Thunderbird 115 “Supernova” | Hacker News Reader

Thunderbird 115 “Supernova”

blog.thunderbird.net

508 pointsAyesh297 comments

> Our fastest ... ever

Last time I installed Thunderbird seems to have been in the 00's sometime[0]. Since then I have used the same install, only updating it, and moving/cloning to other units.

Back then PCs were s-l-o-w but Thunderbird was _fast_. Moreso than Outlook/Outlook Express in startup as well as operation. Then, speed deteriorated bit by bit over the years. Due to feature creep, I suppose (in other news; also UX in several subtle ways that all add up).

I do not believe that the claim of "Fastest ... ever" is credible, and I have reason to believe that speed on an 13yo X86 unit still running 32bit[1] will not be impressive. Still, if speed is improved even slightly I'd welcome that.

[0] Datestamp of earliest email in a random folder is December of 1999 - 23 years ago. But then the earliest emails were imported from another email client into Thunderbird. In any case I started using Thunderbird as a very early adopter, mostly due to their very convincing Firebird product (I was in Tech then, too).

[1] The unit I prefer using for anything that does not require Windows or other ressource hogs (eg. browsing like now). Yes it's _that_ old. It's Linux, so no problem.

>Last time I installed Thunderbird was in December of 1999 - 23 years ago

Surely that can't be right unless you had a time machine, as it was released in 2004, being based on Phoenix/Firefox.

I've always thought of a time machine as being capable of traversing time but not rearranging it.

It existed before that and was called Minotaur, which was a work to separate the mail client from the Mozilla suite. Thunderbird wasn't written from scratch from Phoenix or firebird. But it benefited of all the improvements made to common code used by Phoenix if memory serves right.

The pre-1.0 releases were functional (they were derived from the Mozilla App Suite) and relatively popular. I used Thunderbird 0.2, which Wikipedia says would have been in 2003.

I assumed they mean fast as in, "shortest delay since the previous major release".

It's fast when it doesn't crash on a big local mailbox. Otherwise it's fast to crash and presents you repeatedly with the choices to wait or kill the app.

I hadn't looked at Thunderbird since about that time. I trashed it back then because there was no way to export your filters, in order to copy them to other computers... an absurd deal-breaker. Has that been resolved, by the way?

A few years ago I got my parents new computers. Sadly they are Windows machines, since that's what they're used to. After finding Microsoft's E-mail client to be monumentally defective trash, I installed Thunderbird for them. What a pleasant surprise. It worked well, looked good, and it downloaded all 15,000+ messages from each of their AOL accounts. Yep, AOL.

> I hadn't looked at Thunderbird since about that time. I trashed it back then because there was no way to export your filters, in order to copy them to other computers... an absurd deal-breaker. Has that been resolved, by the way?

I don't think it has been, but I'm hopeful that the upcoming Thunderbird Sync feature will support syncing filters. I know they are only focused on syncing email account credentials right now, but that's honestly the last thing I care about syncing. More important are all the other little settings, such as filters, that are a huge pain to remember to manually change on all my computers.

Thanks for the reply. It's aggravating that this remains unaddressed. I don't even care about "syncing." All we need is to be able to export them to a file and then import them to another installation.

It may not be popular to say this about free software, but WTF? That is simply stupid.

And the apologist brigade downvotes uncomfortable facts yet again.

Your lack of desire for syncing is neither uncomfortable nor a fact.

The filter configuration for an account is in a text file in your profile, in a location like ImapMail/imap.example.org/msgFilterRules.dat

Copying these files around and editing them by hand works fine.

Thanks for the info. That's pretty clumsy, when an import and export function would seemingly be straightforward to implement.

Thunderbird (like Firefox) has a profile folder. If you copy that to another machine everything should be the same on that new machine. I have been doing this since probably 2009 and I make use of filters.

It's absurd that this function (filter import/export) hasn't been built into the application. Why should people have to scrounge around in user directories (after having to look up the appropriate location for whatever platforms they're using)?

Also, can you have global filters? I don't want filters per E-mail account.

Funny, all this time ago and I remember the naming controversy with Firebird the database (which I've also used, we were using Interbase, we were a Delphi shop back then).

Seeing as this looks like the finally moved over the Firefox Quantum codebase, it will possibly be faster provided you have the memory to support it.

Like FF Quantum, it was definitely faster than the previous version but the memory usage jumped big time as they went down the Chromium route of speed optimization.

I sense we may end up with a fork of this just like Firefox did with Pale Moon.

Firefox also started moving away from a shared memory model towards sandboxed tabs during that period, which had an effect on memory consumption.

I LOVE Thunderbird - never even left. I also use Tutanota, which has its own desktop client; very nice for folks who don't want to take care of the encryption themselves.

Thank you for the tip! Tutanota looks great!

Yeah, I'm still disappointed that they swapped out lots of their C++ implementation with JavaScript. While I definitively think that the devs were qualified to determine that their C++ code base was a too big maintenance burden, I just would have hoped that they went for Rust as replacement, after all Thunderbird shares code with Firefox and came from Mozilla, i.e. the company that gave rust the resources it needed to evolve and become stable to be a C++ replacement...

While JS engines are an engineering marvel, they just cannot compete with bare metal compiled code, and the JS single-thread model really doesn't help.

I suspect that this is one of the reasons that the input field used for composing a plain text message hangs up every 20s - one minute as the backend has to do some IO or the like, even if the input field could be completely independent (e.g., I never see this behavior in Firefox, with much more tabs open and stuff happening in the background).

It might have also other reasons, and it might also be solvable with their JS stack, but what I know for sure is that the effects are real, and I face several frustrating moments a day when my email editor just freezes for ~10s and that this behavior was not existing a few years ago. I even upgraded to a quite powerful workstation (a TLC NVMe over PCIe 4.0, 128 GiB of DDR5 memory, i7-12700K CPU), so yeah not signing off on the "fastest ever" either, that's rather a slap in the face of all power users.

Yeah I get this pause while writing emails too. Very annoying. Maybe it's a garbage collection pause?

I thought it was just me because my profile folder is now ~100GB. Are you able to reproduce this even with a new installation and new email account with no emails?

I thought it was the mbox storage format. Adding a label or mark something as read need rewriting the file.

Haven't tried with a new installation. I have quite a few emails.

I used to get this a lot but haven't seen it in a year or two. But I have switched to the message-per file storage format, so that may be part of the issue.

I have 366k messages, but all in one folder and used to see hangs even when that folder wasn't open (but it was being synchronized).

I still get hitches and sometimes crashes due to not responding for too long when navigating other things, but message composition seems fine now.

> the JS single-thread model really doesn't help.

That's just poor engineering and architecture, not an inherent limitation of JS. Modern JS supports multithreading through WebWorkers, see VS code as an example of what a proper editor should be. V8 is an insanely performant engine.

If you're on Windows and use the built-in Windows Defender (or whatever it's called now), try excluding your Thunderbird mail folders from scanning. The AV locks the files while scanning and that freezes TB.

Or replace Defender with a faster AV product. Defender has always been massively impactful on file operations.

No, I'm using Debian Linux (where it worked well >> 5 years or so) – still thanks for the tip.

Javascript's single thread is an event loop. If the code is written correctly, it should not be holding anything else up to do I/O. That can be dispatched to run asynchronously, and when the data is ready the event loop will call back into the code that was waiting for the response. Also, modern JS engines do support spawning threads. But even if they didn't natively, the Thunderbird devs could have exposed APIs to JS code that allow it.

> While JS engines are an engineering marvel, they just cannot compete with bare metal compiled code, and the JS single-thread model really doesn't help.

This has nothing to do with it. When was the last time your browser locked up in Google Docs which is also primarily JS-driven?

Event loops are great and solve all kinds of concurrency hazards. If you need more parallelism, then spin off another event loop to do separate processing tasks. There's no reason each email composition window can't be its own event loop, for instance.

> This has nothing to do with it. When was the last time your browser locked up in Google Docs which is also primarily JS-driven?

