The Future of Thunderbird | Hacker News Reader

The Future of Thunderbird

blog.thunderbird.net

654 pointsTangerineDream460 comments

> “Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?” ~ A notable percentage of Thunderbird users

Honestly this doesn't seem like the main issue with Thunderbird; the main issue is that the UI is very slow, it tends to use a lot of CPU and memory just sitting there and a lot of operations block the UI. This got a lot worse with 102. 102 unfortunately is so low in responsiveness that it's literally quicker for me to open a new tab, load Google Mail (the slowest webmail I'm using) find and(!) read the mail there than switching to the already running Thunderbird and waiting for it to load the new message. It also tends to take pretty long to "boot", so most days I just avoid using it entirely now, as leaving it running in the background substantially decreases battery life.

You drastically overestimate the general software consumer.

Thunderbird is really only used by performance obsessed nerds, and that's largely in part because performance obsessed nerds all but prefer hideously outdated UI.

But for any normies, they're gonna load it up and feel their skin crawl, along with the overwhelming sense someone might turn the corner to their cubicle and begin shouting "NERD!"

In one of the previous threads someone suggested betterbird and I've been using it ever since[1].

It doesn't fix the age old default search output, but it works comparably well for my taste. It also doesn't fix the idle CPU usage unfortunately.

[1] https://www.betterbird.eu/#featuretable

I remember the times when I was the only Thunderbird user in an Outlook infested company. I remember it was crazy fast, especially real-time search folders were a game changer for me, so I could filter messages however I liked and let them appear in multiple folders without affecting performance.

I haven't used it in a while, but if it's true, it's a pity that once so useful and fast piece of software deteriorate so hard. One would expect that a stale project can only benefit from the newer hardware to become crazy fast ...

I remember it was crazy fast

I remember Thunderbird as being both fast, and uniquely able to run on pretty much any hardware.

I used it on an eeePC 701 with no problems, even though the machine had only a 900 MHz processor, 512MB of RAM, and a 4GB disk.

Sad to hear it's gone all bloatware since those days.

It really has. Thunderbird has become slower and slower and prone to lockups. The UI and feature set is still great but the performance is really horrific.

Might it be, in part, due to moving to newer versions of Firefox or Firefox-derived components under the hood? When Thunderbird was starting out, Firefox would have had something like a 10-15Mb memory footprint with no pages loaded and eaten approximately zero processor cycles while idle. It's, um, a lot bigger and hungrier now.

I have never used thunderbird but I am sure a lot changed when when xul went away.

XUL is still there. Even in Firefox, the UI is still powered by XUL – it's just not exposed to addons anymore: https://u.ale.sh/there-is-only-xul.png

They were slowly working away on it until sometime last year.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ORqed8SW_7fPnPdjfz42RoGf... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1446335 https://arewexblstill.com/

Not seeing, not at all, runs great, zero lockups, zero performance issues, looks great, how odd.

In fairness, if you're as bad as I am at actually deleting email, you probably had something like 15 years less email accumulation.

I also ran it on a netbook (some variant of a 901?) for a couple years, and it was great. I'm also pretty sure it would be less great now, even if I were running the same version.

Same situation. A few years ago I started moving old emails into yearly sub folders (just moved all of last years emails into a “2022” folder). This improved performance a lot for me. I’m guessing the smaller folders of emails keep the index files small. Search still works through all of those folders.

> as bad as I am at actually deleting email

People delete email?

I started using the gmail's "archive" button in ~2009 and now I see 112,315 conversations in the "all mail" section. That's probably 200k emails in total. The fact that web mail always runs at the same speed regardless of how much mail you have is seriously underappreciated.

(Some operations like creating a filter and applying it to all past conversations does take 5 seconds, but this doesn't block the UI so it's not a deal breaker)

I don’t even archive them, I mark them as read and leave them in the inbox.

What is the advantage of the archive, if you have to rely on search to find stuff anyway?

"mark as read" happens automatically whereas archive is an explicit action (pressing "e" on your keyboard after enabling hotkeys or swiping the email on mobile)

This lets you turn the inbox into a sort of TODO list that only shows you stuff that's still pending. Of course you also have to use filters aggressively if you wanna maintain inbox-zero without having to manually archive every "your bank statement is ready" email.

> Sad to hear it's gone all bloatware since those days.

If they're basically stacked on top of 90% of firefox (which is how I understand it to work), then it's not necessarily TB's fault. It's like writing a tiny app on top of a framework that gets bloated.

It's funny you mention that because the experience of trying to connect to Exchange with it is bad enough to cow me into using Outlook after all (of course it doesn't help that calendar support is also shunted off to an extension that never worked that well for me).

The main issue with Thunderbird IMO is that line-wrapping and quoting (and especially their interaction) during composition is horrifically buggy!

I never had that issue myself.

But... pasting in a table from anywhere (libreoffice,...) would break everything (still does in 102).

Could be some quirk with a local gentoo install, but if i copy a random 2x2 (or more) table from libreoffice into an empty email (or the very last line of a non-empty one), and want to type anything below the table, there's no way to actually move the typing "cursor" outside of the table itself or type a newline at the end of the table and for the newline to be outside of the table (and not just stretch the last cell). This basically means I have to type some random newlines, paste in the middle of those newlines, so i can then move my cursor out of the tables itself.

I actually just switched to Thunderbird last year because I needed to post a patch to a mailing list and I couldn't find any mail apps for Windows that could do it properly. Previously I used Alpine, but that was a much worse experience because pasting didn't work so I had to clumsily read in a prepared file from disk and not touch any other keys after that for fear of it rewrapping everything. If there are any other mail apps that do this better, and can still connect to "modern" (read: annoying) oauth setups like Office365 etc, I'd definitely be interested in trying them. I don't hate Thunderbird, but to me it seems like the least bad option for supporting both modern top-quote style HTML email and oldskool 7 bit ASCII/triangle bracket quoting/inline patch style email.

Yes, I love the UI of Thunderbird and its superior UI is the only reason I still use it despite the horrific performance issues.

Same. I wouldn't put up with this from any other app. In the last few months it has taken to seizing up for 2-10 seconds at a time in the middle of writing. I've been holding out hope a new release will magically get better. Or that I'll dig deep into what's going on and figure out what the cause is. But switching over to webmail is getting more and more tempting.

That's also the main problem I have with it. The UI is what it is, but it has the considerable advantage that I'm already used to it. I'm not really clamoring for a different UI, there's bigger problems.

Unfortunately, it has some serious performance bugs. It often sits there idle on a brand new laptop eating 50% or 70% of a core. Doing who knows what, without giving any indication or any sort of pause button to the user.

I almost have to keep Thunderbird closed to save my battery. Sometimes I think if I wrote a shell script that suspended the main process four of every five minutes, it'd make for better background task scheduling than whatever must be going on.

The software is burning hundred of billions of CPU cycles running in circles for hours and hours, when it's supposed to be sitting idle.

> That's also the main problem I have with it. The UI is what it is, but it has the considerable advantage that I'm already used to it. I'm not really clamoring for a different UI, there's bigger problems.

If they want to grow the user base (or even maintain it against attrition) then relying on just the current folks isn't enough: you have to get new people to use it. (And hopefully support/donate to it.)

Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is 'current'.

Unless you make the interface skinnable, or provide a 'core' which folks can build their own variant on with whatever interface they desire.

There are a lot of qualifiers there. The linked post by Thunderbird’s Product Design manager spends a lot of time talking about tech debt and feature availability, and not so much about problems with the interface. Indeed, it has a reassuring amount of respect for the current interface, describing a future that "allow[s] veteran users to maintain that familiarity they love".

It doesn't look like the interface is a big problem to anyone. Projects with a tech debt problem could always do with a touch up. But emails haven't changed that much in the last few decades.

> Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is 'current'.

This is an easy thing to say. Sometimes it is even true, but i think its overstated.

To survive you need to lean into whatever makes you unique or interesting, and convince new users that you're worth it. Chase whatever is trendy too far, and you simply become the off-brand version of whoever is the market leader. That annoys your base wothout actually growing new users since you aren't going to be better than whoever you are copying.

The layout I expect Thunderbird to move towards is the one in every mail client I've used in the past decade, I wouldn't call that trendy. At this point you're an outlier so you better have a good reason to stick to the different UI.

Which one is that? Gmail and Outlook have very different (default) layouts.

That's a good point about gmail, but I was thinking of outlook, apple mail, the gnome mail client, and this one called mimestream that I use now. They all have that same familiar 3 column layout: mailboxes, list of messages, message contents. That layout has been the norm for a while, so I think calling it trendy is a bit of a stretch.

It’s also basically what Thunderbird has now, though.

I started using thunderbird half a year ago and like the interface. Sure, there's problems (I haven't encountered a lot of them), but the overall user experience is far better than what I'm used to from other email programs. The only thing that stuck out negatively was when I was searching for an email, in which the way I was wanting to solve it didn't work out as I thought it did. (I was looking for a mail containing specific words from a specific group of senders).

Moreover, detering active users in the hopes of catching new users is a risky move. If you do it you need to be sure that there will be more new users faster than old users leaving. If it doesn't work out, chances are that they ain't coming back.

I can't say anything about keeping TB open and having it steal CPU time. I usually close it after checking for mail. Having it open appears to be a valid use case taht shouldn't create problems, however.

I've been running Thunderbird in the background without problems the last 15-odd years on whatever computer I had at the time. Still do. No performance problems running 20+ mail accounts with loads and loads of mail. Ofcourse it can be slow if you do things that requires TB to recreate the mail storage but other than that I have no problem opening mail and reading it fast. I'm using both IMAP and POP3 accounts mixed.

I believe there are settings you can run that might create more problems with performance but I haven't touched anything the last 5 years so can't say what it was any more.

I do not think I have touched anything either since I like keeping as much at default as possible, but maybe I have and just do not know it, but it is dog slow for me.

> Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is 'current'.

Reminds me of the arguments for Firefox getting rid of the "Old School" interface and copying Chrome to bring in new users. Didn't exactly work out very well...

Isn't Thunderbird still using XUL stuff that has been retired from Firefox? It doesn't seem that wise to keep working on that to be honest.

It is if the alternative is breaking all extensions.

You think Firefox would have more users if they hadn't updated their interface?

I'm still on ff but other browsers became very usable when I lost 100+ extensions.

correction: After the IE disabling update Edge is the only application with internet access. I'm on the Edge now.

A common sentiment (which I share) is that Firefox has less and less to distiguish itself from Chrome(ium). Along with compatibility issues (even if they are rare and not Firefox's fault) there is less and less reason to choose it. Being as good as Chrome is not good enough to maintain users when Google is agressively pushing their browser in ways that Mozilla simply can't.

So why would anyone use Firefox over chrome?

Because it is open source? Sure, but so is Chromium. But both seem to have mostly cathedral-style development and someone outside of Mozilla is unlikely to be able to influence the direction of the project in any meaningful way. It's open source software but not an open source project. User feedback is continuously ignored, often with the only argument being developer convenience.

Because of a focus on privacy? While they do like to push that angle in their marketing and in some ways do more to prevent websites from tracking you they show little concern for making the browser itself respect your privacy with opt out telemetry, eperiments, in-browser advertising and more. Again, any user pushback is summarily dismissed.

The only remaining advantage are some niche features here and there. And those are often provided by extension whose API Mozilla limits more and more.

So I still use Firefox but its only because it is the lesser evil, and the differrence is shrinking. I certainly don't trust Mozilla's autoupdates and won't use upstream builds. Thankfully Linux distros still provide a last defense layer - but that we need that layer at all for something that is supposed to be an open browser is ridiculous. I don't fault anyone who says fuck it and just uses Chrome so that ALL sites work out of the box.

I use firefox on Linux for a pragmatic reason actually: it has a better font rendering than Chrom(ium). On my 4K screen I've started to notice that, with all the fixes for it to work right on Wayland, the fonts are still somewhat blurry. I googled and apparently some experts say that Chrome breaks some font rendering rules, on linux. On Windows I guess it isn't an issue since people wound surely notice.

No, but I think they would have if they have continued to develop their own interface iteratively without just blindly copying Chrome. Right now there is for many no reason to pick Firefox over Chrome because they are so similar.

Yes.

That wouldn't have gained them appreciable new users, but it would have slowed losses. Almost all my browsing is done in Chrome and Brave now. There's not really any reason to use Firefox besides habit now, and I don't, except on my desktop.

Mozilla somehow failed to recognize their entire core userbase was power users and Firefox fans, which relentlessly evangelized the product to other people, going around installing it on grandma's computer.

Then they failed to recognize that while Chrome was a comparable technical product, maybe even slightly better in some ways, the reason for its success it because it was relentlessly shilled by a huge megacorporation that pushed it in advertising, on the world's biggest web properties, and even had it packaged in installers for other products.

Mozilla was never going to be able to compete with Chrome by assuming that "if we were just more like Chrome, people would use us", or "we need to make a browser for grandma." Grandma doesn't download browsers. That is, unless a big banner comes up on YouTube telling her she needs to download Chrome for the best experience. By alienating its core "fanbase" or whatever you want to call it, by alienating its power users, Firefox alienated the only demographic it ever had an actual shot with. Unless you count the even-smaller real-open-source-only-we-need-web-freedom demographic.

Hard to quantify because you'd have to take account of what actual improvements they might have made instead of spending dev hours on UI, settings and defaults tweaks that mostly served to alienate their core users (IMO).

If they focused instead on speed, and somehow managed to keep old plugins compatible, yes.

People moved to Chrome coz it was plainly faster and those who stayed did it for the various plugins they got used to. When new version of FF blows up your workflow might as well go try Chrome. Hell, I'd be using Chrome already if it had sensible vertical tabs implementation... the FF ones after the apocalypse are worse than XUL ones but still better than I've seen on Chrome.

> Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is 'current'.

And that risks doing absolute horseshit. Outlook's new UI for example hides the cc/bcc behind an additional click, extremely annoying for anyone but personal mail usage. How MS still haven't managed to discover and fix that with their billions of corporate users is astonishing.

It sounds like they're rebuilding the whole thing practically, so the UI isn't all they're changing.

> ... so low in responsiveness that it's literally quicker for me to open a new tab [and] load Google Mail

Might have to do with us having allowed to infest mail, like so many other things, with the piece of shit that is CSS. As it's formulated, it would indeed appear gross, but coming to think about it, it's no wonder that loading a document into an already running browser is faster than starting a web browser albatross afresh.

Maybe embedding (and keeping up to date with security band aids) an old Moz browser is the problem, but I don't remember performance to be as much as a problem when I was still using Thunderbird. I was glad it existed and hope their rewrite goes well.

> Might have to do with us having allowed to infest mail, like so many other things, with the piece of shit that is CSS.

Wouldn't that only make sense if your Gmail tab wasn't also loading up the same CSS?

Nope, the issues seem to lie more in just plain bad code. It is seems to be mostly their IMAP code and their mbox code which goes crazy and starts using all CPU, not the UI. The issues happen when opening folders too.

I'm with you on this. I tried Thunderbird again just a few weeks back, to see if it could replace Outlook for me. Nope, but it's nothing to do with the UI, which seems... fine?

My issues were:

   - no support for O365, unless you pay for a 3rd party plugin
   - bizarrely high CPU usage, even when seemingly not doing anything
   - *sometimes* memory usage grows really high
   - a bunch of small niggling issues over missing features - for example, I can't paste in a formatted signature from Outlook

I'd much rather they focused on the above - the UI is just fine!

> no support for O365, unless you pay for a 3rd party plugin

It seems that Thunderbird supports O365 oauth natively now, including access to calendars.

I know I had to use some plugins in the past, but now, it just works.

Hmm, I literally just double-checked before posting (with the beta version, too), and it still says it needs a plugin? Maybe I need to look a bit closer.

at the very least, check which version you're on. The auto-updater is one of the parts that's unreliable.

* https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/01/important-message-for-m...

* https://office365.mcmaster.ca/reconfigure-mozilla-thunderbir...

