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Comment by sudobash1 | Hacker News Reader

> One of the core philosophies behind the development of Thunderbird 102 was doing more with less.

> ...you’ll find out-of-box support for the popular, decentralized chat protocol Matrix in Thunderbird 102

Personally, I see these two statements as being directly contradictory. I'm glad to see Thunderbird's maintenance continuing well, but I want it to be a focused app. On the other hand, I have been glad to have out of the box Lightning integration, so perhaps I will come to enjoy the Matrix addition as well.

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> well, but I want it to be a focused app

Best of the both worlds can be achieved, for example, with good extension support. That way, Thunderbird devs can focus on a set of core features, while the community handles the rest.

Also, why not look Thunderbird as a Communication Software instead of just an Email Client?

Let's just face the fact here: email is dying. Once it was one of the most important tools for communicating on the Internet, now days for majority of people, it's just something comes with a Google/Microsoft/Apple account.

The protocols (POP3/SMTP/IMAP) are heavily outdated as well, and no one is seriously improving it in order to make them more fitting for today's needs (by improving, I mean to make it more real-time, more multi-media friendly, and more efficient so it can transmit a huge amount of data simultaneously at lighting speed). Just take look how many improvement has been done to HTTP as a comparison, it's sad that email protocols received so little loves.

At this circumstances, I would say any optimization done to the ecosystem is welcome. Also, I like the new interface more, IMO it makes Thunderbird at least 10 years younger.

Well the solution to old email protocols is JMAP, which Fastmail supports. But it's going to probably take time until JMAP support really picks up with both mail providers and client developers.

Based on what I've read from RFC8620, their approach is quite smart. It's basically turning email protocol into a set of HTTP RPCs, thus shifts all the transport-related technical problems away.

The downside is that, JSON codes creates redundancy, sometime the redundancy is bigger than the meaningful data itself. But on the other side, you can now host an email server behind a web CDN. I like the development overall.

JMAP was largely designed by Bron, the CEO of Fastmail, and his team.

> with good extension support

Except that Thunderbird has been actively holding back its own extension support, diverting people to the silly "WebExtensions" and making it more difficult to load and run regular extensions.

(In Firefox it's even worse - it seems you can't load regular extensions at all these days.)

> Let's just face the fact here: email is dying. Once it was one of the most important tools for communicating on the Internet, now days for majority of people, it's just something comes with a Google/Microsoft/Apple account.

It is not dying, but rather - powerful commercial interests are trying to assassinate it. These companies love to control your private data, analyze it, sell it, pass it on to the government (Snowden revelations), and use it to market stuff to you. We all need to make a concerted effort to change this state of affairs.

The only "improvement" to HTTP I'm aware of is HTTP/2, which is just plain retarded. HTTP/3 is the same thing but implemented correctly, and is barely used at all.

Both are overengineered systems designed to solve one thing only: establish multiple reliable transmissions streams between two endpoints while only doing the handshake once.

It does very little that's actually useful in practice.

What do you mean by "more real-time"? Email is instant, unless you have a SEG in front of your server scanning everything. Do you want email to be chat? If so, I'd say maybe you don't really understand email.

"Email is dying" - one of those statements folks keep making while the number of email messages sent/received each year continues to grow. There's a lot wrong with email protocols (it's still stupidly easy to craft very convincing phishing emails, and most junk filters are dangerously bad), but what's the alternative for the most common use cases? There's no other protocol where you can just hand over or publish your address in order to receive important/ structured/persistent information from another party. It doesn't require signing up to some single proprietary messaging platform and the fact it's existed for 50 years gives reasonable confidence it will still be around in another 50.

Ah yes, Matrix support added before Exchange support!

Exchange support is probably ridiculously hard because I can’t imagine there’s all that many open source implementations for it.

Matrix support is probably a ton easier.

Besides, matrix is designed to be implemented by multiple parties. Exchange isn’t. In fact, exchange is almost certainly the opposite.

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

Believe there are libraries available as well.

The exchange support for Evolution never worked well for me. There was always something that didn't sync, didn't get detected, or wasn't supported.

