On windows 10, I have dark mode enabled system wide, but I struggle with most third party dark modes, the contrasts between components is not thought out enough - or in the case of email, styled html emails sometimes don't work on a dark background
Is it possible to turn off the dark mode in thunderbird when the os system wide dark mode is enabled
Every time I hear about this recent "dark mode/light mode" fad I am reminded of a time when most software would use the OS's native and fully colour-customisable UI which let you have dark mode[1], light mode[2], rainbow mode[3], and everything in between[4], consistently across all applications with basically zero effort on the part of the application developers.
Yeah, and X resources let us Linux nerds choose freely as well. This is what we get now that every application ships its own implementation of everything, including GUI toolkit.
To be fair this is different for an email application because most email content assumes a white on black. This means that if you want to display the content in black on white it requires non-trivial and heuristic based fiddling.
Thunderbird has always followed my Linux GTK theme so I don't really know what you are complaining about.
Which, at least for me, has never worked properly (I check after each update) and still leads to lags and timeouts in Thunderbird/Outlook. If they don't fix it till my protonmail's subscription expires, I guess I'm moving to another provider.
Why would it be "wise"? If you need secure mailbox free of direct surveillance by providers, you need to host it yourself using software you yourself checked and compiled.
Did they fix the bug where you have a Yahoo or AT&T account and change the password at the server and when you change the password in Thunderbird it gives you server errors?
> * Dark mode (though I actually don't get why a GTK application should do this; well-behaved GTK integration should respect dark GTK themes already)
Maybe that has changed recently, but the UI of Thundebird, like Firefox, used to be primarily based on XUL, only relying on GTK for drawing certain "native" elements, so it wouldn't implicitly inherit the GTK theming.
Extra white space makes the window nearly twice the size for no apparent reason. I wouldn't say the new one is any clearer. Maybe even less clear, since the grey textual tips next to the fields have gone.
Agreed about the flat buttons sadly following the OS-cohesiveness-hindering flatness fad instead of adhering to standard OS styling which can be recognized across apps by users.
Disagreed about the To/Cc redesign, the new design is much more efficient when you have multiple recipients, making good use of horizontal space. The old design did lead to:
1. Tons of wasted horizontal space (as each line is a recipient, on each line you only use the few characters describing each recipient, leaving space on the right blank). And also, one-line-per-recipient leads to tedious vertical scrolling inside a vertically-constrained space (3 lines by default, and you don't want more, you want to preserve vertical space for the email body, not the header).
2. Impossibility to easily copy/paste all recipients. With the new design, it's now easy: select all, copy (and repeat once if you have a Cc field, okay).
There's a reason this To/Cc design is what most (all?) desktop/mobile clients do.
At least in the Mail.app on macOS, clear buttons are still used in the toolbar and the window bar when you compose a new message. I definitely think theres new thunderbird buttons are both a downgrade in terms of usability, but also because, aesthetically, I think they look way worse. The icon design is really quite bad. The "A" char is poorly rendered, the stroke width and proportions seem to be all over the place, and the italics "A" looks particularly bad.
Not a fan of the flat buttons but I strongly disagree about the single/multi line TO situation.
I doubt there will be a single person for whom Thunderbird is their first email/messaging type app. Most would have used something on their iOS or Android devices first at least.
All of them will be comfortable with multiple users in a single To line, while having multiple lines for multiple users will actually appear alien to them.
"I've had issues editing email addresses in clients with multiple mails per line."
This was my first reaction when I saw the change - I really hope they get this right as it goes to the core functionality of Thunderbird. If email addresses can't be easily and accurately edited in the To field, it will be a real problem for me.
Clients tend to get confused about where one address ends and the next one starts. I'm sure there are ways to solve this well, but my personal experience makes me skeptical.
Yes, if that's how it's implemented... Gmail doesn't. They wrap your email address text in a button thing. Others prefer semicolons, or was it commas, or was it both?
