Thunderbird 115
thunderbird.net
thunderbird.net
Maintainers are the unsung heroes of the software world, pouring their hearts into creating vast amounts of value that often goes unappreciated. These unsung heroes perform critical work that enables all of modern technology to function – this is not an exaggeration. These tireless individuals dedicate themselves to writing new features, fixing bugs, answering user inquiries, improving documentation, and developing innovative new software, yet they receive almost no recognition for their efforts.
I just now got an update (thought it would be to 115) but it's to 102 [1].
In the release notes of 102 it says it was made public only 5 days ago (and they say 115 is coming soon). And seemingly it can't update to 115? Am I missing something here?
[1] https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/102.13.0/relea...
[edit] okay it seems 115 is not yet released as https://www.thunderbird.net/ still links to 102. But the Beta links to 116 (https://www.thunderbird.net/de/download/beta/) so I guess they are still moving things around
102.x has been out for a while.
When you receive an update to it depends on your distro or whether you have it installed as a Snap or Flatpak, etc.
- "Thunderbird Project version numbers for releases match to Mozilla Firefox ESR numbers. Thunderbird also provides consecutive betas between the ESR numbers, for example 92-101, which match to Firefox (non-ESR) beta numbers. Future Thunderbird (ESR) releases upcoming are 115, 127, etc."
I've mostly stuck with webmail (Fastmail for personal, Gmail for work) but would love to get back to a local client. So I'm willing to give the new Thunderbird a shot, but it's perplexing when they advertise 115 and give me 102 and it's really unclear how to get the nifty stuff they're advertising.
FOSS is only good because of competition and entitlement.
It hit me that they may be listening to their users more than most desktop app developers when I scrolled to the section about display density. The overwhelming majority of modern desktop apps have exploded the use of white-space and grossly reduced the information density of applications. Mind you, I suspect I will personally want an even more dense setting than their current densest option. But having density settings demonstrated front and center gives me hope.
I'm also concerned that I will still want a traditional three-pane split view (folders at left, message list at top-right, message text at bottom-right). Many desktop users do not run their mail client fully maximized, so a horizontally-biased window size should not be assumed. I run Thunderbird on the left half of a single monitor, meaning it's taller than it is wide. A three-column view will probably not use that space well.
I'm guessing this is not an Electron app. If I am right, that alone deserves praise.
In sum, I am now cautiously optimistic!
Thunderbird is, and has always been, essentially a Firefox distribution which implements an MUA instead of a web browser.
Yes, I have a 3:2 lappy and a second monitor in portrait. Forced widescreen layouts are a no-go here. Thankfully the article implies new options, rather than "Dieter from Shprockets" knows best.
The one use case I switch to my mail provider's webmail UI for is search. I mentally sigh a little bit each time I realise I have to search through my email. Thunderbird's search has been among the worst I have ever come across, sadly. Functional search would be a killer feature. As it's running locally, heck, give me regex. Trivial to implement and would be a huge improvement already.
I've often just resorted to grep on an export of mail directories to find that one email. I even once imported the mails (ugly bash and Ruby hacks) in meilisearch to actually find stuff.
It surprises me that it's possible to have a search experience that's worse than manually grepping through directories.
I use “notmuch” for email and it can index over two decades of emails in seconds. Search is then instantaneous.
TBH, thunderbird could just use notmuch under the hood.
switching to list view manually seems so inefficient
I'm very hopeful about this new version. I can already see one of my U/X gripes fixed in the screenshot.
Thunderbird currently looks dated, and I'm glad to see it brought into the 2020s.
Sometimes current users can be dismissive of UI changes, so it's good to see fellow users who are happy. Moreover, let's not forget the new users, who were previously put off by the dated UI.
I don't think TB looks dated. It looks functional. Which is exactly what I want from a mail client. If I want something that looks modern but is dysfunctional, I'll just switch to Outlook.
* Dark mode didn't exist for a long time, and I'm glad it does, but messages are still displayed brightly.
* The list of emails always has a columns and a header; there's no simplified vertical view.
* There's a threading view, but IIRC it doesn't combine sent and received messages into the same thread view.
