Thunderbird 115 Supernova Preview: The New Folder Pane | Hacker News Reader

Thunderbird 115 Supernova Preview: The New Folder Pane

blog.thunderbird.net

97 pointsjhgalino59 comments

I have been using Thunderbird for so many years across a variety of platforms. Happy to see continued development while maintaining my ability to customize. I appreciate the ability to hide tags and local folders in the new interface. I look forward to trying Supernova.

The graphical changes do seem more refreshing.

I hope the Unified view remains, as it would be very difficult for me to use TB without it.

I spend 95% of my time in TB working with one of my email inboxes (rather than Sent/Archives) etc. And Unified view, puts them as a list right at the top of the Folder Pane.

The article shows the unified view in TB 115.

Which image are you pointing at? I don't think anyone of them do.

First of all, unified view makes sense when you have multiple email addresses set up. In the unified view, the Folder pane goes

    Inbox
        email1@domain.com
        email2@domain.com
    Sent
        email1@domain.com
        email2@domain.com

and so on for Archives, Trash etc.

Here's the money quote:

Younger users have become used to using simpler interfaces. They’ve never used a “Local Folder” and probably don’t even know what that is. So, we’re offering a simple option to turn the Local Folders display on or off.

So that's why they did it. Hide the things for young-lings so they don't get confused, let the old-farts find the options the make it look like it used to.

At least it's an option, I dislike the 'simpler-version first' mentality but I get it. I really appreciate the fact that it's optional.

I've been using their mail-client since it was still baked into Netscape Navigator, so I'm not the target audience.

I've been using TB for over 15 years now, and in that whole time Local Folders has been 100% useless for me. Just visual clutter. I even created an addon to hide it permanently, which got fairly popular and existed until they changed the plugin architecture a few years back. Once the addon broke, someone else created a working alternative almost immediately.

I understand why Local Folders exists, but never once in 15 years have I actually used it. It's about time they created a native option to hide it, and that's coming from an old fogy!

I have used Local Folders when my past workplace was removing my email account, so I copied all of those folders to my Local Folders.

So I am glad they exist, but I am also happy that they can be hidden for those who don't need them.

Local folders are occasionally useful and I'm glad Thunderbird supports them. User experience could have been improved by simply not creating them by default. Then they'd not confuse or annoy anyone, and should the need ever arise, the user could add them.

I self-host all my email, I know what's the point of local folders (heck, I've used mutt when I was really into TUIs), but I've never had an use case for them. Having an option to remove those is welcome. Whatever the defaults are - I don't really care, as long as I can configure it only once and as long as that won't get accidentally reset someday.

@UI_at_80x24,

On the contrary, you ARE ALSO the target audience. It is stated so explicitly multiple times - for example "existing users will not be left behind", "you get to choose", etc.

p.s. I've also been using the browser since the earliest days of Netscape Navigator, and I am on the Thunderbird team.

I'd also be pissed if I got left behind. But it's not happening.

Two things I appreciate about this:

- He is considering the conflicting needs of different people rather than just hyping his personal vision.

- He is discussing the changes ahead of time, explaining what is changing and why, rather than just silently dropping the new version on everyone and telling us to deal with it.

If only more orgs would do these things.

Yeah, I love how they're accommodating different people's preferences. This makes me feel a lot less concerned about the new UI already. I have zero complaints at this point, and am nothing but impressed. I'm looking forward to seeing the other changes.

Long time thunderbird user and I love this. Keep iterating!

I want Outlook's sweep function. Anyone up to the challenge of sending a pull request?

What I really miss is a "web companion" for Thunderbird, basically something like https://roundcube.net/ or https://www.horde.org/apps/webmail, but a bit more powerful and with better UX. I'd like to use a Google Addressbook within such app, for example (there is a completely outdated plug-in for RoundCube). Another important thing would be powerful and fast search.

As someone who is not intimidated by information I for sure am relieved that the original dense layout remains as an option.

But I am preparing myself for having to fiddle with settings and look for the toggle, because I am pretty sure it will not be the default.

And I won't be surprised when the old UI gets quietly deprecated in a year or so.

Did you see the UI to change it? It is in the top level menu. Looks very easy to find and adjust.

Cool! Separate question: What makes people decide to use a mail client instead of webmail? What can I do with a client that I can't do with Gmail web?

This winter, Rackspace had malware get into their hosted exchange environment. The only solution they offered for weeks was moving to office 365. Anybody who only used webmail lost all emails, calendars, and contacts.