I don't use Google Docs, but I often get slow JS-ridden sites, also I never said this is the sole reason it's slow, at the end I even mentioned that it can be fixed with JS too – still rust is 10x faster and more efficient (better power usage on laptops), naturally one can code in both language such that it sucks independently – still, rust makes it harder to hold it wrong.

> There's no reason each email composition window can't be its own event loop, for instance.

Yeah, never said the contrary but a) still will be faster if done in rust or something like that (I use both JS and rust a lot, so I got at least _some_ experience with those different ecosystems) and b) it doesn't help if you do IO and hang in kernel D state then the whole thread hangs, including any IO loop. Rust's prime async framework tokio has solutions for that, being a work-stealing executor it can detect this from another thread and move unrelated futures to other threads and continue execution there. Sure, maybe one can shoestring that together with JS, but it's not making things more maintainable (as was the original goal), as JS gives you no access/synchronisation guarantees.

Doesn't JavaScript's Atomics API provide synchronisation primitives?

I really love the new view. I'm glad they finally adopted the Outlook/Evolution layout, as I've always found it easier to reason about. I'd been using Evolution as a result, but this is tempting.

Anyone know what the Thunderbird -> MS Exchange or OWA story is these days?

Owl is still the best option as far as I am aware.

https://www.beonex.com/owl/

The site is not clear, but if it's server-side, it's a non-starter for pretty much everyone. Do you know where it runs?

It's a client-side extension for Thunderbird. It works extremely well, in my experience.

It's client-side, and works very well for email. It used to be that email notifications through Thunderbird waited until your next email refresh interval, but I noticed they are coming in at the same rate as the Outlook clients after the last update to Owl.

Calendaring through Lightning is incomplete and experimental.

In the "spaces" vertical toolbar on the left, Owl has added a Teams button recently, as well. It opens the Teams O365 app in a tab in Thunderbird, which I really like. I haven't had a chance to check if any meeting or audio features work there.

I've used Owl with Thunderbird to connect to Exchange in the past, I'll vouch for it as well.

Bummer on the model. Would be really nice if I could just pay some amount, say $100, to get access to the source and the extension.

For some things I guess I don't mind closed source from a small company, but my company mail probably isn't one of them.

You get the source ... technically. You can unzip the XPI and you'll have all the code there.

Interesting. Do you know then how it enforces subscription?

There's a licensing server and users seem to be identified by the email addresses they use Owl with. At a glance it seems like it checks for a valid license every once in a while. The code that does it has a couple paragraphs at the top saying something along the lines of "yeah it's all here, there's nothing stopping you from stripping it but please don't redistribute it then because it's my livelihood thank you."

Thanks. Very cool, that's basically the model I was hoping for (that or open source with some identifying watermark per install). I'll give it a look.

> Cheap, 2 coffees per year

Price: 10€. Starbucks really did a lot of damage here. 2 coffees should be 3€, not 10.

The coffee is cheap. It's the milkshake, chocolate drizzle and whipped cream they add to it that adds to the costs.

Probably correct. I only ever drink coffee black with no sugar and I can't ever being surprised the few times I got my coffee at a Starbucks.

Yes, but I was more complaining bout how the concept of "Starbucks coffee" took over the "coffee cup" concept.

Do you mean a corporate instance of Exchange your company is hosting? If so have the Exchange admins enable IMAPS [1]. I've used Thunderbird with Exchange in the past. The admins can also publish SRV records in AD or DNS to give Thunderbird some hints depending on your corporate configuration vpn vs lan vs public. The use of a VPN should be encouraged to avoid exposing a public endpoint and bots brute-forcing AD accounts leading to lockouts.

For their Microsoft 365 / O365 use [2]

[1] - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/clients/pop3-and-...

[2] - https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/pop-imap-and-smtp...

This will depend on if your org will use conditional access or not. CA policies will generally kill non modern auth protocols like imap and pop3.

Yep my org shut down imap about a year ago. So I set up a rule in my inbox to forward everything to a gmail account, and I access my mail from there.

That sounds like some other form of corporate violation. At least I know my friendly megacorp would frown on that.

It was their suggested solution, so....

infosec guys hate him

FYI that's leaking corporate data on purpose

Depending on which industry and country you are in, you might be committing a crime.

I like it.

> If so have the Exchange admins enable IMAPS.

That seems highly unlikely in any org that hasn't already done it. But good luck, and godspeed to those who want to give it a try, but if history is any guide not only is "no" the worst thing that can happen, but the odds-on favorite.

Yup I've been there. I find that if I ask the same question worded differently every 3 to 6 months I might get a different answer depending on who is reviewing my request, especially in bigger companies.

Davmail works.

https://davmail.sourceforge.net/

I use exquilla[1] for some years now. It is paid though and costs 10€/year. Furthermore it is only mails...

[1] https://www.exquilla.com/

Why does this website look almost identical to the Owl website below?

edit: Same pricing, same exact signup form and "Domain Licenses" page, etc. but way worse design. I'm guessing this is a knock-off of Owl? Or worse?

Same company owns both. IIRC, exquilla came first.

If like me you're wondering when this will be released via the in-application auto-update mechanism, the bottom of the article states:

> As with any major release, we sometimes become aware of corner cases after significant public testing. The Thunderbird team will wait to enable automatic updates until we’re confident no such issues exist.

So if you want it now you have to download the new installer, you can't just do what I was doing and continually check for a new version and hope it turns up in the next few hours :)

i have about 50 email addresses. thunderbird handles it ok at the moment but i'm a bit worried the new update won't. fingers crossed..

Isolated data point: I have a couple of accounts, some of them have more than 50k messages. I noticed Thunderbird's auto-update wouldn't trigger so I manually installed the macOS .dmg with no issues. The previous Thunderbird profile was loaded as usual (with the folders on an external disk)

I have to say that the new look and feel is definitely better but it looked much nicer in the screenshots, I don't know why, I don't think it's a technical thing, perhaps my own expectations.

It definitely looks better on the screenshots! I thought it was me, but I've noticed other people writing about this too. Maybe the design was not translated well to the code, some subtle things like proportions and distance between elements being off.

I suspect it could also be some old user settings that are messing with it. Perhaps a fresh install would not have that problem. The new defaults may play nicer with the new design.

it was too easy. worked smooth and instantly besides having to re-authorize my microsoft account. (they saw it as a new app). thunderbird looks a lot nicer now. i like it.

Because when I think of what I need in an email client, I think "beautiful" not "functional". It's a tool not a work of art. I use it to get work done not stare at it in awe.

UX people have killed application software. I need basic tools to work, not make me excited to use them. When I pick up a screwdriver, I don't do it for the experience. Ugh.

You know what's a beautiful email client to me? Netscape Communicator 4.x

I think that's an exceptionally reductive and cynical take, without providing any real reasons for the hate, or how this update will reduce your usability of the application.

Tangibly, "beautiful" UX is code for "rounded corners and lots of useless buffer space in between the informative elements". This is visible in the screenshots in the link. Things are further apart, less dense, and therefore more "beautiful".

I agree that OP's take is reductive and cynical. I would add that in this case, as in essentially every other case where this is done, it is also accurate.

The guys down at the shop aren't talkin about how pretty the snap on tools are.

Make it work. Make it easy to work with. Then make it pretty.

> The guys down at the shop aren't talkin about how pretty the snap on tools are.

Got a new diamond turning lathe in the machine shop about a month ago, whew lad. Warehouse got a vertical stacker and started giving tours, lol. Our glass shop keeps the MRF machine so clean the repair techs claim we must not use it.

> Make it work. Make it easy to work with. Then make it pretty.

Any specific usability issues in mind about this 19 year old email client?

I think people are allowed to say they dislike the design of something without providing a academic thesis as to their reasoning.

Here is a big one for me though: the war on information density by UX designers

Have a look at the side by side comparison: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/115.0/whatsnew...

Give me the one on the right every day of the week and twice on Sunday. It looks like a professional application, a tool for getting work done. The one on the left looks like a toy website for newbies (or worse: Outlook).

I have a 32 inch 4K display and most of the designers seem to think most of that space should be filled by useless dead space and massive buttons like this is Windows 95 and the average user needs the "start" affordance (now tarted up with eye-catching bright colors!) to know what to click on. Apparently my head is expected to literally explode if I ever see two distinct lines of information separated by less than two line breaks.

