Thunderbird’s New Home (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Thunderbird’s New Home (2020)

blog.thunderbird.net

77 pointswebmaven72 comments

I love thunderbird, been using it since day 1, and it's the only mail client I use. But it's been going downhill at a disturbing pace. With every new version, I have to worry about what's going to be broken this time. The god awful new(ish) To/CC/BCC thing still bugs me. The number of bugs in the calender in particular is mind boggling. I tried tackling some of them myself, but their code base is not the easiest to penetrate.

It might be a good idea for the TB team to work on developer experience in order to attract some more contributors.

All software goes back. Until recently I used apple maps on carplay, I could press the big direction button in the corner to toggle the audio announcement on and off

Recently this updated, that function went away, it's now press the screen, wait, press a tiny icon, wait, press another tiny icon, wait

UX designers always have to fiddle and make things worse

I wouldn’t throw one profession under the bus, probably a team effort, designers are rarely in charge

True, you need to throw a team under the bus

> But it's been going downhill at a disturbing pace.

Mozilla announced 10 years ago (2012) that they were halting major development of Thunderbird.

This is probably why.

https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2012/7/6/3142046/mozil...

If only they actually halted major development that would be great.

The problem is that there are Mozilla developers who appear to randomly poke at the codebase and "change" stuff. One recent example is how they've changed the calendar event edit dialog. Now instead of being able to edit the event directly, you have to click on an intermediate button (so first you have a read-only dialog, then the actual edit dialog).

When I've searched why they would do that, I found that it was because one developer thought that "it's probably how it should be". They've changed something that's been that way for more than 10 years with no UX study, no discussion with users - just one guy who thought that it'd be nice to change this.

What you described sounds like a symptom of not having someone in charge leading execution of a consistent vision.

And that’s what exactly happened 10 years ago. Mozilla handing Thunderbird over to the Community to manage.

So I don’t disagree with your frustration, but am simply saying that the issue is caused by lack of centralized ownership … which Mozilla communicated a decade ago they would no longer own.

  > With every new version, I have to worry about what's going to be broken this time.

We used to be able to force IDO-8601 dates with `LC_TIME=en_DE.utf-8` but now Thunderbird ignores even that. I love Thunderbird, but with the MM-DD-YYYY date format (yes, neither little- nor big- endian but rather the day is in the fucking middle) I absolutely cannot use it.

Will this

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customize-date-time-for...

work?

Thank you, but that page is not current. The intl.date_time config options have been removed. And just last Friday I tried to change the Language & Appearance > Date and Time Formatting with no positive results. I assume that option is no longer read, even though it exists in the UI.

I also love and hate Thunderbird. Feature-wise it's king but the biggest pain for me is lost folders. It happens once every couple of years but it's very frustrating, especially if the lost local folder is the only archive left from an old email account.

What I've learned is that the mbox format used by Thunderbird is not reliable for long term email storage. If something seems wrong with a mailbox in Thunderbird (e.g. a few lost or corrupted emails), do NOT compact it, or you will lose your email forever.

The alternative storage format, maildir, is in my experience much more reliable. I've used maildir and TUI email clients for 7 years without incidents, the only downside is the steep learning curve. Thunderbird has support for maildir but it's still experimental and I wouldn't advice anyone using Thunderbird+maildir for storing emails long term.

Thunderbird's "maildir-style" support is proprietary in the sense that it's not standard – it's open source, but not like other maildir. It's still file-per-email, but they adapted their implementation to, for starters, support Windows file systems, as the more general maildir format is not supported natively on Windows due to the use of certain characters in the filenames.

So, you can use it in Thunderbird, but not share that with other applications that also support maildir, they won't be compatible.

I really wish that they would agregate to a tested storage format, like SQLite.

I've been in the exact same place as you. Just this week I decided to move to Evolution. So far, so good; I don't love everything about it, but at least it works and the calendar feels like an integrated part of it rather than a bolted on afterthought. Google calendar support out of the box too, which I need for work.

It doesn't work on Wayland for me, but that seems to be a general WebKitGTK bug and might be related to something Ubuntu- or NVidia-specific.

Evolution looks neat but for me a huge problem is the lack of crossplatform-ness. I use windows as my main desktop OS simply because I like to play a lot of games in my free time, but at the same time I use Linux for development (at work and at home), thus it's quite important that I can use certain programms on both machines.

Thunderbird seems like the only cross-platform open-source mailcient that that is at least somewhat alive.

I tried moving off thunderbird to just about every graphical open source client I could find but they were all missing some key threading functionality that I use heavily. Particularly either 1. Show the discussion tree in my inbox and 2. Pull up the entire thread for a message in my inbox (or search or any other folder).

