Mozilla Thunderbird Beta now supports Matrix chat | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla Thunderbird Beta now supports Matrix chat

matrix.org

438 pointsjakecopp157 comments

Is there a hidden feature in Thunderbird, or an add-on, that allows easily sending replies from the email address to which message was received? Without having to have those email addresses already added as accounts/identities.

And also writing fresh emails from specific emails addresses maybe by easily editing the “from” field.

i.e if I had used an email netflix@mydomain.tld to register on Netflix and I am replying to an email received on that then the reply should automatically bo sent from that email.

Apple mail allows this by adding such email addresses in advance. I already have almost 20 in the from list. It’s a mess. Couldn’t find any other generic client (iPhone or Mac) that does it.

No disrespect to your question - it is fair and reasonable - but why is the top comment on a post about Thunderbird's Matrix integration essentially a tech support question about a completely unrelated thing in Thunderbird?

Because it's a niche feature barely anyone will use or is interested in using and so they have nothing to say that would be on topic. But, this being HN, people still use the post to piggyback on with their issues or requests regarding Thunderbird in general.

Actually, this happens faily often. Each time some popular project gets a post like "php 8 released", "net 6 released", typically, what should be discussed is the theme of the release, new features, changes etc., but what the top posts end up being is just people arguing how php is shit and java/kotlin is better than net yadda yadda. Seems to be natural in open discussions, also happens on Reddit.

Yup - "Reply with this identity when delivery headers match". Set it to something like "*@example.com", and you're good to go.

That needs more identities to be added in advance. Just like Apple Mail. I want to avoid that.

How else would that work, though? Thunderbird doesn't know what SMTP server and credentials to use without you telling it.

It knows the domain already and SMTP credentials are already saved.

I’ve already set creds for abc@domain.tld, xyz@domain.tld and pr course as usual I can reply, send new emails from these addresses.

But I should also be able to send emails/reply from pqrs/dfg/john/tom/ram/bond/bill/etc@domain.tld. Of course reply will be automatic but sending new email might just require changing the from field.

It can have a setting that “if a from address identified isn’t already added as an identity, it should use the SMTP creds of matching domain”. It won’t work for something like Gmail, Outlook.com (I mean one anyway can’t have catch-all on these domains) but would work great for personal emails.

This is what I meant.

Because without such a feature - catchall feature is often rendered very limited. Even iCloud+ supports replying - id you’ve to send a fresh mail from a catchall/disposable (or service/provider/business specific) email address you’re out of luck.

My thunderbird has an option for “modify from …” which lets me write whatever I want. On mobile, can’t check exact text. I do remember I had to reggae a switch in the preferences to make that option appear, don’t remember which one - have been using it for years.

Just checked, it's called "Customize From Address ..."

Cool! Thank you! Works great. Just have to remember to get rid of my signature as it has all my personal contact info lol

Thunderbird has a mobile app as well? The website says it doesn’t.

I was away from my laptop on mobile writing the message, so I couldn’t check what the option was called on my laptop….

It used to work fine with an extension called Virtual Identity. That no longer works (hasn't been updated in a long time, and I'm not sure if it could be made to work again).

No it doesn't, you can use a wildcard.

Holy cow, I too have been looking for this for ages! *@my.domain in there and it works!

Thank you!

I feel like I had this working in Evolution once?

In reality I found that 99% of the time I only use aliases for receiving and filtering incoming email. On the one day a month I need to send from netflix@mydomain.com, I just sack up and add it as an account alias. Le sigh.

Of course, mutt does this right:

https://gitlab.com/muttmua/mutt/-/wikis/MuttFaq/Header#how-t...

…but now there’s a new problem in that GitLab’s deep linking seems to be broken. Yay.

It’s not Thunderbird, but I do this in Fastmail (web or app) using their “masked email” feature. Replies come from the same alias created uniquely for my Netflix account.

https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/4406536368911-Ma...

You can do this without masked email too. I have a wildcard alias setup so *@mydomain.tld are accepted, and I have a wildcard sending identity *@mydomain.tld

If you have a sending identity that matches with the address the email was received, on the app and webui it will reply from that address.

