I'm digging Brave on mobile. I really like the simplified view they offer when you go to a site. It removes all the noise and just lets you read content.
It looks like an IMoB (Irrelevant Mention of Brave). They are shockingly common. Yesterday there was one in the NewPipe thread, from someone who was supposedly afraid Brave could be taken down by a DMCA request.
Because when I think of what I need in an email client, I think "beautiful" not "functional". It's a tool not a work of art. I use it to get work done not stare at it in awe.
UX people have killed application software. I need basic tools to work, not make me excited to use them. When I pick up a screwdriver, I don't do it for the experience. Ugh.
You know what's a beautiful email client to me? Netscape Communicator 4.x
I think that's an exceptionally reductive and cynical take, without providing any real reasons for the hate, or how this update will reduce your usability of the application.
Tangibly, "beautiful" UX is code for "rounded corners and lots of useless buffer space in between the informative elements". This is visible in the screenshots in the link. Things are further apart, less dense, and therefore more "beautiful".
I agree that OP's take is reductive and cynical. I would add that in this case, as in essentially every other case where this is done, it is also accurate.
> The guys down at the shop aren't talkin about how pretty the snap on tools are.
Got a new diamond turning lathe in the machine shop about a month ago, whew lad. Warehouse got a vertical stacker and started giving tours, lol. Our glass shop keeps the MRF machine so clean the repair techs claim we must not use it.
> Make it work. Make it easy to work with. Then make it pretty.
Any specific usability issues in mind about this 19 year old email client?
Give me the one on the right every day of the week and twice on Sunday. It looks like a professional application, a tool for getting work done. The one on the left looks like a toy website for newbies (or worse: Outlook).
I have a 32 inch 4K display and most of the designers seem to think most of that space should be filled by useless dead space and massive buttons like this is Windows 95 and the average user needs the "start" affordance (now tarted up with eye-catching bright colors!) to know what to click on. Apparently my head is expected to literally explode if I ever see two distinct lines of information separated by less than two line breaks.
This kind of infantalizing of the UI for can be defended in some contexts but here, it demonstrates that the designers do not know their target audience. This isn't the dial-up days, grandma doesn't read her mail on Outlook Express or any other local client, she uses a website like everybody else. The only people using actual local clients in 2023 are in enterprise (Outlook…) or are power users who want features they can't get on the web.
> Give me the one on the right every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
This is such an apropos example because the left-right windshield wiper widget to switch between the two screenshots referenced, ostensibly to give me a "beautiful" "experience" because two static thumbnails is for squares, is unusable and borderline broken.
This was not part of the war on information density. The 3 column layout was requested often. It is optional. It can show more messages and more of the message on common screens. Professionals do not use 32 inch 4K displays only. Sender above subject is faster to skim in my experience. Not to you maybe. You can use the old layout.
I dislike the blue new message button. Probably CSS can fix it.
>It can show more messages and more of the message on common screens
This is trivially disproven. Look at the screenshots provided. The "new" view shows 14 messages using the entire height of the display. The "old" view shows 14 messages… in half the amount of vertical space. Toggling off the preview pane would double it to around 28.
Even throwaway computers have wide aspect ratio displays nowadays, vertical space is at more of a premium than horizontal.
This trade-off of giving more space to the preview pane at the cost of halving the amount of inbox that you can see is, again, evidence of designers not knowing their target audience. One click to bring up a message is an affordance (arguably, a limitation) copied from the limited web clients that the user likely installed a local client to move away from. It's bad for security, it's bad for cognitive load (keyboard navigation of the list results in distracting flashing, and now there are two distinct interfaces to see a message), and all of these trade-offs come at the supposedly benefit of not needing to double-click to open the message?
I agree in as much as I prioritize functionality (including responsiveness and lack of bloat) well above a beautiful UI. But I think that most peoples beef with UI/UX is that it often gets implemented at the expense of functionality.
Any UX that decreases functionality is not truly good UX. It is probably just flashy.
Also, personally, I don't entirely agree with your screwdriver metaphor. I have some beautiful old screwdrivers with lovely wood handles that I got as hand-me-downs. I do select them in favor of others for the experience. They are a delight for me to use (but again, most importantly, they are very functional).
Edit: Also, they claim in the title that this is a faster Thunderbird. I would consider that a big plus for functionality.
Horrible take. The aesthetics and user experience of an app has a direct correlation to whether the average user (which includes me, a programmer at Amazon) will use a tool.
> Horrible take. The aesthetics and user experience of an app has a direct correlation to whether the average user (which includes me, a programmer at Amazon) will use a tool.
I've stopped using Amazon Music because the UI/UX is unusable. I've cancelled Prime and shifted my shopping to other properties such as Walmart because the continual user-hostile UI changes have pushed me away as a customer. Example, now making it impossible to filter by Amazon.com as the seller so my searches are inundated by screens full of all-caps Chinese counterfeit shit, now with infinite scroll! Accessing customer service entails more and more dark patterns by the day, and arguing with AI chat bots because I can't even get a human into chat anymore.
As long as you're proud of your descent into a knockoff AliExpress, I support your efforts. The important distinction here is these applications were all fine, before the UX gods got involved in "beautifying" them to the point they became unusable.
You're replying to someone that works at Amazon, not to Amazon itself. You also have no idea if they work for the shopping part of Amazon or Amazon Web Services, which is a completely different thing. On top of this, half of your complaints have nothing to do with UIs. As if UI designers are to blame for AI chat bots and chinese counterfeits.
When picking up a pair of scissors, I do care if they're designed for right or left handed. And the handle, of the scissors or screwdriver, is it comfortable and durable? Screwdriver makers have long known not to make the handle of smooth metal. Is the screwdriver magnetic? Does it have swappable heads? Are the swappable heads reversible plug in and out, are they themselves reversible, giving me two cross and two straight heads in one robust non conducting, rubberised, shock absorbing screwdriver package? If mgnetic, how magnetic?
You've described ergonomics pretty well, but the trend of modern UX design is more akin to replacing the screwdriver handle with a hot pink veiny dildo, self-declaring it beautiful, and vehemently decrying any criticism to why these changes are unnecessary.
An app doesn't have to look like shit for it to be functional. It can be both.
If they think it needs to look like Netscape Navigator to be functional, then at least they should understand that they're a minority. Most apps are trying to serve most users, not the small group that prefers the Windows 95 style or a command line client.
The comment itself isn't very useful. Users of this site are not even the most supportive of modern UIs and will praise HN's look (and the old reddit UI), but what's exactly housemusicfan's problem with the new Thunderbird UI? What was made worse? It comes off as an "old man yells at cloud" type of comment and that won't gather much support.
