What’s New in Thunderbird 78
blog.thunderbird.net
blog.thunderbird.net
It's incredible how slow most of the email clients on the market are. What's even more incredible is that, apart from Outlook, none of the other clients offer a good way of editing tables properly.
But there's also a problem: I now have Thunderbird exactly how I wanted it, but it took a few hours to set it up and it required some technical knowledge: calendar, tasks, Gmail like smart search, multi language corrections. For a normal user, that might be off-putting. However, I think Thunderbird is gaining momentum again and will soon be back to one of the biggest player on the market.
Since I was more than willing to pay for a good solution, I've now redirected that monthly payment to Thunderbird.
Seems like Microsoft is leveraging their position in the same way Google does with browsers and Apple does with hardware.
I'm on a Mac, and really prefer the native Mac mail client. It's fast, polished, and has insanely great search tools. But I keep Outlook running, too, because to properly and reliably deal with Exchange calendaring (esp with respect to coordinated online meeting setup), it's really the only good option.
Which means I have two copies of my work email corpus on my machine. And it's not small.
I experience neither issue on my Mac with Mail.app or Outlook, so I suspect local issues for you.
I'm glad Claws mail exists; an ancient client but the only graphical one I could find that's actually fast and lightweight. Although Mailspring is pretty good as well and is not quite as slow as one might expect from an Electron app.
In the end I am really glad I have no need of more "enterprise" features in this area.
If you haven't already, check out how profiles and the profile manager work, and maybe put your Thunderbird profile in a location you backup, or even sync with other devices if needed [0]. The ability to install Thunderbird on a new machine, point it to the profile directory and have it exactly as you set it up is just wonderful. I guess by installing plugins and configuring it, but not adding email accounts, you could even make a profile for less technically savy people to use and add their email acount to.
[0] One pitfall is that a profile can only get opened by versions as new or newer than the last Thunderbird installation that used it -- for this purpose I made an empty profile I can switch to just to update Thunderbird before I use my actual profile. There's probably a dozen better ways of doing this, but even this duct-tape method works fine for me.
It really is odd. I've tried a handful of clients, but the one I wanted to work the most was MailSpring. The UI was clean, it was supposed to be fast, and have great integration off the bat. I forget if it was my gmail, my student email (through gmail), or my hotmail account, but one of them would just refuse to connect. If I can only have 2/3 of my emails, I'm not going to bother. That was a few months ago, so maybe it's fixed, but damn.
Thunderbird works, but if they could have some easier customization, I think they could really take back some of the market.
I’m still searching for a fast email client with great UX, but for now I assume they are mutually exclusive.
Definitely. And that's sad. I guess everybody uses web mail these days.
Thunderbird's problem is and always has been a lack of resources. Mozilla infamously bungled, underfunded, and then abandoned it (as a result of narrowing their focus from "the Internet" from their original charter and trying to redefine "Internet" to mean "the Web"). But even after the spin-off and independence, Thunderbird's lack of resources isn't helped by Thunderbird development being more difficult than it needs to be (read: seemingly unapproachable for many potential contributors).
"How to keep contributors when they are not even contributors yet" by Soledad Penades is incredibly relevant (moreso for its title than the actual specifics of the post content, but there are good lessons there, too):
https://soledadpenades.com/posts/2015/how-to-keep-contributo...
Ten years ago, you could get folks who were willing to get dirty with XPCOM/XBL/XUL because they already existed in the wider Mozilla community, and the biggest problem was Thunderbird's build process and compile times. Nowadays, you have the same barrier wrt annoying build processes, but the pool of knowledgeable people is smaller since the XUL add-ons ecosystem has been decimated. Ultimately, Thunderbird will need to address its legacy use of XUL, but they already know that and seem to be working on it.