If you've constantly upgraded over the years, try creating a new account or even reseting your profile. Perhaps there are/were some 'stale' settings that are messing things up.

I definitely used Thunderbird for an O365 account that required 2FA and so had to use OAuth, back to.... 2021 at least, I think. Though I think you might have had to know to change the auth method to OAuth to get it working, at least at the time.

Yeah, you can use Thunderbird with Office365 authenticating with OAuth2.

I have multiple 0365 accounts, have done for years, and don't pay for a plug. Not sure what's different with your O365 auth process.

Signatures are a pain.

I would add to that GPG just doesn’t work. They have support for it but if you try to use it fails to store any keys.

That hasn't been my experience at all. I used to use the Enigmail plug in which worked okay.

Since its deprecation and Thunderbird's integration of GPG, there were a few hiccups (mostly UI differences between Enigmail and native TB support), but none with key management.

I can generate, store and use keys without issue.

How does it "not support" Office365? No Exchange support?

Condolences on having to use O365, BTW.

Probably talking about

https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/owl-f...

which is paid.

Can achieve feature parity with plain IMAP + TbSync but that's another 3rd party addon.

So "doesn't work out of the box with o365" isn't that big of a stretch, plain TB will only get you IMAP working.

That's honestly more of MS being cancer and not using standards than anything else.

They also introduced required OAUTH2 authentication last year and in a way that you need essentially org admin rights to give any other client than TB access... because you need to create fucking app in MS panels that then gets used by mail client to authorize you. It is entirely aisine platform

Anecdotally, on my high-end desktop, with 2 Google accounts and a NameCheap private email account (all IMAP), Thunderbird is sitting at 0-0.2% CPU, 2 entries in task manager totaling 190.3 MB.

It does have a quirk with IMAP, in that it only checks your main folder until you visit a sub-folder. Then it'll check those, but even then, any time I go in and click a folder, it tends to react by "really checking."

But quirks aside, performance doesn't seem like an issue for me.

I am seeing similar results. That being said, I'm only using thunderbird on Windows, so I can't speak to Mac/Linux perf.

I've used it on Linux since 2005 at least, and my only problems were importing a big Outlook .pst and having trouble with its formatting and attachments. It's open daily on my machine, and while it has become more memory hungry, the CPU usage is minimum.

Maybe it's because I only use POP/SMTP accounts?

On my Ryzen 7 4800H (8 core) 16GB laptop running Linux Mint, Thunderbird Mail is using 290MB-360MB of RAM. Mostly no registered CPU usage, but when I clicked around a few folders, it went up to about 3% very briefly.

Same, I have a pretty decent gaming PC. Only about 1GB of mail in my archive from what I can see though.

Uses %1.5 of my 32G of RAM and 0.2% CPU. I'm running on Linux, but I do not see the performance issues others are having.

> It does have a quirk with IMAP, in that it only checks your main folder until you visit a sub-folder. Then it'll check those, but even then, any time I go in and click a folder, it tends to react by "really checking."

You can enable checking all folders by setting "mail.server.default.check_all_folders_for_new" config option. Quite weird it's not on by default, though.

Besides the sibling comment by Gare to change the default, you can do this on a per-folder basis by right-clicking, Properties... and checking the box: "When getting new messages for this account, always check this folder"

A mail client taking up to 0.2% CPU doing nothing (I assume you're not interacting with it, nor is it trying to download/upload mail or similar), on a "high-end desktop", is itself a little surprising.

I'm watching it now, and it's sitting at 0%. Considering it does poll for emails from time to time (maybe 1x minute) I don't thinks it bad that it ramps up to 0.1% to do so.

Discord, Teams, Firefox, and Slack all seem to use 0-0.1% without much interaction (though I am typing into Firefox right now!) - Thunderbird seems to be 0% more often than not.

A salient question would be what OS you are running. It's been my experience that Thunderbird is orders of magnitude slower on Windows. I find it to be fast enough on Linux, though still acknowledging the fact that it is a bit slow. I read somewhere that this speed difference is due to antivirus.

I run it on Linux and I have issues there.

I guess 'notable' means something like >= 0.01% in this case. But tech debt is an issue if nobody can effectively fork off anything if unhappy with the direction taken.

I wonder how many thunderbird devs read HN - I would guess a lot. It really sounds like they are focused the wrong problems with the rebuild.

It's crazy that it's slower than an Electron app! Like most HNers, I fully believe that any JavaScript is slower than native, so how can this be false for this app???

The post said that Thunderbird is an app running on top of Firefox, so it's not much different than an Electron app. There are probably many more layers than a native one. Slowness is too new expected but actually I never felt that Thunderbird is slow. I use it daily.

Thunderbird is not native. It's built on top of Firefox. As such, it's not that different from an Electron app.

I feel like you could argue that UI performance falls under the "look so old" statement.

Modern UIs are more likely to be slow and laggy compared to old ones.

Yep, just recently switched to Evolution which is considerably faster and has a nicely working calender.

I'm super confused to come here and see people complain about its performance.

For me it runs lightning fast, especially compared to other tools like Outlook. Clicking any message loads it instantly, searching through my 30000 emails in 10 different accounts is also instant, etc. Why is my experience so different? Mostly everything is on default settings.

Pretty much the only complaint I have about this tool is that parts of the window sometimes flash for seemingly no reason when it is left open for a while.

In my experience, sending email in Thunderbird takes an average of 5 seconds or more with just a popup "sending" sitting there. Why not put it in background processes like the other email clients.

I've never seen this implemented in a way that isnt confusing. It goes to some "Outbox" and you no longer understand why it stuck there and how often it's retrying. You can also have weird failure modes where the mail is sent but not saved to the Sent folder. This is also not obvious to display in a background process

But.. it seems like a solveable problem..

This is what the Mail app in macOS does. Disappear in background, outbox for the moment and let me compose another email.

I prefer email sitting in the outbox for a short period of time before send/receive completes, it has saved me from mistakes enough times that it is worth the delay.

I like that. I hate optimistic UIs that tell me something has happened when it clearly is just on a queue somewhere.

> I'm super confused to come here and see people complain about its performance.

I can't complain about performance. My profile folder is ~90 GB. I have multiple email accounts connected and a large local folder which contains email from Google Takeout since I had to delete some (larger) emails from my Google mail to make space. That being said, it would be nice to not see application not responding messages on Fedora (Gnome) as much.

On my Linux machine, there's noticeable latency when scrolling through the messages pane. I use the vertical (side by side) layout, but the delay disappears when I use the stacked layout. The jankiness seems to be a function of the messages pane's height.

> For me it runs lightning fast

Same here, been running it for years, it even runs and looks great on my oldest (10 years old) machine.

What operating system do you use? I think Windows, Mac and Linux have pretty different performance characteristics with Firefox and Thunderbird.

You haven't used it with imap and lots of mail then. I get 100…500 emails daily and tb freezes for 15…60 seconds at a time. My inbox is kept in order by a bunch of filters, but the thing still freezes if I have lots of e-mails in another mailbox.

The mailboxes are very inefficient, being regular mboxes with an index. I'd rather have the e-mails in a sqlite database. A Maildir on disk is a waste of inodes and a liability when one does a search or archives the thing. Old mail is rarely touched and sqlite has a full text search function.

The interface is okay. Quirky, dated but okay. I just need a snooze option like Gmail's but one that doesn't hide the e-mail. Now I have to convert the e-mail to a task and add an alarm to the task which requires a lot of clicks and setting options that are unergonomic.

>You haven't used it with imap and lots of mail then. I get 100…500 emails daily and tb freezes for 15…60 seconds at a time. My inbox is kept in order by a bunch of filters, but the thing still freezes if I have lots of e-mails in another mailbox.

I do, around 100k mails in various dirs with order of magnitude higher volume than you. Just need to set it up

> The mailboxes are very inefficient, being regular mboxes with an index. I'd rather have the e-mails in a sqlite database. A Maildir on disk is a waste of inodes and a liability when one does a search or archives the thing. Old mail is rarely touched and sqlite has a full text search function.

You can set it to maildir style, sadly impossible after account creation and requires unbelievably much effort for such simple change.

Like, this piece of shit asked me to restart client to change IMAP server name, who wrote that garbage?

Out of curiosity: We're talking "magnitude higher", so that means 1k to 5k mails each day.

How do you cope with that? Given a work day has 8 hours, you'll have at best 30 seconds to process an email (480 working minutes for 1000 mails) and that includes reading, answering and doing the actual work required to have an answer. That seems like not manageable?

I get several thousand emails a day but only a handful require reading or response.

Many are just notifications from GitHub from 7-year-ago employers since leaving an org does not (did not?) unsubscribe you.

Others are build logs which are useful to keep around for searching and so forth.

Typically I just let my mail provider sort them for me.

I was using thunderbird with the same very large accounts on Linux and windows.

For some reason on Linux it was fine in Windows it was literally unusable. Particularly when composing a message of all things.

There’s definitely some quirks somewhere.

Outlook is very slow for me, but I only use it on my work laptop. Thunderbird is almost as slow, and that's on my own desktop. Even something simple like mousing over emails in the list is slow - there is a noticable delay between the mouse reaching each email, and the grey highlight.

I moved from claws-mail (because O365 now requires oauth and non-thunderbird experience with it is absolutely fucking awful) and it is noticeable slower. Not enough to call it "slow" tho, it is pretty snappy

I miss the old UI (from like 20 years ago).

I switched off of it because the new index builder was slow on whatever spinning disk single machine I had back then. Also, the UI was trying too hard to look new, and it made it difficult to use.

Oh well. I haven’t looked back. Plenty of functional old school mail UIs exist (Fastmail and Apple Mail for macOS come to mind.). I’d prefer an open source one though.

SeaMonkey is still around. Dunno if they've changed the UI recently, but it was still the same old thing secretary years ago.

The search is also shamefully bad.

I've hit "Thunderbird is slow" many times and it has turned out that the reason is that GMail is applying rate limiting.

I originally switched from Apple mail because I thought Apple mail could not handle my gmail.

https://support.google.com/a/answer/1071518?hl=en

Gmail has all sorts of limits people don't realize, including a limit on the number of incoming emails (1/s, which does seem pretty reasonable).

I have multiple mailboxes, which are quite large. Never saw a performance problem at all and I am dumbfounded what could be the issue for people. Its speed and ease of use is why I prefer it to web mail by a large margin. It starts quicker than my browser too.

This! On my Xubuntu installation(s) the rendering has become so slow to almost be unusable. There were some helpful tips floating around to remedy this situation (turning off webrender seemed to help) but these have stopped working as well.

I am now considering dumping the Bird after almost twenty years of continuous and happy use. The main reason I am still sticking around is because I hope it turns out to be a simple bug that some kind soul will fix.

The issue is indeed "Why Thunderbird takes so long to change" (the visual representation of this development problem is it's old looking UI).

If Thunderbird was easy to develop and modify then all the performance issues you're talking about would be resolved.

The problem is that Thunderbird's legacy code base makes making changes extremely difficult, slow and risky.

And that's Thunderbird's fundamental problem as the article describes well.

Unfortunately, at least for me, I've had to mostly switch away from Thunderbird. It has becoming rather frustratingly slow. For example, if I archive an email, it takes 10 to 15 seconds for this to be reflected in the interface. When I have 50 or so emails to deal with, this adds up to a surprising amount of time, and becomes rather frustrating. (I suspect having large volumes of email is part of the issue.)

On the much needed feature side of things, other email clients have the very useful feature of showing the complete conversation history (across all accounts) in a sidebar. This alone has been a compelling reason to switch email clients, though, the real reason I switched was the extremely slow interface.

I sincerely hope these changes will make Thunderbird usable for me again.

> the very useful feature of showing the complete conversation history (across all accounts)

Isn't this the same as the unified inbox feature in Thunderbird? All your accounts can be displayed sorted and threaded together.

Sorry for not being clear earlier; for the client I'm using, when you read an email from someone, there's a sidebar that lists all of your past emails to/from them. It's very useful to see past interactions with the person in one glance.

Want to recommend one of those other email clients for Mac? The threading/conversation support is my biggest gripe apart from the slowness. I am also guilty of rarely deleting things.

EDITED TO ADD: Using gmail and fastmail.

'nother edit: should deal gracefully with emailing files to myself. C.f the threading in fastmail's webmail, which is ... weird?

If you're using Gmail, I can recommend Mimestream [1].

It's still in beta, but I've been using it for the better part of a year without issue. Fast, simple, clean.

[1] https://mimestream.com/

I second Mimestream, never had a problem until their most recent bug yesterday. They are fast on fixes though.

Have to say I dislike the fact that Mimestream will cost money, but they don't say how much yet. I don't want to get used to something that will then cost more than I can afford. I don't mind paying, at all, but if it's going to be a €5 a month subscription that'll be too much for me, for example.

I agree, that is annoying. It seems as though they are preparing to release 1.0 soon, so we'll find out soon enough.

This sounds like a great business model actually: release a killer software product, and make the beta free to get users addicted, with the caveat that when you get out of beta, there will be a "small" monthly fee. Then, when it's time to go mainstream, charge them $100/month to keep access to their data. And make sure there's no way to go back by locking the users' data behind encryption for "safety from hackers" or similar.

Superhuman is incredibly fast, and has amazing keyboard support. It's the fastest thing for getting through a busy inbox. It's $$$ though. But also includes a great mobile client.

> The threading/conversation support is my biggest gripe apart from the slowness.

I'm curious what gripes you have here. Compared to GMail linear threading based on subject I find the correct threading based on headers fantastic.

I'm not sure if it's strictly Thunderbird's fault, or if it's because people sometimes reply to a random message with a bunch of people one it, change the subject, and things go downhill from there.

The fact that I'm dealing with this in three different interfaces (Thunderbird, Gmail, Fastmail) is probably not helping my sanity.

> Want to recommend one of those other email clients for Mac?

... is Mail not OK?

You know, I've never tried it. I was looking for a cross-platform solution, but I haven't run anything but Mac for a couple of years now. Perhaps I should take a look.

I'd mostly used Macs for like a decade before I gave Mail a try. Just didn't occur to me. Takes a while to break the "first party and/or default is probably not acceptably-decent" mindset. I've found it entirely OK. Good enough it's not at all worth searching for something better (for me—email needs vary greatly, I'm sure)

Kinda like getting used to drag-n-drop usually doing something sensible, rather than its fucking everything up, doing nothing, or causing a crash/state-corruption in the target program. I'd been trained by other platforms to just about never try to use it for anything except dragging files from directory to directory, and had to un-learn that.

Yeah, mail.app is performant, updated, and native.

It ain’t outlook if you need that level of Corp crap but it does well with my massive mess of email from 2002 onwards over various hosting and forwards and works well with gmail.

I cannot understand why it does not allow to autocomplete the destination folder when one moves a message, you have to rely on the "predicted" folder or just use the mouse.

I found Mail.app to be very quick to use, especially with Mail Act-On which gave me tons of filtering and best of all, hotkeys that made moving, archiving and applying any number of rules super easy.

The price has gone up a fair bit since I had to move away from Mac, so I don't know if the value proposition is still there, but I know it saved me hours of time...

Thunderbird is the closest to productive I've gotten on Windows since, but I want those hotkeys!

I’ve found search in Mail.app to be hopeless, and the solutions you see online of rebuilding Spotlight indexing or deleting-and-recreating your accounts in Mail.app aren’t really solutions in my eyes since they don’t fix the root of the problem (or do so incidentally and invisibly). I use Mail.app only because it integrates with iCloud and my iPhone, otherwise I would go all-in on Thunderbird. On non-Apple machines I always use Thunderbird.

Apple Mail on Mac and iOS/iPadOS works great. I'm using pobox.com (Fastmail's sibling) for forwarding.

MailMate (https://freron.com/)

I love Mailspring, it's modern and open source: https://getmailspring.com/

The UI uses Electron, but the actual sync engine is in C++, so it's pretty fast.