The HN Brahmins are free to use this as evidence that their world view is superior, but my post sat at +8 before suddenly dropping to -4 in the span of a few minutes. So my assessment is the overall opinion is far more balanced, but the echo chamber always prevails, and it's much more difficult to dig yourself out of the hole once you've been buried within.
I do not treat post score as a popularity contest or validation that an opinion is correct (or not).
The sad truth is this industry is full of thin skinned prima donnas who love nothing more than "educating" their customers on what's best for them, whilst continually performing them a disservice in the form of UX "improvements" that literally no one asked for.
Probably Thunderbird has more features than Apple's typical "think different and do it, eh, our way only", but not sure Thunderbird was meant to specifically have advantages over the macOS email program.
I expect both do what it says on the tin and it's a matter of preference and what you're used to: if you come from Linux, odds are you didn't pirate macOS email program and emulated it, so you're used to Thunderbird already. Or if you want to have the same client on your work PC as well, you can install Thunderbird anywhere.
Here’s one big advantage - I can send from any email on my domain by setting that email address in a second by just clicking on “from” field and I don’t even have “add” this permanently in setting somewhere. Try doing that in Mail.app.
I don't get it. On first boot my iCloud email is already setup, I add my other three email accounts (2 gmail, 1 self rolled). In the Mail compose window I have a dropdown that lets me choose any of the accounts to reply. I can also use Apple's new hide my email option.
Okay so you can proxy via Apple as well as choose from Alice@example.com, Bob@example.net, or Charles@example.org. What if you want to be Joseph@example.net today? In Thunderbird, you click on the From field and change the name, et voila. From the comment above, I presume that on macOS email, you will need to dig into settings.
My use for this is to give everyone a unique address (bitcointalk.org@lucb1e.com is one that was leaked to spammers already anyway). I block senders that send spam. No need to ever wait for spam filtering or check any spam box, because I get spam on maybe three addresses per year and those are easily dealt with
(Of course, your email server will need to allow using arbitrary sending addresses.)
They mean an arbitrary "from" email address, useful when you own the domain attached to your address. You can do that in Mail.app, but you need to configure it in advance, whereas Thunderbird lets you type any address directly.
I want this feature too because I use custom addresses, such as booking@mydomain.fr for hotel reservations, and replying with contact@mydomain.fr could be confusing to the receiver.
Thunderbird lets you send mail from an account that doesn't explicitly exist. On your Mac Mail app, you need to sign in to three accounts to get three items in the dropdown (Even if you don't have to do it on every machine, you had to do it at one time). Thunderbird lets you make up the From: address on the fly.
FairEmail does that even better, though unfortunately it's mobile only. There's a setting you can enable and then it will, when replying, match the email address to which the email was sent.
I so sorely miss this on Thunderbird because I literally never use the default email address (everyone has a unique address so I don't need to filter, aka have my computer guess what's, spam). There may once have been an extension but if I do remember that correctly then I expect the developer gave up after fixing it for the fifth time when they broke backwards compatibility again.
In Thunderbird, I can directly edit the "From" field to whatever value I want when I send the email.
I can make it a random value such as "abc123456789@example.com" and it will happily try to send it. The email address can also be from a domain I don't even own.
From the Gmail, docs, I have to manually go to settings, enroll the additional email address, then manually have to select the "From" address from the dropdown menu. I cannot put an arbitrary email address (including arbitrary domain). This will have to be done each time I want to have a different from header which means if I want to have a randomly generated email used as the "From" address for every one of my emails, it's not going to be easy in the Gmail interface.
I don't do it daily, but it's still often enough usage for me that having to set each one up individually would grind my gears. My own domains setup with catchalls and many custom name@ across services. I might be unusual though!
Not that unusual; I've been doing the same since the 1990s.
For each organisation, project or person I interact with over email I issue a unique ${RANDOM}.${ORG}@mydomain.org across many separate domains.
Combined with procmail rules on my email server I can more easily:
1. efficiently filter and file emails into per-org, per-topic or per-project sub-directories
2. have all IMAP4 clients see the same view since filtering/filing is done server-side
3. block any addresses that receive spam without accidentally binning other email
4. know for certain there has been some kind of breach if emails arrive from another source
5. have some clients subscribed and sync-ing to only a (small) sub-set of IMAP4 folders
6. find emails related to specific orgs, projects, or people
I use Qmail's Maildir format (one file per email) on both server and Thunderbird which makes even manual 'grepping' for obscure or complex search parameters an easily scriptable operation.
I have a simple script accessible via SSH or web that adds the new entry to postfix's virtual table so unknown addresses are rejected - avoids needing to operate a catch-all policy and filter after reception since the SMTP daemon refuses delivery as soon as it sees the RCPT TO:
On the Postfix side using postgrey for grey-listing of unknown SMTP clients cuts almost all spam as well - in fact today I was surprised to see (for the first time in years) Thunderbird marking a project mail-list email as possible spam. I cannot recall the last time Thunderbird did that which I think shows how effective grey-listing on the mail server can be combined with other postfix filtering like reverse MX, SPF, DMARC, etc.
Actually quite often. I'm very surprised users do not use unique email addresses when contacting different companies or vendors to protect against spam if one of your email addresses gets leaked after the company is hacked.
For example, I would use email address A for company A, B for company B and so forth. If company A ever gets hacked, I can just block any emails going to email A and not worry about playing whack-a-mole with the 100s of email addresses that spammers will use.
I can also use the email addresses as a way to auto filter or apply inbox rules.
I'm very surprised users only use 1 email address at a time especially if your email gets leaked once to spammers, you have to start dealing of spam or hoping your email solution has very very good anti-spam measures.
For me, this is just a normal usage of an email client.
I can do this from Apple mail, I have multiple accounts on the same domain, and other domains. I even have an exchange account added, any email I send I can just click the “from” field and pick any of my emails or domains from the dropdown
Don't you need to set-up the accounts in the first place? In Thunderbird it's just an ad-hoc text entry field, useful for when you are using a catch-all account and you need to respond from a random service specific email address.
For example say my account is dugite-code@example.tld but fetchmail pulls in my gmail emails. If I want to send from house-repairs@example.tld or dugite-code@gmail.com I don't need to configure the three accounts separately I just edit the from field as I'm composing the emails.
You literally can't do what I said in my comment and you explained this in your comment "pick any of my emails or domains from the dropdown" (which means you had added those beforehand) and you still said you can do that. I hope it was just an oversight and not the belief :)
Maybe it's just me, but it is buggy to the point of being unusable every time I try it.
Example: When it is in the middle of popping up suggestions as you compose, it suddenly seems to decide you aren't in the compose window any more and interprets anything you type as a keyboard shortcut (e.g. "n" for new message "e" for archive). Since I type rather fast, this happens to me all the time.
