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Comment by roomey | Hacker News Reader

There is of course a flood of negative comments...

So in the interest of balance I have to say thunderbird is a excellent program. I use it as my daily driver in work and for personal use.

It has so many features that puts me, the user, in control that I totally take them for granted until I have to use outlook for something.

I use it in a multinational, I used it with exchange and now with office 365. People can complain away but there are many like me who rely on it every single day and it has a real, positive impact on our work lives every single day.

Some days are just email client and Web browser, and without thunderbird and Firefox working for me as the user...... I dunno, work would be a lot more frustrating I guess. MASSIVE thanks to all the contributors to thunderbird!

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I too have enjoyed Thunderbird for a long time. It's lightweight and fast which is a big plus for me. It makes showing people how to encrypt their emails very easy. The only thing missing and there is probably an addon for this is a sync with Fastmail's aliases and sending identities to give it the same composing pull-down as their web interface. I sometimes forget to manually set the "From:" to the correct alias.

I've been using Thunderbird since 2009 and while I really like it, I wouldn't call it lightweight and fast: it's pretty slow to start, takes quite a lot of memory and the search feature is really slow.

It's an excellent piece of software no matter what and I'm not sure you can do a much faster and lightweight email client anyway, because it basically needs to be a web browser to render HTML emails properly (but I'm pretty sure the search feature could be an order of magnitude faster)

After dropping all caches on my system, Thunderbird 102 starts in 3 seconds flat. Yes it's not lightning fast, but it's loading my office e-mails which contains 15 years of e-mails at this point.

Search is generally instantaneous on my system, including my work mails. Maybe you need to repair your index or something?

On the RAM department it's using ~750MB of memory, which is not low in any means, but considering the mail volume it's handling, it's acceptable for me.

How is 3 seconds slow? Gmail web client takes more than three seconds these days.

Thunderbird performance has never been an issue for me, except for one issue where it occasionally starts chewing CPU when syncing my monster inbox. This issue to be fair has become very rare in the last two years.

It's not slow in my terms, just not lightning fast (i.e. vim, mutt, kate, bbedit, etc. fast).

I have never seen that CPU eating behavior on mine, and the mailbox is nowhere small.

In other words, I love Thunderbird, I have no complaints.

Could I make a recommendation (feel free to ignore it).

There is a way to delete your search dB (its an sqlite file in your profile (but google first for instructions), and leave it rebuild (depending in your mailbox size it can take a day or two).

I had to do it once when I moved a bunch of folders.

The search should be instant.

It does take a few secs to start but a while back I created a new profile and imported my old rules etc and it's much quicker to start now.

How do you encrypt with Thunderbird?

It has native support with gpg's backend

Your statement needs some clarification.

Yes, Thunderbird supports OpenPGP, with a fully integrated solution.

However, Thunderbird doesn't use gpg by default, because of license incompatibility Thunderbird cannot bundle GnuPG software.

That's why Thunderbird uses the RNP library as its default OpenPGP backend.

You may optionally configure externally installed GnuPG for secret key operations, as described at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:OpenPGP:Smartcards

Thunderbird supports OpenPGP and S/MIME for email encryption.

For how to set it up, see here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-help-setup-...

My wife actually hates gmail and has used Thunderbird as her email UI for years. Recently we ditched Google for her work domain and moved email hosting to another provider. Thunderbird has protected her from that change - she basically didn't notice. The only difference to her is that she's using K-9 on her phone instead of the Gmail app.

And now K9 is going to become the mobile Thunderbird App, so things will be even more seamless!

How so?

Here is the official announcement: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/06/revealed-thunderbird-on...

Oh wow that's awesome! K9 is the best mobile email client I've used! Congrats to the team!

I've tried thunderbird multiple times and the upgrades look good so I'm going to try it again. But there's an issue I haven't ever clearly figured out. How do I integrate gmail properly? I love how much easier it was to setup this time, but how do I get the folders integrated? (Primary, social, promotions, updates, forums) Gmail is already sorting this for me but it is way too much to just view everything all at once. Forums and social are showing up automatically but not the others.

Also, I know people use a lot of addons. Are there any that I should look into?

Are you using Thunderbird IMAP to synchronize with Gmail? IMAP lets you select which remote folders you want synchronized on the client. Maybe check your Gmail account in Thunderbird settings, find the IMAP section, and make sure all the Gmail folders you want to sync are enabled.

I am using IMAP. I don't see this option that you're talking about. FWIW, all my custom folders loaded correctly. It is just that don't see that top bar[0], except for social and forums (my least used ones).