I've stuck with Thunderbird because it doesn't have an major flaws. But it is definitely slow and clunky.

I was a Thunderbird user for maybe 15 years. Switched to Evolution, imported Thunderbird and was happy from day one. No issues.

Sorry that you are using Nvidia and therefore have Wayland issues. Using Wayland since 2 years and ditto no issues.

I use Thunderbird primarily for the offline Calendar.

I wish there was a simple offline Calendar app that is isn’t bundled with email. Too bad Sunbird isn’t active anymore.

If you use Linux, you might want to try Kalendar: https://claudiocambra.com/2022/02/12/kalendar-1-0-is-out/ (there is also some experimental work to have it work on Windows)

Disclaimer: I'm one of the core developer of Kalendar

Off topic, but it's always surprising that these business blogs never link back to the project homepage (root domain). The Thunderbird blog has zero links back to the project homepage in both header and footer.

Seems that it's mozilla.com backlinks that are important for them. Other than to Thunderbird's blog, there's only a donation link pointing at thunderbird.net. It's about money not promoting the product.

I appreciate no malware on that site though. Mozilla is so scummy nowadays that they infected their "we value your privacy" sites with Google's Analytics/TagManager spyware and force Firefox to open this crap post-updating. Thunderbird would open such sites, too, and you can't use uBlock Origin to block malware sites in Thunderbird.

Great points all around! Do I have some good news for you: uBO is available for Thunderbird! Here’s the current releases:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases/

Look for uBlock0_[version#].thunderbird.xpi

You can also verify this support from their Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin

Hey, that's awesome! I stand corrected.

More to the point, I hope it helps you! Since it’s been around so long, a lot of folks forgot or never knew that Thunderbird supports add-ons/extensions just like Firefox, or just expect the ones they want to not be available. I can only thank the devs of uBO.

same with help forums :(

I was looking for a very particular old email, and had some backed-up Thunderbird mailboxes from the mid aughts. I was surprised and dismayed to find the “modern redesigned” newest release completely incapable of opening them at all.

I don’t recall the exact version I had to download to get them to work. I suspect 67, 68 is the non-XUL redesign.

In my mind, being able to read old mailboxes should be one of the core competencies of a mail app, particularly one that speaks POP, where the download itself is a destructive act server-side. The current Thunderbird fails.

You need to know your market, most people are happy with webmail these days, and the people using mail apps often have particular needs. There’s no amount of modernizing your going to do to Thunderbird to pull in average Joe’s. The day of the stand-alone mail client, particularly one without a weird edge, has long passed.

Yes, most people won't even have a computer to run Thunderbird on.

> most people are happy with webmail these days

Webmail or Gmail?

Yes

I've been wanting to ask what mail clients people around here like to use. I use Thunderboard sort of by default, but imho it sucks. There are some amazing rants in the support forum about their repeatedly finding new ways to screw up user control over the font size. It's almost like reading about cartoon villains.

My setup is probably a bit unusual, as I use four desktop apps and webmail

1) work emails (we use self hosted zimbra) - combination of zimbra desktop + outlook. I use outlook for usual email job - I do a lot of email exchange with corpos and Outlook is best when it comes to table support in emails (copy-paste to/from Excel). When I need to search for an email or clean up my inbox (not everything can be filtered with rules) I usually swtich to Zimbra desktop (unfortunately abandoned project) for its very compact UI (I hate a lot of spacing in modern apps), very fast searching and some UI features like "mark email", press "M" for a "move emails to folder" window with search field. If only zimbra desktop had decent table support, it would be ideal for me.

2) private emails - Thunderbird. With some plugins (currently use three: "Manually sort folders", "quick folders move" and "quick folders") I can achieve Zimbra's "move emails to folder" experience. Searching is good, but thunderbird lacks good table support so a "no-go" for me when it comes to work emails.

3) mutt - from time to time - pure nostalgia, I send maybe 5 emails / month here...

3) webmails (zimbra's web interface and roundcube) when in need and without access to my laptop/pc.

I used Thunderbird, then due to lack of office/outlook integration used Evolution. It worked OK but felt unpolished and mostly unused. That said, they were generally responsive to bug reports.

Now I just use webmail everywhere. It's good enough, and eliminates most the frustrations I've had over the years with third party clients.

Interesting, I sometimes feel the same way. I like fastmail's web client, but it is non-FOSS, and my mom doesn't use fastmail. I've been looking for a mail client primarily for her, that lets her set the fonts nice and large.

See I specifically pointed my mom away from mail clients. She had called telling me her computer died(in reality, hard drive died), and asked how to download all her email again(probably 8+ years of email). She was devastated when I told her the news. Back then at least, it was ISP ran POP, and clients by default of course delete on retrieve. Told her to just use gmail going forward.