I had the 2-line message header view on my wishlist for a long time. Thunderbird did pretty great.
As I posted above, there is a setting for saving sent emails in the inbox along with received messages, so that threads are complete.
This.
For better or worse, I've rather come to view "modern" flashy UI aesthetics as being indicative of poorly performing software. It's not fair, I recognize, but in my personal experience, it's a reasonable heuristic.
There is a simple setting somewhere that allows you to have all sent emails be saved in the Inbox. Right now I'm not where I can look up the exact setting for this, but I'm sure you can find it without looking too long. I've been using it this way forever, all my threads are complete and easy to follow.
I’m not using (and probably never will) any of the non-email features like the calendar, or the chat. But they are relatively hidden away, so they don’t bother me.
But indeed if you don't use it it does not get in the way, which is perfect.
Of course I keep them there when I download in K9.
The difference is that with the third-party approach, the third party is really a risk factor of unknown magnitude (even if trusted and paid). With the "local" approach you are in full control.
When I'm working I always have access to my laptop with the complete mail archive.
When I'm not working I don't need the mail archive. Access to the latest mail in the POP3 server is enough. Proof is all these years since 1994. Furthermore I didn't have any access to my mail when away from my computer up to my first Android phone in 2011. Nothing bad happened to me and to the vast majority of people, which were handling mail in the same way pre smartphones. I mean: no access when on the move.
BTW, when I send mail from the phone I BCC myself so I'll download the message for permanent storage later on.
I'm curious as to why, if you don't mind! Are you specifically looking for "download only once then get rid of it"?
My mail stays on my computer, backed up locally and encrypted to a remote location.
I lose the ability to access old messages from remote but it never was a problem in almost 17 years of self employment. Before that, I already had about 13 years of downloaded emails, from the times when web mail was not a thing. No need to upload my old messages to Gmail, if this is even possible. I just kept using a local mail client. For my personal mail I remember some emacs clients, Netscape Mail (bundled with the browser,) Outlook Explorer then Thunderbird. I might forget something.
But after I started running my own server, I prefer IMAP so that all of my email is in one place regardless of what machine I'm using. And it still lives on a machine that I have control over.
Same here. I want to "receive" each message exactly once, not have it synced automatically all over the place. I only handle my email from either my desktop computer or my laptop, with a simple script to copy it all back and forth whenever I switch the device I am using.
I was on call for my jobs for decades and never had any problems with this method, however it was before smartphones became common. I do not handle email on my smartphone, ever.
It’s perfectly feasible to write an email client that hands off received events to a calendar application and receives the response to send back. It’s all icalendar components under the hood anyway.
Putting everything together in a single monolithic program that handles email, calendar and contacts is a design choice, not a technical requirement.
And yes, I do use the workflow that your descube receiving and sending calendar events. But Thunderbird’s design is annoying because it’s a all or nothing situation: you can’t just use it as an email client and use some other calendar application.
The road map does state Q4 2022 as a target so I imagine the work has just taken too much time already and the version 115 deadline wasn't made.
If I got the 'polished' version as part of the normal update cycle I'd be upset that my tight, space-efficient and incredibly responsive productivity app had decided to use a design language that reduces information displayed. The point of email is to communicate information and I now have to interact with the UI more than I did before to get the same amount of information.
The launched version hits the density that Thunderbird has been for about a decade and is what I'd prefer (ie the compact mode might be better for those being upgraded).
Thanks! Glad you mentioned it! On Linux the Thunderbird update is just one among many other updates in an update batch, so usually it will just be installed with the rest of the updatable items. I will have to pay attention now, so I don't install this unwittingly.
> "The point of email is to communicate information"
Deserves repetition.
> have to interact with the UI
This interaction is a cost, and you pay. I like mine cheap.
It's difficult to overemphasise how much this kind of thing gives users of your software confidence. The common assumption is, if it looks good, it works well (and the opposite).
I don't want to take away from the work that has been done here, but like .. just copy the design? You can take screenshots and compare to the design until it matches. It looked amazing, I feel bad for the designer because their vision has really been lost in what's been implemented.
Here's what it looked like last month: https://web.archive.org/web/20230614035125/https://developer...