There is such a thing as off-line. And, with email that can be a good thing for multiple reasons - except when trying to send or receive of course :)
With the current incarnation of Thunderbird there is even a switch you can flip to make the email client offline, even if your PC is not. Believe it or not, that is an extremely valued feature here.
I agree strongly with this. Even on workstation I have the default to Offline and decide when to let it poll the IMAP4 servers - great for not allowing distractions or interruptions except on your own schedule, not someone else's.
With synchronized folders and offline storage it makes composing, reading, and replying easy with outgoing queued until next time connected when out and about with a portable device.
Realistically next time I buy a new laptop it won't be heavily premeditated: the odds are that my old one will die and I'll need something that works that week. I don't want to end up buying another Apple just because I don't have time to switch mail clients.
Obviously a mail client only takes a few hours to set up, but it's not just the mail clients: I try to avoid anything Apple-specific for the same reason.
Well it's Cross platform and not tied into one providers email service, So you have the same PIM (Personal information manager) on all your computers. Theme-able so you can tweak a lot using CSS. And most importantly it's Extensible like Firefox. Some of the more powerful extensions fore example are the sieve editor (for mail servers that support sieve) advanced tagging management, markdown rendering, printing layout tools and templating.
If you ever stop using Apple, you can take your mail with you. I've been using Thunderbird since 2006, first on Windows, then on Linux, and it's still the same profile directory as the original installation.
I've been using caldav and carddav in Thunderbird for over a year, and I don't believe I installed any plugins for it - I'm tempted to say yes? What prompts the question?
Last time I tried I had to install external address book extension and calendar and it did not integrate that well (auto completion not working properly...).
So, i just nuked and paved my current machine, and just before i did i know for a fact that caldav worked flawlessly on Thunderbird version 91...And, CardDav? Meh, not so great. And neither caldav nor carddav required me to add/install any extensions; so, really, i see it as progress.
As soon as i'm done with other elements of my new machine install here, i will see how a newer version of thunderbird handles caldav and cardav...But, my point is, at least caldav used to work really, really nicely and smoothly on older versions of thunderbird. (Caveat: this is with Zoho as calendar/caldav provider...so no idea about trying to use Google calendar or other cal. providers.)
In the context of the two comments above yours, that doesn't invalidate what their point.
I've been using a web/online only client for a few years and agree with the parent comment. Fastmail's web UI works better for me than Gmail or Outlook.
I use an email client because I don't want to deploy PGP keys to the server -- then there's no point.
It's interesting though: on mobile, everyone wants a client application. On desktop, people wonder why bother with client software when we have a browser. "Reddit for Desktop"? Hah, doesn't even exist! But "Reddit is Fun" for Android? People died on that hill.
For mobile I think usually it's so it can handle error cases more gracefully. How people expect something should act when the network goes away and it's a web page is often different than when it's an application.
The Reddit thing is also mixed with the fact that Reddit's mobile web interface is complete shit. You can't even collapse threads (or it's so hidden as ot be useless), which is something the desktop web interface does. It might not be the best example of why mobile users want an app, as it's functionally worse using their mobile web version, probably on purpose to force you to their app so they can monetize you... and now we understand why they did what they did and why people didn't want to use their official app, as the way they monetize you is to inconvenience you with more ads.
Tildes.net is meant to work well on mobile web but I still get a vibe that there would be a large group that would appreciate an app for it. I am undecided myself: notifications in the notification area were nice (back when I used reddit is fun, 13 days ago) and things felt more... native? Fast? Behave as expected? But it's not like it's essential.
And that, on mobile, you're sometimes offline. Desktops and especially laptops are meant for use in fixed places like homes and offices (*cough* it's the truth!), where there is internet available, so you don't need an app to have your data cached offline.
Pardon my french, but Play Store is a bloody mess. My parents and grandparents have a lot of trouble navigating it to find what they need. They have less trouble with f-droid, probably also because it's not overflowing with adware and other crap that they need to wade through on google
Perhaps the difference is that on mobile, users are more sensitive to bad UX because there it's so much more easy for sites and apps to be irritating/unpleasant to use, and big corp first party mobile apps have a tendency to optimize for ad impressions, IAP sales, or engagement over usability. This creates a market for third party apps which exist entirely to be more usable.
In my own experience, it's because there are much more spaces in desktop and it's easier for companies to do what they want on it, and easier for users to ignore the flaws. Also usually users can use 2 hands to operate on desktop environment, so everything would look a bit more smooth.
On mobile, it's a different story, the screen real estate is small, and users can't operate both/one hand(s) comfortably like on desktop. Therefore, if you don't design the app smart enough and make users not comfortable, you're screwed up.
Apollo on mobile and desktop here. I haven't used reddit in a browser except by accident in something like five years, and I haven't used reddit pretty much at all for the past three weeks or so.
Its security, among other things. No mobile app has root access and can interfere with other apps or steal data easily. With desktop, many apps want admin access and its usually granted with one mouse click or one password copy paste. Even without admin access, desktop apps have many more rights.
I use Apple Mail in most cases because I have several email accounts and don't want to keep a tab for them all open or have to use a forwarding setup, and on mobile because I don't want to have to use several different apps to check mail.
Any time I want to blend multiple accounts, I greatly prefer a mail application. Web blending options all suck and/or give one party all the data all the time, which isn't always an option even if you wanted that.
I still use Thunderbird, but at v52, because I want a local copy and archive of all my emails. It's also better to use compared to most webmail interfaces, particularly Gmail which is terrible.
Why v52, you might ask? Because I don't have time for updates to break my shit and v52 is the oldest version that supports TLS1.3. I do not like the new interface. At all. It can die in a fire.
I used to prefer Apple Mail on the desktop over web-based alternatives, but nowadays Apple Mail has become quite unstable and slow for me, so I’ve been using gmail’s web interface more and more.
A shame really, desktop should provide a better experience.
What is the 'doubt' part in your question? If the number is big enough to be worth building? Probably absolute figures are more interesting than a percentage. And they're high enough to take in enough donations to fund an engineering team.
*raises hand* I have my own domain with an IMAP account, and use Thunderbird right now because:
1. I want a full synced copy of everything that I can access indefinitely, even if there are network connection problems or if the remote server goes down.
2. I want to ensure everything gets backed along with other personal documents on my computer.
3. I want sufficiently-expressive tools for searching e-mails and filtering new ones that come in.
P.S.: While I would ideally want all filter-to-folder stuff to happen server-side, there are some issues with how easy that is to keep up-to-date and issues where some clients (i.e. on my phone) won't sync non-inbox folders to see new messages, etc.
Same. I self-host and spend time places without consistent internet access. A dumbfounded browser is useless. A disconnected client is still useful; they were designed for that use case.
> I want to ensure everything gets backed along with other personal documents on my computer.
