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298 pointsbuovjaga124 comments

Last year when donating specifically to Thunderbird was made possible on mozilla.org, I donated to the project because it has provided a lot of value over the years.

Recently I started looking at the discussions on the tb-planning mailing list and it looks like we'll get a revamped (fully rewritten) Thunderbird. That sounds like a very long project to me - probably a few years just to bring it to what Thunderbird already provides today. Plus the extensions system needs to be revamped as well (similar to what's happening on the Firefox side with XUL ones going out). Getting Exchange calendaring done is also not a priority because of the complexity and the effort needed. So it looks like we will get a better maintainable product after some years. I'm not sure if that's going to appeal to many people to donate.

I'm happy with Thunderbird and some extensions that I use regularly, with the only exception being calendaring support for Exchange being very poor and unreliable (even with the Exchange EWS Provider extension or with external solutions like DavMail). Since I don't like taking risks with email client alpha or beta releases because of the fear of data loss (and with huge mailboxes, even detecting data loss would be a chore), I'll just stick with the current version and hope that the new revamped one comes in a stable form sooner (of course, I will donate periodically). I'm excited and afraid!

I still use Evolution with its Exchange provider for work e-mail and Thunderbird for personal e-mail.

I like Thunderbird and have used it for well over a decade, and I really hope development continues on it. There aren't a lot of mature open source desktop e-mail clients out there these days and I hope Thunderbird stays maintained for a long time.

Are you referring to this addon? https://github.com/Ericsson/exchangecalendar

It seems to be dead currently, seems it stopped working in the latest Thunderbird release and the author is unresponsive.

When I read http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/software-development-canc... I considered it a bit tongue-in-cheek/satire/something. When I read about things like TB rewrite, I think maybe it was just... true?

I switched to using EM Client for Exchange stuff, it's got an impressive feature set.

http://www.emclient.com/

That fully rewritten Thunderbird will apparently be based on Electron, the Javascript GUI.

The CPU-thrashing, memory hungry, battery killer Electron. I do not want an email client, or any other software that is meant to run constantly in the background, to be written in Election.

Thunderbird is already written with a JavaScript GUI running on top of web rendering engine so even if this is true it's just a lateral step

Why are you spreading this information, when you know no such thing has been decided?

The issue was discussed previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14156251

Yes, there has been lots of discussion, but no decision.

My CS instructor once asked everyone in the class to "raise you hand if you still use an email client." My hand was the only one that went up, and a couple of people laughed and said "really?"

I think that was almost 10 years ago.

I don't get how anyone (that are somewhat computer savvy) can live without one. Sure, webmail is an awesome backup for when you don't use your main device. But seriously, gmail and the like are absolutely horrible to use compared to a real client.

I guess the sad state of affair in regards to email syncing protocols (POP3 and IMAP) are partly to blame, JMAP might help a little but I guess it's too late.

What are you doing that's so complicated with email?

I get email. I read them. I archive them. I only interact with each email for about 10s and then it's gone, usually forever. Very occasionally I need to search for something in the archive. I also need to send so I just need a text box to write in and somewhere to drop attachments.

What else is there that you need in a client?

Being able to search through old emails and conversations.

Finding an attachment someone sent last week that you didn't have time to look at until now.

Finding a long set of instructions you sent to someone two years ago so you can forward it to someone else.

Gmail covers almost everything I need. I still use Thunderbird to create temporary IMAP backups (so I have another backup besides Google Takeout) and also to transfer e-mails from multiple providers just by drag and dropping from their inboxes or the file manager. Or when I want to edit the header of an email so that Gmail doesn't group them up in a conversation, this is a very rare / edge case that allows me to still use the conversations feature.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190

Plus labels and filters allow me to automatically "tag" messages based on sender/domain/wildcards/other variables

I don't have a huge amount of emails but I manage 3 Gmail accounts using a single client (with inbox delegation) and also older Ymail and Hotmail accounts as POP3.