Its just yet another thing I shouldn't have to think about
I wholeheartedly disagree. The new "To" field is much, much easier to use, and I'd be curious why you think it's the result of 'trade offs made under the mobile constraint'.
It's not a mobile constraint. Nearly every desktop mail client also uses a single To line.
I mentioned mobile because as far as discoverability is concerned, there is an order of magnitude more mobile users than desktop users, so the vast majority of users will have no problem understanding this concept.
And if you've been a desktop user long enough that you havent used a smartphone then you're probably used enough software that have similar patterns (and used email enoguh) that you shouldnt have trouble realizing that single To line means you can add multiple recipients to the same line.
Agreed the multi line To field was a frustrating user experience. From my office we were reliant on the addon MRC Compose as no-one would use it over outlook otherwise
> I doubt there will be a single person for whom Thunderbird is their first email/messaging type app. Most would have used something on their iOS or Android devices first at least.
You'd be wrong. I, grudgingly, moved from mutt to Thunderbird after it was clear that email was turning into MIME-encoded web pages.
If you've been using Mutt, the concept of multiple recipients itself is a much harder process of discovery :)
Ironically, I am moving from Thunderbird to Mutt (NeoMutt actually). I find the elimination of HTML means it's actually easier for me to not get distracted by stuff I dont care about for email, which is interaction with real human beings, who are unlikely to be typing complicated HTML messages. Besides, with the right config (I'm still working on it), the HTML message is 1 shortcut away.
Unfortunately, my colleagues, who mostly use Outlook, employ HTML to its full extent when pasting in content to messages. ("Refer to the text highlighted in red.", "See the table for details", etc.)
Back in my BBS days, there was ANSI color with IBM-extended (CP437) block graphics to liven things up, so I can see it has gone full circle a bit.
> Most would have used something on their iOS or Android devices first at least.
This almost equals to assuming that nobody is older than 25 or 30 especially because the no "single person" assumption. I started with UNIX's mail in a terminal, used a dozen of different clients on UNIX, Windows, Linux, Android, not all of them graphical.
I've been using Thunderbird probably since its very first day. My other client is K9 on Android. I think the address pills will be OK but I want to test their manipulation with keyboard and touchpad.
The old To/Cc design was really bad. If you have more than three addresses, then these three lines scroll. The only indication that there are more than three addresses is a tiny scrollbar all the way to the right. I recently sent an e-mail to more people than intended when editing an old message as new, because it had more To-addresses that weren't visible and I didn't notice the scrollbar.
Now it needs some visual indication of a complete e-mail address in the To: line. Like a rounded rectangle 1px border around a complete e-mail address and some kind of hint, that you can enter more than one address.
There is a visual indication of a complete email addresses: each correct/complete email address is wrapped in a "pill", a light gray one (see OP screenshot). An incomplete email will similarly get wrapped into a dark red pill.
Your comment maybe indicates the gray is too subtle, or invisible to users with bad eyesight.
The worst bit is that you can't even expand that part of the window to see more addresses at once! Need to include the whole team on this mail? Prepare to squint...
Extra white space makes the window nearly twice the size for no apparent reason.
The old window was twice as big as it needs to be too, but I agree the new one is even worse.
I don't like the flat buttons either. I don't use macOS much, but the old ones with a subtle border look like they're native UI, whereas the new flat ones don't. A random image I found confirms that the old buttons and checkbox look the same as what the OS itself uses, while the new ones look very out-of-place:
The point of the huge window is that you have multiple steps and the window is sized for the largest one so it doesn't resize between steps. I'm also unhappy about the extra space but the window being larger than its contents makes sense here.
"The compose window now also takes up less space with recipients listed in “pills” instead of an entire line for every address.."
Yup, already hate it. I much prefer not looking through a list of buttons on the To line for the one I want to remove. Additionally, I can instantly see if I'm sending and email to my coworkers company or personal address without some damn tag after his name.
I switched to Outlook and found out my calendars and tasks from my Fastmail account were not supported (only Exchange accounts are now supported). If Thunderbird has now improved their calendar and task support, I will switch back.