I also noticed something odd. I closed it and reopened and lost all the info. I didn't install from snap or apt because apt was providing version 92 so I installed manually. I do see ~/.thunderbird (no ~/.config) but seems odd that the info wasn't stored there. This is a big red flag. ~~I also can't find in the settings where to specify the storage location.~~ (found)

[0] https://i.imgur.com/AbCEZSm.png

The idea to use special filter is a good one, but as others stated the 'top bar' isn't a real thing in email. Maybe some sort of IMAP extension, but it's a bit like asking how to put onenote into a Google doc - you might find some workaround but you are looking at two different things.

I don't use those folders, I also don't use a local email client these days...

Not sure about the weird settings disappearing bit.

But regarding the categories, Gmail doesn't automatically expose these to IMAP. But there is something you can do even if a bit hacky.

Create 5 labels named after the 5 Categories. Then create 5 filters each of which look something like this.

Search criteria: "category:primary" -> Apply label "primary".

Repeat the above step for all the categories. Et Voila. Your categories will appear in IMAP as folders of the same name.

Thunderbird has been my primary mail client since ~2006. It has been rock solid and fast. Way faster than popular web mail UIs today.

I'm in the same boat. I have to use Outlook for work, but I use TB for pretty much everything else (and still import my work cal to make sure I have a 'master' view of all my time since I work from home mostly anyway).

It's punchy, has decent (not awesome) UX, is easy to set up, and doesn't act like a memory leak with a UI.

Check out the Owl plugin. It costs 10 euro per year, but it's great.

Yer darn tootin'! That's why we don't want it broken.

Yes, precisely. I rely on Thunderbird every single day, which is why I froze it at version 60-something (rolling back about four years) after the upgrades kept breaking it and mangling the appearance for me and the other people in my company.

It was a lovely mail client. It seems they're repeating all the mistakes that firefox made. Firefox added pocket, everyone disabled it and eventually the feature was removed. Firefox added chat, everybody disabled it and eventually the feature was removed.

Now Thunderbird has added chat, that's great. What does it support, Slack? no. Discord? no. Oh. That's not great, then, that's useless. They're intending to jumpstart a chat protocol with a client that's used by like 0.8% of users? Sure.

The last update made the context-menus and dropdown-menus white backgrounded menus with literally no border, so you had no way to determine where the menu background ended and the email background started. That was the update that pushed me over the edge and prompted the rollback and push of whatever 60-ish version I chose. My staff need imap and calendaring and consistency. That version delivers.

I have absolutely zero interest in playing the 'what spurious UI change will throw my staff into confusion today' game with a basic productivity tool.

>Now Thunderbird has added chat, that's great. What does it support, Slack? no. Discord? no. Oh. That's not great, then, that's useless. They're intending to jumpstart a chat protocol with a client that's used by like 0.8% of users? Sure.

Thunderbird has had XMPP and other chat for many, many years now.

Like I said, 0.8% of users. Slack and discord and maybe the MS product are what matter in the chat space. If you're not offering that then the dev resources would probably be better funnelled into bug chasing and UI consistency.

'It supports XMPP' that's great. ICQ support would arguably be more useful.

you realize discord bans people who use third party clients, right?

Headless chrome isn't a third party client.

That's the last thing I want in my Mozilla made email client.

I'm pretty happy with added Matrix support though, may make me take a look at Thunderbird again in addition to aerc.

Yes. It is. It's been confirmed multiple times that even using browser plugins that interact with the Discord client code in any way counts, in their opinion, as a "third party client".

One should note that doesn't really happen with Ripcord [0] though.

[0] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

I've seen multiple people be banned from using this client. It does everything in its power to remain unnoticed but you only need to come across the wrong server-side detection update once to get the hammer.

Good to know and unfortunate although not terribly surprising. I guess this is the recommended user experience that the commenter up the thread is suggesting be integrated into thunderbird?

There were some automated bans that happened after an outage (years ago), but those bans got lifted. After that, I haven't seen anyone get banned for using Ripcord. But like all things, YMMV. The benefits of Ripcord outweigh the negatives for me.

> It does everything in its power to remain unnoticed

It reports its user agent as "Ripcord"

> doesn't really happen

Does that mean 0 cases (timeframe?) and official confirmation from the discord team that ripcord is allowed?

If not it can and will happen (as before). Why would it be inherently different with ripcord?

This mostly gets answered by user keb_ (see below) but I will add that Ripcord and Discord have "tussled" before: exchanged emails, etc.