Font size and multiple other layout parts. I am using Thunderbird on 3 operating systems and adding new account is done in different places in all three up-to-date Thunderbirds. For several months now, Thunderbird tends to ignore manually inputted IMAP host address and tries to use x part of y@x e-mail address format to connect to, even if there's no A/AAAA records for it (MX exists). e-mail-related SRV records seem to be ignored.

Regarding font size, it can be changed with mouse scroll even in windows like account configuration.

I've been using Claws-mail[0] for a couple of years now. It is ugly, but gets the job done. It is simple, can index tens of thousands of email, has native support for GPG, and, most importantly, it's super lightweight.

Downsides: bad support for HTML emails; calendar integration is not good; it is single-threaded, so you can't do a lot of things simultaneously (like fetching work e-mail and browsing personal mails), but this is not a huge problem IMO.

[0] https://www.claws-mail.org/

I've been bouncing between multiple email clients myself. My biggest gripe so far is that, as someone that owns their domain and likes to make lots of email addresses for each vendor, most clients expect you to setup an "identity" first and that's all it wants to send email from. That completely breaks the whole point of one-address-per vendor, and it's annoying.

I use Geary for email, and Thunderbird for RSS feeds.

Thunderbird at least since 2005. Default setup just wastes so much space on widescreen. I use "MoreLayouts" plugin to fix that a bit and "Manually sort folders" plugin to fix folders. And some eye candy like DKIM verifier and display user agent plugins.

Still no way to disable sync/turn off accounts while keeping the mail in place.

I used Evolution for the O365 compatibility. It worked fine , even if it sometimes struggled to sync my mailbox ( i presume due to the archiving done server-side but no idea). Funnily the search worked much better than Outlook Web did.

Thunderbird has the OWL plugin for O365 compatibility. It's not free, but not expensive. And it works terrific, I've been using it since last summer.

I’m a huge fan of Mailspring (https://getmailspring.com/)

> It's almost like reading about cartoon villains.

Doesn't that point to what comments like that are really about (anywhere on the Interet)?: They are about the rhetoric - the form, the Internet rant, with the hyperbole (we need a word for the form; we all recognize it) - and about not the reality. For example, they aren't there to inform - hyperbole and rants replace information and knoweldge with wild extremes and emotion; they do not contribute to building knowledge.

Ok, I think I found the post I was remembering, and it seemed to me like understandable frustration at bad software decisions:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1269361#answer-1...

Note that the css hack discussed in the thread helps by controlling some of the sizes, but not enough of them. You end up with a mishmash on the screen.

Hmm, this one further in the thread is more of a rant:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1269361?page=2#a...

There are a few other responses to the original comment, and one of the mods deleted some naughty words from the rant, leading to this comment:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1269361?page=2#a...

This one puts the blame where it belongs:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1269361?page=3#a...

Finally, this sums up the wider situation:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1269361?page=3#a... : "Unfortunately, this is typical with Mozilla: every "upgrade" is a downgrade in some important aspect of the program."

That rings true for Firefox as well.

Ok, I'll stop pasting links from that thread here but I found it to be worth scrolling through, to see the user frustration that Mozilla derps around so much with advanced features without managing to get something as basic as font sizes working properly. I can use Thunderbird with just some annoyance here and there, but for my mom (her vision isn't so good any more), Thunderbird is unusable and there seems to be no sane way to fix it. (One of the suggestions was to fork the source code: thanks a lot).

We're agreeing, possibly. I am saying those comments are only outlets of emotion, using a common form (Internet rants), telling us about the author (who is frustrated, etc.) and very little about the problem. You say, "it seemed to me like understandable frustration".

No, I would say that the comments (at least collectively) convey the information that Thunderbird really has a problem, and that the developers are concentrating on the wrong things. It is also really true that new versions introduced regressions by breaking the workarounds for font issues in older versions, and that the devs don't seem to care.

The purpose of a mail reader is to read mail. If the fonts are too small to read and can't be enlarged without a lot of hassle, then the mail reader has a serious usability issue no matter what other features it has.

Gist

> Moving to MZLA Technologies Corporation will not only allow the Thunderbird project more flexibility and agility, but will also allow us to explore offering our users products and services that were not possible under the Mozilla Foundation. The move will allow the project to collect revenue through partnerships and non-charitable donations, which in turn can be used to cover the costs of new products and services.

> The move will allow the project to collect revenue through partnerships and non-charitable donations,

This doesn't sound good. I hope they aren't going to start including Google / general advertising in Thunderbird. I hope it doesn't turn into an about:config nightmare of disabling all this stuff.