It has becoming rather frustratingly slow.

You can bet the "rewrite" aka "make it look modern" jazz won't make this better.

Probably worse.

> For example, if I archive an email, it takes 10 to 15 seconds for this to be reflected in the interface

Have you tried changing local storage format from default mbox (one big linear file per folder) to maildir (each message in its own file)?

This is a great example of the kinds of problems they're trying to tackle. This shouldn't be an issue. Just use sqlite or similar.

At least on Linux, I think the mbox vs maildir is an interoperability thing. I can access folders created by thunderbird, or existing user local ones in any local mail client or remotely through IMAP.

It may be they don't want to break those external tools.

So have a checkbox for "also persist mailbox in an interoperable format", that then lets you choose mbox or maildir; where it's going to save the data for its own use in SQLite either way; only save in that "interoperable format" asynchronously in the background, and on quit (just like e.g. a Redis RDB file); and, if enabled, also scan the interoperable backing store for changes made on startup, to apply them to the internal, canonical store.

FYI, iTunes.app (or whatever it's called now) for a long time had a legacy XML-file representation of the music library "for interoperability", that you could enable to be persisted to disk alongside its newer, binary DB file; when enabled, it worked exactly like this.

Maildir is fairly performant and Thunderbird does have its own index dbs for performance in mbox and maildir formats already. It's why the compact option exists for mbox since delete only removes the index key until you trigger a compact.

Making the sqlite db the primary would mean that unless there was constant synchronisation I would be missing emails in the other clients.

I feel like just switching to maildir across the board is a pretty good solution performance wise. Although, I do understand that folders with large numbers of files is a problem under Windows (many projects had to rework their design for this). So perhaps a sqlite solution for Windows would be a good idea.. or just a maildir with more nested folders to reduce size, linked to the thunderbird indexing.

Modern NTFS doesn't have as much of a problem with folders full of files as its reputation states. Though File Explorer always still seems to make it seem slower/worse than it is. (Most of that is still things like populating thumbnail caches and stuff, though, more than actual disk performance.)

The bigger issue with the Maildir standard on Windows is that the Maildir standard uses colons in filenames which is not allowed on Windows.

(ETA: The obvious idea here to me would be to do something like a bare git repo as a Maildir-like with content-addressed storage.)

Hm.. Not sure how modern that NTFS would have to be. Firefox and Minecraft had to do modifications to avoid the issue of slow file access and slow reads of folders full of small files. Hedgewars too.

I feel these weren't the only cases. And none of those had anything to do with Explorer.

But, it might have improved, and might be "good enough" for email.

So much depends on the specific APIs, of course, and how many versions of Windows you are expecting to support, and what your seek patterns and locking expectations/behavior are. (In my experience, it has been misunderstandings of the Windows file lock model/ACL lookups that seem more often the problem than directory size, but obviously everyone's benchmarks are different. File locks are super "slow", especially if you are not opting out of locks you don't need.)

I'm not suggesting that architecting with lots of small files in a single folder is yet the best architecture on Windows, just that for Maildir specifically on Windows it is among the least of the problems.

'k. take your word for it. Esp in relation to Maildir. I know very little about Windows development.

But... just, FWIW, this particular subject has come up a lot on HN over the years with various explanations. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18783525 and many many others easily searchable on hn.algolia.com

My fav comment was by an MS dev: "NTFS code is a purple opium-fueled Victorian horror novel that uses global recursive locks and SEH for flow control."

I definitely understand it gets talked about a lot, endlessly. It's not an unearned reputation. I just think that, especially in light of things like that last comment you like, so much of that reputation at this point is folklore more than benchmarks. People take "Windows is bad at lots of files in a single folder" as faith from some bible of Operating Systems Allegories rather than something they've worked with directly or seen tested themselves first-hand.

Part of what certainly doesn't help is that most of the "lots of files in a single folder" applications make other POSIX-based assumptions (such as locks and consistency with respect to concurrency are generally much more opt-in and eventually consistent by default in POSIX rather than opt-out and aggressively consistent by default in Windows). If you are trying to use POSIX-based assumptions on Windows it doesn't matter what you are doing, including "lots of files in a single folder", you are going to have a bad time. I can easily presume that is what happened in most of your anecdotal counter-examples (Java Minecraft, Firefox, Hedgewars, will all have different, plausible POSIX biases), though I can't know for certain without benchmarks and performance data in front of me, and none of those are currently my job. "Lots of files in a single folder" at that point, under that presumption, is a symptom, rather than the root cause. It's very easy to blame the symptom sometimes, especially when that sort of performance debugging/fixing is getting in the way of your real goals and that symptom is sometimes such an easy fix (use more folders, bundle more zips, what have you).

Again, I can't say that with too much certainty without specific performance data, it's just I do think people need to question the "Orthodoxy" of "well, Windows is just bad at that" more than they do sometimes.

Hm. Did you read the comment by the Microsoft dev in the linked thread? He gives the following reasons:

"We've long since gotten all the low-hanging fruit and are left with what is essentially "death by a thousand cuts," with no single component responsible for our (lack of) performance, but with lots of different things contributing"

* Linux has a top-level directory entry cache that means that certain queries (most notably stat calls) can be serviced without calling into the file system at all once an item is in the cache. Windows has no such cache, and leaves much more up to the file systems... [snip]

* Windows's IO stack is extensible, allowing filter drivers to attach to volumes and intercept IO requests before the file system sees them. ... [snip] .. Even a clean install of Windows will have a number of filters present, particularly on the system volume (so if you have a D: drive or partition, I recommend using that instead, since it likely has fewer filters attached). Filters are involved in many IO operations, most notably creating/opening files.

* The NT file system API is designed around handles, not paths. Almost any operation requires opening the file first, which can be expensive. ... [snip]

"Whether we like it or not (and we don't), file operations in Windows are more expensive than in Linux, even more so for those operations that only touch file metadata (such as stat)."

I can say my personal experience under Windows has been that compiling the same project was twice as fast in a linux virtualbox inside windows, than in the host. :)

AFAIU the problem isn't so much NTFS but the (pluggable) Win32 filesystem layers above. It gets even worse with AV software plugging itself into those layers.

Packing individual resources into archives is the norm for Games for a reason.

> Making the sqlite db the primary would mean that unless there was constant synchronisation I would be missing emails in the other clients.

This is a perfect example of complicating what should be a simple thing to support a very, very niche use case. Thunderbird should just use sqlite so all normal operations including search are fast across all platforms, and if you have a use case like wanting to synchronize with other mail clients using maildir, then write a plugin that will duplicate the sqlite db to a user-specified maildir.

You can asynchronously generate the mbox/maildir data.

Thunderbird does store emails in SQLite databases.

I want my email to stay in the same structure Thunderbird has now.

Damn. I _knew_ there was something I forgot to do setting up Tbird this time!

Maildir support has been considered beta for a long time in Thunderbird, and using it for anything ‘critical’ doesn’t sound possible unless you like to live dangerously (for me, everything to do with email is critical- some messages are more important than others, but I really can’t deal with email being unstable, it’d be like the postal system being consistently unstable). Do you use the maildir format with Thunderbird? - if you have, how do you find it?

I have been using maildir storage for a few years now, on 4 instances of Thunderbird, each with 10-50GB worth of messages per folder, on both NTFS and ext4. So far not a single case of lost message or usability issues. All operations are instant and don't block UI.

I tried that before, blew out my storage (obviously since each small file now takes 4KiB block minimum in ext4, unless you specifically mkfs with a smaller block size or use zfs)

I don't know how your archive is, mine is a few tens of thousands of messages, many of them with attachments, it works OK, fast and no problems at all.

After these news, I'm searching for an alternative right away. I won't touch a "rewriting from scratch" piece of software with a ten feet pole. Very disappointing.

Suggestions very welcome.

I would just wait for the inevitable fork.

My suggestion would be to wait and see.

They know they have a huge user base, including enterprise users. They can do it right and modernize the UI without breaking your workflow. Maybe they will propose compact views and everything. They already have such options.

I've been using Thunderbird for 2005 and like it as is, but I wouldn't mind some fresh air. I'd also love being able to convince my younger relatives to adopt Thunderbird but that somewhat cannot happen in its current state.

Thunderbird is also not Firefox and I would expect them not handle UI/UX changes differently. Worst case, it will remain customizable. I'm not quite happy with the current Firefox UI, but luckily, someone built the Lepton theme [1] which is perfect for me. Thunderbird will still be based on Gecko for the UI, and I'm sure it'll remain at least as customizable as Firefox, even if it involves some hackery.

If Thunderbird works well for you, just wait. Maybe you'll like the changes after all?

As for the suggestions I could suggest KMail, it seems good, and would integrate perfectly with my KDE Plasma desktop environment, though I have been trapped in Thunderbird for more than a decade now.

[1] https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/

Thank you, also to behringer, for the suggestions. I used KMail when Linux was my primary system at home, years ago, nice to know it's still alive and kicking. I'm planning going back to Linux so it's a logical move.

Not sure changes will be good or bad, but rewriting implies some things stop working. My workflow is mostly fetch mail, read mail, done. Nothing fancy. If they want to write a new client, just do it and replace the old one only when they're on par functionally. But they never do that :(

> My suggestion would be to wait and see.

This is what I'm going with. We use Thunderbird for work and as long they don't kill of functionality and disrupt what we're doing I don't really care what Thunderbird looks like.

I'm a little worried about a bunch of new bugs, especially ones that result in data loss though. As things change I may be pushing back on updates for a while just to make sure things are stable.

If things go bad, I'll have to look for forks or set up something else that can reasonably handle IMAP and supports MBOX

Compact the folders. If still slow, vacuum the sqlites. Still slow? Do a FS checkup, may have corruption.

Compacting folders is something I hope that they fix. I tell Thunderbird to download/sync all accounts and immediately it prompts me to compact and if I let it, it will only fail with an error because it's still in the middle of doing what I just asked it to. A little more intelligence in when it prompts for compacting would be nice.

Better yet, they could do a better job handling it automatically so I don't need it to ask me.

There must be something weird about your setup. I have 40k messages in my Inbox & everything is snappy: Mailbox operations complete immediately.

I delete a lot of email so I don't have more than a few k messages in an email account, but I have 3 of accounts setup in T-Bird and it's always been very snappy.

70K here. The only thing a bit slow is search (but not slower than in other clients I tested).

If you’re on Windows, certain antivirus, including Defender, can absolutely kill Thunderbird’s performance. There seems to be some kind of lock contention going on, and the result is Thunderbird taking a long time to do common tasks. Excluding the profile folder from antivirus would solve the issue, with the caveat that any incoming attachments would no longer be automatically scanned.

Slowness and memory bloat is the main problem of Thunderbird. I don't know what the cause is, but it is frustrating that there are no full-featured open-source mail apps that have decent performance.

Kmail's UI can be fast, but its IMAP support is so horribly slow and buggy at least for me.

kmail imap support was somewhat rough around 10 years ago, but it been totally stable for me ever since. i have push/idle enabled on server/client, it been working just fine. the only problem that i have it's when letsencrypt certificate rotated at night and at morning i get few hundreds popups asking to approve new certificate

Is it ported over to Rust yet?

Yes, as it is based on Firefox, which Rust was invented for.

> The curse: coordinating efforts across a volunteer community was challenging…

> …Since Thunderbird was being contributed to by many volunteer contributors with varying tastes, it resulted in an Inconsistent user interface without a coherent user experience.

Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month" really never stops giving.

You don't actually get more efficient by moving to a giant decentralized volunteer engineering workforce -- someone has to coordinate all that, or else what you're going to get is a mess, both under the hood and in what is visible. And coordinating all that is hard and resource-intensive, the more so the _more_ developers involved.

Some open source projects manage to do that coordination with a decentralized volunteer coordinating staff (although in many cases, it's not truly "volunteer", it's people being paid by various employers collaborating across organizations/employers -- this was in fact most of original open source success stories). But it's not easy. And requires stability and tenure in that decentralized coordinating staff, to hold the vision, and to have the relationships to work together in a unified way. (A "benevolent dictator" is another way to do it).

The hardest part of developing software that is too much for one person to do by themselves (and that one person never leaves), is always the inter-personal communication, coordination, and shared-mental-model-making-and-sharing, not the coding.

So anyway, without being involved in Thunderbird at all, I totally believe this story, and that bringing it back into an organization of paid employees as a core was necessary to prevent complete disintegration (I mean, other organizational solutions are possible too, but they are all even more challenging, this is the simplest), because... that's how it works.

One entity (person/group) with a strong product vision + a giant decentralized workforce is pretty much how everything gets built. The actual people putting hands to keyboard have the mythical man month thing going for them.

The part of mythical man month I was thinking of, which I consider the most famous/useful take-away, is how adding people to a project will not necessarily make it go faster, because the more people, the more coordination work -- and Brooks paid a lot of attention to the fact that the "coordination work" isn't just, like, issuing orders and monitoring people, but involves building and sharing and maintaining "mental models", a vision for how it all goes together in a consistent and coherent way.

i don't think that vision can be developed and maintained succesfully only by people who never get their hands dirty, it needs to be iteratively developed with constant feedback from the work itself and it's reception, if it is to be successful.

> it needs to be iteratively developed with constant feedback from the work itself and it's reception, if it is to be successful.

There's a danger here too in that you can iterate on a design in a "monolithic" way where you iterate over a brittle design that's still hard to work with years later because you need to reload the entire system into your brain to make sense of it again.

Looking at Unix as an open source design success story, it was designed in relatively well-defined "layers". So for example it can get away with making literally everything a "file" with a common file interface, even if you're actually working with a physical peripheral or a "black hole" like /dev/null. And on these layers you can build all kinds of different implementations.

I try to push for a similar approach even on proprietary projects because if we can compartmentalize what we need to know to work with the pieces of our systems, they'll be easier to understand with less effort than if we need to understand everything about them before iterating on them.

And this can be passively "encouraged" by how the work is divided across teams/workgroups to leverage Conway's Law (which can also just as easily lead to software components that don't make any engineering sense if people aren't conscious of the effect their organization has on their software's organization).

I've used Thunderbird exclusively for desktop mail for many years. To my knowledge, it still sucks less than any other free and open option, but that's not much of a bar.

Over time, Thunderbird has become slower and less reliable, most notably in the area of search. While the advanced search tools are excellent, the results are lousy. Email that I know exists is often unfindable until I force Thunderbird to re-index my whole mailbox.

Seeing F/OSS devs of (what I consider to be) a critical app like Thunderbird talk about "modernizing the interface" is the worst. The interface is fine and there are far bigger problems -- problems related to actual functionality as opposed to prettiness -- that desperately need work.

And to echo others' comments: courting the "average user" is worse than a waste of resources, it's an active turning away from the core users and supporters.

> To my knowledge, [Thunderbird] still sucks less than any other free and open option,

Have you tried Claws Mail? It's a plain native traditional email client, and I find it really snappy.

There is even a Windows port. Not sure how "native" people might consider that as it's still based on GTK for Windows, and I don't have personal experience with it, but might be worth giving a try?

https://www.claws-mail.org/downloads.php

Claws is really great, but it IME it lacked in getting the search results - I just never could find things as easily as in thunderbird; maybe I was not knowing how to "hold" it best yet, though.

That said, I need to scan through a lot of mails for some specific things, thunderbird is barely getting a long with that anymore (the day I have to setup notmuch for real seems to be around the corner), so for most people Claws search may be easily good enough.

Holy crap, this is amazing.

I had already lost hope of finding a civilized email client. This is what all software should look like.

Thank you.

> The interface is fine and there are far bigger problems -- problems related to actual functionality as opposed to prettiness -- that desperately need work.

You may want to read the blog post again. This isn't just about a new UI, it's about overhauling the codebase in general, so that they can improve all aspects.

I get that, but they listed

"Rebuild the interface from scratch..."

as a separate bullet point from codebase issues, and later talked about

"A UI that looks and feels modern is getting initially implemented...aiming at offering a simple and clean interface for “new” users..."