This kind of infantalizing of the UI for can be defended in some contexts but here, it demonstrates that the designers do not know their target audience. This isn't the dial-up days, grandma doesn't read her mail on Outlook Express or any other local client, she uses a website like everybody else. The only people using actual local clients in 2023 are in enterprise (Outlook…) or are power users who want features they can't get on the web.

> Give me the one on the right every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

This is such an apropos example because the left-right windshield wiper widget to switch between the two screenshots referenced, ostensibly to give me a "beautiful" "experience" because two static thumbnails is for squares, is unusable and borderline broken.

No one asked for a thesis.

This was not part of the war on information density. The 3 column layout was requested often. It is optional. It can show more messages and more of the message on common screens. Professionals do not use 32 inch 4K displays only. Sender above subject is faster to skim in my experience. Not to you maybe. You can use the old layout.

I dislike the blue new message button. Probably CSS can fix it.

>It can show more messages and more of the message on common screens

This is trivially disproven. Look at the screenshots provided. The "new" view shows 14 messages using the entire height of the display. The "old" view shows 14 messages… in half the amount of vertical space. Toggling off the preview pane would double it to around 28.

Even throwaway computers have wide aspect ratio displays nowadays, vertical space is at more of a premium than horizontal.

This trade-off of giving more space to the preview pane at the cost of halving the amount of inbox that you can see is, again, evidence of designers not knowing their target audience. One click to bring up a message is an affordance (arguably, a limitation) copied from the limited web clients that the user likely installed a local client to move away from. It's bad for security, it's bad for cognitive load (keyboard navigation of the list results in distracting flashing, and now there are two distinct interfaces to see a message), and all of these trade-offs come at the supposedly benefit of not needing to double-click to open the message?

Completely disagree. I want something that works, and works well. UX is not about being pretty, it's about being functional.

That isn't what (most) UX designers do these days, it's all about fancy animations

There is nothing about looking good that precludes being useful.

Pegasus Mail on DOS was my favorite. I would like to get back to something like that. Fast, focused. Could even have "templates" (if you copy a draft)

Obi-Wan Voice: "Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time... a long time."

> Could even have "templates"

Thunderbird apparently also: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Message_templates

Sure, but who’s got 2 MB of disk space and 520k of free RAM? I’m not rich.

Beautiful and functional are not mutually exclusive. What specifically about this update creates a lack of function for you?

I agree in as much as I prioritize functionality (including responsiveness and lack of bloat) well above a beautiful UI. But I think that most peoples beef with UI/UX is that it often gets implemented at the expense of functionality.

Any UX that decreases functionality is not truly good UX. It is probably just flashy.

Also, personally, I don't entirely agree with your screwdriver metaphor. I have some beautiful old screwdrivers with lovely wood handles that I got as hand-me-downs. I do select them in favor of others for the experience. They are a delight for me to use (but again, most importantly, they are very functional).

Edit: Also, they claim in the title that this is a faster Thunderbird. I would consider that a big plus for functionality.

Horrible take. The aesthetics and user experience of an app has a direct correlation to whether the average user (which includes me, a programmer at Amazon) will use a tool.

> Horrible take. The aesthetics and user experience of an app has a direct correlation to whether the average user (which includes me, a programmer at Amazon) will use a tool.

I've stopped using Amazon Music because the UI/UX is unusable. I've cancelled Prime and shifted my shopping to other properties such as Walmart because the continual user-hostile UI changes have pushed me away as a customer. Example, now making it impossible to filter by Amazon.com as the seller so my searches are inundated by screens full of all-caps Chinese counterfeit shit, now with infinite scroll! Accessing customer service entails more and more dark patterns by the day, and arguing with AI chat bots because I can't even get a human into chat anymore.

As long as you're proud of your descent into a knockoff AliExpress, I support your efforts. The important distinction here is these applications were all fine, before the UX gods got involved in "beautifying" them to the point they became unusable.

You're replying to someone that works at Amazon, not to Amazon itself. You also have no idea if they work for the shopping part of Amazon or Amazon Web Services, which is a completely different thing. On top of this, half of your complaints have nothing to do with UIs. As if UI designers are to blame for AI chat bots and chinese counterfeits.

When picking up a pair of scissors, I do care if they're designed for right or left handed. And the handle, of the scissors or screwdriver, is it comfortable and durable? Screwdriver makers have long known not to make the handle of smooth metal. Is the screwdriver magnetic? Does it have swappable heads? Are the swappable heads reversible plug in and out, are they themselves reversible, giving me two cross and two straight heads in one robust non conducting, rubberised, shock absorbing screwdriver package? If mgnetic, how magnetic?

You've described ergonomics pretty well, but the trend of modern UX design is more akin to replacing the screwdriver handle with a hot pink veiny dildo, self-declaring it beautiful, and vehemently decrying any criticism to why these changes are unnecessary.

I guess you also prefer slower software which is why you ignored the first adjective in the heading, “Fastest”.

Or maybe you simply enjoy the thrill of ranting for no reason.

Just because their marketing says it's the fastest doesn't make it so.

housemusicfan you have been downvoted.

Welcome to the bottom of the comments section.

I hang out here a lot.

After using TB for about 20 years, I have a few very well curated opinions. But those, like yours will not be seen on HN...

Of course they've been downvoted.

An app doesn't have to look like shit for it to be functional. It can be both.

If they think it needs to look like Netscape Navigator to be functional, then at least they should understand that they're a minority. Most apps are trying to serve most users, not the small group that prefers the Windows 95 style or a command line client.

The comment itself isn't very useful. Users of this site are not even the most supportive of modern UIs and will praise HN's look (and the old reddit UI), but what's exactly housemusicfan's problem with the new Thunderbird UI? What was made worse? It comes off as an "old man yells at cloud" type of comment and that won't gather much support.

The HN Brahmins are free to use this as evidence that their world view is superior, but my post sat at +8 before suddenly dropping to -4 in the span of a few minutes. So my assessment is the overall opinion is far more balanced, but the echo chamber always prevails, and it's much more difficult to dig yourself out of the hole once you've been buried within.

I do not treat post score as a popularity contest or validation that an opinion is correct (or not).

The sad truth is this industry is full of thin skinned prima donnas who love nothing more than "educating" their customers on what's best for them, whilst continually performing them a disservice in the form of UX "improvements" that literally no one asked for.

As soon as the Conversations add-on is updated (it makes Gmail-like threads in Thunderbird), I'm upgrading

Oh wow you just reminded me threaded emails weren't commonplace until Gmail and I'm having horrible flashbacks.

It is so easy to forget how things used to be terrible before.

Like an email chain that keeps adding Re in the subject line

> Re: RE: Re: Re: Re: RE: Re:

What? Threaded emails were present back in Eudora and were always in Evolution and Thunderbird, no? Weren't they even on newsgroup readers?

Present in specialist clients like Eudora, perhaps, but I think for mass-market users that only touched webmail and Outlook the introduction of threading in Gmail must have seemed heavenly.

Eudora was -the mass-market-client back in Win 3.1 (along with Trumpet TCP/IP package)

I never said Gmail invented threaded emails, just that it brought threaded emails to the masses. Outlook and almost all webmail didn't have threading support at the time.

What's the difference between that and everything always had threads except Outlook?

Opera's email client had them too, I know I was using that around 2000. It was the first time I'd seen the feature, and it was one of the major reasons I used Opera for as long as I did. But Opera, then as now, was far from mainstream...

Tin. I used tin from mid 90s until around 2005, and it supported threads.

> Gmail

Ok, so that's why people want threaded view? I've always thought that was puzzling, as I don't use it myself (neither threads nor Google).

Gmail might have gotten the inspiration after they purchased DejaNews and made the Usenet archive into Google Groups. Just a guess.

Usenet was always threaded in the clients I used back then. But for somme reason threaded email does not work for me, personally.

Threaded email is great.

Gmail has a thing I don't know who else has. The emails are categorized in General, Social Networks, Ads and Informative Updates.

this is an idea first popularized by Gmail Inbox, an app from days yore. later adopted by Gmail itself, and Spark email, at least.