Disclaimer: I work at Fastmail, but not on the webui or app.

Fastmail does SUCH a great job managing multiple addresses and domains. My favorite feature is the auto-BCC so that when I'm sending from a joint e-mail address I share with my wife, she always gets a copy.

Thanks, I didn't know this was an option. Turning on now. :)

I am a Fastmail customer for 2-3 years. That was the reason, why I switched to you guys!

I've been trying to decide if I should switch from GApps to Fastmail. This is the killer feature I wanted along with unlimited domains, looks like I'll be transferring over soon.

> I have a wildcard sending identity *@mydomain.tld

Uh. Neat, I’ve been adding aliases individually as I needed them.

I did that too when I used Fastmail, was a right pain, wish I'd known!

It never occurred to me to try a wildcard. I was getting sick of adding sending identities in fastmail. Thanks for the tip!

In case any Mutt users are interested, here’s how this can be accomplished.

    # When replying to an email, use the To: address of the original email as the
    # From: address in the reply (requires that the To: address be recognised by
    # Mutt as being one of my alternate addresses).
    set reverse_name

    # Regex to let Mutt know what other email addresses are used by me.
    alternates @example

I had been thinking of writing a script to dynamically create a file of alternative addresses from /etc/aliases but this isn’t necessary. There’s no need to individually list all my alternate addresses as – currently – all name@example.com and name@example.info addresses are me so it is enough to just match the `@example` regular expression.

Edit: For composing a new message (not a reply), I have this set:

    # When composing a message, edit the headers along with the message body.
    # This should make it easier to see that the correct From address is being used
    # and to fix this if necessary.
    set edit_headers

I'm just trying this add-on which seems to work, ReplyAsOriginalRecipientUp: https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/reply...

That’s how always used Thunderbird. I can even switch identities when replying, if I want to do that. Also, you can have multiple identities for the same account, if you have aliases.

I can have identities in Apple Mail but that would mean dozens, hundreds of identities have to be added. Add netflix@mydomain, reddit@, hnyc@, amazon@,… and so on.

Except one or two main identities I don’t want to pre-add these emails. Because I’m aware it’s already possible at least in Apple Mail.

I do my email address like you. One of the things I was thankful for with Fastmail is that it does this automatically for me (sets the FROM address when I hit reply to whatever the receipt address was). I hate when you hit reply and your mail client sends it from the default address and then the recipient bounces it because it doesn't match anything in their records.

I have indeed heard about it and it’s on the radar but not having any trial is a bummer. Btw what’s that 600 email (alias?) limit?

Also, wouldn’t want to buy a domain just to try. On top of that they don’t allow domains on their starting paid tier (which already costs 4 times current paid mail host) and my email resource usage doesn’t warn more than that.

Can you please tell us how the UI is?

E.g. You registered on Reddit and just used a random/disposable/freshly thought of email address like “reddit@kingcharles.tld”.

Now if you receive an email from Reddit or anybody on the email I guess you can just hit reply and it will be replied from that Email — for this you would have to come back to Fastmail app/dashboard ans add that “reddit@…” as an identity/email or you don’t have to as long as the domain matches (and of course it does, that’s how you received mail in the first place)?

And what if you’re not replying? You’re initiating an email to someone but suddenly want to use “another-addr-random@kingcharles.tld”? You can just set it at the time of sending the mail you this email address has to be added as an identity/alias?

You can choose it at time of either sending a new email or replying. From the sending identity drop down, pick *@kingcharles.tld, and then it will populate the From field with <@kingcharles.tld> and you type in front of the @ sign whatever you want, no prior setup.

>E.g. You registered on Reddit and just used a random/disposable/freshly thought of email address like “reddit@kingcharles.tld”. >Now if you receive an email from Reddit or anybody on the email I guess you can just hit reply and it will be replied from that Email

Yes, that's exactly how it works. I just went and checked it. I have one catchall alias set up with a name of King Charles on *@kingcharles.tld. Anything that comes into that domain like reddit@kingcharles.tld I can reply to and the FROM will be King Charles <reddit@kingcharles.tld> without me having to do anything. [It actually shows it as three textboxes "King Charles", "reddit", "kingcharles.tld" you can edit]

I pay $5 a month which I consider a bargain.

