index my whole mailbox.
|
| Nice to have confirmation of this very irritating bug! When
| something isn't found in Thunderbird I now resort to searching
| in Fastmail's web interface.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| 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?
| nipperkinfeet wrote:
| 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.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ilyt wrote:
| Oh please fuck not again. It's the only fucking client that works
| with O365 without fuckery ;/
| ttoinou wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| whydoyoucare wrote:
| 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.
| magnat wrote:
| 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.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| 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.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| 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.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| > "Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long
| to change?"
|
| If it works...
| fsh wrote:
| 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?
| pmontra wrote:
| 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.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| planter wrote:
| > What To Expect Going Forward
|
| > [...] And yes, absolutely: the constant addition of new
| features [...]
|
| Please don't.
| hbn wrote:
| 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
| mbfg wrote:
| 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.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| 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.
| angst_ridden wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| | after migrating from SeaMonkey
|
| Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long, long time.
| angst_ridden wrote:
| Yeah, well, being very old myself, stuff like Mosaic /
| Navigator / NetExplorer / SpyGlass still all seem sorta
| recent to me.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| So the solution to Thunderbird's problems is to move your email
| to a different piece of software?
| angst_ridden wrote:
| 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.
| nashashmi wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Filelink is an add on. They have added it.
| psim1 wrote:
| 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.
| purpleblue wrote:
| 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.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| 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
| endlessvoid94 wrote:
| 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?
| officeplant wrote:
| Meanwhile the current Apple Mail app can be very slow & crash
| prone in my experience.
| DwnVoteHoneyPot wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > some weird 'RTF' format and IIRC security issues
|
| unlike the reliable and standards-based clients on Windows,
| you mean?
| XCSme wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yeah it seems like they're announcing their high-level
| aspirations, so not really note-worthy _yet_.
| evanwang0 wrote:
| I hope this will spawn an Electron alternative. Would be nice to
| see a break from Chrome monoculture.
| nocman wrote:
| 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.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| 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).
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| 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.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| 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?
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > "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.
| miroljub wrote:
| I remember the times when I was the only Thunderbird user in an
| Outlook infested company. I remember it was crazy fast,
| especially real-time search folders were a game changer for me,
| so I could filter messages however I liked and let them appear
| in multiple folders without affecting performance.
|
| I haven't used it in a while, but if it's true, it's a pity
| that once so useful and fast piece of software deteriorate so
| hard. One would expect that a stale project can only benefit
| from the newer hardware to become crazy fast ...
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I remember it was crazy fast_
|
| I remember Thunderbird as being both fast, and uniquely able
| to run on pretty much any hardware.
|
| I used it on an eeePC 701 with no problems, even though the
| machine had only a 900 MHz processor, 512MB of RAM, and a 4GB
| disk.
|
| Sad to hear it's gone all bloatware since those days.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Sad to hear it's gone all bloatware since those days.
|
| If they're basically stacked on _top_ of 90% of firefox
| (which is how I understand it to work), then it 's not
| necessarily TB's fault. It's like writing a tiny app on top
| of a framework that gets bloated.
| jeltz wrote:
| It really has. Thunderbird has become slower and slower and
| prone to lockups. The UI and feature set is still great but
| the performance is really horrific.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Might it be, in part, due to moving to newer versions of
| Firefox or Firefox-derived components under the hood?
| When Thunderbird was starting out, Firefox would have had
| something like a 10-15Mb memory footprint with no pages
| loaded and eaten approximately zero processor cycles
| while idle. It's, um, a lot bigger and hungrier now.
| mmcgaha wrote:
| I have never used thunderbird but I am sure a lot changed
| when when xul went away.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| In fairness, if you're as bad as I am at actually deleting
| email, you probably had something like 15 years less email
| accumulation.
|
| I also ran it on a netbook (some variant of a 901?) for a
| couple years, and it was great. I'm also pretty sure it
| would be less great now, even if I were running the same
| version.