Even text based email clients like mutt and gnus supported threads. And they were proper threads like we have on HN. I don't fully understand why Gmail had to reinvent threads but I think a big part was Microsoft's god awful email clients not sending messages properly such that other clients could thread them. Because, of course, their client didn't even support threads so why should anyone have them?

What’s the advantage of this add-on over the inbuilt default threading?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/message-threading-thund...

You get an endless conversation with no option to delete mails out of it (for instance forwards) under a single entry. Quite annoying. What's wrong with the thread collapsed by default displaying the most recent entry and an icon to open it up?

You don't see mails you sent because they are in a different folder.

You may have to wait longer for the Conversations extension to support Thunderbird 115. The extension developer has said that it needs significant changes and that he doesn't have enough spare time. The latest update on support for Thunderbird 115 [1] says that there's more work to be done and some dependencies on Thunderbird fixes.

[1]: https://github.com/thunderbird-conversations/thunderbird-con...

I used Thunderbird a lot when I was still on Windows, around 2007, and loved it, both for email and as my RSS reader. By the time I moved to linux somewhere in 2009 it started to feel... stuck. I needed calendaring, and Lightning barely worked with caldav. The contact management system in Thunderbird was always bad, but when trying to integrate with carddav (with SoGo at that point) at best it was problematic. Then the whole Thunderbird project seemed abandoned at one point, only to pick up Firefox's new engine and layout ideas which killed off a lot of plugins.

I moved to Evolution, and for linux, I don't think there's a smoother option out there with the same level of features. Unlike Thunderbird it finds my carddav & caldav server from PTR records and configures the whole thing correctly, working, with one "Collection Account", plus it never had the 2GB file size issue I hit with Thunderbird that made my life quite miserable in 2009.

Anyhow: congratulation, it's a lot of work, and the team can now close a feature request that was open since the beginning of time (wide view), but I'm done jumping from software to software as long as the current one works as expected; for me, that's Gnome Evolution.

There's some really messed up padding when you use a menubar -- instead of being aligned with the hamburger menu, it's shifted BELOW it, resulting in huge amounts of empty space in both bars

https://bug1843292.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=9343...

I suspect this is a result of the menubar being less trendy (and maybe not even taken into account when designing/testing).

Edit: using 'compact' and 'default' densities, text gets cropped all over the place (e.g.: in email subjects, email FROM, etc). Only density "relaxed" seems to work. There's a lot of graphical quirks all over the place. Honestly, this feels very rushed and in beta-like state.

Edit2: if the window is narrow enough, the bar from the menulist overflows into the email and renders overlapped.

If I click on an thread with multiple messages, the reading pane shows a preview of each message, but clicking on them doesn't open them. Double clicking on the thread on the list opens each message in a new tab. There doesn't seem to be any obvious way to open a single message from a thread.

Does clicking on "New Message" still create a new window instead of letting the new message be composed in a tab?

That's the one "feature" I've been waiting on that just seems to be stuck in limbo.

Looks like the bug is still open: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=449299

ideally you'd be able to do either. I much prefer new windows when opening existing messages or writing new ones, but I wouldn't assume that works best for everyone else

What I and many others would like is seamless synchronization of calendars and contacts with Gmail, Outlook, and other accounts.

Alas, seamless synchronization with calendars and contacts managed by others is really hard -- and boring.

Improving design and responsiveness is so much easier -- and much more exciting!

So, all the development effort has gone into... improving design and responsiveness.

We've been using that at work in Thunderbird since forever. What is it that you're missing?

It's possible to have read only access to Outlook Calendars from Thunderbird. But you couldn't accept event invites or create new events. At least at my previous work, which I left last summer.

I apparently don't get event invites from Outlook Calendars then. All the invites that I get in Thunderbird from colleagues (on Thunderbird) and customer (no idea what they use) seem to work fine. Does Outlook not use the caldav standard that everyone else uses? Which clients do work with that then, only Outlook itself? Gotta be annoying if anyone in the company uses, say, an Android or iOS device

What I mean is that if you have an Outlook account, and you want to use Thunderbird for it, you will need to sync your Outlook calendar with Thunderbird. Outlook uses Exchange ActiveSync instead of CalDav/CardDav for this syncing.

The way to give Thunderbird these capabilities are by installing these two connected addons [1, 2]. At least till June 2022, I could see meeting invites from colleagues in Thunderbird. I would also see the translucent event in the calendar in Thunderbird. But accepting the invite would not work [2]. Also creating and sending Outlook calendar events from within Thunderbird didn't work. So, I always had to open the web Calendar to do these things. Thunderbird was only good for meeting reminders.

There is a new major release of the addon since then, so it is possible that the bug is fixed.

> I apparently don't get event invites from Outlook Calendars then

Obviously if your email/calendar account is something else, then you have no problem. If someone sends an invite to my gmail, from their outlook, I can accept it fine from within Thunderbird, because Thunderbird/gmail are communicating using Caldav (I think).

> Which clients do work with that then, only Outlook itself?

I will use Thunderbird as much as possible till it is pried from my cold dead hands!

[1] https://github.com/jobisoft/TbSync/

[2] https://github.com/jobisoft/EAS-4-TbSync/wiki/About:-Provide...

Luckily this is open source software. Be the change you want to see in the world!

Link to your bug report?

Never had a problem syncing with Fastmail on those points. Would be curious when the last time you tried syncing as such.

Evolution works flawlessly for my Outlook and Dav contacts and calendars; I don't use Gmail, so I can't comment on that one.

Design improvement and responsiveness is good, think.

What I would like on the backend is for them to fix the maildir storage [1]. Currently email is stored in mbox, which is very buggy and causes all sorts of weird errors.

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

I have zero interest in these feature hiding, information density reducing ‘upgrades’. Nice hamburger menu, real innovation.

Found the not-Thunderbird user. The hamburger menu was introduced about ten years ago I'd wager.

Maybe you'd like to make your own free(dom/beer) email client and see what positive responses people post there? :)

What's your point? People aren't required to build something equivalent before they're allowed to have critical feedback.

Isn't the parent comment complaining about the upgrade and mentions the hamburger menu as one of the "innovations"?

The hamburger menu was already there, it's not new. That's the point, I think.

Maybe they are not a Thunderbird user but I am. You can still disable the hamburger menu in the older versions. If they are removing the menu bars entirely I will stop using Thunderbird. What's the point of using a desktop app if you don't get the nice features and dense UI of the desktop apps.

This layout displays information way more efficiently. It makes absolutely no sense to have the email content panel below the email list, because emails don't have that aspect ratio, so you either end up with super zoomed in emails or huge empty borders. Makes no sense. With this, the available space is used more efficiently, and differing font sizes are used to differentiate between different types of text and how important it is. That's more ergonomic as well.

> It makes absolutely no sense to have the email content panel below the email list, because emails don't have that aspect ratio,

It does make sense, because the list of emails typically requires the full length of your window. And while most emails may not use the full width of the window - some do; and one shouldn't have to open a separate window for those.

    +--+---------------+
    | f| list of       |
    | o| folder emails,|
    | l| one per line  |
    | d+---------------+
    | e| selected email|
    | r| contents      |
    | s|               |
    +--+---------------+

is the only way to go... for me. I realize that some people like it different and that's fine.

That's my opinion as well. However, given a sufficiently wide screen I think I could get into side-by-side view if I could drastically shrink or even hide the folders pane as I don't use it that often (particularly with a unified folder, which I believe 115 offers).

We shall see. Apparently you can keep the legacy view anyway so everyone's happy.

No, unhappy, because in addition to the UI warping so far, they've taken away the toolbar; and they're insisting on drawing stuff inside the title bar. And that's in addition to breaking things for extension developers etc.

Same, since I use Thunderbird tiled next to Teams, this layout is the only real option. Haven't tried the new release yet but hoping to see this in there...

I prefer the traditional layout over the MS Outlook one. It requires less screen estate, and you don't need to open some emails in a separate window to read them at an adequate size.

As someone who has Outlook allergy, I hope this won't be an issue in Thunderbird now.