More importantly, though, the problem Thunderbird needs work on is the same old problem from before: the headache of setting up a development environment that can actually perform a successful build, and how long it takes for that build to complete. The way that Zotero is built is currently pretty hacky, but nonetheless an example of how easy it should be to get a development environment set up. (In fact, it can and should be made easier than that, but just getting Thunderbird's build process to where Zotero is right now would be a huge boon to making Thunderbird something that potential contributors actually start considering as "approachable".)
https://github.com/zotero/zotero-standalone-build/blob/maste...
Originally, Thunderbird and Firefox lived in the same CVS codebase, and the only difference to build Thunderbird was changing one line in your config file. When Mozilla moved to Mercurial, the Thunderbird code was left out of the repository on purpose, and so gained the annoying split-repository. Then Mozilla removed the ability to build the C++ code in anything other than a link-everything-into-libxul configuration. (Well, you could choose to have binary components live elsewhere, but the string APIs turn out to be completely different for pretty much no good reason--and mail code is obviously very string-heavy)
There was a plan to build Thunderbird on top of a vanilla XULRunner. Then XULRunner was killed off. Webrunner was next (I think), and that was then killed off again. Now I believe there's yet another thing, but of course Firefox has also shut off access to binary (C/C++) extensions, so if Thunderbird wanted to use it, it would have to rewrite ~1M lines of code.
Yeah, and just to point out: in a profoundly stupid move. I mean, it was stupid then, too, it's just that now we have the evidence for it.
The constant refrain was that niche being a dead end. But the rise and proliferation of Electron (to the point that people bring it up to complain about it in places where it's not even on topic) and the success of Chromebooks (compared the failure of FirefoxOS for mobile; which itself was a leadership/execution error) both mean exactly one thing: those calling the shots on that decision and their supporters were flat out wrong. And so where is that crowd now? Mostly with their legacy and influence still being felt in every decision—and where those decisions contribute to Firefox being more marginal every passing year. Even if you forgive the original mistake, how is this not outright embarrassing for Mozilla Corp leadership?
I've been a regular Outlook user for many years, and honestly I'm pretty happy with it. My only real pain is the lack of ability to easily export/import my mail accounts between machines, but that's something I do only every few years.
I did run Thunderbird on a low-power laptop some years ago, and did like it, but at the time it was nowhere near feature parity with Outlook.
The simple fact that it does not mark lines starting with '> ' as quoting is really off-putting.
At work, my co-workers are getting convinced that in-line replies are much better, but if the author (me!) uses plain-text only, all the other Outlook users will have a hard time reading my emails.
Actually, all about plain-text email is a pain in Outlook. I took more time to configure it (as good as it can) to send plain-text email, but now I read all my incoming emails as plain-text.
And to make it quote with '> ' in the beginning and make it properly work was a hell.
All in all, Outlook, to me, is the symbol of the Microsoft of the 1990s.
Bonus: with External Editor [1], I can use Vim (or any other editor) to edit my emails in Thunderbird. No way I could ever do so on Outlook.
- No proper conversation view on desktop.
- Filters (e.g unread) get disabled on every view change (including switching between mail and calendar)
- The mobile client has no setting to stop it from marking messages as read upon changing focus to another message.
- The message editor isn't really WYSIWYG. I often insert paragraph breaks that are gone in the sent message.
- It's generally buggy, like everything Microsoft makes lately.
Compared to Apple Mail + Calendar + Contacts, it is a night-and-day.
A little naive I know. I don't see any other way to scale though.
I really like Thunderbird, but if you need to use exchange and are on linux I think there isn't a nicer option than Evolution at the moment. It plays nice with all MS services and integrates with the OS for contacts, calendar etc.
Ofcourse all of this only applies if you are using Linux and its possible evolution is annoying on non gnome systems (i haven't tried it outside of gnome). I think kmail also has exchange support but i haven't tried it.
Honestly, I'd rather get a mail with tables in it than a mail that references a companion attachment. It's not even close.
Email is more of a 'record' than a 'document' - these are different things. Wiki and Git repos are more for building up a permanent body of work which will be referred to and built on (i.e. documents), rather than transitory discissions and a log of daily events (i.e. records).