Virtual identity was exactly what you are asking for

https://www.absorb.it/virtual-id

Unfortunately it seems to have been abandonded

Damn! It indeed is exactly that. And yes, that’s abandoned. But thanks anyway!

You can change the from address to whatever you want when you send an email.

In the "From" drop down, you can choose any of your existing addresses or to customise it.

It feels to me that the problem is that email addresses are considered to be the identity. In your (and mine!) case, the domain is our identity, and the individual addresses are just different inboxes. Email clients need an option for that.

You don't need an add-on for that. I have a plain TB 91 setup with three identies configured for three different mail servers. When replying I can choose from the identities, and in the drop down there is another option "Customize From Address" which enables editing the address without creating another identity. It's a bit hidden, but should be there without an add-on. Doesn't work for new mails though, in this case the option is there but disabled.

GP (and I) don't want to configure multiple 'identities' though. I (and probably GP) create new email addresses 'on the fly', for a specific shop I order from once say, and if there's something I need to reply to I want (possibly need from their CRM's perspective) to reply from the address they already have for me.

Embarrassingly largely for this reason, I wrote my own client. (Good fun though, and not the only reason.)

I would love such a feature too. currently I have to either add a ton of identities or do a lot of unnecessary manual copy and pasting.

AFAIK, you can edit the from field for fresh emails, when using the user-defined-from-option below your identities. Nevertheless, when you have a conversation, it would be much easier if there would be an option to use the recipients address.

> And also writing fresh emails from specific emails addresses maybe by easily editing the “from” field.

that it has.

Firefox Relay solves this by giving you a replies@relay.firefox.com for the Reply-To. Works great for me for a dollar a month.

But of course I understand the desire to selfhost such a solution.

If you don't add them in advance, how could it tell the difference between your addresses, and a mailing list, or if there are multiple addresses.

The crossover I never knew I wanted but am glad to see

Does anyone know of any services that offer all the backing services for add-ons for thunderbird: WebDAV for filelink, CalDAV, CardDAV, (and now) Matrix?

How much would you be willing to pay for it?

I provide Matrix hosting (as well as XMPP and ActivityPub Mastodon) on Communick [0].

At the moment I'm more focused on taking these services to offer custom domain hosting, and personally I've been staying away from servers and using DecSync [1] + syncthing to get my calendars and contacts on my devices [2], so I haven't thought about adding a DAV server to the mix on Communick. But if you tell me there is any actual demand, I would definitely consider it.

[0] https://communick.com

[1] https://github.com/39aldo39/DecSync

[2] https://raphael.lullis.net/thinking-heads-are-not-in-the-clo...

I was about to ask the same thing -- I run a service that offers DAV and was wondering if I should add CalDAV and CardDAV (I've been wanting to do it for a while) and offered this bundled service...

You might want to send that question jakecopp 's way though! :)

Oh, so you are the guy from Vadosware? That's cool, I really liked your idea of using AirTable to power the landing page of your site.

Oh I am -- thanks for visiting the site! -- it was Baserow[0] and since then I've actually finally gotten a chance to try out NocoDB[1][2] as well!

I'm a heavy Thunderbird (+ maddy[3]) user, and have been wondering lately if I'm missing anything by not having CardDAV/CalDAV

[0]: https://baserow.io/

[1]: https://nocodb.com/

[2]: https://nomorepizzaparties.com/accounting.html

[3]: https://foxcpp.dev/maddy/

NextCloud is what I think of when I think of self hosting a webdav, caldav, etc. setup.

Ahhh but I wasn’t thinking of quite self Hosting but a managed service… do businesses use Nextcloud in that way I wonder.

Hetzner offers this [1]. For less than 5 EUR a month you get 1 TB of storage plus their managed Nextcloud!