But searching seems like something that is definitely don't better as a web service with people like Google and their extremely sophisticated and proprietary searching and natural language analysis algorithms. That's a reason to use web services rather than local clients.

Google's biggest trick has been convincing people that "search" is something that is much too hard and sophisticated to do locally.

see https://notmuchmail.org/ your email archive just isn't that big

as for natural language processing, I'm not aware that Gmail does this for user search? maybe it does, but I haven't noticed more than some basic stemming. and given the choice (is not hidden), even most basic users prefer exact/stemmed keyword search over "cleverly" second-guessing returning noise results you didn't ask for.

also there's many non-proprietary search result sorting and filtering techniques that do a great (and predictable!) job, locally, without having to go all deeplearning about it.

remember that a lot of the sophisticated NLP analysis stuff Gmail does, is for the benefit of targeted advertising first and user experience second.

> and their extremely sophisticated and proprietary searching and natural language analysis algorithms.

That they use to read your emails, harvest your data and advertise to you.

Gmail has filters to search that have yet to fail me. I can typically find whatever I need in a 13 year old gmail with tens of thousands of messages

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190

Having more than one account with different providers accessible in one place?

> I guess the sad state of affair in regards to email syncing protocols (POP3 and IMAP) are partly to blame, JMAP might help a little but I guess it's too late.

I'd say it's entirely that. Sync was so often half-broken with real email clients across multiple devices that having no offline access was a price nearly everyone was willing to pay to fix that, provided the web client were good enough (and, clearly, the problem was so bad that it didn't even need to be that good).

[EDIT] Also: accessing your email on devices you don't own/control.

Gmail's IMAP implementation is terribly buggy and broken. I got sick of every saved draft turning into part of an e-mail thread/conversation.

I switching to running my own e-mail server around 2013 and have had a much better experience using just Thunderbird and occasionally RoundCube.

For me, it's search. Search is absolutely terrible in every email client I've ever tried, except Google.

Two observations:

1. Search was better in Opera 12 than in any email client I've ever used (Gmail included). That has never been surpassed.

2. Gmail used to have excellent search, until recently. Recently I've observed many very glaring bugs with it, where swathes of matching emails are completely omitted from search results. This is something that may have gone unnoticed if I'd not begun to use the search function to regularly recall emails I knew existed, but it's become a repeated, almost reliably testable phenomenon with my own account.

GMail seems fine? The threading & quote collapse feature is a godsend compared to godawful attempts by offline clients.

threading, agreed. but the way quote collapse features and is pushed in Gmail basically created or greatly exacerbated the very problem it's a solution for. People used to clean their quotes for relevance, but now they're hidden out of mind, and every mail contains nearly the full conversation, collapsed. it's useless extra data quietly dragging along every mail in a thread, hardly any human ever sees it, but I bet it's super useful for their machine learning (targeted advertising) priorities.

I think you're right about the syncing protocols. I held onto thunderbird to work with my company's gmail server for six years and it was awful. Sure it was more configurable, but since I switched to the web client I no longer deal with:

+ 2+ minute wait for new emails to hit my inbox, + spinning wheel every time I load the inbox, and + oddly formatted html mail from coworkers.

Maybe those issues are to do with google's slow imap servers, but I finally realized no matter where the issues come from I need to get work done. That can't happen with the combination of gmail, large accounts, and any external client I know of.

And I have to say, after installing a keyboard plugin I can read email without using the mouse. Something I never got right with t-bird.

I use e-mail client (Outlook) at work. Two reasons:

- it's very convenient for accounts you check only in one place

- it's infinitely more convenient than any browser-based interface besides GMail that I've seen so far

I'd be using a client for my personal mail too, if configuring Emacs to work with GMail wasn't such a pain.

Also, don't tell me that on your phone you check your e-mail through a browser!

The desktop Outlook client still has a lot of features that the Outlook (Office365) web client still doesn't have. Some of those features are critical to handling large volumes of mail.

> Also, don't tell me that on your phone you check your e-mail through a browser!