I don't blame the devs, Exchange is a proprietary standard so you can't expect it to work well. It's like the reverse-engineered drivers for hardware the manufacturer doesn't bother to write Linux support or sufficient documentation for: it doesn't work great, but that's despite the devs' best effort, not because of it.

> The exchange support for Evolution never worked well for me.

it has been working beautifully for me in the past 6-7 years

including calendar and contacts

> the manufacturer doesn't bother to write Linux support or sufficient documentation for

you mean documentation, like this?

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/client-developer/w...

Microsoft has many flaws, but not writing documentation it's not usually one of them.

In addition to Evolution mentioned in another reply, KDE's KMail supports exchange (through Akonadi), and it seems to work quite well for me.

The exchange protocol is like CORBA and the US tax system got together and had a baby. You’d also need an exchange server to test it with, and running an exchange server isn’t trivial.

You can simply implement ActiveSync though and test against a free Microsoft account, which also uses Exchange for mail.

> Exchange support is probably ridiculously hard because I can’t imagine there’s all that many open source implementations for it.

There are at least two, based on EWS (Exchange Web Services):

- evolution-ews (Gnome)

- akonadi-ews (KDE)

Honest question: is exchange support still relevant nowadays?

A lot of companies seem to have switched to Office365 which is not the same thing and most of the one I have worked with block third-party clients in their security policies.

I've always used Exchange support to include Exchange Online support and yes that's very important. I would switch to Thunderbird the day they announced full Exchange support.

Office365 is pretty much just Exchange underneath. And tons of larger orgs still use on-prem Exchange. Microsoft just announced the next version of on-premise Exchange for launch in 2024.

As cloud costs ratchet up and the weaknesses become more apparent, I suspect you'll see orgs start migrating back away from the cloud.

Unfortunately yes. Some organizations (like mine) use Office365 and disable IMAP/SMTP, so the only way to interface to the mail server is via Exchange :(

You'd be surprised. In certain sectors, companies prefer to keep as little as possible of their sensitive information in the cloud, emails included. Running their own exchange server is a common way to do that.

This. I've been looking for a new Exchange client since Outlook Web stopped properly supporting Firefox. I reached immediately for Thunderbird, but switched away quickly because of the need to pay for (somewhat clumsy) Exchange integration. If Owl were free, I wouldn't mind the long delays or weird synchronization issues. As a subscription service, I'll take my business elsewhere.

There's DavMail ( http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ ) - which you can use with Thunderbird or any other client.

How is OWA not working for you on FF? (Genuinely curious)

OWA has a known issue with Firefox on Linux where it incorrectly believes that Ctrl is pressed while typing an email. This results in frequent missed characters and spurious actions, including moving focus to the search bar, archiving messages, saving the current message as a draft and closing it, etc. This makes OWA extremely frustrating to use. Another issue with OWA is the unhelpful completions (which I've noted before on HN), which in my experience seem to be related to the spurious actions (more suggested completions = more spurious actions)

Finally, so this is what was happening.

What specific long delays or weird synchronization issues do you experience? I just bought the plugin but don't notice any yet with ~7000 mails. Did you find a good alternative? I read above that using DavMail as a proxy can also work.

Matrix support while the editor itself is left to rot. I finally switched away from self-hosted to Proton. Buh bye thunderbird!

you not need that. Ask to enable SMTP on the exchange server, and use any email client with it.

To be fair, Matrix is a very email-like protocol. I think it makes sense to have it in an email client, especially if you're going to have RSS feeds as well.

Agreed, we should take them both out. :-)

To be honest though, I'm interested in how the Matrix support will look. While I think the Element client is nice, and certainly the best of the Matrix clients I've tried, I wouldn't mind not having to have that during work hours so much.

For RSS, I'm sticking with Newsblur though!

Thank you for the tip with newsblur! I'm struggling to see pricing info. How much is the subscription?

It's about two thirds of the way down the page of https://newsblur.com/ (when you're not logged in).

Paid account is US$36/year.

You can sign up with a free try-before-you-buy account to give it a go first, though.

It makes sense in the context of the program being a spinoff of the Netscape suite (or early Mozilla suite) which had multiple parts including the browser. After all this program still has a NNTP client jammed in it, adding matrix is simply a matter of modernizing what was already there (the original IRC client).

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