I hate thunderbird, but I hate outlook more. I use the web outlook client and when typing it skips some key presses, I googled the issue and other users report the same. I have no idea how you screw up a textarea, but they did.

At this point, as far as GUI clients go, Thunderbird is the least worst option.

It doesn't just skip key presses, it actually invokes commands as I'm typing. Entire threads frequently get archived because of this. So annoying!

Unfortunately, using another client requires a working application ID and whatnot in active directory. Getting IT to do this isn't going to happen, they're too heads up MSFT y'know what.

You can turn off hot keys, which would probably fix this issue. I cried the day I figured out I could disable the ‘hover’ buttons on mailthreads, which I’d inadvertently used to archive / delete mail hundreds of times before. The entire UI looks pretty, but is absolutely useless.

Thunderbird's kind of crappy out of the box, but the best part of it's Moz DNA is being highly customizable and extensible.I've looked at just about every option for mail clients on linux and haven't found one with what I would consider a 'modern' feature-set, largely because the open-source model mostly precludes the sort of middle-ware servers which commercial mail clients on other platforms use to provide "magic" features. The next best thing, then, is highly-configurable mail flow control, which, with the right extensions, Thunderbird can get mostly right.

I just noticed this yesterday! I usually use the desktop Outlook client, but yesterday I got an email on my other machine, and was replying using the web version. It just randomly dropped characters as I was typing. What on earth would cause that to happen? Best I can tell is that the autocomplete functionality was struggling to keep up with what I was typing? Or there is some onKeyPress function that doesn't reliably return a character because of it?

Disabling autocomplete suggestions improves, but does not eliminate the problem. I believe you can also work around the problem by using Edge/not-Firefox. It’s clear that MS have stopped testing or caring about Firefox compatibility (if they ever did in the first place). At this point, the bug is at least months old.

Edge is proprietary and thus completely unacceptable. MSFT has hundreds of billions of dollars, surely they can make a web application work with Firefox. Testing it only in edge is sheer arrogance.

I begrudgingly use chromium whenever there's a meeting in wretched Teams. It's only because I'm using a reasonably new Thinkpad that it even works at all. My previous computer wouldn't even run chromium.

No it's not, it's entirely chromium based, anything unique to edge, is reusable by chromium project, n vice versa for chrome.

I use Firefox which I suspect is half the issue, but I think most of Microsoft’s engineering teams are falling short on quality. Live / Azure login is another pet hate.

For a long time, I was a heavy Thunderbird user. But that was a long time ago.

If Thunderbird is coming back and will have consistent ongoing development work being done on it, then I might be convinced to take another look and see if it solves some of my complaints about the more recent versions of mail.app.

Thanks for posting this!

I have not stopped using Thunderbird since 2005 and while I was a bit concerned for the short period of uncertainly about Thunderbird's development, it had no practical consequences for me. I find it works well. I find no reason to stop using it, other than since I use KDE, KMail would probably be better integrated to my desktop environment but I haven't managed to switch so far. So Thunderbird's UI from the 2000's it is… but it is really efficient and KDE Breeze's GTK theme does not fail to give it a good look.

It's just a mail client, been using it since Netscape times so can't really stop using it. It has all I need and works as it's supposed to do. And it's still being updated. I get frustraded with everything else, especially webmail clients...

Thunderbird is one of those products that is slowly being improved to death.

Title should probably be suffixed '(2020)' - not that anything has changed :P

Email clients are more or less feature-complete at this point.

Thunderbird 72 was. Since then my most important extensions are slowing drying up and away, but I treasure that v72 tarball and the extensions that I use with it.

Thunderbird is the only FOSS mail client that I managed to set up yahoo mail and gmail addresses in less than a minute. If you mail provider requires an in browser athorizaton, you are just taken there. No fuss, which is why I use it. Actually I never managed to make those addresses work with either Geary, Evolution or Kmail.

On the other hand the UX/UI is quite bad. Just try it out, you'll see what I mean.

I use thunderbird every day, and it just works. Admittedly, I just do basic stuff with it.

I remember Nylus N1 being a good mail client. Sadly they discontinued it. It was really good.

I’m quite happy with the default email client on my Mac, but I’m looking for a good mail client for Windows

I was a fan of Nylas N1 too until I knew they used to send email auth to their servers.

One of the authors forked Nylas to create Mailspring which does most of the stuff client side.

Long time thunderbird user, recently switched to Postbox. No regrets.

If they hadn't screwed with it, I'd still be using thunderbird. I don't know why they became so anti-user.

Seems like postbox is more Apple focused. Used it for a while but couldn't find any feature that would convince me to switch.

Seems to be no Linux version of postbox unfortunately.

Isn't postbox just a thunderbird fork?

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