Basic-html gmail, yes.

I'd use gmail's native app for this but it's just awful.

All my fav native email clients get bought and killed by larger companies.

You arent alone. Its also a great idea if you travel. Unlocking the phone doesnt give them access to email.

There's still some major features missing in gmail. The biggest, for me, is "sort by." I use this feature at least once a week in Outlook and for the life of me can't figure out why this relatively simple feature hasn't been added to gmail.

The feature does exist however it doesn't work in every scenario. Essentially when your pager shows

"X - Y of Z" (and not "X - Y of many") the keyword being many of course.

Your able to hover over the "X - Y of Z" and choose "Oldest" [1].

So essentially if data is indexed your able to.

I was not able to search any filter and apply this however on any Label I created I was able to do this.

So steps to find the oldest from amazon would probably have to be

1. Create filter+label that groups them all into one category. Wait for indexing to catch up should be fairly quickly since we are not talking petabytes of random data.

2. Choose the label on the left and on the top right hover over the "1-100 of 9999" and choose oldest.

Not the best work-a-round of course and makes sense why it's setup this way (Helps with optimization) however if a person sets up a lot of labels then they are already set up to do this feature.

[1] https://gsuitetips.com/tips/gmail/sort-email-by-oldest-first...

edit Also there is the method of using the search field parameters for example.

"Amazon.com before:2004/04/16" [2]

then you could more quickly go thru them (however if you didn't know your starting point this would prove to be tricky of course!)

[2] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en

I appreciate the response and in the case of a dire need I suppose I might utilize that. But WOW that's a lot of trouble to do something that's essentially a couple clicks in Outlook.

What do you sort by, if I may ask? I'm so used to GMail that I guess I don't feel like I'm missing anything. All of my needs are handled by searching for stuff and and/or applying stars.

Try finding the first email you ever got from Amazon (or any common sender). In Outlook this would be trivial. from: Amazon, sort by date. With Gmail you can search by the sender, but you have to click through page after page to find the oldest one.

Right. Well, now I'm sad because I realized that indeed I had this problem occasionally; the way GMail implements search I don't exactly even trust them that the first mail they show me is actually the first mail, and not search bugging out. I guess I forgot about that because I very rarely need to do such a search.

You also reminded me of another e-mail annoyance - people sending PGP signatures in attachments make it nigh-impossible to search for actual attachments, as every conversation with those senders looks like it has one.

You can search by attachment size, which might help a bit.

When I deleted my gmail accounts in 2013 (post Snowden leaks) they still didn't have partial word search. I had to connect to Gmail using Thunderbird and Google's terrible IMAP implementation just to search for parts of words .. in 2013 .. from the e-mail provider that's a search company. O_o

I do, with fastmail.

Students don't have office jobs. Get a real job and suddenly things like Outlook or TB make a lot of sense. Webmail is ultimately overly limiting compared to a native client for many common work-related use cases. Not to mention, your phone email app is an email client.

I like to think of myself as being minimalist and flexible in some ways, but if I started a company tomorrow I could see myself springing for Outlook running the front end for a postfix/dovecot server just for the convenience.

Nine year veteran of "real office jobs". There was a one or two year stint with Thunderbird, but otherwise it's all been Gmail's web interface and Android app.

Exactly what work use cases have I been missing out on?

What sorts of use cases? My Thunderbird experience doesn't mirror this at all.

I've found setting up complex filters to be easier to set up in Gmail. Gmail's search is also much faster and it's results more relevant with huge mailboxes.

Gmail also lets you create calendar events from keywords in messages, which Lightning didn't do last time I used it, iirc. I admittedly haven't used Lightning very much; I found that syncing Google Calendars in Thunderbird had a nasty tendency to lock up the app.

Everyone laughed, because absolutely no one connects their phone's mail client to their webmail provider. That would be crazy.