[1] https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share

Thanks for sharing, I have been looking for a reasonably priced managed NextCloud solution, but had a hard time finding any. NextCloud should focus more on promoting the actors that offers a simple way to get started. I tried contacting several of their premium partners listed on their webpage, but none of the scandinavian ones offered anything ready to use.

Hi I went through the faq and it wasn’t mentioned, but does the “storage share powered by nextcloud” Hetzner service, include all the other features of nextcloud as well like chat, etc?

I last used it at a start-up a few years ago (I self-host everything now) so my memory is a bit hazy but yes, I remember the option at that time to add and enable any apps you wanted available from Nextcloud's app catalog.

Thanks for verifying guys!

Yes, it does

When I tried to sign up they required me to send in a picture of my passport. Is this just me or did you guys have to do the same?

Signed up from Norway, did not have to give more than the usual name, address and email. No passport.

It's the unfortunate reality of many VPS providers nowadays. To be fair, in moat cases Hetzner will also let you pay up front to validate.

There are managed NextCloud hosts. https://nextcloud.com/providers/

My Italian ISP, Fastweb, offers a service called wowspace for like 9,95€/years that offers unlimited cloud storage via a clunky web-app.

Turns out that's really a nextcloud with mustaches, and if you fiddle enough with the web ui you can extract a login token to use the desktop client.

I haven't bothered because i already run nextcloud at home... but yeah, businesses use nextcloud in a number of ways.

I haven't heard of anyone that hosts both Matrix & Mail/Calendar/Contacts.

That would be a really interesting enterprise solution though - effectively replacing Slack/Teams for internal comms!

Just add some LDAP services for identity management, authentication and it's fairly close to the project I'm on right now. A cursory look at getting a matrix server running didn't work out yet though, with issues for clients to recognise the server at all. I don't mind sysops work but right now a set&forget solution would spare some needed energy.

The Thunderbird+Matrix integration sounds like a match - I hope that holds up in practice as well!

Edit: as others mentioned, Nextcloud has the features.

Do you mind if I send you an email? I am looking for people/companies that might be interested in having a managed matrix provider.

Yeah, it might be a hard sell compared to GApps for most businesses but I'd like to think there are is a subset that would want the F/OSS solution!

I wonder if bundling FF Send would also be useful, see there's a filelink provider for that as well which is interesting.

Fastmail has been that all-in solution. They host Mail/Calendar/Contacts, and they used to host XMPP/Jabber. But unfortunately they made the decision to shut down XMPP (https://fastmail.blog/historical/shutting-down-our-xmpp-chat...) and probably for the same reason won't get into Matrix.

> For intra-business messaging, most companies seem to be sticking with proven multi-user protocols like IRC rather than XMPP Multi-User Chat (MUC), or are moving to more sophisticated proprietary collaboration platforms like Slack.

That sounds true as of 2015, however Matrix now has a large following in open source & in some governments & businesses. I can't find a list of orgs using Matrix but that would be interesting to see.

May I interest you in Matrix (and/or XMPP) for messaging and Mastodon (for social media) on Communick[0]?

I've done some experiments with running an email server as well, but I don't think I would be able to run it as reliably and cost-effectively as the more established players.

> replacing Slack/Teams for internal comms

Also, Mastodon (or Pleroma) can work as a substitute for Yammer.

[0] https://communick.com

Unfortunately matrix is a no go for regulated business (read: you might be required to monitor employees and hand over chats to govt.)

Matrix development is mainly funded by providing deployments for regulated business(!) - ie the French state, German armed forces, UK government, DOD etc. If you search for “audit bot” in https://element.io/enterprise/pricing#features you’ll see all the stuff available for enterprisey deployments from Element.

Thanks!

There is some development in that area. This is from an Element dev, apparently. Not sure if this is very up to date as it’s from about a year ago, but it seems highly topical.

https://brendan.abolivier.bzh/matrix-retention-policies/

https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/develop/docs/mess...

If need be, you can require the use of a Matrix client that doesn’t support end to end encryption, or has support for it disabled. Nothing stopping you from doing that, almost all the clients are FOSS.