It's what Thunderbird should have been imo.
https://tyler.io/mailmate/ https://tyler.io/additional-mailmate-tips/
MailMate’s correspondence viewer looks great. The conversations add-on for Thunderbird keeps locking up for me, even when I’m in the middle of writing an email. Maddening.
I was maintaining it but haven't been able to find time to work on the upgrade.
There was talk in the dev mailing list about adding TNEF support but that probably wont happen until 2021
Sadly the improperly configured Outlook clients are still not extinct in some of the organizations we work with. Does anyone know a good guide (with screenshots would be ideal) of the settings they would have to change?
Unfortunately it's not only the clients it's the servers as well. Also this is still occasionally an issue in Office 365
This guide doesn't look bad - https://capsulecrm.com/support/setup-and-configuration/micro...
The official Microsoft article - Change the message format to HTML, Rich Text Format, or plain text - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-the-messag...
And of course the Microsoft Exchange article - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/tnef-conversion-op...
https://blog.thunderbird.net/files/2020/07/compose-compariso...
Old: Clear that you can enter multiple "To" addresses. Obvious that the formatting buttons are buttons.
New: Single-line "to" implies you can only enter one address. "Flat" buttons don't look like buttons.
https://blog.thunderbird.net/files/2020/07/account-setup.png
Extra white space makes the window nearly twice the size for no apparent reason. I wouldn't say the new one is any clearer. Maybe even less clear, since the grey textual tips next to the fields have gone.
I'm very happy that it's being updated.
Your comment maybe indicates the gray is too subtle, or invisible to users with bad eyesight.
Disagreed about the To/Cc redesign, the new design is much more efficient when you have multiple recipients, making good use of horizontal space. The old design did lead to:
1. Tons of wasted horizontal space (as each line is a recipient, on each line you only use the few characters describing each recipient, leaving space on the right blank). And also, one-line-per-recipient leads to tedious vertical scrolling inside a vertically-constrained space (3 lines by default, and you don't want more, you want to preserve vertical space for the email body, not the header).
2. Impossibility to easily copy/paste all recipients. With the new design, it's now easy: select all, copy (and repeat once if you have a Cc field, okay).
There's a reason this To/Cc design is what most (all?) desktop/mobile clients do.
I doubt there will be a single person for whom Thunderbird is their first email/messaging type app. Most would have used something on their iOS or Android devices first at least.
All of them will be comfortable with multiple users in a single To line, while having multiple lines for multiple users will actually appear alien to them.
This almost equals to assuming that nobody is older than 25 or 30 especially because the no "single person" assumption. I started with UNIX's mail in a terminal, used a dozen of different clients on UNIX, Windows, Linux, Android, not all of them graphical.
I've been using Thunderbird probably since its very first day. My other client is K9 on Android. I think the address pills will be OK but I want to test their manipulation with keyboard and touchpad.
I use thunderbird because I want an email client, not a dumbed down web experience built for mobile.
I mentioned mobile because as far as discoverability is concerned, there is an order of magnitude more mobile users than desktop users, so the vast majority of users will have no problem understanding this concept.
And if you've been a desktop user long enough that you havent used a smartphone then you're probably used enough software that have similar patterns (and used email enoguh) that you shouldnt have trouble realizing that single To line means you can add multiple recipients to the same line.
I've literally never used a mail client that didn't do multiple emails on the same line. On Desktop or Mobile.
And it's never been an issue.
As long as everybody is on your address book it's fine, but if they're not, things tend to get awry.
I haven't tried the new Thunderbird, but I am suspicious of this change as well.
This was my first reaction when I saw the change - I really hope they get this right as it goes to the core functionality of Thunderbird. If email addresses can't be easily and accurately edited in the To field, it will be a real problem for me.
I've used every major email platform and every single one manages to endure despite having emails on one line. Even Outlook does one line these days.