(or they're a bit clueless about how their work phone connects to some sort of IMAP host)

The story happened 10 years ago. But also, yeah, I kind of stopped worrying about offline email clients when I realized how much I check from my phone. The only thing I'd use them for on a desktop is mailing lists.

So absolutely noone, not a single person uses GMail on Android?

Interesting.

You can run Thunderbird on iOS/Android?

The comment above wasn't specifically about Thunderbird, but any native non-webmail client.

I'm still not following. It sounds like he is saying everybody uses a phone browser to check their webmail, which is obviously not true.

Dare to dream! Maybe such a thing will come to pass with all these changes afoot!

I don't know, I went back to Mutt after 10 years of Thunderbird recently and couldn't be happier. But more pointedly, I don't see how I could live without an e-mail client.

My company GMail session is invalidated every time I quit Chrome, and there's a moderately annoying 2FA process required to log back in. Thunderbird's IMAP credentials always work.

I don't use it all the time, but sometimes I want to read my email without digging out my phone.

I use Postbox with my three webmail providers.

Logging into the webmail separately honestly seems like a pain. Why do that when I can just fire up Postbox on my desktop and have all my mail right there?

Day to day I use my email provider's regular web interface but I use Thunderbird every few months when I need to do a massive email cleanup - there is no other tool I'd rather use and it's indispensable to me for that purpose.

Also the article states, "In many ways, there is more need for independent and secure email than ever" and I agree 100%. Thank you to everyone who works on this project!

Also for travel purposes, being able to "do" email offline with Thunderbird is very nice as well.

I use Thunderbird as my main email client and I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with it! I have a complicated email set up with 1000s of folders, and lots of mail accounts and filtering and by and large it does a great job.

I still use mutt when I really want an email powertool, but I can't use it as my daily email client any more (and haven't for years) now that HTML emails are so prevalent.

I use lots of plugins with Thunderbird (Copy Sent to Currrent, Enigmail, External Editor, Nostalgy, QuickFolders, Identity Chooser, Mail Redirect, ...) to try to bring back some of the functionality I'm used to with mutt and it works quite well now.

In recent months I find Thunderbird needs restarting once a day which is frustrating. It goes into some kind of internal loop processing an email and never returns. Probably a consequence of too many plugins!

> I can't use [mutt] as my daily email client [...] now that HTML emails are so prevalent.

Whats the problem? What prevents you from viewing HTML emails as plain text? Often, that's more readable anyway.

Just put the following lines into your ~/.mailcap file:

    text/html; w3m $(grep -qi 'content-type.*charset' %s || echo '-I UTF-8') -dump %s; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput

Feel free to skip the encoding fix, or to use another html-to-text converter than the text browser w3m.

It's certainly a better option than reading straight HTML, but it never quite does a complete job, and whenever I use mutt these days I routinely find myself having to kick in a mail client with full HTML support.

I like mutt, I used it for nearly a decade as my primary method for handling work emails, but unfortunately HTML email is the way of the world and it got to a point where mutt was hindering me (and others) more than it was aiding me.

> unfortunately HTML email is the way of the world

Is it really? I still use mutt, and I have found 99% of the time, heavy HTML in e-mail means the mail is spam.

Occasionally an important e-mail (bank, etc) might contain a few HTML links, easy enough to visually parse. Real individual people IME send plain text, even non-techies.

Have you been using it in an enterprise scenario? Essentially the main email clients people use, Outlook etc, all default to HTML emails these days. Plus there is a big love of embedded images in signatures, different fonts around the text in their signatures.. all sorts of stuff. Roughly 90% of the direct email I receive in my inbox comes through in HTML form. Plain text is more often coming from mailing lists and automated systems that email me.

> Plus there is a big love of embedded images in signatures, different fonts around the text in their signatures.. all sorts of stuff.

IMO not displaying people's dumb signatures is a big advantage of text email clients. I switched to mu4e with w3m this year after about a decade of gmail use, and get and reply to a lot of HTML emails. I used the plain-text toggle in gmail all the time, and now w3m automatically does it for me. Never going back to webmail.