It also looks like they added minimize to system tray, something else I found was impossible in Outlook.
Just FIY the winmail.dat (the horrible Microsoft email format) plugin LookOut (Fix Version) has not been updated for this release and unless someone jumps in to help Probably wont be updated. https://github.com/TB-throwback/LookOut-fix-version/
I was maintaining it but haven't been able to find time to work on the upgrade.
There was talk in the dev mailing list about adding TNEF support but that probably wont happen until 2021
Thank you for maintaining the extension until now!
Sadly the improperly configured Outlook clients are still not extinct in some of the organizations we work with. Does anyone know a good guide (with screenshots would be ideal) of the settings they would have to change?
Set up a radicale server and and the calendars sync just fine. Add the cardbook adding and contacts do too. I guess thats what you mean by not first class?
AFAICT, Cardbook doesn't work with TB78 (https://gitlab.com/CardBook/CardBook/-/issues/574) . The built-in Calendar integration is real nice though - was able to pick up various CalDAV options well. Edit1: fixed link.
Don't underestimate the power of defaults and core functionality.
If gmail support PGP, you could start to really use it, since you could be reasonably confident the recipient could read the message even if they have no idea what PGP was. For a plugin they would have to actively look for it.
Unfortunately Thunderbird user base is tiny but it's something
Yes. It adheres to the original six levels of trust, generating a confusing UI that in practice nobody but three people used. Easy mode was still confusing, with details like does the button show "the current state or an option to switch to that state"? An alternative plugin, autocrypt, was actually a much better beginner-proof way of having pgp.
I still think TB 78 isn't enough, but it's a step into the the right direction, where we recognize that there's a brilliant system in pgp, obscured by outdated and even counterproductive security insights (such as the trust levels). It also is included by default, important for secure by default mail communication.
It used to be XUL, but since that was deprecated and Firefox doesn’t support it, for a while Thunderbird was still using it with a plan to switch out. The larger plan for Thunderbird is to use “web technologies” (meaning HTML, CSS and JS). IIRC, this move is already in progress.
I have native apps for email on the various machines I own (between phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops that's at least 5). And, in a pinch, I can still use webmail.
I'm not sure why "cloud" matters for email -- it's always been hosted on a server somewhere.
If you use POP for your mail client, your client downloads the mails from the server that then deletes them and you only have them on your computer (Unless you use Gmail that does some hybrid thing storing the old emails but marks them as read I believe)
POP3 doesn't automatically delete the emails it fetched (with RETR). It has to emit another specific command (DELE) for this purpose.
So, keeping or not keeping mails on the server is a matter of configuration in your client. I think all clients propose this choice and some will also add extra options like deleting only after a number of days since fetching.
On the other hand I can't understand how people can only use webmail. Do you only have one email account? I've got a personal email on a server I'm running, a backup gmail, a school/work account, and the root account for the email server. Even if I wasn't too lazy to set up webmail on my email server, I still wouldn't want to go to three different websites to check my email, I'd use a mail client to bring all of them into one place.
I'm a major fan. I self host email, contacts, calendar, and Thunderbird is essential in my workflow.
Only issue is that the task descriptions don't render HTML and with all the crazy zoom meeting invites it is ugly. HTML in caldav is not standard but I would like the option since its a thing these days.
The integration of GPG into the client was a great move. The addition of dark mode is also good to keep up with the times. After all this while, the best thing I love about this release is the simplification of the To (and also CC and BCC) list into one field instead of being multiple rows (it was always painful to scroll).
I used to use Thunderbird as my only mail client for many years and still prefer it for personal accounts. I loved global search when it was launched, but that was not improved over time for accurate searches, especially for large mailboxes (I struggle to find mails with it in mailboxes that are a few Gigabytes in size).
Thunderbird has not focused on built-in MS Exchange support (especially including calendar), which, combined with environments where IMAP is disabled, makes it a no-go. I know of one commercial extension (Owl) that works with MS Exchange/Office 365, but that extension requires the purchase to be made by providing which email address one wants to use it for. It’s a privacy concern that the developer said they wouldn’t fix. So I’m stuck with Outlook Web Access at work (I refuse to use the Outlook client).