| tacotacotaco wrote:
| Same situation. A few years ago I started moving old
| emails into yearly sub folders (just moved all of last
| years emails into a "2022" folder). This improved
| performance a lot for me. I'm guessing the smaller
| folders of emails keep the index files small. Search
| still works through all of those folders.
| NavinF wrote:
| > as bad as I am at actually deleting email
|
| People delete email?
|
| I started using the gmail's "archive" button in ~2009 and
| now I see 112,315 conversations in the "all mail"
| section. That's probably 200k emails in total. The fact
| that web mail always runs at the same speed regardless of
| how much mail you have is seriously underappreciated.
|
| (Some operations like creating a filter and applying it
| to all past conversations does take 5 seconds, but this
| doesn't block the UI so it's not a deal breaker)
| jahsome wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| > _... so low in responsiveness that it 's literally quicker
| for me to open a new tab [and] load Google Mail_
|
| Might have to do with us having allowed to infest mail, like so
| many other things, with the piece of shit that is CSS. As it's
| formulated, it would indeed appear gross, but coming to think
| about it, it's no wonder that loading a document into an
| already running browser is faster than starting a web browser
| albatross afresh.
|
| Maybe embedding (and keeping up to date with security band
| aids) an old Moz browser is the problem, but I don't remember
| performance to be as much as a problem when I was still using
| Thunderbird. I was glad it existed and hope their rewrite goes
| well.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| > Might have to do with us having allowed to infest mail,
| like so many other things, with the piece of shit that is
| CSS.
|
| Wouldn't that only make sense if your Gmail tab wasn't also
| loading up the same CSS?
| jeltz wrote:
| Nope, the issues seem to lie more in just plain bad code. It
| is seems to be mostly their IMAP code and their mbox code
| which goes crazy and starts using all CPU, not the UI. The
| issues happen when opening folders too.
| ktm5j wrote:
| I feel like you could argue that UI performance falls under the
| "look so old" statement.
| riedel wrote:
| I guess 'notable' means something like >= 0.01% in this case.
| But tech debt is an issue if nobody can effectively fork off
| anything if unhappy with the direction taken.
| djha-skin wrote:
| A salient question would be what OS you are running. It's been
| my experience that Thunderbird is orders of magnitude slower on
| Windows. I find it to be fast enough on Linux, though still
| acknowledging the fact that it is a bit slow. I read somewhere
| that this speed difference is due to antivirus.
| spoils19 wrote:
| It's crazy that it's slower than an Electron app! Like most
| HNers, I fully believe that any JavaScript is slower than
| native, so how can this be false for this app???
| pmontra wrote:
| The post said that Thunderbird is an app running on top of
| Firefox, so it's not much different than an Electron app.
| There are probably many more layers than a native one.
| Slowness is too new expected but actually I never felt that
| Thunderbird is slow. I use it daily.
| ryanisnan wrote:
| I wonder how many thunderbird devs read HN - I would guess a
| lot. It really sounds like they are focused the wrong problems
| with the rebuild.
| jeltz wrote:
| Yes, I love the UI of Thunderbird and its superior UI is the
| only reason I still use it despite the horrific performance
| issues.
| wpietri wrote:
| Same. I wouldn't put up with this from any other app. In the
| last few months it has taken to seizing up for 2-10 seconds
| at a time in the middle of writing. I've been holding out
| hope a new release will magically get better. Or that I'll
| dig deep into what's going on and figure out what the cause
| is. But switching over to webmail is getting more and more
| tempting.
| tux3 wrote:
| That's also the main problem I have with it. The UI is what it
| is, but it has the considerable advantage that I'm _already_
| used to it. I 'm not really clamoring for a different UI,
| there's bigger problems.
|
| Unfortunately, it has some serious performance bugs. It often
| sits there idle on a brand new laptop eating 50% or 70% of a
| core. Doing who knows what, without giving any indication or
| any sort of pause button to the user.