Many users (and extension developers, and probably developers) have tried to push back against the degradation of the UI into a hodge-podge of pieces of some mobile phone app. Some of the objections staved off even worse degradations, but for the most part they have been ignored or suppressed.

If you're encountering the horrible Microsoft proprietary TNEF/winmail.dat issue the Lookout plugin is looking for help updating to a webextension: https://github.com/TB-throwback/LookOut-fix-version

Some more discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36664113

Wow. After years of being irritated by the inconsistent font sizes in incoming emails in Thunderbird (and using Claws-mail instead), I downloaded this new version and finally figured out how to set it up properly (which was likely always possible). You have to set the default font size, then go into "Advanced" and set the same size for 'Latin,' 'Other Writing Systems,' and any other languages you use.

After using Claws-mail for years, I doubt I'll change, but at least the option is there.

What's the advantage of thunderbird over the built in apple apps? Better privacy?

For me, extensions and a consistent experience when I need to work on different platforms

Probably Thunderbird has more features than Apple's typical "think different and do it, eh, our way only", but not sure Thunderbird was meant to specifically have advantages over the macOS email program.

I expect both do what it says on the tin and it's a matter of preference and what you're used to: if you come from Linux, odds are you didn't pirate macOS email program and emulated it, so you're used to Thunderbird already. Or if you want to have the same client on your work PC as well, you can install Thunderbird anywhere.

So wait do you actually know how thunderbird is different or are you just speculating?

Speculating. Let me know if I'm wrong!

Here’s one big advantage - I can send from any email on my domain by setting that email address in a second by just clicking on “from” field and I don’t even have “add” this permanently in setting somewhere. Try doing that in Mail.app.

I don't get it. On first boot my iCloud email is already setup, I add my other three email accounts (2 gmail, 1 self rolled). In the Mail compose window I have a dropdown that lets me choose any of the accounts to reply. I can also use Apple's new hide my email option.

Okay so you can proxy via Apple as well as choose from Alice@example.com, Bob@example.net, or Charles@example.org. What if you want to be Joseph@example.net today? In Thunderbird, you click on the From field and change the name, et voila. From the comment above, I presume that on macOS email, you will need to dig into settings.

My use for this is to give everyone a unique address (bitcointalk.org@lucb1e.com is one that was leaked to spammers already anyway). I block senders that send spam. No need to ever wait for spam filtering or check any spam box, because I get spam on maybe three addresses per year and those are easily dealt with

(Of course, your email server will need to allow using arbitrary sending addresses.)

> (Of course, your email server will need to allow using arbitrary sending addresses.)

this bit is important. it's not just that thunderbird is magic.

Sure, but at the same time, if other clients cannot do this, then it's also thunderbird that has this advantage

They mean an arbitrary "from" email address, useful when you own the domain attached to your address. You can do that in Mail.app, but you need to configure it in advance, whereas Thunderbird lets you type any address directly.

I want this feature too because I use custom addresses, such as booking@mydomain.fr for hotel reservations, and replying with contact@mydomain.fr could be confusing to the receiver.

Thunderbird lets you send mail from an account that doesn't explicitly exist. On your Mac Mail app, you need to sign in to three accounts to get three items in the dropdown (Even if you don't have to do it on every machine, you had to do it at one time). Thunderbird lets you make up the From: address on the fly.

FairEmail does that even better, though unfortunately it's mobile only. There's a setting you can enable and then it will, when replying, match the email address to which the email was sent.

I so sorely miss this on Thunderbird because I literally never use the default email address (everyone has a unique address so I don't need to filter, aka have my computer guess what's, spam). There may once have been an extension but if I do remember that correctly then I expect the developer gave up after fixing it for the fifth time when they broke backwards compatibility again.

I do agree what FairEmail does it indeed cool. But sadly it's mobile only and that too Android only.

Unless I'm misunderstanding, you can do this in GMail.

I don't believe Gmail can do what the parent is looking for per this Gmail article: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en

In Thunderbird, I can directly edit the "From" field to whatever value I want when I send the email.

I can make it a random value such as "abc123456789@example.com" and it will happily try to send it. The email address can also be from a domain I don't even own.

From the Gmail, docs, I have to manually go to settings, enroll the additional email address, then manually have to select the "From" address from the dropdown menu. I cannot put an arbitrary email address (including arbitrary domain). This will have to be done each time I want to have a different from header which means if I want to have a randomly generated email used as the "From" address for every one of my emails, it's not going to be easy in the Gmail interface.

How often do you even need to send a spoofed email other than your own email address? This is very unrealistic usage of an email client, or a reason.

I don't do it daily, but it's still often enough usage for me that having to set each one up individually would grind my gears. My own domains setup with catchalls and many custom name@ across services. I might be unusual though!

Not that unusual; I've been doing the same since the 1990s.

For each organisation, project or person I interact with over email I issue a unique ${RANDOM}.${ORG}@mydomain.org across many separate domains.

Combined with procmail rules on my email server I can more easily:

1. efficiently filter and file emails into per-org, per-topic or per-project sub-directories 2. have all IMAP4 clients see the same view since filtering/filing is done server-side 3. block any addresses that receive spam without accidentally binning other email 4. know for certain there has been some kind of breach if emails arrive from another source 5. have some clients subscribed and sync-ing to only a (small) sub-set of IMAP4 folders 6. find emails related to specific orgs, projects, or people

I use Qmail's Maildir format (one file per email) on both server and Thunderbird which makes even manual 'grepping' for obscure or complex search parameters an easily scriptable operation.

I have a simple script accessible via SSH or web that adds the new entry to postfix's virtual table so unknown addresses are rejected - avoids needing to operate a catch-all policy and filter after reception since the SMTP daemon refuses delivery as soon as it sees the RCPT TO:

On the Postfix side using postgrey for grey-listing of unknown SMTP clients cuts almost all spam as well - in fact today I was surprised to see (for the first time in years) Thunderbird marking a project mail-list email as possible spam. I cannot recall the last time Thunderbird did that which I think shows how effective grey-listing on the mail server can be combined with other postfix filtering like reverse MX, SPF, DMARC, etc.

Actually quite often. I'm very surprised users do not use unique email addresses when contacting different companies or vendors to protect against spam if one of your email addresses gets leaked after the company is hacked.

For example, I would use email address A for company A, B for company B and so forth. If company A ever gets hacked, I can just block any emails going to email A and not worry about playing whack-a-mole with the 100s of email addresses that spammers will use.

I can also use the email addresses as a way to auto filter or apply inbox rules.

I'm very surprised users only use 1 email address at a time especially if your email gets leaked once to spammers, you have to start dealing of spam or hoping your email solution has very very good anti-spam measures.

For me, this is just a normal usage of an email client.

I am not talking about multiple accounts or aliases. The example is a spoof method, not alternative sender.

This is one of the primary reasons I ended up on MailMate, which I am thrilled to have discovered.

I can do this from Apple mail, I have multiple accounts on the same domain, and other domains. I even have an exchange account added, any email I send I can just click the “from” field and pick any of my emails or domains from the dropdown

Don't you need to set-up the accounts in the first place? In Thunderbird it's just an ad-hoc text entry field, useful for when you are using a catch-all account and you need to respond from a random service specific email address.

For example say my account is dugite-code@example.tld but fetchmail pulls in my gmail emails. If I want to send from house-repairs@example.tld or dugite-code@gmail.com I don't need to configure the three accounts separately I just edit the from field as I'm composing the emails.

You literally can't do what I said in my comment and you explained this in your comment "pick any of my emails or domains from the dropdown" (which means you had added those beforehand) and you still said you can do that. I hope it was just an oversight and not the belief :)

Ah! I misinterpreted. Yes all of the accounts have to be “added” prior to this functionality in Apple mail. I stand corrected

Being able to switch from macOS to Linux/Windows seamlessly.

A more seamless switch would be just using the web clients.

Seamless but significantly more inefficient if you prefer the desktop app experience.

Unless you want to use firefox. O365 is unusable in firefox.

Why would you say something so bold, yet so false?

Maybe it's just me, but it is buggy to the point of being unusable every time I try it.