> Email that I know exists is often unfindable until I force Thunderbird to re-index my whole mailbox.

Nice to have confirmation of this very irritating bug! When something isn't found in Thunderbird I now resort to searching in Fastmail's web interface.

Nooooooooo

Why change the UI? I mean, I like Thunderbird exactly since it's the only email client that didn't go into the direction of emulating GMail or Apple Mail or other mail interfaces that shows you the messages in a conversational manner.

I like Thunderbird because it has more or less the same user experience of the old "Outlook" Windows application. Why change something that works???

At least I hope they will give users the possibility to remain with the classical interface, otherwise I think I will still remain on older versions (after all IMAP is relatively stable so I shouldn't have that much issues).

The only thing I would like on Thunderbird is sync of the settings with a Mozilla account like Firefox does. Not that it's a big deal, I just copy around the profile directory (because reconfiguring 10 email accounts each time I change/format the PC takes almost 1 hour).

I'll add one more negative sentiment.

> Using a solid base architecture like Firefox is the perfect starting point.

No, but why? Why does an email client need a web browser to function, and why is that the "perfect starting point"?

The only reason an email client might use a web _view_ for, is for reading HTML emails, and even then that web view should be a far more restricted and barebones version of a traditional browser tab.

This approach simply inherits all the security issues from the insane complexity of modern browsers, just to reuse some common components that should've been extracted and separated from all the browser baggage.

Hey, Mozilla, remember XUL? Before you decided to deprecate and remove it from Firefox, it was the unified UI framework that both a browser and an email client could use, without sharing any of their core dependencies. What a concept!

I'm surprised Mozilla still has interest in maintaining Thunderbird. I'm curious to know what the userbase for it is, but I can't imagine desktop email clients have a mainstream audience anymore.

Dropping XUL really broke so many extensions. I think everyone dumped FF then and started over with chrome.

Thank goodness for Pale Moon & the UXP.

This is awesome. Never heard of this before. Now I’m crying.

Ex Mozilla here.

> Why does an email client need a web browser to function, and why is that the "perfect starting point"?

I'm not saying using Firefox is the best thing, but there are arguments to be made: first, Firefox is multiplatform, and good at it, and that's something Thunderbird needs as well. Then, like you said, an email client needs to display web pages, so no matter what, a web engine is needed (and it's absolutely possible to re-use Firefox core without building and including all the HTML features regular Firefox comes with). And finally, the whole TB code base is already in JS/XPCom, which would make the transition much easier.

> Hey, Mozilla, remember XUL? Before you decided to deprecate and remove it from Firefox, it was the unified UI framework that both a browser and an email client could use

That's an unnecessary snarky. There are millions of reasons why it made sense to remove XUL. Yes, on paper XUL is great, but it was based on old UI ideas, we had to make tons of hacks to work around those old ideas, and performance was not on par with what overly-optimised HTML could achieve. XBL was way to limited, and tons of features were just useless (remember RDF and templates?).

I would love to see XUL come back, but we need a modern version of it, and to be honest, this could just be an extension of HTML.

> without sharing any of their core dependencies

That's not true.

> I'm surprised Mozilla still has interest in maintaining Thunderbird

It's not Mozilla-Mozilla who's maintaining Thunderbird, but another entity.

> Yes, on paper XUL is great, but it was based on old UI ideas, we had to make tons of hacks to work around those old ideas, and performance was not on par with what overly-optimised HTML could achieve.

Criticizing the quality of something by saying it’s from “old ideas” is a total non sequitir. Old is not the same as bad (there are plenty of great ideas that are old) and modern is not the same as good.

The pointlessness of just saying XUL is old is underlined when you suggest replacing it with HTML. HTML is even older than XUL and a pretty good idea.

And by the way whatever you replace(d) XUL with will be an old idea soon too.

Thanks for your comment. I'm commenting as a long-time user of Mozilla software--since the Netscape days--and I'm not familiar with the internal or technical reasons that led to these decisions, so I appreciate your perspective. My snarkiness is coming from a place of tough love and frustration with the current state of Mozilla, so allow me to push back against some of your points.

> Firefox is multiplatform, and good at it, and that's something Thunderbird needs as well

I get that, but why isn't the UI toolkit and whatever multiplatform support that Thunderbird needs, not abstracted away from the web browser dependencies? Maybe it is so, but from this article, it sounds like actual Firefox components are reused by Thunderbird, for better or worse.

> an email client needs to display web pages, so no matter what, a web engine is needed

Again, I'm not familiar with the internals, but surely the engine needed to render just HTML and CSS for purposes of HTML emails, is not the same engine needed to render modern web sites with JavaScript and all the overhead of related technologies. You do say that it's possible to re-use Firefox core without all Firefox features, so I would assume that this purpose-built engine for Thunderbird is a very, very minor subset of Firefox, that could be isolated in a way to not pull in all other Firefox dependencies.

And keep in mind, that all this is to render HTML emails, a minor part of the feature set of an email client, which many users--particularly those that still choose to use a desktop email client--prefer to disable altogether.

> the whole TB code base is already in JS/XPCom, which would make the transition much easier.

I see, but this is a benefit for Mozilla developers, not users. Often technical decisions are made because it benefits the developer, rather than user experience. This is the reason we see the proliferation of so many Electron apps, and so many failed attempts at cross-platform mobile toolkits. The direction Mozilla seems to be headed in is to reinvent Electron for Firefox, which is again prioritizing the QoL of internal developers over users. No user _wants_ to run a separate web browser process that wraps a single web site just because it was convenient for developers to build it.

> There are millions of reasons why it made sense to remove XUL.

I can imagine that was certainly the case, but all reasons you've listed were problems for developers.

> performance was not on par with what overly-optimised HTML could achieve

You mean actual UI performance, or performance in some synthetic benchmark? I've used a few of the Firefox forks that still use XUL (Pale Moon, Basilisk, etc.), and while I chose to abandon them for other reasons, UI performance was never an issue.[1]

> I would love to see XUL come back, but we need a modern version of it, and to be honest, this could just be an extension of HTML.

As a user, my frustration wasn't with XUL going away. It was because it was removed without an equivalent replacement, while breaking and severely limiting many extensions. So I'd also like to see a modern XUL alternative, since a crossplatform and generic UI toolkit is exactly what's needed to build applications as diverse as a web browser and email client (or audio player[2], or chat client[3]).

> > without sharing any of their core dependencies > That's not true.

That's a sign of my technical ignorance then, but there's no reason why a sane UI toolkit _couldn't_ be built without a cross-contamination of dependencies between projects that use it.

[1]: After reading this article[4], which I highly recommend for anyone interested in the topic, it makes it clear that there were several issues with XUL/XPCOM that limited performance. IMHO, that's not a reason to remove XUL altogether, but to address these performance bottlenecks in a way that avoids throwing the baby out with the bath water. Indeed, a lot of effort seemed to go in this direction, but ultimately it was decided to scrap it entirely. It seems like Mozilla was chasing the performance of Chrome by becoming more like Chrome, rather than fixing the issues with XUL.

This comment[5] from a Pale Moon maintainer is enlightening. To summarize, there are warts and security issues with XUL (extensions, in this case), but such a framework can continue to exist if the maintainers prioritize keeping their existing user base of power users, instead of chasing the development model of Chrome. Yet Mozilla decided to do the latter, alienating their user base in the process, while still failing to attract new users. In retrospect, how was this a good decision?

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_(software)

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instantbird

[4]: https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addo...

[5]: https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addo...

The thing is, people want to read html emails. MS outlook doesn't need a web browser to run, because it uses ... MS Word to render emails, which if you've ever tried to send formatted emails programmatically you'll know it's a dark, dark state of affairs.

Good. Pretty much all emails I care about would be better off without any formatting beyond what e.g. Markdown provide - and that subset of HTML works well enough in Outlook.

I dread the day that Google manages to grab enough of Outlook's marketshare so that they can dictate the direction of email just like they have been doing to the web - we're almost there already.

> Why does Thunderbird look so old

UI isn't a fashion show. I'd much rather have a UI that looks older but is comfortable to use than something trendy.

> UI isn't a fashion show.

Yes, it is. At least, it is for UI designers.

Only for UI designers who put aesthetics before usability.

IOW, for most UI designers on current software products.

Very few changes I see these days actually improve anything; they are merely change for the sake of providing evidence to justify the UI designers' salaries.

If something already works, and we know how to use it, there had better be a damn good reason for changing it, because you are burdening thousands, millions, or even billions of people with yet another entirely unnecessary learning task in our already over-stressed lives.

We are far past the time when the new version of X will be seen by orders of magnitude more users than the previous version, so it'll be only the minority that have to relearn, and the majority will enjoy the improved UI (assuming that the new stuff is actually an improvement; BIG assumption). Today, most of it will burden existing users.

You want to make the colors prettier, add a dark/night mode, round the corners, highlight things a bit better? Wonderful. Just don't mess with the organization.

> Just don't mess with the organization.

And don't mess with discoverability and ergonomics. I hate buttons that don't look like buttons, controls littering the title bar so that I can't use it to move the window, etc etc

Also for the users. For my part, I appreciate if stuff looks modern. I understand the whitespace madness complaints, but a software which looks like 1999 is not something I want to work with.

There is a degree of modern style needed because Thunderbird does not exist in a vacuum. Windows evolved, macOS evolved, iPhone/Android look different than 1997 Windows .. which Thunderbird looked like the last years.

For anyone else who likes 1997-Windows-style software and can tolerate shareware, try Becky! Internet Mail: http://www.rimarts.co.jp/becky.htm

Meanwhile, the only major website my elderly dad, who didn't really start using the Web until something like 2015, can use unassisted with a fair amount of confidence, is Craigslist.

I'm skeptical that normal, non-technical users actually benefit from or even prefer all this crap. Someone does, but I'm not convinced it's them.

Next you'll be moving my steering wheel 'cause my neighbour repainted his house.

Ok, but whilst you wear your clothes out in front of people (a literal fashion show), few people parade their MUA's UI in front of their friends, do they? Like, get check the chrome in my mail program guys...??

It doesn't look old, it looks overloaded and inconvenient. HN UI looks old, but it's the most convenient UI to use.

I'm still on TB68 because Enigmail was *broken after, and I think the UI is convenient except adding new accounts and managing SMTP servers.

*I send emails in plaintext, don't tell me about S/MIME.

Enigmail functionality is now built-in, it's quite nice!

When TB78 was introduced, the only supported S/MIME and did not allow inline encryption in plaintext. Has this changed now?

I use OpenGPG for signing and writing emails, they are plaintext encrypted. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/openpgp-thunderbird-how... https://www.linuxbabe.com/security/encrypt-emails-gpg-thunde...

HN is really bad on touch devices. Call me young and naive, but I mostly read HN on the couch on my tablet.

I mostly read HN on my iPhone using the website with the zoom cranked up a little bit and I find it works better than the variety of native clients available.

I use HN half on my phone and half on my desktop. It's OK on both, I just have to zoom the upvote buttons sometimes before touching them.

It's better than the average news site but worse than if they just spent 10 minutes adding some mobile CSS. I constantly log out accidentally on mobile.

True. There is even a media query that can detect touch devices: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/poin...

So they could keep the good old HN alive for PCs.

HN is one of the best web sites for my phone. There are some improvements they could make but I would not call being among the top 5% best mobile websites being "really bad".

I use Hckrnews.com, which is convenient on my phone and allows me to filter posts in order to be focused with my time.

I will take overloaded any day of the week. I am sick of the trend of removing all widgets for some sense of a clean interface. I am on a desktop machine with a ginormous amount of pixels and real-estate. Show me all the buttons.

I think it's the UI an email client must have, no less, no more. I quote the post

> A UI that looks and feels modern is getting initially implemented with version 115 in July, aiming at offering a simple and clean interface for “new” users, as well as the implementation of more customizable options with a flexible and adaptable interface to allow “old” users to maintain that familiarity they love.

I don't understand why today's new users shouldn't be able to cope with an interface any old new user didn't have any problem using. However as long as they keep the promise not to take away the current convenient interface, they can do whatever they feel like to remove functionality for a dumb modern mode.

I mean, dark mode would be nice.

Themes won’t get you what you want?

How do I install one on mobile?

Well tbh I didn't realize that Thunderbird had an Android release. Looks to be about a year old? That's super new in the history of Thunderbird, and I don't know anything about how it works.

If there's no theming support, then yeah, at minimum a dark mode is a totally reasonable request.

edit: or were you talking about HN?

I don't love light gray on white just because comment got some downvotes. Finding that you got answer to your comment is also PITA, especially if it is something older than "right now".

Old reddit + RES is entirely better in every regard. New reddit is utter garbage tho.

I bet you can go on Slashdot and find a thread from a million years ago with people saying they will never switch to this trendy new Thunderbird and that you can pull their pine/elm/mutt from their cold dead hands. I remember a time when running X11 with twm and an xterm was considered too fancy

Minotaur!

By the time it was renamed Thunderbird, Netcraft had already confirmed /. was dead. Now get off my lawn!

On the other hand, I gave thunderbird a try after switching to linux and found their UI so bad that it was harming usability. After the app had finished taking up the screen with various controls, settings and the list of messages, there was a tiny window left over to read the email itself, and it seemed like the threading of messages was basically broken. It wasn't that it looked old exactly that bothered me (although it did), but that I was buried in a mountain of jank from the start.

I quickly found a new client, but not one I love. If thunderbird does get a UI overhaul I'd give them another chance, and it sounds like they're moving towards a UI that I at the very least would prefer.

The Thunderbird Saga reminds of an old computer industry joke.

The new CEO of a tech company shows up for day one. He meets his recently-fired predecessor as he enters his office. They shake hands and the outgoing guy says "I left three letters for you in the bottom drawer, use them as needed".

First quarter for the new CEO, he hasn't much to put in the win column, having barely familiarized himself with staff and projects. But he has to provide a report to the Directors. Desperate, he pulls the first envelope, which reads "Blame your predecessor".

Next quarter isn't much better. Again desperate to prepare for the Board Meeting, pulls the second letter which reads "Blame the economy".

Third quarter he's just about to get some traction but still doesn't have anything earth shattering to report, he goes for the last letter, which reads "Write three letters".

I laughed a lot.

After I finished one contract I told my team there (all permies) to remember to blame me after I'm gone.

I have been using Thunderbird for years. Every now and again I get curious about what else is out there and I start looking into alternatives like Claws or Neomutt. But then inevitably I realise that these are simply solutions in search of a problem for me, that Thunderbird continues to work absolutely fine and there is really no reason to switch. I understand others will have a different use case to me but it always blows my mind to see people having so many problems with Thunderbird when it has been just a very consistent workhorse in my experience.

I use Thunderbird for personal stuff and Outlook for work. I know it's probably not a fair comparison as my work laptop is slowed down by all the security stuff and general corporate spyware, but damn I only wish my work email could be half as snappy as my personal email.

A tip for those complaining about search, particularly about its performance: if you can, try filtering instead. It's more limited (I think it only searches sender and subject line) but it is blazingly fast for me, filtering out several GB of emails in less than a second, always.

Finally, for those wondering why an email client needs to be built on top of a web browser - this is because in 2023, most "normies" receive a lot of email that is heavy on HTML, so in order to be in any way useful to the majority of users, an email client needs to be really good at parsing HTML, which browsers are. Of course it seems like overkill if you only receive plaintext email.

After getting my parents new computers, setting them up from scratch, and finding that Windows is an even more depressing shitshow than ever and lacking any competent E-mail program... I installed Thunderbird for the first time in at least a decade and a half.

And I was pleasantly surprised to find that it's better than I remember, and worked great for the 20,000 messages or so in each of their AOL In boxes. Sadly, I'm not kidding about those In boxes.

For my accounts I rely on Apple Mail and SpamSieve, which works well. The dealbreaker for me when I tried Thunderbird years ago is that it lacked any way to export the filters you'd set up, so you could copy them to your other computers. Has this been addressed?