Same here. I started using e-mail around 1993 and for the next decade went through a series of e-mail programs that used different storage formats. Some of that mail I still have as plain text archives, but a lot got corrupted due to character encoding conflicts and other problems that I was unable to resolve.
Since around 2005, I’ve been using Thunderbird to back up all of my e-mail locally, including the Gmail accounts that I normally use through the web interface. Several times recently I’ve been asked about something that happened ten or fifteen years ago, and I was able to find the relevant e-mails in my Thunderbird archive in a few seconds.
> a lot got corrupted due to character encoding conflicts and other problems that I was unable to resolve.
That reminds me that I'd better make sure me-of-2033 will still be able to open these, er... taptaptap Mork [0] mail formats.
> Several times recently I’ve been asked about something that happened ten or fifteen years ago, and I was able to find the relevant e-mails in my Thunderbird archive in a few seconds.
I had a funny moment where one of my siblings was like: "You should see this comic!" and I said: "That author name looks familiar... Oh hey, that art-style and name rings a bell... Oh look, I e-mailed them under another screen-name once when they were working on something entirely different 15 years ago."
> 3. I want sufficiently-expressive tools for searching e-mails and filtering new ones that come in.
This is the feature that I love best about Thunderbird. It downloads all my mail locally into plain text MBOX files so I can use things like grep to quickly extract whatever information I need and I can even send the result to some other tool. Is there a web interface somewhere that lets you use regular expressions for searching your messages?
I never used the client while on windows (for decades) but for some reason started using the mail app on MacOS. (I recall I used to need to mess with POP/IMAP/SMTP addresses in the past but now I just authenticate once and it just works.) It’s still not an entirely pleasant experience (my biggest gripe is it doesn’t show full email addresses, so you don’t know which account received the email). But still beats having to type the browser and clicking a bookmark I guess.
It looks like the Outlook I am required to use at work. I disabled Thunderbird Autoupdate when I learned this was coming down the pike a couple of days ago on HN.
> Card View emulates a mobile interface list with multi-line support, offering a more comfortable appearance to reduce cognitive burden. (And because we want Supernova to feel familiar for veteran users, the legacy “Table” view is still available.)
So what's the problem? Just keep using the view you prefer.
Oh thank goodness. I love the look of Thunderbird, and was dreading this change. I hope there are options to retain the same density on the email list.
I really love the new view. I'm glad they finally adopted the Outlook/Evolution layout, as I've always found it easier to reason about. I'd been using Evolution as a result, but this is tempting.
Anyone know what the Thunderbird -> MS Exchange or OWA story is these days?
It's client-side, and works very well for email. It used to be that email notifications through Thunderbird waited until your next email refresh interval, but I noticed they are coming in at the same rate as the Outlook clients after the last update to Owl.
Calendaring through Lightning is incomplete and experimental.
In the "spaces" vertical toolbar on the left, Owl has added a Teams button recently, as well. It opens the Teams O365 app in a tab in Thunderbird, which I really like. I haven't had a chance to check if any meeting or audio features work there.
There's a licensing server and users seem to be identified by the email addresses they use Owl with. At a glance it seems like it checks for a valid license every once in a while. The code that does it has a couple paragraphs at the top saying something along the lines of "yeah it's all here, there's nothing stopping you from stripping it but please don't redistribute it then because it's my livelihood thank you."
Do you mean a corporate instance of Exchange your company is hosting? If so have the Exchange admins enable IMAPS [1]. I've used Thunderbird with Exchange in the past. The admins can also publish SRV records in AD or DNS to give Thunderbird some hints depending on your corporate configuration vpn vs lan vs public. The use of a VPN should be encouraged to avoid exposing a public endpoint and bots brute-forcing AD accounts leading to lockouts.
That seems highly unlikely in any org that hasn't already done it. But good luck, and godspeed to those who want to give it a try, but if history is any guide not only is "no" the worst thing that can happen, but the odds-on favorite.
Yup I've been there. I find that if I ask the same question worded differently every 3 to 6 months I might get a different answer depending on who is reviewing my request, especially in bigger companies.
Present in specialist clients like Eudora, perhaps, but I think for mass-market users that only touched webmail and Outlook the introduction of threading in Gmail must have seemed heavenly.
I never said Gmail invented threaded emails, just that it brought threaded emails to the masses. Outlook and almost all webmail didn't have threading support at the time.
Opera's email client had them too, I know I was using that around 2000. It was the first time I'd seen the feature, and it was one of the major reasons I used Opera for as long as I did. But Opera, then as now, was far from mainstream...
Even text based email clients like mutt and gnus supported threads. And they were proper threads like we have on HN. I don't fully understand why Gmail had to reinvent threads but I think a big part was Microsoft's god awful email clients not sending messages properly such that other clients could thread them. Because, of course, their client didn't even support threads so why should anyone have them?
You get an endless conversation with no option to delete mails out of it (for instance forwards) under a single entry. Quite annoying. What's wrong with the thread collapsed by default displaying the most recent entry and an icon to open it up?
You may have to wait longer for the Conversations extension to support Thunderbird 115. The extension developer has said that it needs significant changes and that he doesn't have enough spare time. The latest update on support for Thunderbird 115 [1] says that there's more work to be done and some dependencies on Thunderbird fixes.
It's possible to have read only access to Outlook Calendars from Thunderbird. But you couldn't accept event invites or create new events. At least at my previous work, which I left last summer.
I apparently don't get event invites from Outlook Calendars then. All the invites that I get in Thunderbird from colleagues (on Thunderbird) and customer (no idea what they use) seem to work fine. Does Outlook not use the caldav standard that everyone else uses? Which clients do work with that then, only Outlook itself? Gotta be annoying if anyone in the company uses, say, an Android or iOS device
What I mean is that if you have an Outlook account, and you want to use Thunderbird for it, you will need to sync your Outlook calendar with Thunderbird. Outlook uses Exchange ActiveSync instead of CalDav/CardDav for this syncing.
The way to give Thunderbird these capabilities are by installing these two connected addons [1, 2]. At least till June 2022, I could see meeting invites from colleagues in Thunderbird. I would also see the translucent event in the calendar in Thunderbird. But accepting the invite would not work [2]. Also creating and sending Outlook calendar events from within Thunderbird didn't work. So, I always had to open the web Calendar to do these things. Thunderbird was only good for meeting reminders.
There is a new major release of the addon since then, so it is possible that the bug is fixed.
> I apparently don't get event invites from Outlook Calendars then
Obviously if your email/calendar account is something else, then you have no problem. If someone sends an invite to my gmail, from their outlook, I can accept it fine from within Thunderbird, because Thunderbird/gmail are communicating using Caldav (I think).
> Which clients do work with that then, only Outlook itself?
I will use Thunderbird as much as possible till it is pried from my cold dead hands!