Its just yet another thing I shouldn't have to think about
You'd be wrong. I, grudgingly, moved from mutt to Thunderbird after it was clear that email was turning into MIME-encoded web pages.
Ironically, I am moving from Thunderbird to Mutt (NeoMutt actually). I find the elimination of HTML means it's actually easier for me to not get distracted by stuff I dont care about for email, which is interaction with real human beings, who are unlikely to be typing complicated HTML messages. Besides, with the right config (I'm still working on it), the HTML message is 1 shortcut away.
Back in my BBS days, there was ANSI color with IBM-extended (CP437) block graphics to liven things up, so I can see it has gone full circle a bit.
The old window was twice as big as it needs to be too, but I agree the new one is even worse.
I don't like the flat buttons either. I don't use macOS much, but the old ones with a subtle border look like they're native UI, whereas the new flat ones don't. A random image I found confirms that the old buttons and checkbox look the same as what the OS itself uses, while the new ones look very out-of-place:
Glad at least they've kept the (albeit small) separators between the buttons.
I immensely dislike the UI trend where everything is flat so there's no discernible separation between elements.
Yup, already hate it. I much prefer not looking through a list of buttons on the To line for the one I want to remove. Additionally, I can instantly see if I'm sending and email to my coworkers company or personal address without some damn tag after his name.
I know a few who swear by it
I used to use Thunderbird as my only mail client for many years and still prefer it for personal accounts. I loved global search when it was launched, but that was not improved over time for accurate searches, especially for large mailboxes (I struggle to find mails with it in mailboxes that are a few Gigabytes in size).
Thunderbird has not focused on built-in MS Exchange support (especially including calendar), which, combined with environments where IMAP is disabled, makes it a no-go. I know of one commercial extension (Owl) that works with MS Exchange/Office 365, but that extension requires the purchase to be made by providing which email address one wants to use it for. It’s a privacy concern that the developer said they wouldn’t fix. So I’m stuck with Outlook Web Access at work (I refuse to use the Outlook client).
I think in general I simply dislike "material design".
I do think there's great promise to the core idea of treating data in our UIs like we'd treat, for example, pieces of paper on our desk, or pages in a book, but just more efficiently. For example I've always felt that a music app built around a paradigm of piles or boxes of songs, interacted with very physically and naturally to build playlists, would be wonderful (especially versus the current state of the iOS music app). However most of the time it's just flatness for flatness's sake, and an excuse for designers to go wild with minimalism.
Right now one can manually switch the storage to maildir, but it is not safe to use that storage with other maildir compatible software.
It suggests a way to add metadata about messages through the use of flags added to file names, but doesn’t specify what these must be.
I don’t think, therefore, that Maildir as a standard provides enough to allow it to be relied upon for portability between clients (MUAs). That’s not to say a standard couldn’t emerge if there were some agreements.
Maildir has the advantage that searching, adding and deleting emails is very fast, much faster than if those operations were made on single big file. Worth it.
The one thing that I did find is that deleting folders with many files was very slow. I guess that path wasn't well optimized. However even then you could deleted hundreds of files a second so for regular mail usage it likely isn't a major issue.
* Integrated OpenGPG E2EE (fully realized in a future 78.2 release)
* Significant UI improvements
* Integration of calendars and tasks
* Dark mode (though I actually don't get why a GTK application should do this; well-behaved GTK integration should respect dark GTK themes already)
Maybe that has changed recently, but the UI of Thundebird, like Firefox, used to be primarily based on XUL, only relying on GTK for drawing certain "native" elements, so it wouldn't implicitly inherit the GTK theming.
The other thing I'm wondering about is how this will integrate with OpenGPG, more specifically if it will allow the use with smartcards. And it looks like it planned ![1]
Great work Team Thunderbird. Been a fan for the past 5 years, will be for the foreseeable future.