It is OpenPGP capability that is being integrated into the client, not GnuPG. You will have to import your keys from any existing GnuPG installation. Any new keys you add in Thunderbird will not be accessible to other things that use GnuPG.
I skimmed through the features and was very excited for the dark mode announcement. But that quickly went down the drain when I couldn't find how to force it from the setting, because I'm using i3wm, and there's no "dark mode" per se.
The other thing I'm wondering about is how this will integrate with OpenGPG, more specifically if it will allow the use with smartcards. And it looks like it planned ![1]
Great work Team Thunderbird. Been a fan for the past 5 years, will be for the foreseeable future.
Likewise. I know it is merely a cosmetic change, but it is just easier on my eyes.
For me Thunderbird is a way to slowly attempt to disentangle from Google. Thus far it has not been a disappointment. No welcome screen, no problem, there is an option for that. You don't want stuff to be compacted every time it starts, no problem; change one value to false. If only most programs were like that today.
> The other thing I'm wondering about is how this will integrate with OpenGPG, more specifically if it will allow the use with smartcards. And it looks like it planned ![1]
Actually smartcards were already supported when I tested alpha some time ago. Thunderbird used GpgME to talk to GnuPG and GnuPG talked to the smartcard.
The OpenPGP support is based on Enigmail (ginally merged in!), which has been a wrapper around GPG all along. GPG does all the actual cryptography in this setup.
I really wish TB would store mails in Maildir by default and operate on that storage according to the standard so that the local mailstore becomes compatible with other mail clients.
Right now one can manually switch the storage to maildir, but it is not safe to use that storage with other maildir compatible software.
Maildir only suggests the safe delivery mechanism that gets around lack of atomicity guarantees in filesystems by using the guarantee that a rename is atomic as a workaround.
It suggests a way to add metadata about messages through the use of flags added to file names, but doesn’t specify what these must be.
I don’t think, therefore, that Maildir as a standard provides enough to allow it to be relied upon for portability between clients (MUAs). That’s not to say a standard couldn’t emerge if there were some agreements.
Each email in its own file means a minimum of x KB on disk for each email, where x is usually 4. For people with thousands of emails that's very wasteful.
I would take a safe Maildir implementation over subtle (or sometimes catastrophic) data loss bugs any day. The one really serious problem I have with Thunderbird is that after being stung more than once, I feel like not only do I have to keep normal backups, I also have to retain old backups indefinitely, just in case a folder was corrupted silently a long time ago and I only find out months or years later when I need to search older messages.
Waste isn't the issue with big folders; filesystem performance (especially NTFS, which is to say Windows users, which is to say ~90% of users) degrades pretty horribly when folders have tens of thousands of files. Even on Linux filesystems, having a folder with a 100,000 files in it was having issues.
FWIW on ext4 I benchmarked adding millions of files to a folder and compared with `xx/...` and `x/x/x/x/...` and found the performance to be basically identical between the options and didn't degrade with the file count.
The one thing that I did find is that deleting folders with many files was very slow. I guess that path wasn't well optimized. However even then you could deleted hundreds of files a second so for regular mail usage it likely isn't a major issue.
Only if you use filesystem that cannot efficiently store small files, either together with metadata or packing several small files together, and allocates a full allocation unit for each separately.
Maildir, as opposed to emails stored in one big file, does cause some disk space to get wasted, but in past 10 years, it is immaterial. Even million empty emails, each taking 4kB of disk space, would take only 4GB in total. The small files aren't a concern for saving disk space: the big ones are.
Maildir has the advantage that searching, adding and deleting emails is very fast, much faster than if those operations were made on single big file. Worth it.
for personal mail the advantage in Maildir is incremental backups acting on the file system level are efficient. With an mbox file or sqlite db the whole file has to be backuped and transfered again. Of course for backup/snapshot mechanisms working on the block level one big file does not matter.