|
| I almost have to keep Thunderbird closed to save my battery.
| Sometimes I think if I wrote a shell script that suspended the
| main process four of every five minutes, it'd make for better
| background task scheduling than whatever must be going on.
|
| The software is burning hundred of billions of CPU cycles
| running in circles for hours and hours, when it's supposed to
| be sitting idle.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _That 's also the main problem I have with it. The UI is
| what it is, but it has the considerable advantage that I'm
| already used to it. I'm not really clamoring for a different
| UI, there's bigger problems._
|
| If they want to grow the user base (or even maintain it
| against attrition) then relying on just the current folks
| isn't enough: you have to get new people to use it. (And
| hopefully support/donate to it.)
|
| Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old
| School interface and going with whatever is 'current'.
|
| Unless you make the interface skinnable, or provide a 'core'
| which folks can build their own variant on with whatever
| interface they desire.
| roenxi wrote:
| There are a lot of qualifiers there. The linked post by
| Thunderbird's Product Design manager spends a lot of time
| talking about tech debt and feature availability, and not
| so much about problems with the interface. Indeed, it has a
| reassuring amount of respect for the current interface,
| describing a future that "allow[s] veteran users to
| maintain that familiarity they love".
|
| It doesn't look like the interface is a big problem to
| anyone. Projects with a tech debt problem could always do
| with a touch up. But emails haven't changed that much in
| the last few decades.
| ablob wrote:
| I started using thunderbird half a year ago and like the
| interface. Sure, there's problems (I haven't encountered a
| lot of them), but the overall user experience is far better
| than what I'm used to from other email programs. The only
| thing that stuck out negatively was when I was searching
| for an email, in which the way I was wanting to solve it
| didn't work out as I thought it did. (I was looking for a
| mail containing specific words from a specific group of
| senders).
|
| Moreover, detering active users in the hopes of catching
| new users is a risky move. If you do it you need to be sure
| that there will be more new users faster than old users
| leaving. If it doesn't work out, chances are that they
| ain't coming back.
|
| I can't say anything about keeping TB open and having it
| steal CPU time. I usually close it after checking for mail.
| Having it open appears to be a valid use case taht
| shouldn't create problems, however.
| Moru wrote:
| I've been running Thunderbird in the background without
| problems the last 15-odd years on whatever computer I had
| at the time. Still do. No performance problems running
| 20+ mail accounts with loads and loads of mail. Ofcourse
| it can be slow if you do things that requires TB to
| recreate the mail storage but other than that I have no
| problem opening mail and reading it fast. I'm using both
| IMAP and POP3 accounts mixed.
|
| I believe there are settings you can run that might
| create more problems with performance but I haven't
| touched anything the last 5 years so can't say what it
| was any more.
| bawolff wrote:
| > Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old
| School interface and going with whatever is 'current'.
|
| This is an easy thing to say. Sometimes it is even true,
| but i think its overstated.
|
| To survive you need to lean into whatever makes you unique
| or interesting, and convince new users that you're worth
| it. Chase whatever is trendy too far, and you simply become
| the off-brand version of whoever is the market leader. That
| annoys your base wothout actually growing new users since
| you aren't going to be better than whoever you are copying.
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| The main issue with Thunderbird IMO is that line-wrapping and
| quoting (and especially their interaction) during composition
| is horrifically buggy!
| alisonatwork wrote:
| I actually just switched to Thunderbird last year because I
| needed to post a patch to a mailing list and I couldn't find
| any mail apps for Windows that could do it properly.
| Previously I used Alpine, but that was a much worse
| experience because pasting didn't work so I had to clumsily
| read in a prepared file from disk and not touch any other
| keys after that for fear of it rewrapping everything. If
| there are any other mail apps that do this better, and can
| still connect to "modern" (read: annoying) oauth setups like
| Office365 etc, I'd definitely be interested in trying them. I
| don't hate Thunderbird, but to me it seems like the least bad
| option for supporting both modern top-quote style HTML email
| and oldskool 7 bit ASCII/triangle bracket quoting/inline
| patch style email.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| I never had that issue myself.