Totally agreed, I was so excited when I saw these mockups and I hate to be negative but the shipped changes so far are much less exciting.
I run Thunderbird portable from a data pen, which is why this metric is important to me (i realize it won't be for the majority of users).
Edit; Okay i know i could buy a bigger data pen, but i also do weekly backups to the cloud and am limited to 7mbps upload, 2g takes 40 minutes, so every bit i can shave off helps. But i want to emphasize i realize it won't be important for the majority of users
You can get 1TB USBs and hard drives for far less (e.g. $10 used).
This isn't true, but I agree that it shouldn't be high priority for a resource-constrained team.
Curious here: so you continuously upload your Thunderbird executable to the cloud? Why? Most upload+sync solutions worth their salt (FreeFileSync, Syncthing) have competent diffing algorithms that don't upload the same file twice.
I have looked into Sync software, and i use this for local backups, but I'd only trust the cloud with an encrypted file container, which i have to re-upload each time.
The problem with E-Mail is always <mso> html.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/mozilla-now-only-...
My work email rarely exist in a vacuum, they exist in the context of all my other work emails.
The ability to actually cross reference and get work done quickly should always trump aesthetics. These modern “spaced out” UIs are infuriating, they achieve nothing other than requiring more scrolling.
Conversely, why is scrolling considered evil? We can agree that emails are documents. In real life, on your desk, do spread out all your documents so you could see them all at once? Or do you have a stack of them and view them one by one? You can still cross reference by putting documents side by side, just like you can with multiple emails open in separate windows or monitors.
Admittedly depending on the amount of emails and the speed at which you work through them you might benefit from seeing many at once, though there's other ways of dealing with that issue.
> All whitespace achieves is aesthetics, which are meaningless beyond initial adoption.
I don't think whitespace is all about aesthetics. Personally, it makes it easier for me to read and focus on things. It gives individual things more value, rather than them being "just another thing in a gigantic list", easily blending in and showing no significance.
Do you inspect your store's inventory by having one page per SKU or do you get a listing with each SKU summarised into its title?
I think the distinction here is really that some people (myself included) deal with so much email, that they need tools to deal with it in bulk, and others in this thread apparently do not. Maybe they're dealing with emails one by one as they come in, maybe they just don't get that much email.
And for me, having too low of information density makes it harder to use the software.
The obvious answer is to allow both sorts of UI aesthetics.
That's not true. Majority of my interaction with inbox is scanning through dozens of automated e-mail notifications and spam in search of the one I'm interested in. Most of the messages gets deleted or marked as read without ever being opened. And no, you cannot solve this with filtering, there's just too many edge cases.
Either way it's just my personal preference there's no need to understand it.
I’ve found it odd not everyone uses it this way. There’s no better way to blast through an inbox that has let 500+ pile up, and can through and organize it.
One feature I’ve always dreamed of was a column for sender domain, which could be used to sort as well.
For example, edit a previously sent email with a list, and in the new message every list has a space at the end of each element. Try to delete the space and it deletes the last character. You have to use shift-arrow to select the space and delete it. What is that?!
Another example, sometimes I paste from a rich-text source that has a table and it immediately converts the body to plaintext or something awful. Can't Ctrl-Z to undo, and I've already written a bunch of text that I don't want to lose, so I copy my text and paste into something plaintext and start the message over.
In general I avoid pasting into the message body because of these type of weird issues. What component is that? I haven't gotten around to filing a bug yet because I've never tried to explain these issues to anyone else before!
While the old list looks more compact vertically, it really doesn't use horizontal space well. It also wastes a lot of space for the message header, eating away precious space from the email content. Hopefully the message header can be configured to scroll with the whole email content in the preview.
The old list really doesn't work with a vertically split preview on a small screen, but the new card list looks perfectly viable for that.
