Thunderbird 68.0

Webmail could work great offline if we could store more then 5MB on the client.

Obligatory comment that Gmail has a basic HTML view that is substantially faster and less resource intensive, but not as pleasant to use:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/

It loads almost instantly for me, and is quite quick to navigate.

You can use the HTML-only version of Gmail at the bottom of the page which loads in 300 ms or so.

    Gmail view: standard | >basic HTML<

One Thunderbird extension I miss is FireTray that let me minimize it to Tray. Number of new emails would show on the icon, so you never missed an email without it also getting in the way of my other work while alt-tabbing.

I never left Thunderbird. I never really got in what way gmail on browser was better.

Wild-ass guess: Some enterprise user determined that quietly funding it would cost less than rebuilding some bit of internal tooling that depended on it.

(cunningham, cunningham, cunningham, come forth and correct me!)

Mozilla Corp - which owns the Thunderbird project - decided to focus resources on the browser project and away from peripheral software projects like Thunderbird that were fading in usage and couldn't reasonably be seen to make a difference out in the world. In my humble opinion, Mozilla _should_ fund an open-source front end to the various cloud email hosting services.

Since there were others interested in continued development, Thunderbird development didn't stop when Mozilla Corporation decided to scale down its level of support for the project. After a new way of arranging funding was set up (through Mozilla Foundation), there has been more visibility of development. (I don't know of actual metrics of development activity over time.)

Well, this is not the inside story, but what is known publicly. I'm just copy pasting from the Wikipedia article on Mozilla Thunderbird [1] since it has all the details with citations. Basically, Mozilla believed that email was a solved problem that didn't need attention while Firefox OS and others needed more attention. The code sharing between Firefox and Thunderbird also made management of change more cumbersome (it's still difficult on the Thunderbird side now, though it's better than how it was a few years ago).

> On July 6, 2012, Mozilla announced the company was dropping the priority of Thunderbird development because the continuous effort to extend Thunderbird's feature set was mostly fruitless. The new development model shifted to Mozilla offering only "Extended Support Releases", which deliver security and maintenance updates, while allowing the community to take over the development of new features.

> On December 1, 2015, Mozilla Executive Chair Mitchell Baker announced in a company-wide memo that Thunderbird development needs to be uncoupled from Firefox. She referred to Thunderbird developers spending large efforts responding to changes to Mozilla technologies, while Firefox was paying a tax to support Thunderbird development. She also said that she does not believe Thunderbird has the potential for "industry-wide impact" that Firefox does. At the same time, it was announced that Mozilla Foundation will provide at least a temporary legal and financial home for the Thunderbird project.

> Since the memo in 2015, Mozilla has brought Thunderbird back in-house in an announcement on May 9, 2017, and continues to support its development. The Thunderbird development team has also expanded by adding several new members and has undergone an overhaul on security and user-interface.

You could also take a look at the Thunderbird Council email archives (requires a login) [2] and the Thunderbird Engineering Council email archives (high posting volume). [3]

P.S.: I donate money to the Thunderbird project. Anyone who wishes to help out could send a little money solely dedicated to Thunderbird. [4]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Thunderbird

[2]: https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/thunderbird-council

[3]: https://lists.thunderbird.net/mailman/listinfo/maildev_lists...

[4]: https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/

Thunderbird was always the lesser entity within the Mozilla infrastructure, and there have long been influential engineers within the core Gecko development cohort who did not think that Gecko engineers should be attempting to do anything to support Thunderbird. (Of course, there were other engineers who would happily write the patches themselves to fix Thunderbird if informed they broke it, so this is by no means a universal opinion within Mozilla).

In and around 2012, Mozilla was deeply terrified of its sliding market share and felt that the best way forward was to move into the mobile market. The initial XUL-based Firefox for Android proved to be a veritable resource hog, which made Mozilla push a lot harder and faster both in ending its support for XUL, and in revamping its browser engine to work a lot better at mobile devices. One of the results of this effort was the attempt to make a mobile OS, running on the most pitiful smartphones, that would use Gecko as its main application environment. Thunderbird, being a large, featureful, monolithic application with a 15-year-old codebase [1], was (and still is) not really suitable for use on a mobile operating system, and it's probably easier to rewrite the code from scratch than to attempt to modify it for use on mobile devices.