|
| But... pasting in a table from anywhere (libreoffice,...)
| would break everything (still does in 102).
|
| Could be some quirk with a local gentoo install, but if i
| copy a random 2x2 (or more) table from libreoffice into an
| empty email (or the very last line of a non-empty one), and
| want to type anything below the table, there's no way to
| actually move the typing "cursor" outside of the table itself
| or type a newline at the end of the table and for the newline
| to be outside of the table (and not just stretch the last
| cell). This basically means I have to type some random
| newlines, paste in the middle of those newlines, so i can
| then move my cursor out of the tables itself.
| GordonS wrote:
| I'm with you on this. I tried Thunderbird again just a few
| weeks back, to see if it could replace Outlook for me. Nope,
| but it's nothing to do with the UI, which seems... fine?
|
| My issues were: - no support for O365, unless
| you pay for a 3rd party plugin - bizarrely high CPU
| usage, even when seemingly not doing anything -
| *sometimes* memory usage grows really high - a bunch of
| small niggling issues over missing features - for example, I
| can't paste in a formatted signature from Outlook
|
| I'd much rather they focused on the above - the UI is just
| fine!
| wielebny wrote:
| > no support for O365, unless you pay for a 3rd party plugin
|
| It seems that Thunderbird supports O365 oauth natively now,
| including access to calendars.
|
| I know I had to use some plugins in the past, but now, it
| just works.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| Yeah, you can use Thunderbird with Office365 authenticating
| with OAuth2.
| GordonS wrote:
| Hmm, I literally just double-checked before posting (with
| the beta version, too), and it still says it needs a
| plugin? Maybe I need to look a bit closer.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| at the very least, check which version you're on. The
| auto-updater is one of the parts that's unreliable.
| throw0101a wrote:
| * https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/01/important-message-
| for-m...
|
| * https://office365.mcmaster.ca/reconfigure-mozilla-
| thunderbir...
|
| If you've constantly upgraded over the years, try
| creating a new account or even reseting your profile.
| Perhaps there are/were some 'stale' settings that are
| messing things up.
| pleb_nz wrote:
| I have multiple 0365 accounts, have done for years, and don't
| pay for a plug. Not sure what's different with your O365 auth
| process.
|
| Signatures are a pain.
| neogodless wrote:
| Anecdotally, on my high-end desktop, with 2 Google accounts and
| a NameCheap private email account (all IMAP), Thunderbird is
| sitting at 0-0.2% CPU, 2 entries in task manager totaling 190.3
| MB.
|
| It does have a quirk with IMAP, in that it only checks your
| main folder until you _visit_ a sub-folder. Then it 'll check
| those, but even then, any time I go in and click a folder, it
| tends to react by "really checking."
|
| But quirks aside, performance doesn't seem like an issue for
| me.
| mrpotato wrote:
| I am seeing similar results. That being said, I'm only using
| thunderbird on Windows, so I can't speak to Mac/Linux perf.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| I've used it on Linux since 2005 at least, and my only
| problems were importing a big Outlook .pst and having
| trouble with its formatting and attachments. It's open
| daily on my machine, and while it has become more memory
| hungry, the CPU usage is minimum.
|
| Maybe it's because I only use POP/SMTP accounts?
| Accacin wrote:
| Same, I have a pretty decent gaming PC. Only about 1GB of
| mail in my archive from what I can see though.
|
| Uses %1.5 of my 32G of RAM and 0.2% CPU. I'm running on
| Linux, but I do not see the performance issues others are
| having.
| kayson wrote:
| 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.
| powersnail wrote:
| 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.
| freedude wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Whats wrong With outlook in a corporate environment?
| ulizzle wrote:
| 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.
| thesausageking wrote:
| 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.
| hathawsh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If you're going that route, SQLite seems like the most
| appropriate candidate.
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