1. There still doesn't appear to be a threaded email view. Emails are grouped, but I don't see a way to view them in a thread. Just one at a time
2. Rich text emails that are just text look remarkably bad. They're just black text on white background with limited padding. If you use dark mode, it still displays with a white background; many email readers have moved away from that
3. If you click an email group, it opens a summary view instead of an actual email. In order to open the actual email, you have to expand the group by clicking a tiny arrow
4. Having a landing page for an account still seems odd. It just means I have to keep the account open and click Inbox instead. Each of my 4 accounts have about 30-50 folders each so my sidebar is basically impossible to navigate unless I switch to the Unified folder view which has a separate list of issues
5. Going back to #2, if I reply to such an email in dark mode, the quoted text appears as black on dark gray.
6. The composer definitely needs some love
Basically, it still requires 3-4 clicks to do a ton of things that other clients can do in 1 click. Postbox, which forked Thunderbird like 15 years ago and I used for close to a decade, is also looking dated at this point but is much easier to use than Supernova.
Some of these things can be improved or changed, but I couldn't find a good combination that created an experience worth switching to.
It's unfortunate because I had been planning to switch to Thunderbird from Spark v2 since it was announced last year. Instead, it prompted me to re-evaluate Spark v3 which seems to have resolved most of its early issues. I'd prefer to use OSS, but not at the cost of productivity.
Negativity aside, it does look much better than it did previously and I can see the makings of a worthwhile client in there. It's just not ready for me yet.
Actually that's the worst anti-feature for an email client.
In my experience this is NOT always the case. I handle multiple accounts using unified view, and I've had a _lot_ of "accidents" where I replied from another address than the email address that the email was sent to.
Meaning: an email sent to me at one email address may get a reply (possibly with the email text quoted inside) - from a totally different and unrelated email address. Without me actively selecting a "different" reply account.
For a while it seemed the rule is that you reply using the account you used the last time you interacted with the app (the "last active" account -ish). It really seemed to be the rule, not the exception. I'm not sure if this was/is "by design" or "a bug"
T(hings like t)his is one of the reasons I use email/Thunderbird less these days. The cost per time unit has increased and the risk of uncontrolled events likewise.
Of course account switching is desired in some situations, so this should be possible. With some minor difficulty - at least some sort of minor deliberate action should be needed like click a list to change sender email address away from recipient email address. It should not be default behaviour.
You don't have to use the feature if you don't unified folders, but that doesn't mean other people don't want it.
They’re completely pointless for me, because different email accounts represent different contexts for me.
But there’s a lot of people who’ve created a gmail account, a hotmail account, have a their ISP account, etc for no particular reason other than the fact that they created an account when these services came by.
A unified folder is extremely useful for such people.
https://addons.thunderbird.net/thunderbird/addon/bordercolor...
Mail folders are all shown under sections dedicated to each account in the sidebar.
Also I really wish there were more ways to allow me to "trust" certain domains and to filter mail manually, on top of the usual spam filters. Gmail filters are nice but their UX could be better.
Also there should be ways to give my email address in a way that is automatically trusted. For example, some optional passcode in my email address would look like:
john.WORK9643@domain.thing
john.GIRAFFEBANANA@domain.thing
This already exists but is not mainstream.
The email protocol could also have a "friend request" feature to "ask the email client" to whitelist a domain. That way, no email would land in the inbox unless it's from a domain the user approved. Those "trust request" would discourage spammers or websites you give your address to you unsolicited emails.
https://www.betterbird.eu/faq/moz-governance.pdf
https://www.betterbird.eu/faq/permanent-ban.pdf
https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.governance/c/RQHR3eFAYZ8
I'm sure some people don't like the redesign. Personally, I think it's alright: it is a bit more on the "modern" side in some regards, but it's still reasonably pleasing to use, and still not too white-space heavy, and that's all I really care about.
Once they pointed out some features I had no idea existed (like the unified view for mailboxes) my experience was notably better.
Long term (25y) of Mozilla Mail/Thunderbird user here.
I don't think looking for a majority of email users is worthwhile, as the majority of email users are not going to use anything other than the webmail from their provider, and maybe the one built the in to their device.
As for thunderbird users, I'm not so sure. It seems those who feel they'd use thunderbird if the UI was different in this thread still seem to be unsatisfied by these changes, while those who like the UI the way it is are asking for the new UI to be optional
> contextual options based on the tab or Space that is currently active
I find it quite amusing that two whitepace keys/characters, tab and space, are also used to refer to areas of the UI in thunderbird :-)
> Card View emulates a mobile interface list with multi-line support, offering a more comfortable appearance to reduce cognitive burden.