> Have you been using it in an enterprise scenario?

Yeah, sort of, an academic/hospital setting. Actually, I combined my academic and personal e-mail addresses into one at a custom domain, and forward other accounts to it, which annoys some colleagues.

Most people here use Outlook. Sometimes people might have a mailto: link in sig (which gives me a chuckle as it's pointless), but I don't ever remember encountering embedded images.

The biggest human offenders for sending HTML-heavy e-mails are university-wide announcements. In my mind, these fall closer to spam than ham, and what useful information is in them can usually be gained from the title.

> Roughly 90% of the direct email I receive in my inbox comes through in HTML form.

Same, because I haven't bothered to set up spam filtering. But of the e-mails I actually want to read, well below 5% do.

> Plain text is more often coming from mailing lists and automated systems that email me.

Fascinating. For me it is just the opposite. People don't usually seem to bother using HTML, consciously at least. But automated systems use it quite liberally.

> The biggest human offenders for sending HTML-heavy e-mails are university-wide announcements. In my mind, these fall closer to spam than ham, and what useful information is in them can usually be gained from the title.

If only! My alma mater always uses the subject "Important message from <University>". It never is.

I use the view message as plain text setting in Thunderbird for both my work and personal email and have never really had a problem with it.

It's been a long since I used mutt regularly, but I recall that I had my mailcap setup to pipe the HTML straight to FF when I couldn't read the text version. It worked pretty well as long as images weren't embedded in the email.

I personally use sup, but that's exactly how I did it. All you have to do is add a small hook, explained on a multitude of Mutt wiki pages. What issue did you have with images? I just have images set to xdg-open my picture viewer.

https://dev.mutt.org/doc/manual.html#mailcap

Not the parent. One thing that prevents me from using text-only mail clients is that I have to read mail where in-line replies are distinguished from quoted content only by font color set in HTML. This means that I have to disable even Thunderbird's "Simple HTML" feature (which makes all text black).

I see this:

>But there are still pain points – build/release, localization, and divergent plans with respect to add-ons, to name a few. These are pain points for both Thunderbird and Firefox, and we obviously want them resolved. However, the Council feels these pain points would not be addressed by moving to TDF or SFC.

and then this

> We have come to the conclusion that a move to a non-Mozilla organization will be a major distraction to addressing technical issues and building a strong Thunderbird team. Also, while we hope to be independent from Gecko in the long term, it is in Thunderbird’s interest to remain as close to Mozilla as possible to in the hope that it gives use better access to people who can help us plan for and sort through Gecko-driven incompatibilities.

So I'm not sure I fully understand their direction. Are they simply less focused on solving those issues right now?

I use Thunderbird but don't really have a horse in the race, I get what I need out of it and I support them, I'm just curious.

I don't use Thunderbird, but I like that it exists and I hope they survive. Perhaps because it's my life boat if I need to abandon spying web hosted clients (gmail etc).

These days the word 'spying' is used frequently but somehow ironically (?) Why not be honest to you and say that your laziness is more worth for you than your privacy?

'spying' is perceived as boring or 'it happens anyway' or 'we cannot do something about it'. Of course you can. You have the choice to be slightly less lazy and actually use the alternatives where you can&want, maybe even if they are worse! I'm not implying here that Thunderbird is worse than gmail ;)

Furthermore 'spying' should not have the personal touch (only). Instead companies should take this issue really serious to reduce the possibilities of econmic spying. I know companies fighting hard against Google with their products, having strict NDAs but then yes, they use non-encrypted gmail accounts for everything.

Thunderbird is important like all of these alternatives (be it open source or not like DuckDuckGo) to reduce influence of monopolies. As monopolies are bad for users&customers. Always.

BTW: you can donate here: https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/

Personally, my choice of words would be 'convenience' rather than 'lazyness'. It's a 100% conscious decision on my part to abandon an unknown degree of privacy for the convenience of free online (ex. google) products. I would expect this to be true for a significant proportion of the technical readers you get here on HN.

