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Comment by qznc | Hacker News Reader

A redesign is a great symbolic move to fight "Thunderbird’s key problem is being perceived as either dead or stagnant".

Still, Thunderbird needs a bigger vision. What does Thunderbird want to be? The cross-platform Outlook? Then merge Lightning into core. The native Gmail? Then get a conversations view. The backwards-compatible, easy, and secure mailer? Then merge Enigmail into core or make SMIME easy to use or get some Rust code in. The ultra-portable mailer? Then port it to Android and iOS. The super-flexible mailer? Then somehow help plugin devs.

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Thunderbird's problem, i think, is that their userbase contains a large portion of people who value thunderbird for it's stagnancy, but at the same time get angry if you suggest that thunderbird might be stagnant.

Thunderbird is the email client for people who want email to work exactly like it did ten years ago. that's their value-add, and it really should be their vision.

And/or prioritize PGP support

It needs maintenance and minor improvements. Keep your “redesigns” to a new client.

While this describes me pretty well, I have to admit an (optional) conversations view would be pretty useful.

Try the Thunderbird Conversations add-on:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/gmail-con...

It resembles the old Gmail interface, and it's open source.

And you can't move whole conversations, for example. That's a huge pain point for me.

It seems to be a totally different thing than the regular message list, and only some actions work in Conversation mode.

Or don't, as we have seen recently relying on addons to add missing functionalities may not be viable through time.

Thunderbird will soon add support for webextensions, who knows what will happen of the legacy extensions further than short term ?

Internal fork, maintain both. The old version should be east to maintain.

>a large portion of people who value thunderbird for it's stagnancy, but at the same time get angry if you suggest that thunderbird might be stagnant.

Stagnant is a negative characteristic. Keeping things that work the way they are isn't.

MSPaint hasn't been "stagnant" for decades, it was the way people liked it.

There was Eudora for that.

I think one thing that maybe kept ThB from innovating was that people took webmail to heart. It's few people who want a thick client or even want to go thru the config. What port, what server, etc.

On a mobile device, the UI walks them through the scenarios (Google, Microsoft, etc) so they usually don't have to guess or have "IT" set it up for them.

Plus, what ships with MAC and Windows is good enough for most people who do want some kind of thick client.

Regardless, ThB was the ugly child at Mozilla since ever. They should have taken the Opp when Eudora was finally killed, but I don't think Moz had the energy.

> Plus, what ships with MAC and Windows is good enough for most people who do want some kind of thick client.

Airmail and Spark, among others, would like to have a word with you. Airmail in particular started out as a Mac client before being ported to iOS. There exists quite a market for good email clients, I would think.

This is just a focus group of one, but I really want to see two problems solved in email:

1) Trusted identity assertion: I want to know with confidence (at a glance) that the sender is who I think they are.

2) Secure communication: I want the visual metaphor of email (private correspondence) to match the reality of email.

How great would it be if Mozilla lead the way to for email clients to adopt open standards to do easily do these things.

(a) exists, just use an addon that validates DKIM, SPF and DMARC records.

Any recommendations?

You'll probably be interested by caliopen[1] then.

[1]: https://www.caliopen.org/en/

"Thunderbird’s key problem is being perceived as either dead or stagnant"

Some of us spell that "stable and reliable" and consider it the single most important property of our essential day-to-day software. If it ain't broke...

In that case, we would all still be using Pine.

I used to love pine but managing it well with Gmail was terrible as I would have to clean up the inbox and this couldn't be done automatically.

Using gmail is a terrible choice. At the collective level it's taking part in destroying the internet and privacy.

I'd say the difference between dead and stable is if you encounter bugs all the time. I find Thunderbird stable (only triggers a bug roughly once per month and nothing critical) while the Lightning plugin for calender functionality is dead (fails to sync with Google for months).

FWIW, I do use Lightning all the time and only know of a couple of minor UI bugs, and at least one other person in my house uses it to sync with external calendars routinely without serious problems as well, so if there are serious bugs there then they don't seem to be universal. In any case, I'd much rather fixing this sort of thing was the priority for the project than yet another UI theme overhaul because reasons.

The order in which you install add-ons, such as the provider for Google calendar and Exchange calendar support, matters. I've spent too long jiggering with add-ons to get them to play nicely together.

Once I have a functioning setup,I copy the profile wholesale from machine to machine. I use Thunderbird every day and have done for years.

I had to stop using Thunderbird because it became ungodly slow and just unusable. I consider that a bug.

I consider that a local problem that only you have. None of the several person using TB daily for more than a decade have encountered this kind of performance issue.

What have you tried to find the cause of your performance issue ? Have you tried making a new user profile to test if your local profile got somehow corrupted ?

Yes, I've tried many things, including a new profile. Compacting would help for a few days. Thunderbird just doesn't seem to do well with large mail archives going back more than a decade. That is my experience and the experience of others.

Also, I've met many people who experience similar performance issues, so I find it bothersome that because you've never encountered it you're asserting it does not exist.

This is also an issue that's span multiple machines and multiple clean installs.

Add me to your new list then. TB starts up in ~1min. Sometimes it will just hang for a few minutes while updating emails/calendar. (Can't switch to its window) Sometimes it will take 10s+ to dismiss a meeting reminder. Sometimes the meeting reminder can't be dismissed. Sometimes it will get confused by filters working slowly and both beep for a new message and then immediately move it away.

There are bugs upstream for all of those. They're up there for years.

Stable and reliable is why I use it, please dont f* it up guys.

I second that.

I've had to find a non google replacement for firefox, I don't want to go through this again to replace thunderbird.

> The native Gmail? Then get a conversations view.

Thunderbird has had a ML/usenet-like conversations view forever.

Which one ? The one I'm using is not that great

That feature is... problematic.

I am using TB as my mail client and there are so many things that work. Almost. So many things to configure, but not in the way that I feel would be natural.

TB is mostly worse than Outlook, but still much better than most other clients.

Threaded, hierarchical "ML/Usenet-like" views are great, but they're not what people are asking for when they request a "conversation view."

Looks like rust is a requirement for the build process:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...

Why is that significant?

>> ... get some Rust code in.

Maybe I misread it, but to me it sounded like Mozilla did not have Rust support in Thunderbird, but it seems that there is some already ...

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