Last I heard Discord maintains the TOS are getting violated, but apparently the popularity of Ripcord keeps the conflict mostly at bay.

Only bans I've heard of using Ripcord has been when people join servers on that client. Don't know how prevalent it is tho.

Yeesh. I mean kind of makes sense but it doesn't make want to use them more...

I don’t know about Slack, but discord’s terms of service explicitly forbid external chat clients. It’s also proprietary, like Slack I believe. Maybe we should try and encourage more use of open protocols over things like Discord or Slack.

This. For the parent, please don’t hold Thunderbird accountable for services like Discord being hostile towards users.

Discord works in Franz.

I don't like it and barely use it, but a couple of times a year I need to monitor certain groups, so I have a Franz tab which frames the webapp.

And what percent of users use iCal, carddav and imap? Matrix is the most popular open chat protocol. Seems like your angling for Exchange and Slack support. Yeah, no thanks.

> Matrix is the most popular open chat protocol

[citation needed]

Maybe I’m in living in the past but I would’ve thought it was IRC

I just looked up Matrix and IRC in Wikipedia. One was 28 million (and those are only the servers that opt in to reporting), and one was 371,000.

Maybe Jabber has more? But I doubt it.

IRC was 28 million, I take it?

Nope, it's Matrix. IRC is dying.

Matrix doesn’t report daily active users. IRC only reports people who are connected right this moment. Those are two entirely different numbers.

> Matrix doesn’t report daily active users

It does, if you opt in.

Can you show me where to opt in, and where this is documented? The only stats I can find that are close to the number provided are for total registered users.

I'd guess that many of those irc users connect through a matrix service these days

I wouldn't be so sure. If you create a Matrix account and join an IRC channel, your username[m] will never leave the channel, even if you never use Matrix again. I made a few test accounts and it was rather difficult to figure out how leave IRC channels properly if you decide not to use Matrix anymore.

If you part the matrix room, you’ll part the IRC channel.

You can also disconnect from IRC entirely from the bridge admin room.

Finally, if someone joins a channel via Matrix and then disappears without parting or disconnecting, then after 30d we’ll boot them off IRC anyway.

>And what percent of users use iCal, carddav and imap?

Thunderbird users? I'd say ~100% of them use imap, probably ~75% of them use calendaring. I don't know whether Thunderbird uses ical or imap-type calendars behind the scenes but it works with gmail, zimbra and apple type shared/hosted calendars which account for basically ~100% of the non-exchange type calendars in common use. It probably supports exchange-type calendars too though I've never tried that.

I'd wager less than ~2% of TB users use a non-slack non-discord non-irc chat.

I use only SMTP and POP3, no calendar. Chat: Slack (work) and WhatsApp plus Telegram.

I think that TLS is the only new protocol level feature I'm using compared to 30 years ago. Anything else is in the UI and keeping the software compatible with new versions of the OS.

What was I using back then? Some emacs mail client with filters I wrote in elisp. I got my current folder structure started in emacs (roughly one folder per person and customer) and kept it through all the moves to Eudora, Netscape's mail client and Exchange Express until I landed to Thunderbird (desktop) and K9 (phone, much later on.) Work email was on Exchange when I was an employee, always separated from personal email.

>POP3

Which works so well across multiple devices, which is a very very common use-case for email. Either you have some homebrew sync going on or you have a very simple email use-case.

I check mail on my phone with K9 (configured to leave messages on server,) possibly answer BCCing myself and eventually download mail forever on my laptop and remove from server.

My 35 years experience with email: I don't need to read old messages when I'm not at my computer. I never did before 2011 (first Android phone) and nothing changed after then. I can easily figure jobs that need constant access to the complete email archive. Not my one.

And I don't need mail on tablets and my old phone. I've got my main phone always with me, but the setup would be the same.

One reason it works for me could be that communication moved increasingly from email to messaging platforms and those are on my phone, except Slack which is confined to work boundaries. However I feel like I can lose all of WhatsApp and Telegram messages with no harm. I already lost a few years of WhatsApp and nothing happened. Who cares about conversations of 3 years or 3 days ago. It's mostly nearly unsearchable trash. And everybody else and I never had a verbatim trace of any IRL conversations for million of years, so they could be nice to have feature but not an important one.

But I'm doing my best not to lose mail. The long term important messages are in there.

I dont want my mail client eating 4GB of ram just to get chat notifications.. Thank you thunderbird!

> Matrix is the most popular open chat protocol.