Example: When it is in the middle of popping up suggestions as you compose, it suddenly seems to decide you aren't in the compose window any more and interprets anything you type as a keyboard shortcut (e.g. "n" for new message "e" for archive). Since I type rather fast, this happens to me all the time.

There is such a thing as off-line. And, with email that can be a good thing for multiple reasons - except when trying to send or receive of course :)

With the current incarnation of Thunderbird there is even a switch you can flip to make the email client offline, even if your PC is not. Believe it or not, that is an extremely valued feature here.

I agree strongly with this. Even on workstation I have the default to Offline and decide when to let it poll the IMAP4 servers - great for not allowing distractions or interruptions except on your own schedule, not someone else's.

With synchronized folders and offline storage it makes composing, reading, and replying easy with outgoing queued until next time connected when out and about with a portable device.

That's the big point to me.

Realistically next time I buy a new laptop it won't be heavily premeditated: the odds are that my old one will die and I'll need something that works that week. I don't want to end up buying another Apple just because I don't have time to switch mail clients.

Obviously a mail client only takes a few hours to set up, but it's not just the mail clients: I try to avoid anything Apple-specific for the same reason.

Well it's Cross platform and not tied into one providers email service, So you have the same PIM (Personal information manager) on all your computers. Theme-able so you can tweak a lot using CSS. And most importantly it's Extensible like Firefox. Some of the more powerful extensions fore example are the sieve editor (for mail servers that support sieve) advanced tagging management, markdown rendering, printing layout tools and templating.

If you ever stop using Apple, you can take your mail with you. I've been using Thunderbird since 2006, first on Windows, then on Linux, and it's still the same profile directory as the original installation.

Can I suggest you to give a try to Betterbird (https://www.betterbird.eu/)? Betterbird is a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird, with addition bug Fixes and optimizations.

Does anyone know how to make the interface fonts bigger? Not the message composition font, but like, the font for the message list and all the controls? It's really, really, really small on a Retina display and I'm not a teenage gamer anymore.

I posted that as a feature request 13 yrs ago. (ID 570442) following on bug ID 471231 from 15 yrs ago. It seems to be intractable.

I think there's a control to make it larger in the menu in the top right

Click the Hamburger menu and adjust the font size there. For some reason this isn't in the settings menu. Also select the middle density option. I find that helps

Been using the Mozilla suite for email since the late 1990's and migrated to Thunderbird some time in 2003-2004 if I recall. I've never really bothered with speed or understood why it was a concern with a POP/IMAP email client, and that's never been a reason for me to use it.

Migration of my mails from Mozilla to thunderbird was trivial since they used the same mbox format. I've moved my thunderbird profile after that from Linux to Windows to Mac, across nearly 20 years, with no problems.

I will continue to use Thunderbird for the simple reason that it just works on all the common OS'es and it's easy to move your profile across them.

Does it support XDG base directory specification on Linux? Firefox still didn't get there.

If you're talking about the file picker or desktop environment related defaults, you can just go to about:config and set "widget.use-xdg-desktop-portal" to true and/or "widget.use-xdg-desktop-portal.file-picker" to 1. Unfortunately not enabled by default

I'm talking about Firefox for example creating $HOME/.mozilla since it's not using XDG base directory spec fully (it does use it for cache for example).

See https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-...

In my opinion it still lacks some basic modern UI/UX stuff.

For instance the calendar does not implement a click and drag event creation mechanism.

The message preview view is only limited to the senders name and message title, there is no option to have one or two additional lines of text with the message content as preview.

The calendar also does not allow scrolling the weekly view by one day (instead of the whole week) at a time.

> The calendar also does not allow scrolling the weekly view by one day (instead of the whole week) at a time.

Interesting. How would this work? Are you suggesting a grid of arbitrary dimensions with today always top left or in the middle? Thus deemphasising the existence of weeks (and weekends)?

Thunderbird remains the only calendar I'm aware of with a "multi-week" that disregards the utterly useless concept of a month.

Sorry, reread the post and you said the weekly view. So it's similar to my complaint about monthly views. You want to see n days ahead and m days behind, where m,n >= 0 and are your choice. I have no idea why electronic calendars remain stuck in the emulated paper calendar paradigm.

I welcome the UI change, but given that, appart from the terrible search, thunderbird has been working very well so far, I'm not going to risk upgrading one of my most important business software to something that changes so many things.

It will be buggy and slow for a few versions, and likely incompatible with addons. I'll update in a few years.

Is caldav and cardav native yet?

or Exchange support?

I've been using caldav and carddav in Thunderbird for over a year, and I don't believe I installed any plugins for it - I'm tempted to say yes? What prompts the question?

Last time I tried I had to install external address book extension and calendar and it did not integrate that well (auto completion not working properly...).

So, i just nuked and paved my current machine, and just before i did i know for a fact that caldav worked flawlessly on Thunderbird version 91...And, CardDav? Meh, not so great. And neither caldav nor carddav required me to add/install any extensions; so, really, i see it as progress.

As soon as i'm done with other elements of my new machine install here, i will see how a newer version of thunderbird handles caldav and cardav...But, my point is, at least caldav used to work really, really nicely and smoothly on older versions of thunderbird. (Caveat: this is with Zoho as calendar/caldav provider...so no idea about trying to use Google calendar or other cal. providers.)

Maybe someone can help me out. I am always wondering if I should use Thunderbird considering I only use Gmail, both as in private and at work.

I fear the integration with calendar won't be the same but I'm considering it.

Can someone tell me good reasons to switch?

You can try it out without any harm. Is having your own copy of your mail local important to you? Have you ever thought of switching email providers, maybe having a client that you're used to like Thunderbird would make the provider matter a lot less.

Good questions. No, I don't need a local copy and I'm quite ok with Gmail at the moment.

I was thinking about using Thunderbird to interact with Gmail, in reality.

I use thunderbird because the interface is better for bulk managing email than the webapps from either gmail (my previous provider, and my employer's current provider) or fastmail (my current provider). For work, the real threaded view is a big improvement over the gmail UI collapsing it into linear conversations. Calendar integration is there and is mostly "fine". I won't say it's competitive with google calendar as it exists today, but my needs of calendar are less than my needs of mail.

Thanks a lot!

Ever want to scroll through search results when the list is longer than 100? In Thunderbird I can search 200,000 messages, get 10,000 results and scroll the messages immediately and instantaneously from top to bottom. The same exercise in Gmail's web interface takes 4.6 days to complete.

I'm pretty happy with the web clients but just downloaded this to give it a shot. I was surprised to see that in the initial account onboarding they ask for a password. Then once I entered that information it let me log into my provider by a wrapped page (not the system browser) which looked a bit out of date to me.

This never used to bother me back in the day. When I used these tools, I'd happily give my credentials up but I'm very suspicious of this way of registering my account. I suppose it's open source but the juice isn't worth the squeeze compared to the web clients.

The main thing that makes the web clients work for me is search against decades of emails.

The latter works fine (and offline) for me in Thunderbird.

Just tried with a folder that has 7500 messages (2013 till today) and listening to the clock ticking in the background: completes in exactly one second, as near as I can tell.

Searching all folders at once (four big folders are 32k emails together, I don't know the total) takes ~0.3 seconds to come up with "no results", 1 second to find the only result ("umpteen" was my first guess at which query might yield a single hit :D), or 2 seconds on a generic query to find 713 results (and populate a list of 384 involved senders sorted by frequency, a timeline of volume by year, which folders those results can be found in, which mailing list it was sent to if any, etc.). This is on a then-mid-range laptop from 2018.

That sounds like an OAuth authentication flow? Not a lot Thunderbird can do about that unfortunately

New design is too cluttered and way less comfortable to work with mail then it was in 102. It's a big step back for me. The unused space on top is... well a big mistake.

One thing I miss in Thunderbird is automatic labelling of e-mails. Way back I used to use Opera's e-mail client, which I think was called M2. It had bayesian learning for labelling. You would label e-mail and then it would learn from that and label new e-mails itself quite reliably after some training. Then you could build filters for.