Design improvement and responsiveness is good, think.
What I would like on the backend is for them to fix the maildir storage [1]. Currently email is stored in mbox, which is very buggy and causes all sorts of weird errors.
I'm pretty happy with the web clients but just downloaded this to give it a shot. I was surprised to see that in the initial account onboarding they ask for a password. Then once I entered that information it let me log into my provider by a wrapped page (not the system browser) which looked a bit out of date to me.
This never used to bother me back in the day. When I used these tools, I'd happily give my credentials up but I'm very suspicious of this way of registering my account. I suppose it's open source but the juice isn't worth the squeeze compared to the web clients.
The main thing that makes the web clients work for me is search against decades of emails.
The latter works fine (and offline) for me in Thunderbird.
Just tried with a folder that has 7500 messages (2013 till today) and listening to the clock ticking in the background: completes in exactly one second, as near as I can tell.
Searching all folders at once (four big folders are 32k emails together, I don't know the total) takes ~0.3 seconds to come up with "no results", 1 second to find the only result ("umpteen" was my first guess at which query might yield a single hit :D), or 2 seconds on a generic query to find 713 results (and populate a list of 384 involved senders sorted by frequency, a timeline of volume by year, which folders those results can be found in, which mailing list it was sent to if any, etc.). This is on a then-mid-range laptop from 2018.
Maybe they are not a Thunderbird user but I am. You can still disable the hamburger menu in the older versions. If they are removing the menu bars entirely I will stop using Thunderbird. What's the point of using a desktop app if you don't get the nice features and dense UI of the desktop apps.
This layout displays information way more efficiently. It makes absolutely no sense to have the email content panel below the email list, because emails don't have that aspect ratio, so you either end up with super zoomed in emails or huge empty borders. Makes no sense. With this, the available space is used more efficiently, and differing font sizes are used to differentiate between different types of text and how important it is. That's more ergonomic as well.
> It makes absolutely no sense to have the email content panel below the email list, because emails don't have that aspect ratio,
It does make sense, because the list of emails typically requires the full length of your window. And while most emails may not use the full width of the window - some do; and one shouldn't have to open a separate window for those.
+--+---------------+
| f| list of |
| o| folder emails,|
| l| one per line |
| d+---------------+
| e| selected email|
| r| contents |
| s| |
+--+---------------+
is the only way to go... for me. I realize that some people like it different and that's fine.
That's my opinion as well. However, given a sufficiently wide screen I think I could get into side-by-side view if I could drastically shrink or even hide the folders pane as I don't use it that often (particularly with a unified folder, which I believe 115 offers).
We shall see. Apparently you can keep the legacy view anyway so everyone's happy.
No, unhappy, because in addition to the UI warping so far, they've taken away the toolbar; and they're insisting on drawing stuff inside the title bar. And that's in addition to breaking things for extension developers etc.
Same, since I use Thunderbird tiled next to Teams, this layout is the only real option. Haven't tried the new release yet but hoping to see this in there...
I prefer the traditional layout over the MS Outlook one. It requires less screen estate, and you don't need to open some emails in a separate window to read them at an adequate size.
Many users (and extension developers, and probably developers) have tried to push back against the degradation of the UI into a hodge-podge of pieces of some mobile phone app. Some of the objections staved off even worse degradations, but for the most part they have been ignored or suppressed.
Well my previous Mint LTS install just went out of support so guess I'll be rebuilding and might be able to try Supernova.
I hate the message list pane on the left but IIRC in the prerelease press they said you could swap the layout, so I'm hoping that remains true. I've been a happy a happy Thunderbird user for many years with no desire to move to webmail. Glad to see it getting some love!
I said this already I think but I am really looking forward to when they are able to ship Firefox sync support in Thunderbird. It has been deferred a couple of times due to issues but at least for me, account sync is even more useful for Thunderbird than it would be for Firefox.
ideally you'd be able to do either. I much prefer new windows when opening existing messages or writing new ones, but I wouldn't assume that works best for everyone else
I admit that there is an element of, "but I chose an obscure and challenging linux variant, waaah why isn't it supported" here, but (a) there's currently no flatpak and (b) when, for goodness sakes, will major linux projects begin packaging for Nix/NixOS as a matter of course?
It's not hard, and the benefits go far outside merely supporting Nix, as e.g. a flake.nix file would allow this project to generate docker images, and appImage images, as basically afterthoughts. (See e.g. https://github.com/matthewbauer/nix-bundle.)
Nix flake support would also provide a perfectly reproducible build environment, which can help clarify dependencies, and thus help the project build achieve idempotence, but I'll save the full shill for some github issue.
In fact, I'm inclined to roll up my shirtsleeves and help make this real, at least for Thunderbird.
PS. there is also the fact that the Thunderbird provided downloadable tar.bz2 is not usable under nix, which makes this problem more pressing.
Does anyone know how to make the interface fonts bigger? Not the message composition font, but like, the font for the message list and all the controls? It's really, really, really small on a Retina display and I'm not a teenage gamer anymore.
Click the Hamburger menu and adjust the font size there. For some reason this isn't in the settings menu. Also select the middle density option. I find that helps
If you're talking about the file picker or desktop environment related defaults, you can just go to about:config and set "widget.use-xdg-desktop-portal" to true and/or "widget.use-xdg-desktop-portal.file-picker" to 1. Unfortunately not enabled by default
I'm talking about Firefox for example creating $HOME/.mozilla since it's not using XDG base directory spec fully (it does use it for cache for example).
I don't understand what the vision is of thunderbird? where in the market do they see themselves? managing emails on local disk is a nightmare I abandoned as soon as Gmail came out as I could access my mail from any machine and upgrading laptops didn't mean shuffling gigs of emails across.
the only thing I've used TB for in the last 10years was to delete all the large attachments in my Gmail. I also dabbled in trying to get secure end-to-end encryption going but it was a struggle and I quickly forgot how it worked, just started using protonmail instead.
Thunderbird is a mail client, just like the desktop version of Microsoft Outlook. Emails don’t have to be stored locally — I use Thunderbird with two Gmail accounts and it works great.
As bradrn already mentioned, Thunderbird is an email client. It integrates well with many online email offerings. I use it with Fastmail. Works great.
Also many like the ability to access an maintain offline copies. I’m not a gmail user, but I know one can download a backup of 90 days easily, but I have over 25 years of emails and attachments from various accounts through the years which runs over 100GB. Thunderbird handles this.
Thunderbird is free software made by volunteers, as such, it doesn't need to fit anywhere in any market. People like it. You don't have to, and that's fine.
For me, I like it because browsers are a huge mess of surveillance and ad targeting--even Firefox. Not to mention the speed. Even on a fast computer, loading a browser, then opening Gmail is not a quick process. By contrast, Thunderbird opens fairly quickly (Not like notepad on a Windows NT device, but for a modern application, it's pretty fast).