>For my accounts I rely on Apple Mail and SpamSieve, which works well. The dealbreaker for me when I tried Thunderbird years ago is that it lacked any way to export the filters you'd set up, so you could copy them to your other computers. Has this been addressed?

No. You can't even copy them to other accounts on the same computer. I had to recreate dozens of rules last year for just that reason. If TB wasn't head and shoulders above other MUAs, I'd have dumped it.

Then again, I have emails in TB accounts going back to 1996, so perhaps I'm biased in that regard.

Please see my other comment in this thread on how to copy filter rules from one profile to another. [1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34735788

> The dealbreaker for me when I tried Thunderbird years ago is that it lacked any way to export the filters you'd set up, so you could copy them to your other computers. Has this been addressed?

It’s been a while since I used Thunderbird and looked at its internal files. But I remember some .dat file inside the profile that stored the filters and could be copied across.

Edit: Found it. The filter rules are in a file called msgFilterRules.dat. This answer and others on super user (from more than 10 years ago) have the details. [1] I’m sure the Thunderbird forums would also have this information.

[1]: http://superuser.com/questions/439451/ddg#439458

Only tangentially related but I wrote some code to manipulate these filters with the hope that I would help manage/centralize them more easily: https://remusao.github.io/posts/parsing-thunderbird-msg-filt...

Leaving it here in case that’s useful to anyone.

When I saw the headline, I was worried they were going to close the project. I never take community-supported projects for granted. They've been here, providing an extremely important product, for decades.

The biggest issue (from what I read) is technical debt. It's a huge, time consuming and possibly an explosive mess. They have about a dozen developers providing for the needs of millions of users worldwide. They are working on 20 years of (legacy) code.

Even Mozilla had to scrap off the old DNA in favor of new.

I am glad this core group remains excited about the project. Ecstatic that they are looking toward the future. Happy that they are taking the time to make their jobs (much) easier in the long run.

After all those horror stories of people getting locked out of Google, I started using Thunderbird as my email backup. Took a while to get all my emails but now that they have been downloaded, I just run it as a backup tool to fetch the emails. If I had to ask, more than improving the UI (which is an initiative I have nothing against), improving the performance (mainly search) should be accorded high priority.

Yeah, same, except on my home file server (unraid) rather than my desktop.

I use https://hub.docker.com/r/ich777/thunderbird, which exposes the UI as a website with a javascript version of vnc. I log into it every once in a while to verify that it's still fetching updates.

If your concern are backups (only), I think there are better tools for that, such as offlineimap and mbsync.

> If your concern are backups (only), I think there are better tools for that, such as offlineimap and mbsync.

I used to use imapbackup but I wouldn't say they are better tools:

- They rarely support OAUTH directly so it can be a pain to set up with gmail

- You still need a viewer to navigate the backup when you need it (usually a full mail client though there are some lighter maildir frontends)

The highest priority IMHO is security.

Given how a targeted email can reach someone wherever they are (and spam can conceal mass exploits), frequent security updates are the wrong mindset.

The mindset of one necessary security update should be, OMG, we messed up badly, we need to fix and mitigate, and immediately figure out how never to need another security update, ever again.

Web browsers, OTOH, are hopeless for security right now, due to monstrously big-moat standards. But email MUAs (with addressbook, calendar, and maybe chat) are a much-much simpler problem, also high-value, and maybe the place to set a good example.

If someone objects "but we will always have constant stream of security vulns, because we need these 1,000 libraries, many of which are hopeless"... maybe that's not true. Implementing email is conceptually very easy, and you don't need all that much more than conceptual to get all the benefit that users actually want from email.

(Even incoming HTML multipart content-types, which are often a nightmare of BS generated by some MS program, can be transformed to a vastly simpler and cleaned-up form, enabling a very simple and secure rendering/editing engine, with zero baggage from hopeless browser engines.)

I wish we would have more intelligent email clients, that can be as "dumb" as remembering the email addresses and geolocation routes from their senders.

It literally could be a simple ASN lookup, and you would prevent 99% of targeted phishing emails.

Nobody in the world uses some random domain.trade to send emails as company.com ffs.

Microsoft is kind of not giving a damn about security and I dont understand why they do not invest in Outlook security that much. To me this is straight up offensive how they behave.

How can it be that a VBA exploit from 2003 can still compromise an updated system in 2023?

> Nobody in the world uses some random domain.trade to send emails as company.com ffs.

Lots of emails come via mail delivery services.. random domains (sendgrid, amazonses, mailchimp)

Many phishing attempts can be defeated by SPF[0] (the servers that are allowed to send email for this domain), DKIM[1] (proof that it was sent from a domain, and not tampered with), and DMARC[2] (what to do if the email fails SPF/DKIM). Many virus scanners, spam filters pay attention to these, but your mail service can filter mail by it too.

The other piece is seeing `FROM` (just a mail header, spammers will set this to what they're pretending to be) vs `Reply-To` (if you reply this is the address the message will be sent to, for spam this is often unrelated to the content eg random1222@example.com) vs `Return-Path` (who sent the email). This is sort of like the `raw domain` vs `internationalized domain` (allowing UTF8 similar characters to spoof a domain) vs `hiding the URL` problem in the browser.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys_Identified_Mail [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMARC

> Thunderbird is literally a bunch of code running on top of Firefox. All the tabs and sections you see in our applications are just browser tabs with a custom user interface.

There's no such thing as applications. There's just us, and browsers. That's it!

I'll take this over an Electron app any day :) love FF

I thought that Thunderbird was a native application for quite a long time. For some reason it never had the same icky feeling I get from any Electron application (even supposedly "high quality" ones) and worked fast on crappy machines (which is what I've typically used throughout the life). Of course, performance went a bit downhill since they abandoned XUL in favor of pure HTML, but still.

Reading the article, I was expecting the dreaded “and we’re rebuilding it on Electron” (because apparently that’s the only way anyone knows to build a desktop app nowadays), but apparently they don’t plan to move to an entirely different technical base, just to rewrite stuff.

No, because they have already done that (except on Firefox instead of Chromium).

Do they use JavaScript outside the UI?

The SMTP client is now written in javascript and most of the IMAP client as well.

The whole calendaring system is written in javascript.

The chat clients (irc, matrix, etc) are also written in javascript.

Okay, so not that dissimilar to an Electron stack after all.

My complaint is it should store each email in its own file (like NNTP readers do). This makes it much more amenable to backups, search, and makes it a lot less susceptible to corruption.

Instead, Tbird stores one folder in one gigantic file. One threading error, and poof! It's gone. Happened to me several times. Yes, I filed bug reports. No, it was never fixed (at least the Tbird developers denied this was a problem).

Another minor thing I'd like to see is don't hide everything in multiple places.

There's still no way to backup my account settings.

> One threading error, and poof! It's gone. Happened to me several times.

In all the years I've used Thunderbird, it's never happened to me, several machine types.

I like the way the file/folder structure is and do not want to see it changed.

You'll change your mind about liking it when it fails and you lose months/years of mail.

Surely this is what regular backups are for.

> My complaint is it should store each email in its own file

Thunderbird supports one-file-per-email (Maildir) accounts, see settings. It's still marked as "experimental" because of some edge cases, but I have not encountered issues in many years, and it makes for a snappier experience.

- https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/maildir-thunderbird

> There's still no way to backup my account settings.

Import / Export settings has ben around for a few versions:

- https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-export

I never gave up on thunderbird and hope it will rise again to represent "power, protection, and strength for the user". Thunderbird, in contrast with the sibling "browser" is still a desktop app that asks the user to have some agency and exercise it.

Here are my two cents in hashtags and slogans for the future of thunderbird: embrace activitypub/fediverse, expand rss functionality, reinvent bookmarks, think about audio/podcasts, improve filtering and smart search. Leverage open source ecosystems and tools for next generation content management. In sum, become the local app where people spend quality time to organize their online life and experience the digital ocean.

Yeah, you could improve on the looks. But keep in mind: "In architecture, functionalism is the principle that software[/buildings] should be designed based solely on their purpose and function". If the purpose and function are beautiful, people will think thunderbird is beautiful. On the other hand no amount of eye-candy can hide the lack of purpose.

> Here are my two cents in hashtags and slogans for the future of thunderbird: embrace activitypub/fediverse, expand rss functionality, reinvent bookmarks, think about audio/podcasts, improve filtering and smart search. Leverage open source ecosystems and tools for next generation content management. In sum, become the local app where people spend quality time to organize their online life and experience the digital ocean.

And i thought i just wanted a fast, snappy, powerful email client. Silly me.

I've found that keeping all my old mail--including from old dead accounts--in Thunderbird has been a big part of the performance problems I experienced. Having been using Thunderbird from the very earliest of days (after migrating from SeaMonkey), I had a lot of dreck from old POP accounts and newer IMAP accounts.

I've switched to having it do full downloads of messages from IMAP, and run MailBackupX separately to ingest everything. Every month or so, I delete everything older than a month from Thunderbird, and rely on MailBackupX for my historical mail reference, searches, etc.

Now Thunderbird is fast and responsive.

My partner keeps hundreds of thousands of emails in Thunderbird from tens of email accounts, some active, some dead. Last time I looked, it was well over a terabyte of old email. The computer, a reasonably recent and fast Mac, can take several hours to start Thunderbird. That being said, I'm impressed it can handle that much cruft at all.

| after migrating from SeaMonkey

Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long, long time.

Yeah, well, being very old myself, stuff like Mosaic / Navigator / NetExplorer / SpyGlass still all seem sorta recent to me.

So the solution to Thunderbird's problems is to move your email to a different piece of software?

Well, the solution to search / archive.

I could argue that those are two very different functions. I could also argue that with a new architecture, Thunderbird could satisfy both functions well. It just doesn't now.

Thunderbird used to be a Native email client, that was awesome. I want an native email client, contacts and calendar. That's it. I dislike the browser tabs inside Thunderbird (I already use Firefox), either make a web version or keep the native version native. Most of the Thunderbird user base, are the ones that preferred the OG version. Not everything have to be a webview. Maybe they don't want users like me anymore. And that is fine. Is just feel sad, I miss the old Thunderbird.

OG thunderbird may have been better but it wasn't technically native. It used XUL instead of HTML but both were rendered by Gecko.

I wish Eudora was still around. The source code is available, my secret dream is to work on somtimes in the summer...

https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-eudora-email-client-sou...

My parents still run Eudora 7, can't convince them to switch to anything else...

For your future self: At some point they may ask you for some tech support to get their secure connection to mail servers working again. Start with the HermSSL package available here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/hermesmail/files/

Was just thinking that the other day. But Eudora, like Tbird until a short time ago, had issues with HTML mail (_1997_ era HTML maiil).

Still, if you ever do dive in I'm up for doing some beta testing!

I'm still using Eudora because I can't bear to part with it! Yes, its poor HTML renderer and lack of UTF-8 support, amongst other things, have no place in 2023, but other modern mail clients still seem to fall short on the features Eudora just gets right.

There's hope that the HERMES Mail project, which was formed after the Eudora source code was release, will one day be a viable replacement:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/hermesmail/

Wow, there's a name I haven't seen since I was running a (pre-linux) Windows NT 4 box back in like 1996/7.

I used that until I moved to Linux, and I used sylpheed on top of maildir.

I've used Thunderbird now for years, but I also use fastmail as the mail server and use offlineimap for backing fastmail up locally.

I've got email archives going back to 1998 (which is probably when I moved off Windows NT, come to think of it).

I'm dreading the redesign, even though at the moment I have no idea of how it will look like.

What webmail can one use to read and write mail for multiple accounts? I will need to have a sort of unified inbox for at least 5-6 accounts, and to see the folders of all those accounts in the same window.

It seems Roundcube [0] has a 3rd pary plugin for that[1].

There's also cypht [2], I like it's modular concept but I think it's still in alpha state.

[0] https://roundcube.net/about/ [1] https://packagist.org/packages/boressoft/ident_switch [2] https://cypht.org/

The Roundcube plugin seems to implement a form of quick account switching, which isn't exactly what I'm after.

Cypht looks more like it, and I've found that there's a paid version of AfterLogic Webmail [1] which claims to implement a unified inbox.

[1] https://afterlogic.com/webmail-client

Using Mimestream dramatically realigned my expectations of what a snappy UX feels like. Thunderbird is quite slow by comparison.

I'm not sure that desktop software should attempt to align with casual users. Most casual users will stick to the first-party experience. What is supposed to draw a casual Gmail user away from the first-party webmail? What is supposed to draw a casual Google Calendar user away from the first-party web-calendar? What is going to be not 2x better but 10x better than the first-party interface? The desktop interface needs to put power-users first, or put resource-savings first, or put low-latency UI first. What other advantage can be built on the desktop above the first-party experience, one which is also built by professional designers and Product teams, who will always be a step ahead of you on the feature roadmap?

I'm a long time Thunderbird user. Once every one or two years I looked if there was a better free & libre alternative supporting Windows, having a GUI, and an integrated calendar. Each time I came to the conclusion that Thunderbird was still the top contender. This blog post fills me with hope that Thunderbird has a future.

The UI doesn't look that old fashioned to me. It doesn't look like a website - it looks like an application (which is appropriate).

A big part of the problem is that the people in charge of TB UI are basically anti-application, and want everything to look like a pretentious web page or a mobile phone app page. A lot of TB's usable UI has already been spoiled by such changes.

After ten years or so, I moved away from Thunderbird, a few months ago, on my new laptop.

Thunderbird is to my eye becoming too much like a web-browser (I know the connection of course), rather than an email client. I don't want all that complexity in my email client.

I'm now using Claws Mail, which is simple, text-only and what I'm looking for.

Thunderbird had already a good email UX, what it now doesn't really has (anymore!) is performance, this post makes me honestly worried that the project will go in the totally wrong direction, alienating all power users.

Swapping out the C++ pop/imap/... implementation with a JS one is bogus IMO, yeah JS engines are fast nowadays, but still order of magnitude slower than compiled code.

Not to go for the meme, but what I really don't get is why not go for rust if a rewrite is anyway planned and your share the codebase with the product that caused the invention of that language, and showed that its possible to integrate it for subsystems?!

Fact is that my whole Thunderbird hangs and freezes completely ~15 times a day, on my 128 GiB DDR5, fast, PCIe 4 attached TLC NVMe storage and a Alder Lake top model i7 CPU. Look, a input text field, configured for plain text, just must not hang on such a machine, even not on a 15y old one - it's a god damn text input field, if that hangs you just make some things horribly wrongs, it's so irritating and just not healthy for anybodies blood pressure - save local in sync and save to drafts async.

Then there are the crashes, resize some reply window while it loads something in the main one? boom, crashed.

Mail is a big topic add work, for one we got a product that handles mail and for another we use mail in our development flow _a lot_, just like a lot of other Open Source projects. I know quite a few people that use, or well, used, Thunderbird as their mail reader, and more thanks to CalDav and Matrix implementation, ... basically only touching git send-email besides Thunderbird for mail related stuff.

None, literally zero, of them complained about the UI or UX from a few years ago, like never. Well a few that tried out recent betas did about adding some odd side bars, hiding down menus, making a lot of things harder to find.

To conclude my, already cut short, rant (sorry, this one was brewing since a bit): Now I got the aerc client set up, waiting on stand by for the final blow of sensless UI shuffle-around-and-make-unuseable-for-power-user updates; as then I'll have to say good bye to the (former) GOAT mail client - never thought this would happen :-(

As a sole maintainer of a TB add-on, I can't wait for it to completely stop working until rewritten yet again when old TB API gets removed and new version goes live.

> “Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?”

If it works...

For me it doesn't really work. Searching any large folder completely stalls the UI for a few seconds. How can it be so slow to go through a bit of text?

I never had that issue... and my .thunderbird folder is ~15gb. Sorting the email (eg. by size) takes a few seconds though, but i don't do that often.

Compared to eg. gmail (web interface), i find the speeds comparable, with the added benefit of having my emails offline (too).