In Tb one can tag e-mails, but I have yet so see a good way to have it learn this and automatically label e-mails. Assigning tags is still somewhat cumbersome via the context menu or the tags bar, which unfortunately disappears when selecting multiple e-mails.

You can create manual automation rules through the 'filters' functionality though [0]. It's not automatic/bayesian based, but after some tinkering I manage to use it quite effectively.

[0]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/organize-your-messages-...

I know those and sometimes use filters, but am too lazy to manually create filters for all my tags. Also one issue is, that the filters can only either be "or" or "and" filters. One cannot make some conditions "or" and the result of those "and" with another condition. Except if you utilize several layers of folders, having filters working on different layers. At that point it becomes a whole algorithm.

"Bayesian" in this context most likely means naive bayes; which assumes occurrences of all words are independent of each other. The "score" of each label ends up being something like the product of all relative word frequencies, multiplied by the probability of the label itself: p(L) * p(W|L) / p(W).

But this would be super-effective if header fields like sender addresses and subject lines were somehow used as separate features, and you wanted to label based on that.

Yeah, or even be able to select what constitutes a feature for naive bayes and what is not considered. For each label separately configurable!

Opera's mail client was wonderful, and there's nothing close to it right now. I had high hopes for Geary at one point, but it way as unstable as it gets the last time I tried.

Have you tried Vivaldi's email client?

Previous discussion from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36664113

I really hope to see a priority inbox with Thunderbird at some point, I'd love to switch over but email is completely unmanageable these days without it.

Sincere doubt: what percentage of users still use a "mail reader"? Hasn't most of the "end-user" base switched to web alternatives?

Web alternatives are so horrible right now, I would not be surprised more folks are migrating back

Fastmail's web UI is as good as ever.

Fastmail won't load your messages if you don't have internet; I think Fastmail users should be especially in need of a client/local storage.

Yep. That’s a reason why I use Thunderbird.

In the context of the two comments above yours, that doesn't invalidate what their point.

I've been using a web/online only client for a few years and agree with the parent comment. Fastmail's web UI works better for me than Gmail or Outlook.

I like Protonmail’s.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

I use an email client because I don't want to deploy PGP keys to the server -- then there's no point.

It's interesting though: on mobile, everyone wants a client application. On desktop, people wonder why bother with client software when we have a browser. "Reddit for Desktop"? Hah, doesn't even exist! But "Reddit is Fun" for Android? People died on that hill.

Poll: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36703772

For mobile I think usually it's so it can handle error cases more gracefully. How people expect something should act when the network goes away and it's a web page is often different than when it's an application.

The Reddit thing is also mixed with the fact that Reddit's mobile web interface is complete shit. You can't even collapse threads (or it's so hidden as ot be useless), which is something the desktop web interface does. It might not be the best example of why mobile users want an app, as it's functionally worse using their mobile web version, probably on purpose to force you to their app so they can monetize you... and now we understand why they did what they did and why people didn't want to use their official app, as the way they monetize you is to inconvenience you with more ads.

In that particular case, Reddit has a usable browser interface that works on desktop (old.reddit.com) but it doesn't have a mobile equivalent.

Tildes.net is meant to work well on mobile web but I still get a vibe that there would be a large group that would appreciate an app for it. I am undecided myself: notifications in the notification area were nice (back when I used reddit is fun, 13 days ago) and things felt more... native? Fast? Behave as expected? But it's not like it's essential.

old.reddit.com works fine for me on mobile. I use it every day. (Granted, I have the iPhone with the biggest screen available).

I find the mobile web interface is decently usable … except for all the ways it tries to shove the native app down my throat.

(I'd rather use the web interface on mobile and desktop, so I'm not sure the original criticism applies to me, either.)

This is indeed fascinating - people not being as passionate about desktop clients than mobile clients.

I wonder if it's to do with desktop usage more linked to typing compared to mobile usage pattern framed around clicks /taps...

And that, on mobile, you're sometimes offline. Desktops and especially laptops are meant for use in fixed places like homes and offices (*cough* it's the truth!), where there is internet available, so you don't need an app to have your data cached offline.

I'm thinking of the Play Store which make installing and buying apps very easy and more intuitive for non-tech people.

Pardon my french, but Play Store is a bloody mess. My parents and grandparents have a lot of trouble navigating it to find what they need. They have less trouble with f-droid, probably also because it's not overflowing with adware and other crap that they need to wade through on google

Perhaps the difference is that on mobile, users are more sensitive to bad UX because there it's so much more easy for sites and apps to be irritating/unpleasant to use, and big corp first party mobile apps have a tendency to optimize for ad impressions, IAP sales, or engagement over usability. This creates a market for third party apps which exist entirely to be more usable.

I think certain mobile websites are terrible on purpose, because they want to put their spyware on your phone.

In my own experience, it's because there are much more spaces in desktop and it's easier for companies to do what they want on it, and easier for users to ignore the flaws. Also usually users can use 2 hands to operate on desktop environment, so everything would look a bit more smooth.

On mobile, it's a different story, the screen real estate is small, and users can't operate both/one hand(s) comfortably like on desktop. Therefore, if you don't design the app smart enough and make users not comfortable, you're screwed up.

Apollo on mobile and desktop here. I haven't used reddit in a browser except by accident in something like five years, and I haven't used reddit pretty much at all for the past three weeks or so.

Its security, among other things. No mobile app has root access and can interfere with other apps or steal data easily. With desktop, many apps want admin access and its usually granted with one mouse click or one password copy paste. Even without admin access, desktop apps have many more rights.

I still use Thunderbird. It's occasionally really nice to have old emails available offline

I use Apple Mail in most cases because I have several email accounts and don't want to keep a tab for them all open or have to use a forwarding setup, and on mobile because I don't want to have to use several different apps to check mail.

Any time I want to blend multiple accounts, I greatly prefer a mail application. Web blending options all suck and/or give one party all the data all the time, which isn't always an option even if you wanted that.

I'm a big fan of Mailspring. It has some notable features other mailer apps (including webmail) don't have. Its only drawback is no iOS/Android app.

https://www.getmailspring.com/

I still use Thunderbird, but at v52, because I want a local copy and archive of all my emails. It's also better to use compared to most webmail interfaces, particularly Gmail which is terrible.

Why v52, you might ask? Because I don't have time for updates to break my shit and v52 is the oldest version that supports TLS1.3. I do not like the new interface. At all. It can die in a fire.

I used to prefer Apple Mail on the desktop over web-based alternatives, but nowadays Apple Mail has become quite unstable and slow for me, so I’ve been using gmail’s web interface more and more.

A shame really, desktop should provide a better experience.

What is the 'doubt' part in your question? If the number is big enough to be worth building? Probably absolute figures are more interesting than a percentage. And they're high enough to take in enough donations to fund an engineering team.

*raises hand* I have my own domain with an IMAP account, and use Thunderbird right now because:

1. I want a full synced copy of everything that I can access indefinitely, even if there are network connection problems or if the remote server goes down.

2. I want to ensure everything gets backed along with other personal documents on my computer.

3. I want sufficiently-expressive tools for searching e-mails and filtering new ones that come in.

P.S.: While I would ideally want all filter-to-folder stuff to happen server-side, there are some issues with how easy that is to keep up-to-date and issues where some clients (i.e. on my phone) won't sync non-inbox folders to see new messages, etc.

Exactly the same for me.

Same. I self-host and spend time places without consistent internet access. A dumbfounded browser is useless. A disconnected client is still useful; they were designed for that use case.

> I want to ensure everything gets backed along with other personal documents on my computer.

Same here. I started using e-mail around 1993 and for the next decade went through a series of e-mail programs that used different storage formats. Some of that mail I still have as plain text archives, but a lot got corrupted due to character encoding conflicts and other problems that I was unable to resolve.

Since around 2005, I’ve been using Thunderbird to back up all of my e-mail locally, including the Gmail accounts that I normally use through the web interface. Several times recently I’ve been asked about something that happened ten or fifteen years ago, and I was able to find the relevant e-mails in my Thunderbird archive in a few seconds.

> a lot got corrupted due to character encoding conflicts and other problems that I was unable to resolve.