Even if End to End encrypted, the client has access to the decrypted content and could log it.

Or add a keylogger/eventstore into the Matrix client.

You might be, but you might also live in a country where this isn't a thing.

For some subsets the financial sector, that's highly unlikely.

NextCloud does all this, afaik.

NextCloud does all that, I think?

>The crossover I never knew I wanted but am glad to see

You can also use IRC and XMPP in Thunderbird.

If anyone from the Thunderbird team is reading this can you please default the timezone in preferences to match the OS.

Thunderbird has a proper bugtracker.

This bug has been in there for 10 years.

Ah, classic Mozilla.

Classic open source user. They take the free (as in beer) software and complain that nobody works for them.

Mozilla makes money hand over fist and they squander it. This is unrelated to their finances or the source model of the product.

Mozilla takes donations, so it isn't necessarely free. Also Mozilla is wondering why no one wants to use their software, this is one of the reasons why.

>Mozilla takes donations, so it isn't necessarely free.

This is a wild take. Taking donations doesn't invalidate the fact that it is available to everyone for free. By definition donations are voluntary. No part of Thunderbird is behind paywalls of any sort.

Wonder why they didn't think about feature funding. As in, letting people donate to specific features.

Donations are a small part of their income.

Donations to Mozilla which go to Firefox may be a small part of Firefox's income.

Donations directed to Thunderbird go to Thunderbird, and are 99% of Thunderbird's income.

The income streams are not mixed.

Hmm. Maybe they have already experimented with "Donate to this specific feature if you really like it" style focused donation campaigns.

It's a reasonable request though. Something that definitely shouldn't cost them much to fix.

Hard to know! Composing emails in tabs seemed easy without internal knowledge, but the code turned out to be a trainwreck, to the point that even a funded attempt failed. I doubt it will ever be fixed.

They didn’t do that, though.

What is the current behavior? I never noticed any problems, is that just ignorance on my side?

I'd settle for ungimping the new messages badge, bringing back the older (more compact) tree widget (or at least making it easily styled), or at the very least fixing the whole compacting a folder makes it disappear until restart thing (especially since Thunderbird is now very aggressive about suggesting I compact my folders).

I upgraded from ~60 to 91 and it's been nothing but regressions. I couldn't possibly care any less about a chat client when the actual text editor still doesn't let you do something as basic as toggle word wrap. It's almost as if Mozilla's completely forgotten about core competencies.

"I couldn't possibly care any less about a chat client when the actual text editor still doesn't let you do something as basic as toggle word wrap"

It should be easy to do as well, given that they have an option for it in about:config.

> toggle word wrap

Do they accept PRs?

I don't know how building Thunderbird is now, but last time I tried it I came away with the distinct impression that ascending a character in Nethack is probably easier.

I've never ascended a character in Nethack...

Hey that's unfortunate to hear. There might be some changes soon in the documentation how to build Thunderbird. The build process might become easier soon too. For the current process to build Thunderbird check out https://developer.thunderbird.net/thunderbird-development/bu.... If you do find the time check it out and open issues with your problems here https://github.com/thundernest/developer-docs. Thanks!

You know the last time I dared to even think about potentially engaging the Thunderbird team I regretted it pretty severely. The new messages badge was changed to an unread message count. The official response on the PR (that someone else had opened) was along the lines of "screw you, we know best how to use an email client" and even making it configurable was not in the cards.

In that context why on earth would I bother trying digging into documentation of questionable quality to figure out an archaic build process? Mind you in the decade or so since that issue was raised the badge has been made configurable and can show up to 99 unread or new messages. Nobody ever has more than 99, right?

Trying to dig into the theme stuff was… interesting. The documentation is exceptionally sparse, but the tooling itself was terrible. Things fail silently which means that you often have to restart to render any changes to your theme (instead of uninstalling or reloading it). Of course you'll probably also have to manually reload the theme since it won't persist across restarts if there was some sort of silent failure.

All in all interacting with Thunderbird feels more like interacting with a black box than an open source project. So no thanks, I'll pass on that kind of user hostility.