Then you're creating a new format (sqlite is well known, but the schema won't be), which third parties can add support for; depending on your exact goal, this is probably worse than using an already-supported format.
Did Thunderbird remove support for older XUL-based add-ons like Firefox did? It’s unclear to me what the article means by “legacy extensions” - based on context it seems simply to refer to extensions that work in 77.
Good luck running a mail client - you know, a program that takes html documents and renders them, because modern email is html - without running a browser.
In any case, thunderbird essentialy has a lineage going back all the way to netscape navigator (at least spiritually), so it was doing this way before electron was cool.
All of them use some sort of Webbrowser underneath. Thunderbird is using Firefox/Gecko, Geary is using GTKWebkit, macOS Mail is probably using Webkit. Note sure what Windows Mail is using. (Similar to outlook in my experice)
Outlook... is using Microsoft Word. (I mean technical it's just Offices' document rendering engine, but for meail it's equivalent as opening a HTML file in MS Word) (Also sends RTF mail for addresses on the same Exchange server)
Although I'd note that they strip down the HTML avialible. Emails can't execute Javascript. CSS is stripped down and must be in file. (Or completely inlined)
You limited to some very old Web technology in email. (Unless Google somehow managed to convince anyone else to support AMP 4 Email)
Love Thunderbird, and super glad to see that its development pace is picking up again.
The only big thing missing now is a three pane view: there is this 17 (!) years bug on the topic, and hopefully somebody will pick it up soon (Before you say it, I know that I could contribute myself but I do not think my skills are up this particular task)
229 comments
[ 288 ms ] story [ 4541 ms ] threadIs it possible to turn off the dark mode in thunderbird when the os system wide dark mode is enabled
What a pitiful regression it has been since then.
[1] https://64.media.tumblr.com/6d3e8c64cd9a38e70d24c0b1b2c73cb5...
[2] https://64.media.tumblr.com/736251fc23ae5bd8afe4656345d44893...
[3] https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-47IBJRvvGzo/UMohyEJvGEI/AAAAAAAAE...
[4] https://never-obsolete.tumblr.com/tagged/windows-9x-color-sc...
Thunderbird has always followed my Linux GTK theme so I don't really know what you are complaining about.
* Integrated OpenGPG E2EE (fully realized in a future 78.2 release)
* Significant UI improvements
* Integration of calendars and tasks
* Dark mode (though I actually don't get why a GTK application should do this; well-behaved GTK integration should respect dark GTK themes already)
Maybe that has changed recently, but the UI of Thundebird, like Firefox, used to be primarily based on XUL, only relying on GTK for drawing certain "native" elements, so it wouldn't implicitly inherit the GTK theming.
https://blog.thunderbird.net/files/2020/07/compose-compariso...
Old: Clear that you can enter multiple "To" addresses. Obvious that the formatting buttons are buttons.
New: Single-line "to" implies you can only enter one address. "Flat" buttons don't look like buttons.
https://blog.thunderbird.net/files/2020/07/account-setup.png
Extra white space makes the window nearly twice the size for no apparent reason. I wouldn't say the new one is any clearer. Maybe even less clear, since the grey textual tips next to the fields have gone.
Disagreed about the To/Cc redesign, the new design is much more efficient when you have multiple recipients, making good use of horizontal space. The old design did lead to:
1. Tons of wasted horizontal space (as each line is a recipient, on each line you only use the few characters describing each recipient, leaving space on the right blank). And also, one-line-per-recipient leads to tedious vertical scrolling inside a vertically-constrained space (3 lines by default, and you don't want more, you want to preserve vertical space for the email body, not the header).
2. Impossibility to easily copy/paste all recipients. With the new design, it's now easy: select all, copy (and repeat once if you have a Cc field, okay).
There's a reason this To/Cc design is what most (all?) desktop/mobile clients do.
I doubt there will be a single person for whom Thunderbird is their first email/messaging type app. Most would have used something on their iOS or Android devices first at least.