The then-CEO (his name escapes me at the moment) of Mozilla in 2011 was a big advocate of the push to mobile, and continuing support for Thunderbird was the sort of distraction that looks like a big cost that it couldn't afford in a time of crisis. So it's not surprising that they decided to stop paid development, although the announcement came as a shock to the people working on it: one person had been hired with the expectation that he would soon be leading a time of people, only to find that he would become the sole paid engineer on the codebase.

Originally, when Mozilla made the announcement, they promised that there would be a skeleton crew that would do minimal maintenance of the project. A developer, release engineer, QA person, and a build engineer if I recall all the roles correctly. Over the next few years, the people who were still doing paid development were essentially told to stop working on Thunderbird stuff, so that even the skeleton crew promised proved not to last long. In the meantime, though, several community members (myself included) were providing most of the legwork to actually maintain the project.

One of the other things that Mozilla promised was that money donated specifically for Thunderbird would remain in a pool that could only be used for Thunderbird. It took a few years for the community (many thanks especially to rkent's efforts in actually getting this to happen) to actually get access to these finances, but by around 2017, we were able to finally start getting contracts for people to actually work on Thunderbird on a paid basis. There's actually no contribution from Mozilla, except for the free hosting it provides as well as the time that core Gecko developers are willing to spend on contributing to Thunderbird.

[1] In terms of oldest Mozilla code still in active use, Thunderbird has some contenders. There are several pieces that are essentially unchanged from the public CVS 1.1 revision in 1999, and some code I found that is substantially similar to the Netscape Classic code once on MXR--I don't know if that was the 4.x version or the abandoned 5.x version. Some comments in libmime have a date in 1997.

Doesn't MacOS Mail show the unread count in the Dock already?

Holy freaking cow - please no to this, and no to the thread below about "old annoying UI." Thunderbird is a workhorse. I process over 15,000 mails per quarter - manually. I write a lot, I read a lot, and Thunderbird is my home sweet home every day since the time I've left The Bat! at version 3 something. (The Bat is awesome as well but exists only for Windows...)

Thunderbird is the best e-mail client out there. It doesn't need a new UI, colors, animations, apps or any other bells and whistles. It looks great on Mac and BSD. Please, people, don't vote for it to be yet another Apple Mail or another "Web 2.0" or whatever is now considered cool or hip. I don't need that shit. I need a stable standard client that can handle Gigabytes of e-mail without corrupting files. I can rsync my own shit to back it up. I love being able to dig into custom settings manually. I can manage stuff myself. There are others people like me. Just don't get into my way and turn my computer into your computer.

Sorry, this has to be said. Thunderbird is awesome. Cheers, peace and love.

There are commercial email clients based on Thunderbird who fix some of the issues. https://www.postbox-inc.com/ for example

For Exchange support you'd need the OWL addon. Sounds like you should stay on Apple Mail.

Right click on menu/tool bar, Customise…

To debug startup performance, I would see if having one account instead of five makes a difference. I haven't used Thunderbird for a long time but if the delay is due to slow responses from one mail provider in particular, perhaps you can set that account to be offline by default and explicitly take it online and check for mail after Thunderbird starts, while you check your other accounts.

Have you tried running it using strace?

Deleting old mail and "compacting folders" might help.

Vacuuming the sqlite files has helped me in the past:

    killall thunderbird
    find ~/.thund_folder/ -name \*.sqlite -print -exec sqlite3 {} VACUUM \;

Defragmenting the filesystem may still be a thing, depending on your set up.

Thunderbird startup should not at all be affected by it's proximity to reboot. However, Thunderbird startup can be IO intensive so anything impacting IO will affect TB start time.

In the past, the file "panacea.dat" could get corrupted, and this was result in a working albeit very slow Thunderbird; deleting it would make it run quickly again.

(But .. don't trust a stranger on the internet telling you to delete a file. Do your own research)

Because in order to maintain backwards compatibility from 1971ish onwards, each new standard has been awkwardly shoehorned onto the previous standards. And even then lots of big email senders don't properly follow the standards, so displaying email correctly requires being able to discover and implement thousands of unwritten and undocumented rules.

The IMAP standard is known to be vague in places and different servers implement it in different ways. Some server also have long standing bugs that a client has to deal with gracefully. And of course you still have to implement SMTP, POP3 and possible a bunch of different protocols for searching, address book and calendar synchronization.