That's nothing to do with how it looks or why the UI stalls. That's a problem with the search. Just fix the search.

The filter on a single folder is not slow and never stalls the UI. Caveats: I'm on Linux, maybe my large folders are not so large, if it stalls for you it's probably stalling for many more people with similar setups.

Thunderbird still is pretty fast, though not as fast as before.

And until the user-hostile changes (mandatory setup wizards) began creeping in a few years back, one of the venerable classics that you could still rely on.

Pretty sure the new version is going to be a steaming pile of modern usability horrors; reduced features, cheeseburger menus, unreadable UI elements because it has to "look modern", all powered by Electron & co.

Can't say I'm surprised though.

Mandatory setup wizards was really horrible and a throwback to the UI design of the late 90s. So modern!

I use Thunderbird as my main mail client and love it. I've tried a number of clients and always come back to it. The two big things for me are the search and the ecosystem of add-ons.

I do hope the redesign considers add-on developers. A lot have been abandoned by their maintainers who become frustrated with keeping up with Thunderbird's changes. One thing I'd love to see is an easy way to send money to support add-on creators.

For a long time I wished for an e-mail client that shows a side-by-side view of the e-mail your composing and the e-mail you're replying to. I think the majority of people would like such a view, yet nobody offers it. Does anybody know any good solution in macOS?

What's wrong with seeing the email you're replying to quoted in the message itself? It'd be redundant to see the message right next to you and also just below where you're typing.

If you are answering long e-mails you have to keep scrolling up and down!

You could just open a copy of the email in a separate window and tile them side-by-side.

I wish, but any open message window gets terminated and replaced when clicking the reply button.

Edit: Found the work-around: You have to hold the Option key when clicking reply to be allowed two windows. Just Mac things, I guess...

My god, I absolutely agree. On Outlook, you can "Pop Out" the draft of your own email, leaving the original email intact in the background ready for side-by-side view, but that's the only solution I know of.

I hope they focus and improve on search.

It's probably the worst of all email clients we've tested at work and it made my bosses switch to a paid version of Outlook. Sometimes you can't find emails when searching for a name. It's so bad.

There are other quirks and bugs too that definitely make it feel outdated, which sucks because I like it (although it is kinda old looking too as mentioned in the article hehe).

It's crazy looking at their bugtracker, it's just years and years of accumulated issues. I ran into one the other day with a time zone setting on invites, and sure enough there is the bug report in their tracker buried in infinity.

I also hate search. The other day someone gave me a tip though, which has helped quite a bit. The global search and the other search you get in your inbox suck so don't use them.

The actual search that works "okay" if when you right click on a folder and select 'Search Messages'. Sorry if you know this already, but I didn't know and it's so much better searching through this interface as opposed to the other two.

I did not know that. Will try it out on Monday. Thanks :-)

I wanted Thunderbird to be the answer to the question I have been asking for years. "How to replace Outlook in the corporate environment?" Every time I investigate it, Thunderbird is a resounding no. Why? This is not the vision of the Development Team. But if it was a side goal it would afford them the development money to do all the other things.

Whats wrong With outlook in a corporate environment?

Like most MS products it is a bloated pig of a software package designed in many ways to facilitate vendor lock-in but not necessarily provide the most satisfying customer experience. It's security is abysmal and I use two products to protect it from the Internet. It requires a horrible license and the terms of use is borderline tyrannical.

But Teams is worse.

As a longtime user of thunderbird an interface change is the absolute LAST thing I want.

“Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?”

Neither of those are a concern to me. I prefer functioning software, I don't care that much how it looks. And I don't care about the rate of change.

Almost everyone in here has a complaint about thunderbird. The blog is about the struggle of maintaining it as-is, much less refactoring or adding features.

They take the time to explain some background, some of the struggles and the "why" of their decision to do a rebuild. Reliance on other software, years of decentralized development, having a small team to do it.

And yet everyone is just shitting on this piece as if the team has no idea what they're doing.

I don't normally do metacommentary, but this conversation is mind boggling.

No mention of JMAP support.

https://jmap.io/

If I had to guess, I would say that they mentioned it indirectly, by way of saying they need to first eliminate a fair bit of technical debt. They don't want to build new things on a crumbling foundation, so such features are too far away to announce directly.

Is JMAP really enough of an improvement over the standards it is trying to replace to warrant throwing out old, working code built to the old standards? Apple Mail on my iPhone uses IMAP and seems plenty fast for me. Is it the best use of Thunderbird's limited resources to support a new standard, and adding correspondingly fewer other improvements in the meantime? I can understand why they might decide "no."

JMAP failed, let it go already.

Actual Thunderbird users don't care about the UI. That made up quote probably applies to someone that just gave Thunderbird a try though and left disappointed.

> Actual Thunderbird users don't care about the UI

Because it runs so many potential users off.

Obviously the only folks using it don't mind the antiquated UI. I think that's called a tautology?

If they are looking for paths going forward, I hope they investigate what PopOS is doing with rust (COSMIC) [0] and Iced [1] (cross platform ui library).

[0] https://www.phoronix.com/news/COSMIC-Desktop-Iced-Toolkit

[1] https://github.com/iced-rs/iced

I read "A cross-platform GUI library for Rust" but never saw any specifics. Is this targeting MacOS, Windows, Linux?

From [1] https://github.com/iced-rs/iced it says:

"Cross-platform support (Windows, macOS, Linux, and the Web)"

I have to assume with the talk of how hard it is to keep up with Firefox's upstream breaking changes, they'll be switching to essentially a Firefox version of an electron app. i.e. shipping Firefox as a wrapper around a webapp

Are there any reasonable alternatives (please, no outlook)? I love Thunderbird on principle but it's been years and the whole damn UI still freezes while it's downloading messages.

Interlink from Binary Outcast.

Oh please fuck not again. It's the only fucking client that works with O365 without fuckery ;/

They are most definitely changing the UI to be white space fancy and in-line with new users. It is a reset of features. That’s what they are doing with K9 too.

Not the direction I was hoping they would go in.

They should forget the rewrite. And forget the UI change. They should separate the UI stuff into a different module. And let others innovate on it. They should only focus on maintenance changes with Firefox.

And then add new features. Like external linked attachment technology. Snoozing emails. Sorting emails based on content. Unsubscribe highlighting. Scraping incoming emails for patterns. Machine learning for Outgoing emails.

And finally, they really need to get into the email server game. Innovation can’t only be happening in the client.

Filelink is an add on. They have added it.

I read the last thing that made front page, didn't know that Thunderbird is developed by a dozen people, or that it's basically an add-on for Firefox.

I get that they need to chase marketshare and audience and can't stop lest the big guys win forever.

Still, I quite liked the old interface, the nested menus where everything is where it should be and doesn't take four 'steps' and an eventual search to find, the grey-on-darker-grey colorscheme, the hard corners that scream out 'this isn't the ephemeral interwebs, these are rock-solid time-stamped spf-checked emails.

Thank you for an amazing software package, regardless of the Dr-Who-like metamorphosis it goes through.

Hopefully this is more than a UI improvement and also tackles pretty awful UX.

I use catch all mailboxes to combat spam after moving away from Proton, and thunderbird makes me "subscribe" to each one. If I'm not expecting a new mailbox to be created, I simply don't see it.

Plus, the subscription process takes 30+ second per mailbox. The entire UI just freezes. I also have to unsubscribe first, because the checkbox is already marked, and then re-subscribe. Perhaps this is some leftover of mail protocols that makes little sense anymore, but I digress.

I'm ready for email to just die. I don't know what a good alternative is but email feels like the printers of software.

> “Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?”

> ~ A notable percentage of Thunderbird users

What percentage is that, I wonder? A large number, or enough to kind of justify replacing the UI if you fudge the numbers?

I'd expect it's a large number, because I'd expect that most of the people who like the old UI also turn off telemetry.

When Ars Technica did a redesign a couple of years ago, they didn't launch with a dark mode because their telemetry didn't indicate that many people used it. There were a bunch of comments from users asking for dark mode, so they polled subscribers and the numbers who used dark mode were massively higher than the telemetry indicated. Turns out that the people who used dark mode were also the kinds of people who used strict ad blocker profiles which blocked the telemetry

It seems more and more like telemetry is mostly good for seeing only what your most clueless users are doing. It's a problem when your userbase is largely technical and has no problem finding the "don't spy on me" checkbox.

Projects with highly technical users would be better off listening to forums. It doesn't seem like the folks in /r/Thunderbird are overly concerned with the UI

Forums have their own problems. Most turn into echo chambers where one particular opinion is dominant pretty quickly. There's plenty of topics where one subreddit will be broadly positive about a subject, and another subreddit will be broadly negative about the same subject.

I'm not sure there's currently _any_ good way to get unbiased feedback from users. Ideally you should probably cross check a few different methods, but that's hard

Apple Mail on OSX 10.4 (originally NeXT) working well today fyi

the industrial strength, bullet proof, complex but profoundly reliable engineering within Apple Mail shows itself to have stability over decades.

Why is this Thunderbird rewrite going to succeed ? A glossy sales pitch makes it less convincing, not more. This is a years' long project with no guranteed outcomes.. in fact, I would suspect that noveau security trappings and trend-based GUI embellishments would almost guarantee a "mayfly life" at great expense, contrasted to the Oak trees of original Internet standards.

cynical? perhaps.. prove it wrong

Meanwhile the current Apple Mail app can be very slow & crash prone in my experience.

I think Apple Mail was unusable around that time for me. I think it mangled attachments to/from Windows, font sizing was off (i forget if it was previews or when writing). Search didn't work.

Yeah, old versions of Apple Mail used some weird 'RTF' format and IIRC security issues around attachments. I use the modern version, but NextMail was a different thing and legacy bits hung around for a while.

> some weird 'RTF' format and IIRC security issues

unlike the reliable and standards-based clients on Windows, you mean?

I had an issue with Apple Mail taking too much disk space, since it used to download....a lot of mail. Has this been fixed?

Thread Hijack:

Is there a capable alternative to Microsoft's Outlook client, that has good translation of emails built in? This is for Windows.

Outlook is so slow, and it opens a small side pane for translation. It has a horrible UI.

I hope the Thunderbird crew understand how incredibly important this software is and how much some of us depend on it. Good IMAP clients are hard to write and most civilians have become so used to crappy browser-based email that there's not much demand for IMAP clients except among people like the ones who frequent this website.

Apple ruined their IMAP client ("Mail") a few years ago so now that world is basically Outlook and Thunderbird, and I'm sure I don't need to describe why Outlook is unacceptable.

> Apple ruined their IMAP client ("Mail") a few years ago

Please elaborate on this point. I’d like to know how it was before and how it is now.

> so now that world is basically Outlook and Thunderbird, and I'm sure I don't need to describe why Outlook is unacceptable.

Please also elaborate on why Outlook is unacceptable. I like hearing different perspectives.

I personally don’t use Outlook and don’t like it because it pushed a lot of non-standard things (for want of a broader and better word), is actually slow and painful to use, and exists to satisfy Microsoft’s agenda to make everything proprietary (AFAIK Outlook365/Microsoft365/Exchange Server by default disables IMAP, SMTP and POP citing those as insecure even though they’re usable with OAuth2).

My problems with Apple Mail are twofold, and both happened in the last five years.

1. They changed the tabular UI in Mail such that the columns were no longer directly manipulable. For a while they had a setting that allowed you to continue to use the old UI, but that switch is now gone. The new UI is decidedly less functional for me. It reeks of "product manager urination syndrome" where a PM makes his mark by pissing on a good product and ruining it.

2. They introduced a bug that caused data loss on the IMAP server. An email client that destroys data on the server is a dealbreaker for me. I get the impression this has since been fixed, but Apple lost my trust with this one. I switched to Thunderbird.

As for Outlook, you expressed the issues better than I could.

Goodbye, Thunderbird. What options are still available that don't follow this "modern" path. Simply give me the old-fashioned interface and leave me alone.

Look into Interlink from Binary Outcast. It was originally based on Pale Moon in the same way Thunderbird is based on Firefox.

> What To Expect Going Forward

> [...] And yes, absolutely: the constant addition of new features [...]

Please don't.

The only email client that I acknowledge. Used it since the day one. I think that this refactoring is going to be a huge undertake. I hope that they will make it.

I skimmed the article and the video, but I couldn't find exactly where they mention what this new direction will be and what technologies will it use?

Yeah it seems like they're announcing their high-level aspirations, so not really note-worthy yet.

I kind of hate Thunderbird because it is in every way worse than beloved Apple Mail.app, except for one: it can do the Microsoft 365 IMAP Oauth2 dance, but Mail.app can't.

Mail.app's native Exchange functionality has broken for me before and caused me to lose mail so I will not trust it. I thought I had the right solution with an IMAP connection to O365 Exchange until they forced that to use Oauth2.

If you use this proxy of mine then any IMAP (or POP/SMTP) client can be used with a “modern” email provider, regardless of whether it supports OAuth 2.0 natively: https://github.com/simonrob/email-oauth2-proxy

>A renewed attention to usability and accessibility is now part of our daily development process, guaranteeing easy discoverability of all the powerful features, as well as full compatibility with assistive technologies to make Thunderbird usable by everyone.

ah yes, that logorrhea of corporate speak surely means the project is heading in right direction.

I started using Thunderbird with 4 or 5 mailboxes (split out via ProtonMail Bridge) and it is usable especially after I archived the bulk of my emails going back to maybe 2016, and I can't believe they are going to waste engineering cycles on something that sounds like a rewrite.

Bonkers. Might have to take a look at the alternatives mentioned in this thread

I do not care how it looks. It works just fine for me and the last thing I want is to start changing UI in Thunderbird

Does Thunderbird even exist today? I moved away from it a long time ago, the sluggishness was a big turn off and it never improved. When I discovered sylpheed and then claws-mail, it was bye-bye TB.

Of course now that I am old, mutt has become my preferred MUA. Does email pretty well, and keeps away from a lot of modern overhead.

I don't have any issue with the Thunderbird GUI. My main issue is that there is a nasty bug when when you click on an email the body of the email doesn't always match the subject. That is quite a nasty bug and it has been there for at least a year. Am I only the only person that gets this?

Many of us have tried to struggle against the gradual destruction of TB's UI, under the excuse of modernization. But all this gets you is derision and sanctions. This also reflects major problems in how the project is managed, which is a very sad tale way beyond the scope of an HN comment.

What I see in this thread is A LOT of people complaining about a free product, but I wonder how many of them have actually donated money to help with the development? I just donated $100 myself because of the current donation campaign, but I'm happy with what I get largely for free.

There's no way I would donate to Thunderbird in its present state. Why should I want to give money to people doing things I don't like? That's like paying money to Google!

The Future of Thunderbird can only be summarized as having no future with Mozilla.

> Throughout the years, Mozilla’s focus shifted a lot, investing less and less resources into the development of Thunderbird. On July 6, 2012, the Mozilla Foundation announced that it would no longer be focused on innovations for Thunderbird, and that the future Thunderbird development would transition to a community-driven model.

So it isn't a priority and isn't as interesting to Mozilla? As far as Mozilla is concerned; it is dead. This also happened to Servo and it ended up getting severed from Mozilla, since they see it as another cost they cannot maintain.

> In 2023, Thunderbird is pretty well sustainable, with a healthy donation flow, more services in development to increase our revenue stream (stay tuned!)

Thank you Google!

Pretty sure these are user donations.

Mozilla is in close and tight control again these days - much tighter than you know.

Been using Thunderbird since I don't remember, before that sylpheed etc.

Use a Mac now and Thunderbird is using 0.1% CPU idle and 562MB.

I use the "folders on the left, message list on the right top, selected message view underneath" view.

Things that I require on Thunderbird (that I had to hack, muck around with):

* Timestamps in ISO8601

* Either the ability to use a Solarized theme, or one that accurately uses the MacOS light/dark themes.