[[Citation needed]]

Why do we even need chat in an email app? It just adds bloat and slowness for not discernible reason. This is why I WONT be using apps like Thunderbird any time soon.

I've been using TB for many years. It's not ideal, but when I've been looking to replace it - I returned to it every time. Much better UX than Outlook.

I don't need chats and other stuff though. Maybe better Exchange support (because the corporate world loves it, sigh).

I host my own email and Thunderbird is my daily driver client. It's great.

Hah, same, but it's also excellent for integrating with any of the popular e-mail platforms out there (weird custom non-standard folders on some aside) and even acting as a calendar or an RSS reader.

My only problem with it is that the UI seems to slow down while all of the e-mails are being fetched, if you have 10-20 accounts or so connected.

You use it with Exchange and Office 365? Does it have built in support now? or are you using a plugin? if so, would you share which one?

Works with plain IMAP, right? I do it this way (that is, access those mail services)

I just looked into that; it does, but only if my mail admin has enabled it :(

ask it

You can bypass that with running a local instance of davmail - https://github.com/mguessan/davmail

It works really well if you are comfortable on the command line to get it running.

I use this one and can definitely recommend it: https://www.beonex.com/owl/

Works very well, calendar too

The plugin worked well for some time for me, but support is really bad. I once had an issue, where the OWA page would require me to log in again, but of course they f'ed up their login to require JS and that JS did not run in Thunderbird (does any?). The plugin then only showed me the login page. When I contacted them, I basically got a shoulder shrugg as an answer, close to "Ah that's bad for you.". Then a while ago my e-mail account in Thunderbird simply disappeared and I still have no idea why and am assuming the plugin had a bug, which deleted the account from my Thunderbird. Haven't put any effort in yet to get it back working and am using IMAP, unable to confirm calendar events and such, because Outlook also wont load in Firefox for me. Good job ...

I have been in the company 10 years... so its changed a few times.

For about 3 years I used a plug in I paid $20 for (after a trial) that was money well spent for me.

Then I think thunderbird and lightening (for calendar) started everything better natively than the plug in sp I went to just native setup.

There is a group of Linux users who kinda support each other also so I wrote up a post on how to get it all working.

Then I'll be honest about 2 or three years ago we moved to office 365, and when I configured it I think everything just magically started working.

And by working I mean getting better at each release.

It now allows native OAuth2 over imap which I think was a huge step in making it play nice.

I use plugins: lookout (not sure what this does), tbsync with provider for Exchange and provider for Google Calendar (this syncs across all my devices).

I just had a look there so I can give people an idea...

Got well over 100k emails in the work account (office365).

Bout 15k In my shammy gmail

Use proton mail bridge also which is another nice program.

I'm on Ubuntu.

I'm trying not to dox myself here lol

Heh thanks for the info. I was just trying the Office 365 IMAP directly, and for my organization Thunderbird is blocked. I looked around to see if I could easily modify it's Application Id (I mean, it's just telling the server what it is...) but could only find instructions for Evolution. Maybe that's something they will add at some point...

IMAP works out of the box with O365/Exchange and it supports oauth login which MS requires for most new accounts I believe. Calendar sync needs a plugin as far as I know.

ActiveSync for contacts and calendar and Cal/Card DAV are now supported for free by the TbSync plugin.

https://addons.thunderbird.net/de/thunderbird/addon/tbsync/?...

Sadly no sign of support for EWS, but Evolution supports that.

Shame, it's not compatible with Thunderbird 102 (yet!?). Looks like a useful plugin.

Edit: From the github issues page: "I am working on an upgrade, ETA 2 weeks."

I had to install TBSync and its Exchange provider. After that, everything worked perfectly, including calendar syncing.

https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/tbsyn...

https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/eas-4...

TB has some strange UX decisions IMO, but overall it's pretty nice and I wish Mozillians to keep hacking on it for a long time.

An emotional need to cancel out complaints is classic toxic positivity.

It should be noted that anyone who is complaining is probably a regular user of the application, and as such has decided that they over-all like the application enough to use it.

I would ask you to re-read my post please. I posted in the interest of balance, and when I did most of the og comments were negative, the top voted one being from someone who had never installed thunderbird and didn't know how to use a package manager.

I was just thinking of the open source contributors who must feel really down getting just negative feedback, hence I hoped to give a bit of balance.

Also, there is nothing wrong with emotional needs. The majority of our needs beyond the basic are emotionally driven. I like my emotions ;)

Yep, TB is amazing

Happy user here since beginning 2000.

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