But the trust can be broken. Which was my point.

I quit gmail due to the spying in 2013. Running my own e-mail server has been a bit troublesome. The big providers don't often like to accept e-mail from small personal servers, even if you have the correct SPF, reverse-dns, DKIM and DMARC records:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made-...

Then again, towards the end of my time with Gmail, I'd still have friends tell me mail sent from my gmail address ended up in spam. So maybe e-mail is just shit now.

I also like that Thunderbird exists, I don't use it, but my wife does.

That said, if you want a web-hosted client for standard email, why not give self-hosting RainLoop a try?

After reading about rainloop I could see wanting to run it locally, but as soon as you put it on a VM somewhere you're create a very public access point for all of your email accounts if that server gets compromised aren't you? Seems like creating a weak link on purpose.

I don't know specifically about RainLoop, but I usually put services like that behind a BasicAuth on the web server. It's a simple but effective way to protect myself from PHP/application vulnerabilities - at a minor annoyance to the users (authenticating twice, every once in a while).

It's no less safe than running a desktop email client and leaving that computer up 24-7.

I don't think that's true. A home computer can be firewalled with no incoming connections allowed. Your VM in the cloud has potential attack vectors through your own control interfaces (http/ssh/pop/imap) as well as the hosting control panel. In addition it may be listening for incoming smtp. I might trust myself to configure all of those securely but I'm not sure.

You don't need to put it in the cloud. Just run it from inside your local network. If you want to access it from outside, you can setup a VPN.

So for the moment, at least, Thunderbird stays with Mozilla. That's good.

I hope Thunderbird lives on for a long time, but in the FOSS world, one should never depend on a single piece of software for their day-to-day functionality, thus here are some alternatives:

https://alternativeto.net/software/mozilla-thunderbird/?lice...

You must also keep in mind that desktop mail-clients make the (otherwise) complicated PGP-encryption of emails a bit more user-friendly.

I keep forgetting that I intend to give Geary a try.

Geary hasn't been very reliable for me and I have been keeping up to date with the latest versions. I mostly just use it for retrieving attachments and stick to mutt and k9mail the rest of the time. I think it is sad than an android mail program works more reliably and faster than most established desktop mail clients.

A Bright Future

The Thunderbird Council is optimistic about the future. With the organizational question settled, we can focus on the technical challenges ahead. Thunderbird will remain a Gecko-based application at least in the midterm, but many of the technologies Thunderbird relies upon in that platform will one day no longer be supported. The long term plan is to migrate our code to web technologies

Mozilla dumps XUL tech from gecko left and right, removed proper "classic" mod support from Firefox... how is this a bright future. Thunderbird as a big XUL app is stuck with an soon to be not supported old gecko. And how is the plan to slowly rewrite it viable? Replication of the dated UI with HTML5 will be an even bigger clusterfxxk.

We need a proper open source offline client. And it should have a modern UI with at least conversation view like Gmail. Wasn't there a HTML5 based email client in FirefoxOS. Start with that code and set up a new Mozilla foundation funded offline email client, and keep security support for Thunderbird until the new email app is ready.

> how is the plan to slowly rewrite it viable?

Last time this topic came up on HN, someone linked to a thread on tb-planning where the post-XUL future was discussed. IIRC the "slow rewrite" was considered unworkable, and the proposed plan was to restart from scratch using "web technologies" while continuing doing basically security updates for the classic XUL TB until the replacement is ready.

As an aside, what "web technologies" exactly meant wasn't discussed. Is it electron? Or something mozilla-based like the servo + browser.html experiment? Or running a separate server process and connect to it using a normal browser (like e.g. mailpile does)?

I would assume along the lines of using writing the core logic in Javascript, using NPM packages to help implement things, and using UI libraries like React, rather than building everything in C++/XPCOM/XUL.

IDK, I like that Thunderbird sorts without conversation. It is the primary feature I look for in a MUA.