* Larger (16-20pt) font sizes for all panes

* Really good integration between a CardDAV server (I use fastmail) and accumulating email addresses automagically and not get confused with my local MacOS Contacts.

I don't use the tasks/events/calendar integration because it gets confused between my CalDAV server (fastmail), and my local Mac OS calendar.

I hope this will spawn an Electron alternative. Would be nice to see a break from Chrome monoculture.

I guess it's entirely on the table Thunderbird is, in fact, becoming an Electron app. Thunderbird the project has no ties financially to Mozilla anymore AIU, they're merely using gecko as embedded browser. From the comments in this thread, I get that Thunderbird is technically a hold-out from the XUL times, or even a large old-Firefox plugin of sorts more so than a standalone app. With Moz themselves having abandoned their platform over ten years ago, why would the Thunderbird team venture into creating an Electron-workalike based on Firefox when even Moz don't do so? Doesn't sound like something you'd want your mail client team to do considering initial and ongoing effort either (nor strategically, I'm afraid to add, given Moz's trajectory).

Seems odd to me to describe using a Chromium-based toolkit as a way to break the Chrome monoculture. Yeah, I know it is open source, but the ties are still obvious.

The best I can say of thunderbird is it isn't entirely broken, but I'm still looking to move away from it very soon. I need a stable reliable tool, not what TB has become (realistically, what it's always been - not good). Suggestions welcome.

I actually started using Thunderbird recently again after not using it for 5 or so years… honestly they have cleaned up the UI a lot I found!

I don’t really need changes at this point, and find the UI is a pretty good local optimum. Information density is nice!

plus ça change: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

People get mad about it but I haven't seen one open source project without paid designers and product managers at the helm that successfully incorporates non-technical users' needs well enough for them to compete with commercial offerings. Firefox? Android? Blender? Chromium? Signal?

Mozilla is doing this right. They're doing this right. They have a simple mode to suit inexperienced users and a full mode for folks who don't need the simplified experience. If you really think this kind of work ruins applications, then fork it and surely other developers who are enamored with the clunkyness will help maintain it right?

I am still running TB 91.13.1 as there are too many issues with 102 (not just performance). I get annoyed every day by TB prompting me to upgrade (config switches did not help to suppress that).

And now this?! Guess this really is the time to look for an alternative.

I recently adopted Thunderbird as my email client (was using Gmail's web UI) and have really appreciated the power of it, enough that I donated to the project. NOT being like current designs has been part of the appeal. This development sounds high-risk, low-reward from my perspective. Could well end up nerfing the tool I just adopted. But c'est la vie, I guess. Probably the mistake was leaving Thunderbird without real governance back in 2012, so now as it's pulled from anarchy it's going to be painful watching "the law" of centralized development come down.

I would prefer if it were a more democratic process.

Thunderbird has been one of my go-to email clients for years now. Its open-source nature allows for a lot of customization options, and the addition of extensions has made it even more versatile. I especially love its user-friendly interface and how it integrates well with other tools like calendars and to-do lists.

The recent updates to Thunderbird have also been impressive, particularly the improved security features and performance enhancements. Overall, I believe it's a fantastic alternative to proprietary email clients, and I highly recommend giving it a try if you haven't already.

Maybe the problem is IMAP/POP3/SMTP, but I feel like email clients in general are just slow. I have time to manually open every separate email account in the browser, and have all of them ready to read, before Thunderbird (or KMail, etc.) finishes loading new emails. And I don't even have a lot of new emails every day, like 5~10, so I'm not quite sure what exactly is taking so long to sync. I can download a 500MB video in the time TB syncs a few KBs of email.

I've largely given up on desktop email clients at this point. It'd be nice to have a single place to manage emails, but the performance is too poor.

do you have imap idle/push enabled on server/client ? i use kmail for past 20 years or so, and it's been just fine. thunderbird that my wife uses feels much slower in comparison to kmail

I wish Tbird would become usable for me, but every time I try, it falls very very short in polish, in performance, and in capability.

Mac's native Mail program works super super well for me and my enormous corpus of mail, search is nearly instant, and it talks to IMAP and Exchange with ease. It's also reasonably easy to look at. I get some folks don't care for it, and I absolutely concede that the old saw about "the worst one, except for all the others" still applies, but for me, Tbird is just one of "all the others."

I tried out a bunch of desktop email clients on linux, and found thunderbird easiest to use. Doesn't feel particularly slow to me. UI feels fine - but I last used desktop Outlook in 2019 or so.

I've used Thunderbird Portable for years to backup my Google Workspace email. Prior to that it was my primary email client. Really hope it survives and thrives, I could care less how it looks.

All i meed is a sort by latest and group by sender option !! Tried to get it in mutt but couldn’t figure it out !! So i can delete all the mail that comes out on top that is not useful !!

There's one area where I've always thought Thunderbird should be a cross platform leader and example to everyone: setting Email Client Standards.

I spent a lot of time in the anti-phishing/anti-fraud world. During a stint at dmarcian I wrote up an entire proposal that I titled A.P.E.C.S. - Anti-Phishing Email Client Standards. I should probably publish this document at some point since it looks like they've since taken it down and IMO, it still needs to happen.

When you dive hard into the email security problem you quickly discover that there are layers to how end users are exploited.

- Sending Mail Servers

- Receiving Mail Servers

- Information presented to users in the mail client

- Links and attachments in the emails themselves

- The phishing sites they link to

Each layer of this process needs to be addressed. DMARC let's sending mail servers verify that they are actually allowed to send email on behalf of the domain. That alone is a huge scope of the problem and puts the domain owner in charge of preventing abuse from their own domain.

Receiving mail servers have a number of factors that they use to verify inbound emails and DMARC makes that process a lot easier, but you still have to have spam filters, virus scans, IP and sender reputation management, reverse DNS lookups. The tools supporting users here are always getting better but they won't ever be perfect.

The mail client itself is critical though. We know the filters aren't perfect and typically have to err on the side of deliverability, which means that users are going to see messages that the mail server thought were questionable. You're already seeing warning messages in Google for things like this, but the factors here can absolutely be standardized around a number of factors. Users don't respond to "you can trust this" indicators (studies show, don't have them handy) but they do respond to warnings as long as the warnings are very targeted and rare. If you get a warning about every message, it's going to get ignored.

Links and attachments are also in the mail client scope. Attachment scans and link reputation absolutely need to be a part of the scope of this problem. There's an opportunity for link trust to be standardized in the same way as dmarc. Does the URL match the DMARC sender? Cool, that's a really good sign. Is the URL going through a shortener or other tracking system? In that case, there's probably a lot more risk involved. In order to bypass filters, shorteners will link to something safe and then change the redirect target after successful delivery. Reputation scores need to be tracked on shorteners based on immutability of links and responsiveness to abuse take downs. If they don't, then those services should generate a giant warning in the email client and potentially even have the link disabled in the message.

Phishing sites themselves are all over the place and working with hosting abuse teams to take them down is a gargantuan task. Working with a shortener who's linking to it to take it down would prevent every recipient of the message from being duped.

That's the high level. The standards are needed and should be applied across every email client vendor, from Thunderbird to Gmail to Outlook/365 to Fastmail to Apple. IMO Thunderbird has an opportunity to lead the charge here and become a force that protects people from phishing at the point of consumption, regardless of the rules on the mail server itself.

> I should probably publish this document at some point

I'd be interested in seeing it. It sounds like a pretty good idea. It's incredible to me how effective even the worst phishing email/sites are and to me that's an indication that not enough is being done to point out clear warning signs to users.

> Phishing sites themselves are all over the place and working with hosting abuse teams to take them down is a gargantuan task. Working with a shortener who's linking to it to take it down would prevent every recipient of the message from being duped.

The URL shorteners can be the worst. They don't seem to care who creates a link to something, and don't do even basic checking of whats at the other end. You'd think a person creating a link to yet another URL shortener would set off major flags, but they don't seem to care.

Same with survey/form sites that keep being hijacked for phishing purposes. They don't bother with even basic checking for scams either. If someone creates a form with a password field that'd be easy to flag for review, but it doesn't happen. I can report a bunch of identical phishing sites that were created with URLs like: random_form_builder_site.com/targetcompanyname001

random_form_builder_site.com/targetcompanyname002

random_form_builder_site.com/targetcompanyname003

and while they'll generally take them down, they'll do nothing to prevent:

random_form_builder_site.com/targetcompanyname004

random_form_builder_site.com/targetcompanyname005

random_form_builder_site.com/targetcompanyname006

from being created. Not checking for targetcompanyname in the url of new forms/surveys, and not bothering to check to see if the 12 new sites someone just created are identical to the last 12 they were asked to disable.

Anything that can be done to help make those sites less attractive to users before they even click the link in the email they got would really help.

I’ll see if I can dig up my original and convert it into a blog post.

New article on Ars Technica about plans for a new UI in Thunderbird.

“Mozilla plans ground-up UI redesign for Thunderbird email client this July” https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/mozilla-plans-ground...

It would be nice if they could work with Proton to get an integrated mail/calendar solution in place. Not a huge fan of the daemon I have to run to sync Thunderbird with Protonmail.

If the whole thing is such a big, crumbling Lego tower, and it's going to take three years just to fix the problems it has now, this doesn't seem like a compelling argument to keep using it. Surely at some point it must be easier to abandon it and start over - obviously that won't just solve all problems, but there must be a line where the cost of maintaining the current thing outweighs the cost of a rewrite.

My biggest issue with Thunderbird is the Quick filter search I have thousands of emails in one folder and it can block the UI for a while when making a basic search :-( . And it's also not correct, it won't show all the results, so I have to resort to using the real search which is clunky to use on a daily basis. If only they could fix this ! The UI is great already, it doesn't need much work

I'm actually happy with this news, looking forward to see the first stable version. The new calendar looks neat, haven't see the inbox yet. Things that is not clear is how big the difference architecture wise and especially with the UI rebuild they have chance to implement new approach. I really expect this bring smoother interaction, hopefully the UX remains familiar.

Seperate inner shenanigans (yes, I said shenanigans!) from presentation. Allows for skins, easier changes to appearance, etc.

We should pay very close attention to https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr as I think the future of app development is letting multiple clients implement their own custom UI layers on top of a shared core.

I use Thunderbird and I like it, but I keep wondering: shouldn't there be a way to store all email in Postgres locally, instead of on the filesystem? It just seems like it would be a great idea. I can see lots of pros and cons, but I feel like the pros would easily outweigh the cons for someone who uses Postgres often.

If you're going that route, SQLite seems like the most appropriate candidate.

Tip to Thunderbird: dont block the UI thread when doing net requests. I’ll waive the consulting fee for that one.

T-Bird is still my primary email app on my Mac. Apple's "Mail" app fine too but it's great to see the T-Bird team is willing to modernize it with a complete rewrite.

The last T-Bird update was really pretty good considering the old code they were working with so I'm excited to see them take this path.

Nowadays all my emails are from the browser(gmail,outlook,etc), I used to be a thunderbird user and liked it, just wonder if the 'traditional' email client user base will be further in decline? To me the browser is the thunderbird, not as powerful, but good enough for normal use.

I welcome efforts to try and improve it. Frankly, between the Thunderbird search being bad and the inability to configure server-side Gmail filters in the client, I find myself using it less and less despite being a loyal user for I don't know how many years now.

“Thunderbird is literally a bunch of code running on top of Firefox. All the tabs and sections you see in our applications are just browser tabs with a custom user interface.”

Interesting, I have been using it this whole time and I never noticed this.

I pray the UI will be modifiable so we can fix the for certain upcoming use of trends of mobile designs on desktop with margins wider than a football fields and useful functionality hidden/removed "because of simplicity".

Everyone complaining about performance should try this:

Compact the folders. If still slow, vacuum the sqlites. Still slow? Do a FS checkup, may have corruption.

I put this in my cleanup script. Don’t know why they don’t do it automatically after each upgrade to new version?

i really can't think of anything that is a problem for me with the current thunderbird. Works stably for me, makes enough sense as to how it works, and has whatever features i need. Not sure what all the fuss is about.

I still remember the glory days of Thunderbird, good times.

I'm not holding my hopes up, internet history has proved that 2nd systems rarely make it, but as long as they don't change the badass logo, I wish 'em luck.

I am a Linux user, and I gave on Thunderbird due to terrible Exchange support - now I use Evolution, it has its own problems but my calendar is synced.

P.S. No my choice to use Exchange on the server side.

Have you tried Davmail? There's even a container image for it which worked pretty well for me a few years ago.

I really love emClient, but it’s proprietary, there are no plugins and no Linux version (only windows/mac). There is a free version though, that doesn’t come with a lot of restrictions.

OK.

The Thunderbird UI evolved to be everything for every use case, and therefore nothing to everyone. A coherent, opinionated subset of UI features (and keybindings) would be really welcome.

thunderbird looks and acts exactly like how I want it to

>We’re Rebuilding The Thunderbird Interface From Scratch Again!? Make Thunderbird work with Outlook/Exchange without paid plugins ffs...

I'm excited for the rebuild, glad to hear things are moving well. Looking forward to checking out when available.

I remember (perhaps incorrectly) using Thunderbird and then reading it was no longer supported and to move away.

GUI: Claws Mail/Sylpheed

TUI: mbsync+msmtp+Mutt+Maildir

Must adopt material design. Amiright?

I think non-webmail has been more trouble than it's worth for some time now.

I think webmail is not worth the effort and loss of end user control and I prefer local mail clients.

Webmail is a nice option to have if you want it. Email should continue to be a separate set of protocols targeted at that one application. I'd much rather see webmail disappear as an option than standard email servers and clients.

Webmail is not great when you’re juggling several addresses and I don’t see that changing soon.

I find the way this guy says "rep-uh-ZIT-ur-ree" very mellifluous

Thunderbird 2 was nice. After that they just made it worse and worse.

It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the Electron again.

it's not Thunderbird, but Seamonkey is like the old Netscape Communicator, with an integrated full "unixy" email client MUA. It's very old school.

Long live Thunderbird

Outlook UI sucks, but searching feature is better.

Long live Thunderbird

someone please tells me what is special about thunderbird as a mail client, other than nostalgia? Why does it keep showing up on HN?

Are there any companies using local, open source email clients, or just tech enthusiasts?

It's not 2005 anymore, the world doesn't need your little message reader.

Neat, I'm looking forward to it.

i hope they will make it better, though I expect they will make it worse. much worse.

Uhg. This is the exact opposite of what direction I want from Thunderbird. I want it to remain stable. I want it to remain looking like an email client I run on my native OS. I do not want giant white-space webshit design and an entire rebuild that makes all my extensions and well trained spam detection .dat unusable.

Please stop changing things just to change. Thunderbird works.

Yeah, they should work on fixing bugs, improving performance, fixing search and adding some features. The UI is fine, it is the best thing of Thunderbird.

I read the article and sounds like the rewrite is mostly to do with large amounts of technical debt and being tied to firefox's development cycle. This should enable them to fix bugs if they don't have to fight code always coming from an alternative product.

I read it too and I am not as hopefully as you given how previous changes have mostly made the performance worse than fixed anything. Hope I am wrong though.

Extensions are not really a problem, cause Thunderbird have made it to scare off many over the years. They change rules, api, etc. many extension are not maintained, not compatible, whatever. I stopped installing and using Thunderbird extensions, it took me too much time and nerves on updates.

I believe you missed the part where the codebase has become impossible to work on. This isn't change "for change's sake", it's "because if we don't, this product is dead".

Thunderbird is absolutely due for a UX and feature set overhaul. But please please please don't follow current design trends: Thunderbird users are not and will probably never be people who appreciate the "everything is a mobile app" fad of the last few years. The term "webshit" absolutely feels apt here, and I would gladly triple my donation for the coming year if it meant that they committed to maintaining a traditional desktop look and feel in the rewrite.

I will probably need to look for alternatives, if I catch any sniff of "we are an electron app now" or similar. In that case I will probably only use the older version as a lookup program for past e-mails, if I cannot import them into something else. Or I stick with an old version of Thunderbird.