It is unfortunate, I agree. You'd think that after playing the game off and on, sometimes quite intensively, for three decades now, I'd have been able to finish it once at least.

Not...sure...if...want?

I use Thunderbird, and I appreciated past "baked-in" additions like PGP support, but, I kinda just want my email client to be an email client.

From looking at the diff, it seems to be in the same vein as the IRC, XMPP, Google Talk(!), and some weird network I've never heard of "Odnoklassniki" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odnoklassniki)

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/instant-messaging-and-c...

So, in other words: it merely expands the already shipping chat clients to be just one more

Fair enough, I guess. I never realized Thunderbird already supported those. I always had HexChat, Pidgin, or Fractal for IRC/GTalk/Matrix at the ready instead.

It has a good (at least for my purposes) RSS reader, too, which is actually my primary use for it lately

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-subscribe-news-feed...

Thunderbird supports irc?

It's called Chatzilla, it's not great nor widely used.

On the contrary; Thunderbird's chat has built-in IRC support which you can use without installing something like ChatZilla [1][2].

It's not very good, though, including warts such as automatically attempting an SASL login with your credentials, even if you've never registered a services account on the IRC network [3].

[1] https://i.imgur.com/LQrzpoy.png

[2] https://i.imgur.com/X8idAGl.png

[3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1618061

It's been a chat client for such a long time that I think it makes sense to add Matrix support, which is a much more modern protocol than the others supported. I think we've all just forgot that it has chat features, since it only supported protocols like Google Talk, IRC, and XMPP.

Thunderbird also has support for Usenet out of the box. I think the product sees itself more as a complete communication program than just an email program, even if that is what most people use it for.

Chat came to Thunderbird for free - it was developed by a different team and they offered to integrate it, and did so.

This is great for users who are looking for unified communications. Further, chat sessions are index searchable if the user has enabled it.

I imagine this could be useful in workplaces that already use Thunderbird and want to introduce Matrix without the support burden of new desktop software. Potentially cool?

Yep, also nice for parents who already use Thunderbird and now (well, once it exits beta) I can perhaps convince them to use matrix more consistently.

The nitty gritty:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1712721

https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/15485902a00b

https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D141266 (the unified version of those two links)

> Almost complete end-to-end encryption support

Now that is a shocker! I tried hard to find e2e supporting GUI clients and Element was the only viable option.

I have grown to hate these "obese" webapps. I say that because they don't freaking need 4GB ram to send messages between people! I have Teams and several browsers already fighting to the death, I am forced to open slack to multiple groups in my browser except now those tabs are 3GB+ and if I run Element, same thing! Man I miss IRC.

Sorry for the rant. I am sure Thinderbird with Matrix won't need no more than 2GB /S

Fluffy.chat supports E2EE and is cross-platform: https://gitlab.com/famedly/fluffychat

(Though it might not fit your needs completely, as it's written in Flutter, and Flutter is pretty bloated too...)

https://nheko-reborn.github.io/ supports it too?

XMPP clients like Gajim or Dino don't use a lot of RAM and support modern E2EE (OMEMO).

My problem with omemo is it is too opportunistic. But thanks

What do you mean by opportunistic?

This is really great for family members and friends you want to turn on to alternative protocols for chatting. My wife already uses Thunderbird for email and calendar. Now Matrix is just a few clicks away.

Didn't Mozilla drop Thunderbird to community ?

There were several options explored, but Thunderbird is now a new subsidiary owned by Mozilla. https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/30/mozilla_thunderbird_h...

A nice addition to the currently existing embedded clients for IRC, XMPP, Twitter (for some reason?), and Google Talk (infiltration of Alphabet, gotta love that).

Way back when, when it was still called Google Talk, wasn’t it almost just XMPP? Alphabet wasn’t even a thing it was still Google. You can take off your tinfoil hat now :-)

This should be an add-on vs. being integrated in the app. Better still would be a wholly separate app. Thunderbird is for email.

I am not a matrix fan, but I have to point out that thunderbird has had IRC and XMPP support for ages so it is not out of character to add another open instant messaging service (using IRC or XMPP on thunderbird felt underwhelming, though, I was never sure who was the target for this).

