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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

>in the entire 20 year lifetime of the Thunderbird project, no one has added support for a new mail protocol before.

Technically true but also every megacorp's OAuth2 out-of-band authentication implementation needs it's own special configuration (read workaround) per email client and Thunderbird has collected quite a few. These are not normal mail protocols: they're over HTTPS not IMAP or POP3 or SMTP.

This proclamation "no one has added support for a new mail protocol" is a good thing and this change is not good. Supporting proprietary setups is pragmatic and understandable but it's not good. This is only going to briefly mitigate the problems of email splintering into dozens of per-corporation variations while encouraging people to be okay with them in the long run.

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Employees have no choice when it comes to their corporate email provider, and this is not a hill to die on for 99.99999% of them.

On the other hand, being able to use Thunderbird as a client is a net win and a pragmatic move.

The sad fact is: Most employees aren’t able or allowed to install an alternative email client. And most employees don’t care.

Although, I would assume of those that can run what they want and do care they are already aware of and possibly use Thunderbird.

Not every initiative has to just be about new users. Sometimes it's important to retain the ones you have. Making Thunderbird more useful and viable for those that use it already isn't a bad thing.

Years ago I worked for a place used exhange and third party tools were heavily discouraged but not banned. Web access wasn’t supported either so we were almost forced to have to use Outlook on a Windows machine. But I found DAVmail[0] allowed me to use the apps I wanted without being locked in and without mail clients supporting it directly. Nice to see more options here. Hopefully those of us who do care can continue to make the choices to use the tools we like.

[0] https://davmail.sourceforge.net/

> every megacorp's

It's not just one of every megacorp, it's by far the most commonly used email in business, Microsoft's Exchange and especially Exchange online.

I was talking about proprietary OAuth2 authentication protocol implementations in that statement. Like how the Thunderbird OAuth2 protocol for gmail is incompatible with the one for yahoo email, and so on. Which is different from normal protocols like imap/pop3 where the implementations are compatible across companies.

I was not speaking in the context of exchange but in the more general sense of new HTTPS based protocol flavors being added to Thunderbird regularly.

What makes you say the protocol is different for each provider?

I maintain a proxy that transparently adds support for OAuth 2.0 support to IMAP/POP/SMTP clients (https://github.com/simonrob/email-oauth2-proxy), and for normal use it doesn’t need to know anything about which service it is connecting to. Apart from advanced features such as CCG or ROPCG which are mostly O365 only, what is different?

It's also cheaper per head than Google's business offering so it makes sense even for small business.

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