In the case of Thunderbird, there is also shared code with Firefox, and so any core architecture and design changes in Firefox necessitate that the same be adopted in Thunderbird too, as quickly as possible. The mail client code is also very old. Last I recall, there was a plan to rewrite it completely using web technologies.

Mostly it's just a lot of code. Notmuch only does index/search for email and it is 46k LOC (https://www.openhub.net/p/notmuch). Thunderbird in contrast is 1.2 million LOC (https://www.openhub.net/p/thunderbird). A fair amount of that is detritus from being an ancient project, or else is shared with Firefox as the browser toolkit, but handling email and all the dialogs etc. are quite complicated. Mailspring uses Electron and is 218k LOC (https://www.openhub.net/p/mailspring/analyses/latest/languag...). You get the idea

And nobody wants to start a new one, because the majority of people use webmail or the mail app on their phone. Thunderbird is at 1% marketshare, although the sparkchart is weird suggesting measurement difficulties: https://emailclientmarketshare.com/

I wrote a basic one, and I think the answer is that there are just so many moving parts (many of which I didn't attempt).

- mail transfer and delivery (IMAP/POP3, SMTP)

- organization, folders, tags, database, search, indexing, etc. Performance becomes a big issue.

- Email threading (conversations) is a whole thing.

- Email file format, MIME standards, parsing emails is a WHOLE thing. (What is an rfc822-formatted email and why I am getting them?)

- For non-text email, need an entire HTML rendering engine.

- The graphical user interface is not trivial, should be intelligently multithreaded.

- More features: spam filtering, encryption/digital signatures. Vacation replies. Address book. Calendar integration is a whole (optional) thing. Todo-lists.

- For some reason, Thunderbird has a live chat system.

It also seems to be the kind of thing where the last 10-20% is a lot harder than the first 80%.

Email is hard (I wrote a blog series on it at http://quetzalcoatal.blogspot.com/search/label/email-hard, and I haven't even touched anything beyond the message format!).

Some highlights:

* The MIME and message format specifications are often implemented incorrectly (particularly whenever you deal with non-ASCII text!), so you need a lot of logic interpreting the mess that people think is a valid email.

* IMAP is a database synchronization protocol that doesn't think it's a synchronization protocol, and isn't really well-suited for its tasks. That also means, once again, it's often implemented incorrectly, so you get to spend a lot of time working around server bugs. (There was one message where I managed to get 4 different results from 4 different servers on what its structure was!).

* The big webmail services (e.g., Gmail) often use their own extensions that they really want you to use. So you need to have custom code for big servers. And users demand feature parity, so you have to support it.

* By the way, you also need to integrate a web browser to display HTML email. Except quirks of email rendering abound. And there are severe privacy and security concerns too--you need to disable JS at the very least, and often times be very careful about network access so that people can't leak contents out.

newsblur. That's not the answer you were looking for, since it involves a server (self hosted, freemium / paid). But it's very good - not affiliated, just a happy user.

I used to use thunderbird for my rss feeds and like it a lot. However, the problems with that setup is:

1. If you have multiple machines, there is no way to synchronize what has been read.

2. If leave your machine off for any length of time, you may lose updates in that time (many sites only publish the latest 10 updates in RSS; were you flying and offline for 5 hours and 15 stories published during that time? you lost 5 of them).

It was reason 2 that eventually drove me to look for alternatives.

But now I'm afraid that plugin which allows to set different identities for different folders will break... And same for ManageSieve addon, as both of them don't get updates for long time, and if Thunderbird phase-out XUL addons, it will be very bad and painful.

As I understand it, development for Thunderbird was recently ramped up again[1]. Some of the more "obvious" features might have been on the backlog for some time.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2019/01/thunderbird-in-...

>Reading the changelog, it seems like some of those features (like linking an attacent instead of re-uploading it) should have been features a long time ago. Am I misunderstanding something about it?

Filelink is a specific feature which allows pluggable storage providers (e.g. OwnCloud) to be used to transparently provide a link to a large file within the email body. It's not a feature that other clients I use support and therefore I'm a little unsure as to why this "should have been a feature a long time ago".

I don't see why you couldn't have just copy/pasted the link - this seems like a minor UI improvement.

> How is the development and status of the project overall? Is someone here knowledgeable enough about it to give a synopsis?

It's a stable project. I would continue using it if it never got updated again but remained working on the latest versions of Linux distros. It's an email client. It's text. It just needs to not break, and remain as fast as it is now.