I mean thunderbird is already running on an entire browser stack. Wouldn't electron be similar to what thunderbird is already using?

I thought XUL had been removed?

XUL is still hiding in there I think, though most things in Firefox have been rewritten in regular HTML. Not sure about Thunderbird, though the new settings page suspiciously looks like the Firefox one, so if not everything has been migrated yet, some stuff definitely have.

Either way, Gecko is what renders XUL and HTML, and therefore Thunderbird. It's essentially a big chunk of web stuff. It has always been this way.

Though I think Gecko is a tad more memory efficient than Chromium / Electron, and a lot nicer to use than your average Electron app.

And I'm pretty certain Thunderbird is staying this way. Becoming an Electron app would be a huge rewrite, and I think Thunderbird devs like Gecko. They say it in the blog post. It's not happening.

And I want a better design with better out-of-the-box, turn-key support for both Outlook/Exchange and GMail for contacts, mail (with proper conversations/threading), and calendaring. The extensions are clunky, and it always takes way too much time to get even remotely close to looking/acting correct.

Frankly, it's surprising how long they managed to drag it along given they build on top of a weird fork of Firefox ESR. Their foundation is crumbling for years and years. They really need to get off of it.

Unfortunately the web keeps changing. Firefox is trying hard to remain relevant and needs to be flexible with their code-base. So Thunderbird does not live in a stable world.

Strange comment. Thunderbird is for email, not the web.

Are the people who want it to change confused about the difference between smtp and http?

In TFA it says that Thunderbird is built on top of Firefox, which makes it difficult for them to keep up and causes a lot of churn and bugs. I imagine that’s what the parent poster is referring to.

Yes, and today, to render mails, you need a web engine. Unless you only want to deal with text email but that comes from with its fair share of tradeoffs, including the occasional unreadable email in text… which you'll open in a web browser.

And as a mail client you'd better follow the security fixes of the web engine you are using.

I guess not everyone is willing to use an old web engine derived from an old version of Word and maintain this thing for the eternity.

You can turn off auto-updates or build off a present revision. Those won't go away.

Yeah, I did. I technically use a thunderbird fork. It'd be a shame if the extension ecosystem split though.

I like that Thunderbird exactly looks like what it looked like when I started using it in 2005, 18 years ago (save for the OS theme in use).

Though I would not mind some refresh. Many (younger? and as young as me, actually) people who are used to webmails and mobile apps find it ugly, and I can see that.

The world is missing a fast and efficient desktop mail client that looks good and I'd be glad if Thunderbird were it.

There's a world in which the Thunderbird team understands they have a huge number of long time users and they should be careful to keep it usable for them, where they will take feedback and in which they build something that doesn't suck for people who don't now it yet, and this world could be ours.

Wait and see? I understand the concern and that many people are worried, I also don't quite like the trend of UIs with a lot of space lacking contrast everywhere, but I think a good outcome is actually likely.

No. If you want a “pretty” email client go make one and see how it does. Stability is the number one feature I want in a UI. The only other concern is responsiveness. Literally nothing else matters.

> go make one

It's not like it's easy. It crossed my mind a few years ago, actually. But why should I when the email client I actually happen to use decided to actually rebuild its interface? I'm not the one who is unhappy, I'm happy either way actually, I could answer "go fork Thunderbird if you are not happy".

There was an interesting talk at FOSDEM by OpenProject on how to handle UI revamps [1], there are ways to do it without breaking current users. I recommend it, I'm quite picky on presentations but this one was really good and I enjoyed it.

I agree that UI stability is important. UI stability is not the only important thing. Responsiveness indeed too. I hate slow UIs. Consistency with what users are used to (from the rest of the world) is very important too.

What's more, I read in the blog post that they are rebuilding the UI from scratch, but what I don't read is that they decided to change everything.

They can do it right. I can't say they will, but… again, let's see? I'm sure they'd be glad to receive feedback, questions and concerns.

Am I the only one enthusiastic about some potential Thunderbird UI revamp here?

I don't like many UI/UX choices on the current web, but I also like what KDE has been doing, and maybe Gnome too, there are places where UIs get better! Why not Thunderbird?

[1] https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/practical_ux_at_openp...

What if I decide to remap your keyboard every 12 months because I think I have a better layout? If you practice for an hour a day you'll adjust in a month! Of course that will go out the window 11 months later, but I will have my promo in by then. Apple literally does this with keyboard shortcuts and UI elements in MacOS. This is what I imagine when I hear someone wants to "revamp" a UI.

In modern software "UI revamp" means turning muscle memory into papercuts.

Mozilla can rebuild the UI without redesigning it. If they need to throw out underlying code to improve performance or maintainability that's fine. But changing UI elements is like renaming a boat. You just don't do it.

If you decide to turn my functional if bulky 70s office building into something a bit fresher I won't mind. Of course don't do it every month but Thunderbird hasn't changed for twenty years.

Apart from the attach button that was put at the other side of the compose window. That was annoying.

I fully expect the new UI to have a mode resembling the current one and the current keyboard shortcuts to still work. Now, if it's not the case I'll agree with you.

I too am pretty pissed off by many UI revamps and modern web UIs in general, but I'm quite confident because Thunderbird is not your regular shitty web app powered by a horde of investors.

We will see.

> if you decide to turn my functional if bulky 70s office building into something a bit fresher I won't mind.

I worked in one of these and it was the best office space ever. Built into a nature preserve. There were paths along the water between the buildings. Everyone had an office with a window and view of trees and water. It was dated but I had zero complaints. We got bought by a company in Silicon Valley and they moved us to an "open office" in what was essentially a warehouse. Fancy new furniture and desks, none of it better than what we already had. Attractive but uncomfortable. The development team was placed next to sales, which is about as loud as an elementary school at recess. It was horrible. The only view was of a retaining wall in the parking lot. Nothing about it was better. Even the HVAC was worse.

They didn't keep the features that mattered to you and implemented this badly on top of it. Of course it's bad.

Okay, that's a tangent, but if done well, new buildings should be better because we improved on many plans.

At the campus in which I studied, 70s buildings are mostly ugly and badly isolated (done quickly all at the same time because they were needed quickly, standards of back then, also fairly solid). Cold in winter, hot in summer, quite dark inside overall at least for the corridors.

They did a decent job for the new buildings. Rooms still have the same number of people. Those buildings are rented for 30 years costing a lot to the university but they are better overall.

So, yeah. In both cases, new stuff can be better but of course it needs to be well done, stuff that matter need to be there and users listened.

There are a ton of desktop email clients that have that design: Apple Mail, Windows 10/11 Mail application, Outlook, Mailspring, whatever.

Of client that have the UI/UX of Thunderbird... well only Thunderbird remained. I get that if you use the email sporadically with only one account, you are better with a client like you described, but at that point you can as well use a webmail.

Otherwise if you work with emails, and you manage tens or hundreds of email each day, Thunderbird interface is great, is compact, is essential, is functional. Not pretty, but works well, it's stable, it's reliable.

Thunderbird is a work tool, and a work tool to me doesn't have to be pretty, it has to work.

You know what? Nothing needs to be pretty. Why stop at work tools? A home is there to let you cook, sleep and live efficiently. No need to be pretty. A city is there to allow you to go from A to B without any fuzz and to provide the essential services. Pretty cities are annoying.

I have several accounts and thousands of mails. But I can't see how an efficient tool can't be pretty and how a pretty tool can't be efficient.

I agree with the pros you find to the UI of Thunderbird and that's why I use it. But non-prettiness is not a feature. Prettiness is. For most people, it will be more enjoyable, more so if they spend hours each day using the tool, which is more likely in a work environment.

If it's more enjoyable, more people will use it instead of all these non-free pieces of software you listed (and which I will not use as a consequence), which in turn might bring more funding, which might allow the Thunderbird team to make it even more reliable.

Life is there to be enjoyed and this includes work. I also use thunderbird for my personal email account so it's not just work for me, like many people out there.

Why are we even arguing for non-prettiness? This is madness.

Again, the revamping we are talking about is being done for maintainability reasons, which is what you want for your tool to remain efficient, stable and reliable.

I understand the concerns, UI rewrites are often upsetting, but the amount of resistance to change here is quite impressive.

I don't see the point of not wanting improvements. Of course I won't be happy if Thunderbird becomes less reliable or less efficient but we are not there yet.

I trust the Thunderbird team to do the right things. They have not failed me for almost 20 years. I can't use anything else because I'm too used to its UI, the keyboard shortcuts, everything. The first versions after the rewrite might not work very well and have bugs but we can always wait a bit before upgrading.

My home needs to be pretty because fundamentally I am an irrational animal motivated by my emotions. When I sit on my leather couch and look at my house plants and art that makes me feel good. When I come home and find things out of place it makes me feel bad.

A UI revamp is like coming home to a crime scene, or at least a messy kitchen.

Likewise, for many people, pretty tools make them feel better.

Of course, a UI revamp needs to be done carefully, taking existing users in account. If done well, it will be like someone living in the same home having done some cleaning.

Otherwise I agree, it's not good.

Pretty tools don't make me feel better. Useful tools help me do work, and finishing work makes me feel better. I have suffered at the hands of many a meddling UX designer over the years. The best tools I ever used personally were Perl CGI scripts with no styling at all. Just fast page loads and buttons that do what I need.

> But I can't see how an efficient tool can't be pretty and how a pretty tool can't be efficient.

Usually pretty and efficient doesn't go well together. Pretty tools not only add useless things (such as animation, transparency, etc) that are not functional but consume resources, but also are designed towards looking good without thinking at the usability of the tool, for example a lot of whitespace and padding, big line heights and fonts, remove features that most of the user don't need, etc.

A professional tool doesn't need to be pretty. If you go to a plant control room and look at the computer screens they have an interface that looks Windows 95 usually... but that is fine, since they need to be functional, not pretty, they don't need rounded corners, they use high contrast between colours that are ugly from a design point of view but allow to see things easily.

Most email clients are shit. They show you mails in a conversational way that is just wrong, mail are not chats, but letters. They insist on composing HTML mails, instead of plain text ones (like Thunderbird does). And have a very bad UX in general.

Of many things that can improve Thunderbird (for example a better integration with Exchange/Office365 with not only the mail but also the calendar/contacts, sync settings to a Mozilla account, better search in the emails) they focus on the only thing that make most people use Thunderbird.

> I don't see the point of not wanting improvements

I see it. I'm used to a tool, that I use with satisfaction since years. There is no reason why I have to learn to use a new UI or change the way I work because somebody at Mozilla decided that we need a more fancy looking UI. The reason I choose Thunderbird is because other software, such as Outlook, became shit because they followed the same path of modernization that now is following Mozilla.

If something is not broken and users are satisfied with it, why the hell do you want to change it???

By the way, so far I'm happy with the improvements in Thunderbird that Mozilla had done, because having prettier icons and fonts, having the dark theme, are all UI improvements that are purely cosmetics and doesn't change the UX, same shortcuts that I'm used, same mode of operation, I don't have to learn a new thing. Now they decide that the whole UI must be modernized, I don't get it. I will probably stay with the last Thunderbird that will support the current UI for a long time...

In the case of houses, I would think in most cases there's less conflict between prettiness and efficiency, for things like furniture there's much less space for the aesthetics to make a given piece more or less functional or efficient. However the tension isn't entirely gone, Juicero and 'McMansions' spring to mind as possible counterexamples.

I don't think paragonating email clients to houses makes all that much sense. Unless you use them for personal stuff (but most people use mobile phones or webmails for that these days, that to manage 1 personal account it's fine) email clients are a professional tool, used at work.

So it's more correct paragonating them to a factory, where furniture doesn't need to look good but it needs to be functional, safe and reliable.

I'd understand if you just resisted the UI changes. In the video they discuss serious underlying technical debt. Thunderbird is twenty years old now and most of us have technical debt on projects that are a fraction of that age!

I support the revived energy around the Thunderbird project and I trust that they will not betray old and loyal power users. Looking forward to future releases.

Thunderbird sucks, full send. I love free software and I've used TB for ten years because it's bundled with lots of Linux distros. But one paragraph into the post they are making excuses for how bad they are: "Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?"

I'm definitely not complaining about the UI "looking old" - I like UIs that are old, they are simple! But Thunderbird is glitchy, sluggish, and plagued by idiotic design decisions (for example, why the fuck do they make it hard for me to include attachments in a reply? super obvious example of some cranky "principled" programmer who's happy to give the middle finger to Thunderbird's actual users).

We're on TB for one reason - we're too busy to evaluate replacements. If/when we find the time to evaluate other clients we will absolutely replace it. The post stinks of hostility toward their users, which is unfortunately no surprise with Thunderbird.

So much negativity in this thread, jeez.

I love current Thunderbird but it undeniably has its issues. Firstly, of course this is subjective, but its UI is starting to look dated. Lots of you are complaining about modern UIs, but I think the designs [0][1] look great and are much more readable than the current design, which looks straight out of Ubuntu 8.04.

Then there are some major UX issues, the most obvious one being the lack of conversation view, which is how pretty much everybody expects an email client to work in 2023. Supernova implementing that is reason enough to be excited about the release.

I can't wait to try it out - keep up the awesome work, team!

[0] https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap

[1] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/11/thunderbird-supernova-p...

Not everyone has a 16:9 monitor, so super wide views don’t work for me.

And that is the main problem, new designer shows up and doesn’t bother to implement the previous layout or workflow. Effectively hobbling the interface when all us real users wanted were bug fixes.

Hopefully won’t happen this time.

> Not everyone has a 16:9 monitor, so super wide views don’t work for me.

I'd say that you're in a small enough minority that most people will design right past you, just like most websites have an acceptable minimum percentage of browser feature availability after which you can make that feature a requirement for functionality.

Especially as screens tend to get wider, not thinner.

I see what you're saying, but wouldn't it be also great if there was a mail app that didn't consume the entire screen real estate.

> that didn't consume the entire screen real estate.

If you want something really small, perhaps mutt in a terminal could work. :)

Lots of screens are getting squarer again. Macs are 16:10+, my framework and MS surface are 3:2. And a few portrait folks.

But usually that's just an extension upward, pixel density wide.

> Not everyone has a 16:9 monitor, so super wide views don’t work for me.

And even if we do, having an interface that can work as a square, or a rectangle but vertical (for screens that can rotation 90˚), is also useful.

Not all of us run our apps in full screen (which seems to be quite prevalent in the Windows world), but rather 'tiled' or stacked, sometimes with different windows of different apps overlapping (handy on laptops).

The design doesn’t look too bad to me, with exception to that big empty top bar. It feels really awkward.

Thanks for sharing, I hadn't seen these.

With all the negative comments in the thread I had expected some kind of massive changes but it basically looks the same. Sure, nitpick about this or that but in the end the overall look remains nearly identical (for calendar, again, havent seen the other screens).

email "protocol" is clunky and old AF. no need to build an email client for the 21st century when everything underneath it a donkey pulling a cart full of rotten fish. stmp/pop/imap and all the dkip.. is pure crap. we need to overhaul the entire email/messaging delivery system. not just the face of it.

There's plenty of standards bodies just awaiting new proposals — you've got your work cut out for you — thanks for volunteering!

Out of scope.

dear Mozilla, no matter what you do to the UI, it will not make the general population interested in your products. you're just pissing your Google cash away while also pissing off the only userbase you have - powerusers

I'm still using Thunderbird v11.0 and I have no plans of upgrading my install or even installing anything newer for a fresh install.

It's motherfucking email, for fuck's sake. That shit hasn't changed in the past 3 decades, let alone every fucking month. What the fuck is a Thunderbird 102 anyway? I don't need nor want a client that changes under my foot every god damn month, much less multiple UI redesigns that force me to relearn everything just to fucking read and fucking write my fucking emails.

If or when Thunderbird stops running on some version of Windows in the farflung future, I will probably find some other client worth my time and migrate to that; not Thunderbird version 348719 or whatever it's up to at that point.

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