Finally, IMAP has been around since 1986, why would you shuffle gigabytes of email across multiple devices? Inb4 you still need to download with imap. I know, but a good IMAP client only downloads the folder you're currently looking at, then syncs it back to the server, no "shuffling" required.
301 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 274 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36664113
I think we can count out expecting all IMAP folders to automatically download...
What do you use for IMAP download?
Thanks for the details SoftTalker!
This comment isn't even about a mail reader, much less thunderbird, and yet it's at the top of the comments...
UX people have killed application software. I need basic tools to work, not make me excited to use them. When I pick up a screwdriver, I don't do it for the experience. Ugh.
You know what's a beautiful email client to me? Netscape Communicator 4.x
I agree that OP's take is reductive and cynical. I would add that in this case, as in essentially every other case where this is done, it is also accurate.
Make it work. Make it easy to work with. Then make it pretty.
Got a new diamond turning lathe in the machine shop about a month ago, whew lad. Warehouse got a vertical stacker and started giving tours, lol. Our glass shop keeps the MRF machine so clean the repair techs claim we must not use it.
> Make it work. Make it easy to work with. Then make it pretty.
Any specific usability issues in mind about this 19 year old email client?
Here is a big one for me though: the war on information density by UX designers
Have a look at the side by side comparison: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/115.0/whatsnew...
Give me the one on the right every day of the week and twice on Sunday. It looks like a professional application, a tool for getting work done. The one on the left looks like a toy website for newbies (or worse: Outlook).
I have a 32 inch 4K display and most of the designers seem to think most of that space should be filled by useless dead space and massive buttons like this is Windows 95 and the average user needs the "start" affordance (now tarted up with eye-catching bright colors!) to know what to click on. Apparently my head is expected to literally explode if I ever see two distinct lines of information separated by less than two line breaks.
This kind of infantalizing of the UI for can be defended in some contexts but here, it demonstrates that the designers do not know their target audience. This isn't the dial-up days, grandma doesn't read her mail on Outlook Express or any other local client, she uses a website like everybody else. The only people using actual local clients in 2023 are in enterprise (Outlook…) or are power users who want features they can't get on the web.
This is such an apropos example because the left-right windshield wiper widget to switch between the two screenshots referenced, ostensibly to give me a "beautiful" "experience" because two static thumbnails is for squares, is unusable and borderline broken.
This was not part of the war on information density. The 3 column layout was requested often. It is optional. It can show more messages and more of the message on common screens. Professionals do not use 32 inch 4K displays only. Sender above subject is faster to skim in my experience. Not to you maybe. You can use the old layout.
I dislike the blue new message button. Probably CSS can fix it.
This is trivially disproven. Look at the screenshots provided. The "new" view shows 14 messages using the entire height of the display. The "old" view shows 14 messages… in half the amount of vertical space. Toggling off the preview pane would double it to around 28.
Even throwaway computers have wide aspect ratio displays nowadays, vertical space is at more of a premium than horizontal.
This trade-off of giving more space to the preview pane at the cost of halving the amount of inbox that you can see is, again, evidence of designers not knowing their target audience. One click to bring up a message is an affordance (arguably, a limitation) copied from the limited web clients that the user likely installed a local client to move away from. It's bad for security, it's bad for cognitive load (keyboard navigation of the list results in distracting flashing, and now there are two distinct interfaces to see a message), and all of these trade-offs come at the supposedly benefit of not needing to double-click to open the message?
That isn't what (most) UX designers do these days, it's all about fancy animations
Thunderbird apparently also: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Message_templates
Any UX that decreases functionality is not truly good UX. It is probably just flashy.
Also, personally, I don't entirely agree with your screwdriver metaphor. I have some beautiful old screwdrivers with lovely wood handles that I got as hand-me-downs. I do select them in favor of others for the experience. They are a delight for me to use (but again, most importantly, they are very functional).
Edit: Also, they claim in the title that this is a faster Thunderbird. I would consider that a big plus for functionality.
I've stopped using Amazon Music because the UI/UX is unusable. I've cancelled Prime and shifted my shopping to other properties such as Walmart because the continual user-hostile UI changes have pushed me away as a customer. Example, now making it impossible to filter by Amazon.com as the seller so my searches are inundated by screens full of all-caps Chinese counterfeit shit, now with infinite scroll! Accessing customer service entails more and more dark patterns by the day, and arguing with AI chat bots because I can't even get a human into chat anymore.
As long as you're proud of your descent into a knockoff AliExpress, I support your efforts. The important distinction here is these applications were all fine, before the UX gods got involved in "beautifying" them to the point they became unusable.
Or maybe you simply enjoy the thrill of ranting for no reason.
Welcome to the bottom of the comments section.
I hang out here a lot.
After using TB for about 20 years, I have a few very well curated opinions. But those, like yours will not be seen on HN...
An app doesn't have to look like shit for it to be functional. It can be both.
If they think it needs to look like Netscape Navigator to be functional, then at least they should understand that they're a minority. Most apps are trying to serve most users, not the small group that prefers the Windows 95 style or a command line client.
The comment itself isn't very useful. Users of this site are not even the most supportive of modern UIs and will praise HN's look (and the old reddit UI), but what's exactly housemusicfan's problem with the new Thunderbird UI? What was made worse? It comes off as an "old man yells at cloud" type of comment and that won't gather much support.
I do not treat post score as a popularity contest or validation that an opinion is correct (or not).
The sad truth is this industry is full of thin skinned prima donnas who love nothing more than "educating" their customers on what's best for them, whilst continually performing them a disservice in the form of UX "improvements" that literally no one asked for.
I expect both do what it says on the tin and it's a matter of preference and what you're used to: if you come from Linux, odds are you didn't pirate macOS email program and emulated it, so you're used to Thunderbird already. Or if you want to have the same client on your work PC as well, you can install Thunderbird anywhere.
My use for this is to give everyone a unique address (bitcointalk.org@lucb1e.com is one that was leaked to spammers already anyway). I block senders that send spam. No need to ever wait for spam filtering or check any spam box, because I get spam on maybe three addresses per year and those are easily dealt with
(Of course, your email server will need to allow using arbitrary sending addresses.)
this bit is important. it's not just that thunderbird is magic.
I want this feature too because I use custom addresses, such as booking@mydomain.fr for hotel reservations, and replying with contact@mydomain.fr could be confusing to the receiver.
I so sorely miss this on Thunderbird because I literally never use the default email address (everyone has a unique address so I don't need to filter, aka have my computer guess what's, spam). There may once have been an extension but if I do remember that correctly then I expect the developer gave up after fixing it for the fifth time when they broke backwards compatibility again.