Firefox went back to square corners, at least on Linux.

This has exited for a while. Not at my desktop to find the setting at the moment, but I've been using it since I found it a few months ago.

I'm on Ubuntu 19.04 and I thought I was running version 68.

But yeah. It's 60.0.8. For a second I was wondering what this whole announcement was about.

60.8 was released on July 9th 2019.

They skipped 61-67 and released 68.0 today.

60.9 is out in a few days. 68.1 will be the upgrade to the 68.x branch.

Thunderbird ships alongside Firefox ESR releases, based on the ESR Gecko branches. The version matches the Gecko version.

Gecko 60 was an ESR, as is Gecko 68. So Thunderbird 68 is the next major release after Thunderbird 60. Until today, Thunderbird 60.0.something was the latest release, and Ubuntu is not so out of date.

Dreaming in Code is one of my favorite programming books, it documents the development history behind the very ambitious project Chandler. Highly recommended.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32475.Dreaming_in_Code

... Sylpheed, Eudora, mh...

I've tried that too and agree that it has a slick UI. However one inconvenient design choice is that it stores all the messages (headers and bodies) in a giant sqlite database. Sure, full text searches and Gmail-style multiple labels per message are easy to implement this way, but a multi-GB single-file database is harder to back up efficiently and might be less robust than a maildir-type backend, which other clients such as Evolution use.

Your reason to not like it, is my reason to keep it.

I hate the blown up bs UIs of today.

TB does what it's supposed to to and looks like it.

The thing about Thunderbird's "old annoying UI" is that it's incredibly compact. It fist 3 to 4 times the information in the same space. That looks ugly when you are used to the modern web trend of lots of padding and whitespace, but the ugly way is just way more practical to me. It's the reason I use Thunderbird and not Apple Mail.

Control-u shows the message source - you can see the email address there without opening the mail.

(For a little bit of security when opening an email, one can also turn javascript off in Thunderbird. I've never seen why anyone would javascript in email - anything requiring javascript would probably be better done in a browser in my opinion.)

I have been using TbSync and it works well. Even works for Google and iCloud accounts.

there looks to be beta releases on the cardbook gitlab, so I would wait for those to get promoted to stable.

Every addon has a max-version field, hopefully just that (given the leap from 60.x to 68.x) but also possibly the same thing with Firefox where a bunch of addons just died.

Be wary - my boss is quite upset that this latest version seems to have broken a number of his plugins.

The release notes state that the next release (68.1) will be an update from previous versions. 68.0 stands on its own.

Kind of an interesting way to do it but I suppose it lets the most eager folks dip their toes. Sounds like you're better off waiting for 68.1.

It has a lot of interested users

Thunderbird needs to be stable, not revolutionary. In this case, stable, looks the same, works the same is The Feature.

It appears to be a significant enough rewrite that no upgrade path from previous versions is available.

downvotes notwithstanding, this is an important function for a desktop mail client, and it got taken out early in its life. During the XUL era addons could effect minimizing to tray, but with the switch to web extensions, there is no way to achieve this anymore, and it's been a bane to all desktop users because you can't just run Thunderbird in a background mode that pops up desktop notifications anymore. You either have Thunderbird running, in the foreground, or it's not running, and then obviously it's not picking up your mail.

Undo send? That always struck me as a silly feature. It just sends another email, one politely requesting the removal of the first.

Also, TBird does have a unified inbox. I've been using it that way for years.

As for search, I have 20+ years worth of mail in thunderbird. Search works. I mostly rely on the quick filter (which filters sender/subject), and occasionally switch to the full-fledged search feature, which can take a while depending on the complexity of my searches and how far back I want to search.

As usual, I came here to look for recommendations :) I have been enjoying Mailspring[0], an OSS fork of Nylas Mail (RIP). I came across it while looking for the closest thing to Google Inbox (RIP also). Mailspring is cross-platform.

[0]:https://getmailspring.com/

Airmail is a fine client, and MailButler adds the missing features for me.

Thunderbird has Send Later ( https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/send-... for ) which the same as undo send.

Unified folders have been around for a while. 2FA has been around for a while. I think search is local, but it works well enough.

I haven't yet found an email client to replace Thunderbird/Airmail. All the new-fangled ones like Mailbird, Postbox simply leave out too many features to be useful.