GTK_THEME=<theme>:dark
GTK_THEME=Arc:darkFor me Thunderbird is a way to slowly attempt to disentangle from Google. Thus far it has not been a disappointment. No welcome screen, no problem, there is an option for that. You don't want stuff to be compacted every time it starts, no problem; change one value to false. If only most programs were like that today.
Actually smartcards were already supported when I tested alpha some time ago. Thunderbird used GpgME to talk to GnuPG and GnuPG talked to the smartcard.
The only big thing missing now is a three pane view: there is this 17 (!) years bug on the topic, and hopefully somebody will pick it up soon (Before you say it, I know that I could contribute myself but I do not think my skills are up this particular task)
Now I can see it was a change in Thunderbird, and I hate it. It's so clunky, that when enabling Large Text in Gnome (to make things more legible on the 1080p 14in laptop screen) Thunderbird looks disproportionately large compared to every other application.
It feels old, clunky and cludgy. And not in a good way (the way Vim is old, but still marvellous, or mutt is cludgy but still Just Works Everywhere).
The UI feels horribly out of place (on my vanilla Ubuntu), the UX is terribly inconsistent and after -I think- 10+ years of using it, I still have to search where to find stuff. Daily.
I've been comparing it with each and every option for the Ubuntu desktop and even webmail. Clients like Geary[1] or Roundcube [2].
Those are often unfinished; I guess mail clients are like many other software-challenges in that regard: it's easy to make the basics, the 90% that 90% of the people need. It's doable to make those basics really good (see all the webmail, electron mail and other mail clients). But it is really hard to do the last 10%, because each of the individual users has a different 10%.
And so, I find I love the UX of Geary and use Roundcube often for its simplicity and "Getting Stuff Done". But I also find that I keep going back to Thunderbird, because <insert some feature I use once a week> is only there. But, boy, it annoys me how cludgy and convoluted thunderbird then feels.
Edit: forgot to mention that a lot of the 10% things in Thunderbird are severely in my way, daily. I have an RSS reader - why is there one in Thunderbird taking up mental (and memory) space, I don't ever use the built-in IM (is it jabber?), the calendar and todo-tasks feature I don't use, but they attempt to manage my agenda/invites anyway, making me miss an occasional meeting even. I'm sure other people find the GPG being severely in the way (part of the 10% that I use often) or that archiving and offline features are clumsy, confusing and making people miss emails (another feature I often use).
-- [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary [2] https://roundcube.net/
My absolute top favorite email client was the old Opera (<=12) browsers built in email client.
My mailserver is mailinabox, though, an opinionated mailserver setup, so replacing roundcube (which comes with mailinabox) with rainloop would mean migrating my server entirely. Guess that's the downside of using an opinionated mailserver setup.
I love the UI and I hope they never make any significant changes to it.
It does have many features and therefore you have to operate them if you need them. If you don't, you don't. I don't understand how they "hurt" you when you can't even see them.
EDIT: I should have added that as much as i use (and admire) thunderbird, there are many gotchas, and it could benefit from many more adjustments and fixings. Also, i do like to live in a world that has choice, so I would be overjoyed not only for thunderbird to improve but also kmail and all other open source email clients. The more, the merrier!
But when I tried kmail I did like it other than that. However for now Thunderbird seems like the least-bad client in my testing.
I tried KMail it a few months ago, knowing how I used to love it. It is still complex, full-featured and highly configurable. Three attributes that I don't necessarily think are good attributes. I tried it for weeks, but decided that if I'm going to use a mailclient that needs constant tweaking, research and work, I can just as well stick to Thunderbird.
It also still saves hundreds of megabytes not having any K software in gnome. And still, 2020, k-software looks like :brown-emoji: on gnome.
I sort of think Google should do it with GMail, in fact.
Hope your having a great day!
But it interferes with search.
I have two ways of archiving: * Manuall mail older than 2 years off my server into a local storage. The process is somwhat clumsy, but works. * Conssitently archive anything that is done, keeping inbox(0) using the "archive" feature in TB - hotkey 'a'.