Took them long enough.
And they said it couldn't be done, sheesh.
Outlook 2003 had that for... 20 years.
- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=335310 Closed Bug 335310 Opened 18 years ago Closed 16 years ago Suggest Multi-line Message List display (great in vertical view)
- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213945 Bug 213945 Opened 20 years ago Closed 4 months ago Mail/message listing/thread pane needs more organization in 3 vertical pane view (column wrapping, etc) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=307013
- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=307070 Open Bug 307070 Opened 18 years ago Updated 1 month ago Request for Outlook-style AutoPreview feature to see first few lines of messages
As the guy who made a close to pixel perfect office2003 theme for Tbird back in the 00's this feature has sentimental value to me and am very happy this has finally landed.
It's kind of weird they say it emulates mobile interfaces.
EDIT: On 2nd thought I'm thinking this is XUL, Mozilla's sort of electron equivalent for an HTML/CSS UI?
One thing I haven't found out is how to disable tabs. I think it is strange that you can switch between calendar, contacts and mail using the left menu. But the switcher opens new tabs instead.
One huge problem with open-source "hobby" projects is that they tend to not have designers when they need them. A dev sets out to build something, and then after it works asks a designer to help clean it up.
If you want a polished and "nice" application, getting a designer involved before you code is key. Retrofitting designs to dev work is going to be spotty at best.
It sort of looks better, but it doesn't look "good" by modern standards. It still looks like Frankenstein... but at least he's got some lipstick that matches his nails.
It's a tough spot, and you see it all the time when dealing with things built without designers.
I usually hate "infinite scroll" on say a timeline feed, but for calendar, it is exactly what I need as I very often move between months when I'm looking at my calendar.
Is there an extension in Firefox that'll bring the infinite scroll to calendar? Anything on the roadmap officially for that UX?
I'm an avid Thunderbird user and I like to support the team making it, but drives me crazy that sending them money costs 8%. So if you give them $100, they only get $92.
https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/
I know Mozilla is anti-crypto, but there still has to be a cheaper way to send them money.
Translation: We break with the established platform look&feel to follow the brave trend of replacing easily identified colourful icons with vague monochrome silhouettes.
Most users don't care about the alignment and spacing and so on in isolation, but they do get a sense of quality from the overall impact. This stuff really matters in aggregate.
Your professional input may be desired. Though I did not contribute to Thunderbird either (, yet?). Thing is, your critique may result in guidance to make part of these changes according to your skillset! But I am just a hopeless dreamer in the good of many things.
This isn't complex stuff either. I'm not a designer, I don't even do frontend/UI work, I'm basically just a backend engineer. If I'm spotting this stuff on first glance at the main marketing screenshot, which should be the best possible case, then this stuff must be glaringly obvious and pervasive.
I only see one ... icon in the entire screenshot, nothing is fuzzy, and all text looks aligned. The only weirdness is a misalignment between the sidebar header and the main window header, but those don't need to be aligned anyway.
And the first thing you do, is tell everyone how shit their code looks. The same code that pays for yours and everyone else's paychecks.
What do you think is going to happen?
I had MITMed my robot vacuum and discovered that it, like a disaffected teen, hung out in a chat room all day. I created a little python library to send it some XMPP messages so I could work around the app's terrible scheduling and put some commands in a cron file. And then I open sourced the code, because why not share?
It was a happy day for me when that robot died. Then I had a legitimate reason for archiving the project and never dealing with a user request/opinion.
Thunderbird is what it is; if you find it useful in its current incarnation use it (I do), but don't expect it to noticeably improve at the rate we've come to anticipate from other open-source projects. Even though Thunderbird is very popular by common open-source metrics for whatever reason it just doesn't move very quickly.
Which is an advantage, not a problem. I do not change my user behaviour regarding email often (if at all), so I really have no need or desire to see the tool I use for email changing (at all).
Every change brings with it a cost that the user must pay.