The only feature I find annoying is the search feature, which seems to be a universally accepted weakness of Thunderbird.

I'm confused by its two search bars. It doesn't make sense to have two.

One is a global search, the other is a simple filter for the currently opened mail folder. I use both for their respective use cases all the time.

IIRC, the one for the highlighted directory uses regex (I'm really horrible with regex, so I don't use it).

Yeah, the search is really terrible.

I'm thinking when Windows 7 expires in 2020 and I have to migrate to Linux because Microsoft hates having paying customers such as myself, I'll probably move to either Mint or Ubuntu and install a local Sphinx Search server specifically so I can search Thunderbird emails.

Why waiting so long? Move now and give yourself a smoother transition.

The HTML5/JS option is probably the only way out for Thunderbird but it won't seduce current backers. So it's a bit hard for them to say "Thunderbird has been abandoned on an motorway service station".

Well it won't seduce me.

Who wants an email client that uses 600 MB RAM just to open and that eats 100% CPU to animate your email folders?

To be clear, Thunderbird is currently implemented in XUL and JS. Moving to HTML and JS is not going to significantly change its performance characteristics, mostly. There are some details that will need to be done right, like needing to create a good HTML replacement for <xul:tree>, of course.

There comes a time where good sense means you have to kiss these old projects goodbye. It makes sense for Thunderbird to try to move to a platform that users actually want to use. Thunderbird is in the state it's in because very few people still value a "fat" mail client.

Thunderbird supports conversations but they're off by default. But really I prefer the way it works now.

There's also https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/gmail-con... for those that have become used to seeing the content of all emails in a conversation.

Doesn't work well. I personally like GMail-style conversations, but I couldn't use that plugin.

Yes it's a bit of a crutch. I prefer it to Thunderbolt's default view, though.

> And it should have a modern UI with at least conversation view like Gmail.

I never really found the conversation view of email very useful (especially if there are more then two people participating in the conversation). It's hard to tell who replied to whom and you can't really get context if there are responses to multiple parts of the message they're replying to.

I do have a strong preference for the threaded view that Thunderbird has now.

> And it should have a modern UI with at least conversation view like Gmail.

Gnus nnimap provides a threaded, conversation view. It's almost definitely not what you'd consider a 'modern UI,' but I like it quite a bit.

Frankly, I think it would be easier to write a GUI over mutt than to rewrite Thunderbird.

I was a heavy user of Thunderbird, but after migrating to mutt, it's basically obsolete. The only pain point is really HTML, but converting it to text is Good Enough most of the time. Outlook-produced emails still look like crap, but I can click a button and open it on Firefox.

Mutt is not only alive and kicking, there's the new NeoMutt project that is the NeoVim for Mutt. We have initial Lua scripting capabilities now.

http://neomutt.org/

In my mind, there are a handful of things that are essential to getting Thunderbird back to a usable state... some of these could be plugins...

First, the exchange/calendar integration options clearly suck... establishing a clear calendar interface as a built-in with extensible points for plugins for authentication/sync of calendars would be a good start.

Second, likewise with calendar auth/sync would be an extensible interface for folder sync and authentication, so that a cleaner integration for common providers based on an underlying IMAP can be used... this way the conventional "junk, spam, inbox, sent" folders could be presented the correct way as well as the underlying storage for a given provider.

Also, along with calendar/email would be more extension points for scheduling, contacts, etc...

As it stands, even if there were different plugins for a google calendar and an exchange/o365 calendar, contacts, etc... if the underlying pieces can be shared, it would be a better user experience.

Moreover would be some serious reconsideration regarding the UI/UX... I'm a big fan of material design, but some variation on that coming a lot closer to a Gmail app for desktop would be a really nice start... but getting a calendar/task/contacts integration points and primitives for extension would go a long way here. Having the core UI going the same direction as Servo, and having most of the UI/Extensions being HTML/JS based would be nice.

Likewise, NPM compatibility for extensions' modules would be nice as well.