I did find that often archiving in other mailclients, or in thunderbird itself (all using IMAP, no shared storage on my machine) makes thunderbird's search index break. about 20% of the mails in my archive are not searchable. Only after hunting down the "rebuild search index feature" can it be fixed.
The fact that such a feature exists, alone is worrying in several ways.
I saw some conversations about how if you want to have a local copy of emails and be sure that server errors (or server dissappearance, as it was the case) won't affect your access to old email copies, you should manually copy them to the Local Folders section within TB.
Does anybody know what is the "best practices" for keeping access to downloaded emails and not lose them if the server closes? Should I be copying every email to the Local Folders storage?
Only issue is that the task descriptions don't render HTML and with all the crazy zoom meeting invites it is ugly. HTML in caldav is not standard but I would like the option since its a thing these days.
Example: I recently (2 months) received, say, 150 e-mails from one person. During that same period, that person has also received lots (~300) of e-mails that are in my client: ones I sent, ones they were CC-ed, etc.
Now, I need to find that pdf they sent me some time ago. It would be no problem to scour the 10 or so message I received from this adress with a pdf attached (still doable without the mimetype).
TB lets me search messages that "concern" that person, but also gives me the ones they didn't send. Would a "sent by" be too hard to provide? Quick search works a lot better than the regular search for this, it's something I do multiple times a day. I sometimes spend more than 5 minutes looking for an e-mail, then give up, load zimbra, and I'm able to find the e-mail in 10 seconds thanks to the more granular filtering available there.
1. close to tray
2. start minimized (changing shortcut properties in Windows to start minimized doesn't do anything).
3. Always keep tray icon - now it is removed when you click on it which is anoying
I am sure people will accidentally click close instead of minimize.
In the meantime, there is Minimize on Close plugin that works with v70.
Edit: Apparently I was wrong and the replacement "Smart Reply" button does show up, but only sometimes depending on context. Since Thunderbird only shows it selectively now, I did not see that when I was checking before.
So I withdraw my criticism about removing functionality, and I replace it with criticism of changing user settings during updates, replacing a well-established feature with a subtly different one, and hiding controls that are currently not applicable rather than showing them as disabled. The fact that this comment thread exists is a pretty good demonstration of why these are bad ideas.
Thing that baffles me is that you need to install an extensions to have keyboard shortcuts for moving & copying messages with autocompletion, of course the one I was using broke with the latest release ("Quick folder move"). What's the favorite these days?
Same for Lightning and G Suite calendars, but I guess this will be fixed upstream quickly.
Too bad that the formatting toolbar seems to have become visually “heavier”, with bolder lines in some icons. I’ll just have to see what the final product looks like on both my Mac and Elementary...
Finaly Tray support. The only minor thing I need i "send later". It worked through an addon but that will require a subscription(?!) now... https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jik/rewritten-add-ons-f...
If you have a master password defined, the program won't open until you've entered it.
This wasn't the case before.
- carddav plugins are broken
- mail client is nicer
I'm tired of this. Either be a PIM suite and don't break functionality, or don't.
It also looks like they added minimize to system tray, something else I found was impossible in Outlook.
I like to read an email /then/ move them to folders.
Keyconfig lets me just tap a key and it manually runs the mail filters on that selected email. Otherwise I have to drag each email to its appropriate folder, which suuucks.
I really like Thunderbird and that one of options for mail clients if I am on linux, however another electron app is a no-go for me.
Outlook... is using Microsoft Word. (I mean technical it's just Offices' document rendering engine, but for meail it's equivalent as opening a HTML file in MS Word) (Also sends RTF mail for addresses on the same Exchange server)
Although I'd note that they strip down the HTML avialible. Emails can't execute Javascript. CSS is stripped down and must be in file. (Or completely inlined)
You limited to some very old Web technology in email. (Unless Google somehow managed to convince anyone else to support AMP 4 Email)
In any case, thunderbird essentialy has a lineage going back all the way to netscape navigator (at least spiritually), so it was doing this way before electron was cool.