Wait so they weren't able to recover any of the mails yet?

Pretty niche, but I like a desktop client because on my Linux setup (i3) I wasn't able to get reliable always-on-top calendar notifications from Outlook web and was constantly missing meetings.

> What can I do with a client that I can't do with Gmail web?

Use my own e-mail server without touching a Google server (except on the recipient end lol)

For starters, you get a complete local copy of your inbox, offline-accessible.

Read archived emails when offline.

My reasons are:

* Use multiple email addresses from different providers

* Have a standard interface across all accounts

* Be able to adjust the interface to how you like

* For some reason webmail makes it hard to sort columns, add or remove columns, filter emails etc.

I swapped over to it. A dedicated mail client, imo, is always going to be more functional and more performant than a web browser for the purpose of mail tasks.

It's nice to have a dedicated piece of software that I know works and I don't have to worry that some weird browser issue or one of several dozen addons isn't causing a problem.

I mean, Thunderbird is really just FF under the hood from what I understand, but still.

> A dedicated mail client, imo, is always going to be […] more performant than a web browser for the purpose of mail tasks.

Counterexample: Thunderbird. I recently tried TB based clients, and then TB directly to see if it already has those issues. And it turns out, it does. Interacting feels sluggish (not on a resource constrained device, Win 11, 32 GB RAM, Ryzen 5 3600).

Now Outlook (which I use for work and was the reason I wanted to get a unified client for everything) is a bit faster than the MS web interface (or the horribly slow Gmail one), but the fastmail interface is faster than all of those.

Anecdotally, TB has been very fast and my browser was always slow for even basic operations.

Though Outlook is an exception. It has always been...garbage in my experience. Crashes, incredible lag, addons that fail to load, etc. I consider it a miracle if I get through a day with it all working properly.

My encryption settings are constantly being reset so I have to enter them almost EVERY SINGLE TIME, which is lovely.

> my browser was always slow for even basic operations

What webmail?

> Crashes, incredible lag, addons that fail to laod, etc.

Maybe those addons are the issue? I’ve never had lag, and crashes are < 0.5/year. But I also have zero addons.

First and most important, I can not use Gmail. I use fastmail, pay for it, and dont have my most personal data mined for ads. It also means I can move away from fastmail quite easily!

Second, the performance is better, it's just way snappier even on high end computers.

Third, mail clients (not just thunderbird) often have better os level integration, features, and feel. For example, Mail.app on ios/macos.

Honest question: what do you do with email that's so personal? Disclaimer that I don't like Google mining email data, I value privacy and don't want to dismiss it.

But I'm genuinely curious what you do over email that you feel so strongly about. For me, email is basically just a notification feed for me buying shit off Amazon (which the biggest person interested in selling me shit already knows about) and me occasionally having to complain to a customer service inbox.

All personal stuff is iMessage and signal, or secure things like docusign (for employment stuff).

Honestly if I was going to make a privacy related move, it would be to move to my own email domain but still hosted on gsuite.

If your purpose of email is simply commercial emails then I may somewhat agree that paying for emails may not be a worthwhile investment.

Personally I was scared my account might be closed and I would have no recourse as I wasn't a paying customer. Years ago there were stories here of people having all their google accounts closed and being unable to even contact a human at google to check why.

someday when iMessage and Signal are long gone, you're going to want to recall a funny conversation with friends or a message from a lover that you STILL keep thinking about after all these years. when that happens, you'll probably wish those things happened on a platform that makes it easy to save for as long as you want

Takes two to tango so unfortunately most of the folks we email are using Google on the other end getting to read our messages anyhow.

Offline access and far better handling of multiple accounts, mainly. It also means I’m not at the mercy of the webmail provider when it comes to UI, and if my current client of choice takes a turn for the worse I can migrate to something else (or if I’m ambitious, even develop my own).

I want to have all my mail backed up locally and I want to be able to check mail and search across multiple accounts at the same time. Basically I don't trust the corporate cloud and want to be platform agnostic.

Mainly in my case because I host my own domain mail with a cheap mail host with a webmail that's not as good as gmail. Also better offline support than any webmail (gmail's is spotty and last time I used it, only worked in Chrome).

1. All of my email addresses from different providers are in one location

2. I have a local backup of all my emails

Noone seems to have mentioned extensions yet so I'll jump in - extensions!

Like Firefox, Thunderbird can be, uh, extended with additional functionality which can really boost productivity. (I know there are Gmail addons that can do similar things, some of which are pretty powerful too.)