That is not an exaggeration, Outlook had them 20 years ago. People expected this feature, 20 years ago. I myself posted in the bugzilla issue 20 years ago.
It is available in GTK4 file picker. You know, major release, able to break ABI.
I think this is semantics.
Fact it, it took a decade+
[1] https://2165533704-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-p...
[2] https://www.thunderbird.net/media/img/thunderbird/whatsnew/1...
The search bar looks good in the mock-up, but bad in the final version due to not being centered, despite being really similar.
The first one looks like polished quality software while the second one looks like some junky app made by a solo dev on his free time that doesn't care how it looks like
Edit: Also the icons are much better in the second one. The first one has all monochrome icons which makes them much less useful for quickly scanning for the folder that you are looking for.
I can maybe agree that the first one looks more "polished" but at the same time I actually feel a but uneasy looking at it because my brain has to work harder to discern the UI elements due to the lack of colors and low contrast. Although the lines are heavier in the second one, I find it much easier to filter out the data that I am looking for.
Also the first one wastes screen real estate like crazy. I can only see 7 emails in that one, whereas the second one shows 14. I want all the emails that I receive within a single day to be able fit on a single screen so I don't have to scroll. Frankly, I think the first one sucks.
Sure there's more whitespace than some people prefer, but that sort of thing can be addressed with a compact mode.
Design plays a big part in how people perceive trustworthiness. It implies effort and understanding. The reason people spot fake products on AliExpress is not because they're intimately familiar with the legit versions, but because typically there are numerous design aspects that are just slightly weird.
Given the laundry list of issues they need to resolve, and as apparent from this thread the choice by UI experts to complain on HN instead of leaving feedback, I'm absolutely fine with them prioritizing other issues which are easier to address and have far more of an impact on their users.
A well designed UI also makes it easier to understand the UI, what belongs together, where one area ends and another area starts.
Tbird's ongoing lack of polish is a huge chunk of why I don't use it.
The visual metaphor is an ellipsis, and accordingly I expect the three dots aligned horizontally to be a continuation of (and hence pertain to) the buttons/options along the same row as it (which it does).
Similarly, I expect the three dots aligned vertically to pertain to options that are in the same column (which it also does).
It's a subtle visual cue that helps me understand what the button is for, and without it I would need to spend more time figuring out what container each button is in (which is a harder task, given that there aren't always visual dividers between containers, or changes in background colour).
Red Letter Media has a great phrase that rolls around in my head to describe situations like this (they use it for media analysis), "You might not recognize it, but your brain did."
Where you might not be able to point to a problem, but you instinctively know something is off.
New Thunderbird development is glacially slow, but to their credit they have kept the software functional and fixed any security bugs over the decades. And of course, it's free.
[1]: https://tinyapps.org/blog/202207100700_thunderbird-mbox-to-m...
As an analogy think of fedora and red hat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux#Relat...
With that same scheme it would be red hat 6, 12, 19, 28, 34 instead of 5,6,7,8,9.
How? i checked for an update and it's still only on 102
Looks like a typo? Shouldn't this be accessibility?
But mail clients usually use the IMAP search command and the server does the searching:
Client: A282 SEARCH FLAGGED SINCE 1-Feb-1994 NOT FROM "Smith"
Server: * SEARCH 2 84 882
Server: A282 OK SEARCH completed
It looks like the web version of Outlook. This is not a compliment.
Can I disable the search bar wasting that space? I can count on the fingers of one hand how many times I've used email search over the past 2 years. Three times, for the curious.
Can I disable the preview pane like I can now?
What's "unified" about the folders? What's being "unified"?
I've never tagged an email in my life, but there's the tag panel, taking up loads of space. Can I turn it off?
Sidebar "menus" should be considered a criminal act. Where's the menu bar? Why is everyone determined to force the metaphor du jour onto their applications?
Of course it's pretty hard when not even microsoft seems to know what Windows should look like.
Second, Office hasn't really looked like Windows for like... the past 20 years.
It's actually not that terrible, but I believe it's nowhere near feature parity. Not to mention there is a galaxy of add-ons that still need to be rewritten from scratch to work on the web version, and a lot of people cannot live without them.