Regarding NPM compatibility: I'd be worried about potential security issues with something like npm. I recognize that one must already put a lot of trust on developers when using extensions, but I'd worry NPM would make it a lot easier for a nefarious developer to add malicious code to a really deeply buried dependency.

Maybe it's just a matter of using node/npm tooling to develop/package an extension... using a bundler.

Of course, at this point, it might be worth re-doing the whole thing using electron as a base.. the more I use VS Code, the more inclined I am to feel that it may be good enough, and if it's a react app, maybe target react-native for phone/tablet platforms, and electron for desktop.

> A Bright Future

> The long term plan is to migrate our code to web technologies

While I understand what you're getting, bear in mind that in the context of a discussion about Thunderbird specifically and not just in general that Thunderbird is currently best described as being built on "A now-very-deprecated vaguely web-esque technology stack with no future". Moving to web technologies is a step forward even if you don't personally like them much. (And I'm at least sympathetic to that viewpoint.)

What we really need is a good way to execute desktop apps as if they were web services: accessible from nearly any device, access to your data with minimal complication wherever you happen to sign in from, and a lightweight, instant-response, zero-install interaction model. If we value "native clients", we need to address the things that make web clients more convenient.

> What we really need is a good way to execute desktop apps as if they were web services

I think the closest thing we have is the remote desktop protocol. I have used Thunderbird on my desktop via the rdp client I have installed on my phone (though with some degree of difficulty due to the interface and input limitations).

I think something like that could work if rdp clients provided a better interface for clients not using a desktop computer.

My biggest frustration whenever an anti-web/anti-Electron comment is posted on Hacker News summarized.

Here's a proposal on how the move to a new Thunderbird based on web technologies could be handled: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/tb-planning/SPs8gzO5...

I've gone from using Sparrow to Mailbox and now to Spark on macOS and iOS. Every time a good email client comes around, someones seems to kill it.

I hope The Document Foundation gets it to add to Lubreoffice to be a foss alternative to Outlook.

I get thousands of emails a day. I have several email accounts as I switch to a new one because the old one got a lot of spam. I email my friends and family my new email but they keep writing to my old emails. Message filter helps me sort stuff into different folders to find important emails and attachments.

I use thunderbird because my work uses gmail. I guess (maybe) I could add the secondary work gmail account to my regular gmail. Not sure, the other alternative is to keep a separate incognito window or keep work email open in a separate browser.

I just use Thunderbird instead.

You can log into multiple Google accounts at the same time. You then get a user switcher in the top left, which as far as I know does not invalidate existing sessions.

I like to read about these open source organizations apparently very well administrated. It's a very interesting business model to me.

I'm not sure this is a textbook example of open source leading to a well administrated organization. I realize these decisions are complex, but the people who work on Thunderbird have been talking about the inevitability of this move for years at this point. Those are years that a more nimble (and profit motivated) organization could have been spent actually moving to a new technology instead of endlessly debating what to do.

Have mozilla considered Tracy Island?

tl;dr Thunderbird will remain independent, but legally and fiscally be part of Mozilla (rather than e.g. The Document Foundation (of LibreOffice) or the SFC).

Also of note: apparently Thunderbird is receiving enough donations, and has been for a while, to give faith that it will be able to manage just fine independently. Good news IMHO.

I wonder if email providers would pay for to be included as an easy setup/signups in Thunderbird? Sort of like search engines pay to be the default in Firefox

The short answer: not really.

About a decade ago, Mozilla decided that Thunderbird should be making a bigger effort to pay for its own funding. The two business opportunities that were implemented were paid email accounts (driven by a survey that found that a substantial portion of new users expected they were getting an email address when they downloaded Thunderbird), and paid support for the large-attachment uploads. Some of the companies involved have since withdrawn the contracts.

In any case, the money being involved (I'm told) isn't stellar--on the order of $10s of K per annum in total.

I assumed they already were since it does offer you to create one in-client (gandi.net for me currently)

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