But some emails are mainly images with little text, and then I have to export the email.
If gmail support PGP, you could start to really use it, since you could be reasonably confident the recipient could read the message even if they have no idea what PGP was. For a plugin they would have to actively look for it.
Unfortunately Thunderbird user base is tiny but it's something
I still think TB 78 isn't enough, but it's a step into the the right direction, where we recognize that there's a brilliant system in pgp, obscured by outdated and even counterproductive security insights (such as the trust levels). It also is included by default, important for secure by default mail communication.
Firefox is indeed in the process of getting rid of XUL in favour of web technologies, but AFAIK it's not done yet.
And yes, on UNIX platforms the "XUL backend" is gtk.
https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/gmail...
https://github.com/thunderbird-conversations/thunderbird-con...
> Update: A few of you have asked how to make a contribution to Thunderbird under the new corporation, especially when using the monthly option. Please check out our updated site at give.thunderbird.net!
I want something like this for Firefox too!
Not being able to move elsewhere is a lock-in issue (Matrix has an issue for decentralised identities [1]).
I don't see why we couldn't just attach our identities to a private key. Encrypt that private key and back it up on various online providers (using PAKE so that they never see it). Use those to authenticate elsewhere. Designate one, or multiple, providers as a temporary mailbox (rather: ask them to fetch content that you are a recipient of from a DHT). People would identify you with pet names they assign to you. You could publish your key in multiple places (in my HN profile, for instance).
I think of a DHT rather than a blockchain, because blockchains don't scale. Your user account could itself be a blockchain, though, stored encrypted in the DHT.
Not sure why I haven't found such a system yet? Secure scuttlebut seems to come close, but I mostly want an authentication and message passing system, that e-mail could be re-built upon, and bridged with.
The major problems I see with slack and similar is that it is too easy to lose messages. If I click a channel, but get distracted before I can properly read or act on it, the message is effectively gone forever (unless I remember, or the next time I happen to open the channel). No other medium has the explicit "delete" (or archive or whatever) that email has. I find this way way way more useful than the "read" concept. Because read means nothing to me, even if I actually did read it (not that it was just present on my screen for a couple of seconds) it is incredibly likely that I forget about it.
Other things I like about email: - Multiple clients let me use email how it works for me. I can control how it notifies me, how it sorts my messages and everything else I care about. Slack is ok, but I don't really believe that one size fits all. And I'm not sure that it even fits many people. - I can send an email to anyone. I don't need to invite them to my workspace or channel or anything. Just enter an address and it is off.
If you push Command-LeftArrow (on Mac) it's like a back button for Slack channels.
A chat-view in email clients could counter the development, if messages from contacts have visual advantage over automated email. The Ivelope client was featured here before, but went quiet. DeltaChat tries to do it, Chat-over-IMAP is another campaign of vendors.
Problems like mailbox size, search and indexed view of attachments/content, expectations on privacy.. this friction will remain from a user perspective.
What a pitiful regression it has been since then.
[1] https://64.media.tumblr.com/6d3e8c64cd9a38e70d24c0b1b2c73cb5...
[2] https://64.media.tumblr.com/736251fc23ae5bd8afe4656345d44893...
[3] https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-47IBJRvvGzo/UMohyEJvGEI/AAAAAAAAE...
[4] https://never-obsolete.tumblr.com/tagged/windows-9x-color-sc...
Thunderbird has always followed my Linux GTK theme so I don't really know what you are complaining about.
Is it possible to turn off the dark mode in thunderbird when the os system wide dark mode is enabled
I regularly access my “non-cloud based email systems” from 8 different devices.
I'm not sure why "cloud" matters for email -- it's always been hosted on a server somewhere.
So, keeping or not keeping mails on the server is a matter of configuration in your client. I think all clients propose this choice and some will also add extra options like deleting only after a number of days since fetching.
That aside, the reduced latency of native email clients makes them much more pleasant to work with than webmail.