That reminds me that I'd better make sure me-of-2033 will still be able to open these, er... taptaptap Mork [0] mail formats.

> Several times recently I’ve been asked about something that happened ten or fifteen years ago, and I was able to find the relevant e-mails in my Thunderbird archive in a few seconds.

I had a funny moment where one of my siblings was like: "You should see this comic!" and I said: "That author name looks familiar... Oh hey, that art-style and name rings a bell... Oh look, I e-mailed them under another screen-name once when they were working on something entirely different 15 years ago."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mork_(file_format)

> 3. I want sufficiently-expressive tools for searching e-mails and filtering new ones that come in.

This is the feature that I love best about Thunderbird. It downloads all my mail locally into plain text MBOX files so I can use things like grep to quickly extract whatever information I need and I can even send the result to some other tool. Is there a web interface somewhere that lets you use regular expressions for searching your messages?

I never used the client while on windows (for decades) but for some reason started using the mail app on MacOS. (I recall I used to need to mess with POP/IMAP/SMTP addresses in the past but now I just authenticate once and it just works.) It’s still not an entirely pleasant experience (my biggest gripe is it doesn’t show full email addresses, so you don’t know which account received the email). But still beats having to type the browser and clicking a bookmark I guess.

Yes I use an email client. That way I can deal with my email the way I want to, not the way some web provider thinks I should.

Thunderbird has 31 regular and core contributors, so I'd say at least 32 (Them plus me)

Well my previous Mint LTS install just went out of support so guess I'll be rebuilding and might be able to try Supernova.

I hate the message list pane on the left but IIRC in the prerelease press they said you could swap the layout, so I'm hoping that remains true. I've been a happy a happy Thunderbird user for many years with no desire to move to webmail. Glad to see it getting some love!

I admit that there is an element of, "but I chose an obscure and challenging linux variant, waaah why isn't it supported" here, but (a) there's currently no flatpak and (b) when, for goodness sakes, will major linux projects begin packaging for Nix/NixOS as a matter of course?

It's not hard, and the benefits go far outside merely supporting Nix, as e.g. a flake.nix file would allow this project to generate docker images, and appImage images, as basically afterthoughts. (See e.g. https://github.com/matthewbauer/nix-bundle.)

Nix flake support would also provide a perfectly reproducible build environment, which can help clarify dependencies, and thus help the project build achieve idempotence, but I'll save the full shill for some github issue.

In fact, I'm inclined to roll up my shirtsleeves and help make this real, at least for Thunderbird.

PS. there is also the fact that the Thunderbird provided downloadable tar.bz2 is not usable under nix, which makes this problem more pressing.

PPS. Yes, I know about steam-run. Which, btw, works here. All the same, weird that I have to go get some random steam-related thing to make thunderbird happy, right? https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/522822/different-me...

It mildly annoys me the two default choices for e-mail clients on Linux have feature overlaps with my Gnome environment. I already have a calendar app that's part of the desktop. Is there a simple e-mail client that doesn't have its own calendar, but integrates with Gnome's?

Geary or elementary's Mail?

I liked Geary, but couldn't make it do the dual pane (message list, message content).

I said this already I think but I am really looking forward to when they are able to ship Firefox sync support in Thunderbird. It has been deferred a couple of times due to issues but at least for me, account sync is even more useful for Thunderbird than it would be for Firefox.

I'd start using email clients again if there was a way to use 2FA or passkeys for authentication.

I haven't tried Thunderbird in a while, but Windows Mail, Apple Mail, and even Evolution support OAuth, which takes you through the 2FA flow of, at least, GMail and Outlook.com.

Nice, thanks for letting me know. It's been years since I seriously looked into this.

"Thunderbird 115" [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36664113 - 567p, 339c, 3d ago

It looks like the Outlook I am required to use at work. I disabled Thunderbird Autoupdate when I learned this was coming down the pike a couple of days ago on HN.

To quote the release post:

> Card View emulates a mobile interface list with multi-line support, offering a more comfortable appearance to reduce cognitive burden. (And because we want Supernova to feel familiar for veteran users, the legacy “Table” view is still available.)

So what's the problem? Just keep using the view you prefer.

Oh thank goodness. I love the look of Thunderbird, and was dreading this change. I hope there are options to retain the same density on the email list.

Same; I've always hated the Apple Mail look, and have no need for it in my life, or my Thunderbird.

Ok, I missed that then. Thanks for the correction.

I don't understand what the vision is of thunderbird? where in the market do they see themselves? managing emails on local disk is a nightmare I abandoned as soon as Gmail came out as I could access my mail from any machine and upgrading laptops didn't mean shuffling gigs of emails across. the only thing I've used TB for in the last 10years was to delete all the large attachments in my Gmail. I also dabbled in trying to get secure end-to-end encryption going but it was a struggle and I quickly forgot how it worked, just started using protonmail instead.

Thunderbird is a mail client, just like the desktop version of Microsoft Outlook. Emails don’t have to be stored locally — I use Thunderbird with two Gmail accounts and it works great.

As bradrn already mentioned, Thunderbird is an email client. It integrates well with many online email offerings. I use it with Fastmail. Works great.

Also many like the ability to access an maintain offline copies. I’m not a gmail user, but I know one can download a backup of 90 days easily, but I have over 25 years of emails and attachments from various accounts through the years which runs over 100GB. Thunderbird handles this.

My major complaint is Thunderbird search is poor.

Thunderbird is free software made by volunteers, as such, it doesn't need to fit anywhere in any market. People like it. You don't have to, and that's fine.

For me, I like it because browsers are a huge mess of surveillance and ad targeting--even Firefox. Not to mention the speed. Even on a fast computer, loading a browser, then opening Gmail is not a quick process. By contrast, Thunderbird opens fairly quickly (Not like notepad on a Windows NT device, but for a modern application, it's pretty fast).

Finally, IMAP has been around since 1986, why would you shuffle gigabytes of email across multiple devices? Inb4 you still need to download with imap. I know, but a good IMAP client only downloads the folder you're currently looking at, then syncs it back to the server, no "shuffling" required.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36664113

Time to install Thunderbird again, I'm not even sure why I stopped using it but always liked it. Kudos to the team.

Few weeks ago I tried Thunderbird with IMAP account which has ~300k emails. It was painfully slow just to load emails list and view email. Let alone navigate the folders

I want all the emails downloaded for offline search.

I guess I would give this a try again and see how it goes.

Meanwhile, I have been using eM client since a week and it is very prompt to view list, navigate folders, search and all.

With eM client, I have read people complaining about mandatory forced updates even with the paid license.

wat! thunderbird is still a thing :o

an email client. fascinating.

Eh, just going to stick with mutt.

I've considered it.

What do you use for IMAP download?

I use fetchmail, and I use notmuch for indexing my mail.

I'm familiar w/ fetchmail, but notmuch is new to me.

Thanks for the details SoftTalker!

Oh man... What have they f'kd up this time 8-/

I think we can count out expecting all IMAP folders to automatically download...

And yet it looks outdated in its UI and UX, not to mention slow in MacOS I was a huge supporter of both Firefox and thunderbird in the early 00s but their UI/UX became so bad and so old (not to mention insecure) that forced me to go safari and Apple Mail. Both not great, but def much better than the Mozilla offerings. I wish they just rewrite the app from zero, with a modern architecture and UI, and supporting modern hardware.

I'm digging Brave on mobile. I really like the simplified view they offer when you go to a site. It removes all the noise and just lets you read content.

Isn’t brave a browser vs thunderbird being an email client?

To be fair, I associate Brave more with its search engine than its browser, but as far as I know it does not have an email client.

Always amazing how the HN social scoring works...

This comment isn't even about a mail reader, much less thunderbird, and yet it's at the top of the comments...

You posted this when the parent comment wasn't even 3 minutes old yet. Give it a few more seconds...

New comments go to the top. After a few mins they fall if they get no upvotes.

Did you post this in the wrong thread?

It looks like an IMoB (Irrelevant Mention of Brave). They are shockingly common. Yesterday there was one in the NewPipe thread, from someone who was supposedly afraid Brave could be taken down by a DMCA request.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com