Comment by cookiecaper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cookiecaper | Hacker News Reader

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I used Thunderbird daily for the better part of a decade until about 3 months ago. It's nothing personal against the project, which is currently the best serious desktop mail client available afaik. It's simply that Mozilla doesn't care about it anymore since everyone uses webmail now. Thunderbird is doing feature releases about once a year now [0], and Mozilla has pulled most (all?) of its full-time developers [1]. A few months ago, Mitchell Baker sent a message that said they were looking to detach Mozilla from the project completely, partially because it didn't have enough industry-wide impact to be worth Mozilla's resources [2].

The sad fact is that desktop mail clients are going away, and even the big projects like Thunderbird are barely limping along, which I guess is slightly nicer terminology than "pretty much dead"?

[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/releases/

[1] https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stabi...

[2] http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/30/thunderbird-flies-away-from...

Call me a dinosaur, but I'll keep using it as long as it is available. Web email clients SUCK.

And there's about 10 million users that evidently have a reason to keep using it:

https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2015/12/thunderbird-act...

This sounds like my words.:D

So I completely agree. I cringe every time I am forced to use webmail for some reason.

What makes an email client so difficult to write? I don't mean this to sound insulting, I just really don't understand where the complexity is. It seems like you should be able to get to a point where it is feature complete and all development efforts shift to maintenance mode. Or maybe I don't understand what's been going on with Thunderbird and perhaps it's been "done" for years now.

It is basically done. There could be UI refinements and updates to the occasional protocol/security change, but yeah, there's not been much innovation in email standards for a while.

Although, to be honest, email standards are a complete mess in some regards and I suppose this make such an endeavour not as trivial as it looks on first sight.

Just an example: try to create (and use) an IDN-based email address with non-ASCII characters in the local part. You will be amazed how incompatible on so many layers this actually is. I can hardly imagine there weren't dozens of similarly tricky situations where the developers of this, or any other email client for that matter, were forced to make quite serious design choices because of either ambiguity in standards, or widespread lack of support thereof.

You should try Nylas N1

I don't like the fact that it uses an external API. I don't like a third party (other than my mail host) to have access to my email password and messages.

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