Some ones I use: - ThreadViz[1] - a neat little visualisation of the email thread & its linked replies/predecessors (pre-plies?) - Mail Merge[2] - powerful mail merge util with a bunch of options for tailoring emails. - QuickText[3] - keyboard shortcuts for common (template-able) replies - super useful if you are, say, monitoring a support mailbox and want to save a bunch of time with canned replies.

1. https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-us/thunderbird/addon/threa... 2. https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-us/thunderbird/addon/mail-... 3. https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-us/thunderbird/addon/quick...

You can have visibility over multiple accounts: personal mail, professional mail, university mail, hobby mail. only two are from the same provider.

move mail between accounts by drag and drop or even handy shortcuts

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

From the looks of this preview, Thunderbird users will be using webmail soon, just locally hosted.

It's just a bit more snappy and has a few advanced but helpful features that gmail does not.

For comparison... think about how it feels to work in Microsoft Word compared to Google Docs. You can do most of what you can do in Word in Google Docs, but there are helpful things in Word that just make it that much better. And it just feels a little better when you use it... thus, if you need to do really serious word processing, you do it in Word.

Outlook and Thunderbird have a similar feeling when compared to gmail. It won't matter much if you are only sending 10 emails a day. But if you are sending 50 or 60 emails a day over multiple inboxes (particularly in the context of business email)... you might find it's a little easier to organize and respond to people in the desktop clients.

In the case of Thunderbird, here are some features it has I probably couldn't live without:

-Archiving split by Month (As a bonus there is also an easy shortcut key for archiving)

-Open in thread (this is a little different than gmails as far as I understand in the way that thunderbird deals with split threads, which can be important in a business context where you have some replies only going to some people, others going to other people - it's easy to see this tree structure in Thunderbird)

-Folders AND Tags (Thunderbird's Tagging and Folder system are separated, gmails is combined as far as I'm aware. As a bonus, Thunderbirds tags highlight emails in color for easy identification, and also have easy shortcuts)

-Add-Ons (For example, I use a Thunderbird extension that can attach notes to an email message... which can then synchronize between computers which is useful for accounts where a lot of people access the inbox, but where sending an internal email would clog said inbox. For gmail, you can write web extensions, but Thunderbird has an ecosystem already pre-existing and mostly free)

-Reminder if you use the word 'attach' and don't have an attachment (It sucks when you send out an email saying 'such is attached below and it's not actually there. Gmail might have this too now - have not checked.)

These things all seem pretty small but they make a big difference in how I manage my email, and especially with Thunderbird, this is all customizable. Want Unified inboxes, or separate ones? Your choice. Want to see the cc's from an email as a column in your email list, but not the favorites ('important' tag in gmail) column? Your choice too. And there's a lot more options than just these, meaning you can really streamline your email process. And this just ... at least for me, makes enail a little less painful.

Just my two cents :).

Web mail interfaces are locked to individual providers. Some interfaces (like io.ox and Outlook) allow adding other providers, but it feels like a band aid.

I do wish I could use a web based client (or one synced with one) so that all my settings are available on all my devices.

Something like Firefox Sync, that would simplify setting up k9mail, would be very nice.

Anything you need another company's permission to access doesn't belong to you. Google could lock you out of your own email at any point. Any important messages you've sent or received over the years can be taken from you and you could be left with no means at all to get them back. Having a local copy of your correspondence is great for piece of mind.

Because thunderbird stores messages in MBOX format your messages can be read by anything that can handle text files and you can use tools like grep to search through your messages very quickly from the command line. If you get an address with a new email provider having a copy of all your messages on your hard drive means that you can easily move them to the new account.

The font rendering is all over the place. Perhaps it's the screenshots, but just doesn't look good.

I can’t put my finger on it but something about the design reminds me of early 2000s KDE.

That’s neither good nor bad.

It's the font rendering and color scheme. Looks wildly out of date to me.

Still five months away. Looks like a solid enough improvement, though.

is it react/electron based? are old plugins do not work?

I am so glad that the Thunderbird devs have finally made search usable in their newest release. </sarcasm>

Sigh. Don't care at all. Just want it to work. Honestly, this project screwed up when it deprecated all the good plugins, much like Firefox -- though it seems to me Firefox might actually have a good reason for doing so where Thunderbird did not.

Is anyone aware of current work on something like the equivalent of a "Pale moon" fork?

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