> I have to point out that thunderbird has had IRC and XMPP support for ages so it is not out of character to add another open instant messaging service

Sure and Thunderbird should relegate both IRC and XMPP to community maintained plugins. Ultimately developer time is a zero sum game and Thunderbird is wasting finite resources on fluff while neglecting the core of what's supposed to be an e-mail client.

They’ve had a chat client for quite some time.

They just added a protocol.

As a not-current-user, I can’t in good conscience +1 the should part of this. But I was definitely baffled by why this app would have this feature built in.

Is there a practical way to run Thunderbird on Android?

I really like thunderbird, and I used it for a long time, but now I am using mutt.

I realized that I was spending a lot of time in the terminal anyway (using vim as my daily driver) and it did fit me.

What I really like, is that you can script everything, create macro... It is hard to setup (too me like a week to tweak), but now I can do everything a lot faster with less overhead that what I did with thunderbird.

I still recommend thunderbird for less tech savvy users and I hope it will have a bright future.

I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. Having used Mutt for a while around the turn of the millennium, I returned to it about 5 years ago and I could have written this comment myself.

In my time using graphical mail clients, I’ve used Outlook Express, Eudora, Netscape Messenger, Sylpheed and Thunderbird. Thunderbird was my favourite of them all and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to others.

Probably being downvoted for being completely irrelevant to the topic at hand (Thunderbird doing Matrix).

(Not downvoted by me, so just guessing here.)

I’ve wondered for a while, how does mutt work for HTML-formatted email and other MIME types? I compose my own emails with plain text, but plenty of my colleagues as well as the various mailing lists, official emails, and other services that I receive communications with use email which looks like a web page, and I can’t really give that up.

You are not worried about security issues ?

E-mail really needs a client with (html-less) markdown support !

Nobody stops you from sending text/markdown MIME type. It wouldn't even be hard to render both HTML and plaintext from markdown. "Just do it"

The hard part is to fix anything in most common e-mail clients, let alone add something new. One example being Thunderbird - notoriously stale tickets, undocumented codebase and nearly impossible to get anything merged.

What I do is have HTML messages piped through 'w3m --dump'. 99% of the time this results in a usable representation of the message. The other one percent of the time, it's just another couple of keystrokes to load the content in your web browser.

By default I use lynx, which is a bit better than w3m with some content (might be my config), otherwise I have a keystroke to load the message in firefox, but with newsletter adding "view in browser button" more and more, I nearly never use it.

I don't want to setup my email with TB just to try it out, can someone please explain how this works?

We can chat from within TB client using Matrix? So we'd need to be using Matrix (instead of Slack for example) to take advantage of this? Or is there some kind of built-in Matrix chat inside TB?

Also a question for people who use TB - is it possible to use it for teams? So to "delegate" emails for example, or "comment" on emails?

To your first question, you can setup new mail account, new chat account, etc. so it's separated anyway.

It's a matrix client that you use to connect to a matrix home server

This is quite cool… thanks Tbird team!

I played around with Matrix, but it seemed to have a far too disproportionate number of furry porn channels for anything I'd want anywhere my e-mail

Matrix is a federated protocol, so it depends on what server you use (including self-hosting your own). Not using it because a server has a lot of furry porn rooms would be like not using email because hotmail has furry porn.

For what it's worth, I've self-hosted a matrix server for years for my family and friends, have participated in a reasonable number of rooms on the flagship matrix.org server, and have never run into any furry porn.

Don't go on the internet.

a friend wants to know what server this was...

Probably matrix.org. there are some sketchy rooms on that instance.

As much as I used to love Mozilla, I don't know if I can trust them with my e2ee (chat/etc) client...

don't trust, verify! Thunderbird is open sourced!

Code involving encryption is critical and also notoriously easy to get wrong. There aren't very many people on the planet who could do a meaningful audit of something as complex as Thunderbird.

Or more likely, pay someone to verify it for you!

Or more likely, use it and hope for the best...

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