All of them will be comfortable with multiple users in a single To line, while having multiple lines for multiple users will actually appear alien to them.
I use thunderbird because I want an email client, not a dumbed down web experience built for mobile.
I've literally never used a mail client that didn't do multiple emails on the same line. On Desktop or Mobile.
And it's never been an issue.
As long as everybody is on your address book it's fine, but if they're not, things tend to get awry.
I haven't tried the new Thunderbird, but I am suspicious of this change as well.
This was my first reaction when I saw the change - I really hope they get this right as it goes to the core functionality of Thunderbird. If email addresses can't be easily and accurately edited in the To field, it will be a real problem for me.
Its just yet another thing I shouldn't have to think about
I've used every major email platform and every single one manages to endure despite having emails on one line. Even Outlook does one line these days.
I mentioned mobile because as far as discoverability is concerned, there is an order of magnitude more mobile users than desktop users, so the vast majority of users will have no problem understanding this concept.
And if you've been a desktop user long enough that you havent used a smartphone then you're probably used enough software that have similar patterns (and used email enoguh) that you shouldnt have trouble realizing that single To line means you can add multiple recipients to the same line.
You'd be wrong. I, grudgingly, moved from mutt to Thunderbird after it was clear that email was turning into MIME-encoded web pages.
Ironically, I am moving from Thunderbird to Mutt (NeoMutt actually). I find the elimination of HTML means it's actually easier for me to not get distracted by stuff I dont care about for email, which is interaction with real human beings, who are unlikely to be typing complicated HTML messages. Besides, with the right config (I'm still working on it), the HTML message is 1 shortcut away.
Back in my BBS days, there was ANSI color with IBM-extended (CP437) block graphics to liven things up, so I can see it has gone full circle a bit.
This almost equals to assuming that nobody is older than 25 or 30 especially because the no "single person" assumption. I started with UNIX's mail in a terminal, used a dozen of different clients on UNIX, Windows, Linux, Android, not all of them graphical.
I've been using Thunderbird probably since its very first day. My other client is K9 on Android. I think the address pills will be OK but I want to test their manipulation with keyboard and touchpad.
I'm very happy that it's being updated.
Your comment maybe indicates the gray is too subtle, or invisible to users with bad eyesight.
Glad at least they've kept the (albeit small) separators between the buttons.
I immensely dislike the UI trend where everything is flat so there's no discernible separation between elements.
The old window was twice as big as it needs to be too, but I agree the new one is even worse.
I don't like the flat buttons either. I don't use macOS much, but the old ones with a subtle border look like they're native UI, whereas the new flat ones don't. A random image I found confirms that the old buttons and checkbox look the same as what the OS itself uses, while the new ones look very out-of-place:
https://i.stack.imgur.com/5ACES.png
I know a few who swear by it
Yup, already hate it. I much prefer not looking through a list of buttons on the To line for the one I want to remove. Additionally, I can instantly see if I'm sending and email to my coworkers company or personal address without some damn tag after his name.
It also looks like they added minimize to system tray, something else I found was impossible in Outlook.
I was maintaining it but haven't been able to find time to work on the upgrade.
There was talk in the dev mailing list about adding TNEF support but that probably wont happen until 2021
Sadly the improperly configured Outlook clients are still not extinct in some of the organizations we work with. Does anyone know a good guide (with screenshots would be ideal) of the settings they would have to change?
Unfortunately it's not only the clients it's the servers as well. Also this is still occasionally an issue in Office 365
This guide doesn't look bad - https://capsulecrm.com/support/setup-and-configuration/micro...
The official Microsoft article - Change the message format to HTML, Rich Text Format, or plain text - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-the-messag...
And of course the Microsoft Exchange article - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/tnef-conversion-op...
https://radicale.org/3.0.html
If gmail support PGP, you could start to really use it, since you could be reasonably confident the recipient could read the message even if they have no idea what PGP was. For a plugin they would have to actively look for it.