Excel is a classic case of 80% of users requiring 20% of all functionality, but that 20% being different for each user. Still, Microsoft made it very clear that the future is web-first.
They don't seem to care.
For my part, LibreOffice Calc does all of what I want Excel to do, although not quite as smoothly. But I'm much happier donating to them than paying Microsoft.
Native is dead as it seems, at least for he Microsoft Office Team.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/20/microsoft_calendar_ma...
1. Outlook desktop - old MFC / win32 crapfest
2. Windows Mail / Calendar - new WPF crapfest.
3. O365 online outlook / outlook.com - fat web app.
4. "New" Outlook - this is a fat Electron style app based on the web app.
The latter is actually pretty good - been using it for a couple of months. This is apparently going to replace all the other ones on the desktop.
6. MacOS Outlook
You must be using a different New Outlook than me. I've been conscripted into trying it before the mass rollout to the rest of my company. It's so slow and missing so many features from the Old Outlook that it's only really usable for the most basic tasks.
> Although you can't create, run, or edit VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) macros in Excel for the web, you can open and edit a workbook that contains macros. Any existing macros will remain in the workbook, and you can open the workbook in the Excel desktop app to view and edit the macros.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/work-with-vba-mac...
Yet, even with those limitations, it is still the mot powerful note application out there. So... I still use it.
I imagine that it will be a similar situation with the rest of the office suite.
Microsoft positions Outlook for big corporate customers. They often need extensibility in their clients. Preferably you implement them only once to run on any client (web, Windows, macOS, Linux, mobile, ...)
And multi platform capabilities are one of the top goals for Thunderbird.
I think it makes sense that they accept they’re unlikely to achieve a decent OS specific look and therefore they’re focused on creating its own unique style.
Really? And what about tiny scrollbars?
Oh, how I hate that use of "we"! Please realize: "YOU" does not equal "EVERYONE"
Personally (sample size 1) I use several different PC-like hardware units for productive work, as well as personal use. These units have different hardware/software/OS in general, but some applications are used cross-platform: Email is one. Hence the need for Thunderbird in the first place. I have been using it for no less than a decade and probably much longer - iow as long as I remember.
The fact is that none (0, zero) of the total amount of hardware units I personally use _at_all_ "... have mouse wheels and touch screens" - not a single one.
I am not a robot! I exist, and I'm a core user of that product (which has become increasingly annoying in multiple ways during the years - way too narrow scroll bars are actually a good example of the dev team undermining usability - but there is no feasible alternative).
It seems the team is operating from some assumptions about user preferences that generally does not include (the likes of) me.
(ADDED: which would be fine if my demands were higher than their aility to deliver, but that is not the case. I only ever use the very basic core functions (read, write, folders; not even search) - no UI features added the past 5-10 years have been relevant for me. All of them have cost me time/productivity as anything new in the UI (no matter how minor) requires a breach of habit and a new learning loop, even if just to ignore said new feature.)
So, for the past couple of years my personal use of email has been on a steady decline. I just tend to avoid that kind of activity when/if I can.
ADDED: Don't preach me webmail in replies please. I did write "there is no feasible alternative" because that was exactly what I ment to say. Same goes for "just join the dev team and make a change yourself". I have actually considered these, but then: There IS NO feasible alternative. And that is the singular reason I still have Thunderbird installed even if used sparingly these days
But we have much bigger screens than many years ago when thunderbird was initially designed.
Laptop screens stayed mostly the same sizes, so it makes sense to adjust density to the device type you are using or the window size. This is already done for smartphones, mobile websites usually have much smaller paddings. Same is usually done for iOS vs iPad apps.
I find the UX for GMail, for example to be particularly good, not perfect but very very good for the task. The biggest issue I have with gmail is really folder and rule management.
There's something psychological about the appearance of a low-density display as well. I can't quite explain it, but it causes me a bit of displeasure because it feels wasteful. There are so many pixels available but they aren't doing anything for me. I don't know why this causes me discomfort, but it does.
Finally, it's important for an application like a mail client to not lose sight of the fact that the way people use email varies. I personally use dozens of folders, meaning the density of the folder list should be as compact as reasonably possible so that I don't need to scroll.