In Thunderbird, I can directly edit the "From" field to whatever value I want when I send the email.
I can make it a random value such as "abc123456789@example.com" and it will happily try to send it. The email address can also be from a domain I don't even own.
From the Gmail, docs, I have to manually go to settings, enroll the additional email address, then manually have to select the "From" address from the dropdown menu. I cannot put an arbitrary email address (including arbitrary domain). This will have to be done each time I want to have a different from header which means if I want to have a randomly generated email used as the "From" address for every one of my emails, it's not going to be easy in the Gmail interface.
For each organisation, project or person I interact with over email I issue a unique ${RANDOM}.${ORG}@mydomain.org across many separate domains.
Combined with procmail rules on my email server I can more easily:
1. efficiently filter and file emails into per-org, per-topic or per-project sub-directories 2. have all IMAP4 clients see the same view since filtering/filing is done server-side 3. block any addresses that receive spam without accidentally binning other email 4. know for certain there has been some kind of breach if emails arrive from another source 5. have some clients subscribed and sync-ing to only a (small) sub-set of IMAP4 folders 6. find emails related to specific orgs, projects, or people
I use Qmail's Maildir format (one file per email) on both server and Thunderbird which makes even manual 'grepping' for obscure or complex search parameters an easily scriptable operation.
I have a simple script accessible via SSH or web that adds the new entry to postfix's virtual table so unknown addresses are rejected - avoids needing to operate a catch-all policy and filter after reception since the SMTP daemon refuses delivery as soon as it sees the RCPT TO:
On the Postfix side using postgrey for grey-listing of unknown SMTP clients cuts almost all spam as well - in fact today I was surprised to see (for the first time in years) Thunderbird marking a project mail-list email as possible spam. I cannot recall the last time Thunderbird did that which I think shows how effective grey-listing on the mail server can be combined with other postfix filtering like reverse MX, SPF, DMARC, etc.
For example, I would use email address A for company A, B for company B and so forth. If company A ever gets hacked, I can just block any emails going to email A and not worry about playing whack-a-mole with the 100s of email addresses that spammers will use.
I can also use the email addresses as a way to auto filter or apply inbox rules.
I'm very surprised users only use 1 email address at a time especially if your email gets leaked once to spammers, you have to start dealing of spam or hoping your email solution has very very good anti-spam measures.
For me, this is just a normal usage of an email client.
For example say my account is dugite-code@example.tld but fetchmail pulls in my gmail emails. If I want to send from house-repairs@example.tld or dugite-code@gmail.com I don't need to configure the three accounts separately I just edit the from field as I'm composing the emails.
Example: When it is in the middle of popping up suggestions as you compose, it suddenly seems to decide you aren't in the compose window any more and interprets anything you type as a keyboard shortcut (e.g. "n" for new message "e" for archive). Since I type rather fast, this happens to me all the time.
With the current incarnation of Thunderbird there is even a switch you can flip to make the email client offline, even if your PC is not. Believe it or not, that is an extremely valued feature here.
With synchronized folders and offline storage it makes composing, reading, and replying easy with outgoing queued until next time connected when out and about with a portable device.
Realistically next time I buy a new laptop it won't be heavily premeditated: the odds are that my old one will die and I'll need something that works that week. I don't want to end up buying another Apple just because I don't have time to switch mail clients.
Obviously a mail client only takes a few hours to set up, but it's not just the mail clients: I try to avoid anything Apple-specific for the same reason.
As soon as i'm done with other elements of my new machine install here, i will see how a newer version of thunderbird handles caldav and cardav...But, my point is, at least caldav used to work really, really nicely and smoothly on older versions of thunderbird. (Caveat: this is with Zoho as calendar/caldav provider...so no idea about trying to use Google calendar or other cal. providers.)
I've been using a web/online only client for a few years and agree with the parent comment. Fastmail's web UI works better for me than Gmail or Outlook.
I use an email client because I don't want to deploy PGP keys to the server -- then there's no point.
It's interesting though: on mobile, everyone wants a client application. On desktop, people wonder why bother with client software when we have a browser. "Reddit for Desktop"? Hah, doesn't even exist! But "Reddit is Fun" for Android? People died on that hill.
The Reddit thing is also mixed with the fact that Reddit's mobile web interface is complete shit. You can't even collapse threads (or it's so hidden as ot be useless), which is something the desktop web interface does. It might not be the best example of why mobile users want an app, as it's functionally worse using their mobile web version, probably on purpose to force you to their app so they can monetize you... and now we understand why they did what they did and why people didn't want to use their official app, as the way they monetize you is to inconvenience you with more ads.
(I'd rather use the web interface on mobile and desktop, so I'm not sure the original criticism applies to me, either.)
I wonder if it's to do with desktop usage more linked to typing compared to mobile usage pattern framed around clicks /taps...
On mobile, it's a different story, the screen real estate is small, and users can't operate both/one hand(s) comfortably like on desktop. Therefore, if you don't design the app smart enough and make users not comfortable, you're screwed up.
https://www.getmailspring.com/
Why v52, you might ask? Because I don't have time for updates to break my shit and v52 is the oldest version that supports TLS1.3. I do not like the new interface. At all. It can die in a fire.
A shame really, desktop should provide a better experience.
1. I want a full synced copy of everything that I can access indefinitely, even if there are network connection problems or if the remote server goes down.
2. I want to ensure everything gets backed along with other personal documents on my computer.
3. I want sufficiently-expressive tools for searching e-mails and filtering new ones that come in.
P.S.: While I would ideally want all filter-to-folder stuff to happen server-side, there are some issues with how easy that is to keep up-to-date and issues where some clients (i.e. on my phone) won't sync non-inbox folders to see new messages, etc.
Same here. I started using e-mail around 1993 and for the next decade went through a series of e-mail programs that used different storage formats. Some of that mail I still have as plain text archives, but a lot got corrupted due to character encoding conflicts and other problems that I was unable to resolve.
Since around 2005, I’ve been using Thunderbird to back up all of my e-mail locally, including the Gmail accounts that I normally use through the web interface. Several times recently I’ve been asked about something that happened ten or fifteen years ago, and I was able to find the relevant e-mails in my Thunderbird archive in a few seconds.
That reminds me that I'd better make sure me-of-2033 will still be able to open these, er... taptaptap Mork [0] mail formats.
> Several times recently I’ve been asked about something that happened ten or fifteen years ago, and I was able to find the relevant e-mails in my Thunderbird archive in a few seconds.
I had a funny moment where one of my siblings was like: "You should see this comic!" and I said: "That author name looks familiar... Oh hey, that art-style and name rings a bell... Oh look, I e-mailed them under another screen-name once when they were working on something entirely different 15 years ago."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mork_(file_format)
This is the feature that I love best about Thunderbird. It downloads all my mail locally into plain text MBOX files so I can use things like grep to quickly extract whatever information I need and I can even send the result to some other tool. Is there a web interface somewhere that lets you use regular expressions for searching your messages?