Unfortunately Thunderbird user base is tiny but it's something
I still think TB 78 isn't enough, but it's a step into the the right direction, where we recognize that there's a brilliant system in pgp, obscured by outdated and even counterproductive security insights (such as the trust levels). It also is included by default, important for secure by default mail communication.
Firefox is indeed in the process of getting rid of XUL in favour of web technologies, but AFAIK it's not done yet.
And yes, on UNIX platforms the "XUL backend" is gtk.
I regularly access my “non-cloud based email systems” from 8 different devices.
I'm not sure why "cloud" matters for email -- it's always been hosted on a server somewhere.
So, keeping or not keeping mails on the server is a matter of configuration in your client. I think all clients propose this choice and some will also add extra options like deleting only after a number of days since fetching.
That aside, the reduced latency of native email clients makes them much more pleasant to work with than webmail.
Only issue is that the task descriptions don't render HTML and with all the crazy zoom meeting invites it is ugly. HTML in caldav is not standard but I would like the option since its a thing these days.
I used to use Thunderbird as my only mail client for many years and still prefer it for personal accounts. I loved global search when it was launched, but that was not improved over time for accurate searches, especially for large mailboxes (I struggle to find mails with it in mailboxes that are a few Gigabytes in size).
Thunderbird has not focused on built-in MS Exchange support (especially including calendar), which, combined with environments where IMAP is disabled, makes it a no-go. I know of one commercial extension (Owl) that works with MS Exchange/Office 365, but that extension requires the purchase to be made by providing which email address one wants to use it for. It’s a privacy concern that the developer said they wouldn’t fix. So I’m stuck with Outlook Web Access at work (I refuse to use the Outlook client).
The other thing I'm wondering about is how this will integrate with OpenGPG, more specifically if it will allow the use with smartcards. And it looks like it planned ![1]
Great work Team Thunderbird. Been a fan for the past 5 years, will be for the foreseeable future.
[1]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:OpenPGP:Status
For me Thunderbird is a way to slowly attempt to disentangle from Google. Thus far it has not been a disappointment. No welcome screen, no problem, there is an option for that. You don't want stuff to be compacted every time it starts, no problem; change one value to false. If only most programs were like that today.
Actually smartcards were already supported when I tested alpha some time ago. Thunderbird used GpgME to talk to GnuPG and GnuPG talked to the smartcard.
Right now one can manually switch the storage to maildir, but it is not safe to use that storage with other maildir compatible software.
It suggests a way to add metadata about messages through the use of flags added to file names, but doesn’t specify what these must be.
I don’t think, therefore, that Maildir as a standard provides enough to allow it to be relied upon for portability between clients (MUAs). That’s not to say a standard couldn’t emerge if there were some agreements.
The one thing that I did find is that deleting folders with many files was very slow. I guess that path wasn't well optimized. However even then you could deleted hundreds of files a second so for regular mail usage it likely isn't a major issue.
Maildir has the advantage that searching, adding and deleting emails is very fast, much faster than if those operations were made on single big file. Worth it.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=361807
I really like Thunderbird and that one of options for mail clients if I am on linux, however another electron app is a no-go for me.
In any case, thunderbird essentialy has a lineage going back all the way to netscape navigator (at least spiritually), so it was doing this way before electron was cool.
But some emails are mainly images with little text, and then I have to export the email.
Outlook... is using Microsoft Word. (I mean technical it's just Offices' document rendering engine, but for meail it's equivalent as opening a HTML file in MS Word) (Also sends RTF mail for addresses on the same Exchange server)
Although I'd note that they strip down the HTML avialible. Emails can't execute Javascript. CSS is stripped down and must be in file. (Or completely inlined)
You limited to some very old Web technology in email. (Unless Google somehow managed to convince anyone else to support AMP 4 Email)
The only big thing missing now is a three pane view: there is this 17 (!) years bug on the topic, and hopefully somebody will pick it up soon (Before you say it, I know that I could contribute myself but I do not think my skills are up this particular task)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213945