Also maybe not Gmail but aside from that IMHO Thunderbird offers better UX than all other browser mail apps.
1. Threads are collapsed into a 1-dimensional list making moderately complex discussions hard to follow.
2. Deleting many messages is very slow. With Thunderbird I can mash <Delete> while scanning subjects and pause for a second to see the actual message body. I get a lot of email that I need to sort through or be aware of so my morning generally consists of quickly (15min) going through up to 100 conversions and getting quick status updates or just deleting uninteresting threads. For whatever reason doing this in GMail is a complete slog. (I'm not sure why, they have the <y> shortcut to archive and have a preview pane but it is just way slower, maybe they need to precache a few messages on either side of the current one?)
3. Threads are based on subject meaning that unrelated messages get grouped together. (Apparently this was changed in 2019 (https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2019/03/threading-ch...) but I've definitely seen this issue for at least a year after that announcement when I stopped using GMail)
I do admit that most of GMail is pretty good. But for me these limitations are enough to really impede my workflow. I've found that Thunderbird is the least-bad option for me. However Thunderbird's performance is quite poor. I do have 350k messages downloaded locally but even opening my empty inbox sometimes causes lockups. IIUC this is because Thunderbird is mostly single-threaded but apparently there is progress slowly being made here. For example composing messages used to frequently lock up for a few seconds but I haven't seen that in a couple years.
You can disable this - it's called "Conversation mode" and you can turn it off. Many of my colleagues have it off as they find it unusable due to their workflow (they often end up with threads with 50-100 emails in them & conversation mode makes it painful).
(Be aware that Conversation mode is required for some tools/plugins/extensions to work though.)
Besides, when you have more than one mail with more providers it sucks.
2. Email in web browser is arse, particularly Gmail.
I am more curious why people are still using the very limited web based ones and one for each address, when much more capable and universal local clients exist.
Having access to mail offline has saved my bacon a few times, especially while traveling.
* not all of my email accounts are hosted by Google/Microsoft
* I want one email client to manage all of my email
* I want offline access and local search
Other then that, I am also not a fan of gmails web interface and the way it handles emails.
Gmail has weird limitations around non Gmail accounts. You can only add up to five, and they get checked randomly - sometimes only once an hour but mostly around 20 minutes. There's no way to force a check. This is a ridiculous limitation - imagine having to wait that long for an email log in code, for example.
If I only used one Gmail account there would be no reason to use Thunderbird. Now I have something like 7 or 8 email addresses across several businesses and a real, reliable email client is vital.
Searching through gigabytes of mail is trivial on a desktop but way too expensive to do on the cloud.
So much quicker, webmail is incredibly slow no matter what hardware and internet you have.
There's also the local backup point that others have mentioned.
On a more serious note, am I using my desktop so very differently? The idea that a web app could even come close to competing with a native app for me simply doesn’t compute.
You mean like Thunderbird is doing here?
Also a local copy of the emails is nice to have.
So that my emails are truly mine. I pull them off the server straight away for anti-tampering and reducing attack exposure should the provider be compromised. I can then compress and backup my emails. If my provider should falter I can change providers and still have all my emails, even pushing any of them back up to the new server should I have such a need. The same logic applies for my contacts. When a web-only provider goes offline, so do all my emails and contacts which feels too much like corporate capture to me.
But will E-mail on the whole ever get features like other chat platform? Even conversation view is not good on the eye. Quoting is ugly in long Email body.
Maybe only protocols are getting updated!? I think email is only still here because its a form of identification.
Most companies and groups are moving towards Discord, Slack, etc. for a proper discussion.
They are moving for instant discussions, but not for proper discussions.
Instant messaging is the death of knowledge. Emails aren't much better IMO, but there's still a bigger feeling of permanency and availability than IM.
It uses emails for chatting.
Though personally, I'm quite happy with this separation of emails and chats. They are for different stuff.
That must be right. I got let go from my last job because I refused to use 5+ different instant messaging software and instead stick with email. In hindsight, I guess I should have been wiser.
Most of the "smart" features just seem to get in th way :(