> Card View emulates a mobile interface list with multi-line support, offering a more comfortable appearance to reduce cognitive burden. (And because we want Supernova to feel familiar for veteran users, the legacy “Table” view is still available.)
So what's the problem? Just keep using the view you prefer.
Anyone know what the Thunderbird -> MS Exchange or OWA story is these days?
https://www.beonex.com/owl/
Calendaring through Lightning is incomplete and experimental.
In the "spaces" vertical toolbar on the left, Owl has added a Teams button recently, as well. It opens the Teams O365 app in a tab in Thunderbird, which I really like. I haven't had a chance to check if any meeting or audio features work there.
For some things I guess I don't mind closed source from a small company, but my company mail probably isn't one of them.
Price: 10€. Starbucks really did a lot of damage here. 2 coffees should be 3€, not 10.
For their Microsoft 365 / O365 use [2]
[1] - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/clients/pop3-and-...
[2] - https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/pop-imap-and-smtp...
That seems highly unlikely in any org that hasn't already done it. But good luck, and godspeed to those who want to give it a try, but if history is any guide not only is "no" the worst thing that can happen, but the odds-on favorite.
https://davmail.sourceforge.net/
[1] https://www.exquilla.com/
edit: Same pricing, same exact signup form and "Domain Licenses" page, etc. but way worse design. I'm guessing this is a knock-off of Owl? Or worse?
Like an email chain that keeps adding Re in the subject line
> Re: RE: Re: Re: Re: RE: Re:
Ok, so that's why people want threaded view? I've always thought that was puzzling, as I don't use it myself (neither threads nor Google).
Gmail might have gotten the inspiration after they purchased DejaNews and made the Usenet archive into Google Groups. Just a guess.
Usenet was always threaded in the clients I used back then. But for somme reason threaded email does not work for me, personally.
Gmail has a thing I don't know who else has. The emails are categorized in General, Social Networks, Ads and Informative Updates.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/message-threading-thund...
[1]: https://github.com/thunderbird-conversations/thunderbird-con...
Alas, seamless synchronization with calendars and contacts managed by others is really hard -- and boring.
Improving design and responsiveness is so much easier -- and much more exciting!
So, all the development effort has gone into... improving design and responsiveness.
The way to give Thunderbird these capabilities are by installing these two connected addons [1, 2]. At least till June 2022, I could see meeting invites from colleagues in Thunderbird. I would also see the translucent event in the calendar in Thunderbird. But accepting the invite would not work [2]. Also creating and sending Outlook calendar events from within Thunderbird didn't work. So, I always had to open the web Calendar to do these things. Thunderbird was only good for meeting reminders.
There is a new major release of the addon since then, so it is possible that the bug is fixed.
> I apparently don't get event invites from Outlook Calendars then
Obviously if your email/calendar account is something else, then you have no problem. If someone sends an invite to my gmail, from their outlook, I can accept it fine from within Thunderbird, because Thunderbird/gmail are communicating using Caldav (I think).
> Which clients do work with that then, only Outlook itself?
I will use Thunderbird as much as possible till it is pried from my cold dead hands!
[1] https://github.com/jobisoft/TbSync/
[2] https://github.com/jobisoft/EAS-4-TbSync/wiki/About:-Provide...
What I would like on the backend is for them to fix the maildir storage [1]. Currently email is stored in mbox, which is very buggy and causes all sorts of weird errors.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/maildir-thunderbird
This never used to bother me back in the day. When I used these tools, I'd happily give my credentials up but I'm very suspicious of this way of registering my account. I suppose it's open source but the juice isn't worth the squeeze compared to the web clients.
The main thing that makes the web clients work for me is search against decades of emails.
Just tried with a folder that has 7500 messages (2013 till today) and listening to the clock ticking in the background: completes in exactly one second, as near as I can tell.
Searching all folders at once (four big folders are 32k emails together, I don't know the total) takes ~0.3 seconds to come up with "no results", 1 second to find the only result ("umpteen" was my first guess at which query might yield a single hit :D), or 2 seconds on a generic query to find 713 results (and populate a list of 384 involved senders sorted by frequency, a timeline of volume by year, which folders those results can be found in, which mailing list it was sent to if any, etc.). This is on a then-mid-range laptop from 2018.
Maybe you'd like to make your own free(dom/beer) email client and see what positive responses people post there? :)
The hamburger menu was already there, it's not new. That's the point, I think.
It does make sense, because the list of emails typically requires the full length of your window. And while most emails may not use the full width of the window - some do; and one shouldn't have to open a separate window for those.
is the only way to go... for me. I realize that some people like it different and that's fine.We shall see. Apparently you can keep the legacy view anyway so everyone's happy.
I hate the message list pane on the left but IIRC in the prerelease press they said you could swap the layout, so I'm hoping that remains true. I've been a happy a happy Thunderbird user for many years with no desire to move to webmail. Glad to see it getting some love!
That's the one "feature" I've been waiting on that just seems to be stuck in limbo.
Looks like the bug is still open: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=449299
It's not hard, and the benefits go far outside merely supporting Nix, as e.g. a flake.nix file would allow this project to generate docker images, and appImage images, as basically afterthoughts. (See e.g. https://github.com/matthewbauer/nix-bundle.)
Nix flake support would also provide a perfectly reproducible build environment, which can help clarify dependencies, and thus help the project build achieve idempotence, but I'll save the full shill for some github issue.
In fact, I'm inclined to roll up my shirtsleeves and help make this real, at least for Thunderbird.
PS. there is also the fact that the Thunderbird provided downloadable tar.bz2 is not usable under nix, which makes this problem more pressing.
PPS. Yes, I know about steam-run. Which, btw, works here. All the same, weird that I have to go get some random steam-related thing to make thunderbird happy, right? https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/522822/different-me...
See https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-...
Also many like the ability to access an maintain offline copies. I’m not a gmail user, but I know one can download a backup of 90 days easily, but I have over 25 years of emails and attachments from various accounts through the years which runs over 100GB. Thunderbird handles this.
My major complaint is Thunderbird search is poor.
For me, I like it because browsers are a huge mess of surveillance and ad targeting--even Firefox. Not to mention the speed. Even on a fast computer, loading a browser, then opening Gmail is not a quick process. By contrast, Thunderbird opens fairly quickly (Not like notepad on a Windows NT device, but for a modern application, it's pretty fast).
Finally, IMAP has been around since 1986, why would you shuffle gigabytes of email across multiple devices? Inb4 you still need to download with imap. I know, but a good IMAP client only downloads the folder you're currently looking at, then syncs it back to the server, no "shuffling" required.