Thunderbird 128 "Nebula" | Hacker News Reader

Thunderbird 128 "Nebula"

blog.thunderbird.net

> We plan to launch the first phase of built-in support for Exchange, as well as Mozilla Sync, in a future Nebula point release (e.g. Thunderbird 128.X). Although these features are very close to being finished, technical obstacles prevented them from being ready today. Alex will keep you updated in his monthly Thunderbird Monthly Dev Digests.

> For advanced users who want to help test our initial implementation of Exchange (currently limited to Mail), we’ve hidden the option behind a preference. This Wiki page explains how to enable it. While we definitely welcome your testing and feedback, please keep in mind this feature is currently experimental, and you may run into unexpected behavior or errors.

It ia finally coming. I really don't know what is so special about Exchange that took them all these years? There were already an extension to allow Exchange for a decade or so.

> I really don't know what is so special about Exchange that took them all these years?

Maybe they've been an open source project, built upon open standards, for an open Internet -- not doing enterprise sales to shops that are hopelessly bent over the barrel.

There exist individual users (hello!) who use Office 365 for email. It's not just enterprise sales.

And I'm occasionally one of them (under duress). But that doesn't mean it's necessarily the best strategic move, to remove some of that pain, while keeping the enterprise stuck.

It's a tough call to make, but I suspect one helpful hint is to ask: What does the vicious company want us, the 'competition', to do? Well, to be a half-butted fringe implementation endorsing and chasing their lock-in, which they can then shake up at any time if we ever matter (which has been one of their MOs for decades). Doing what they want is probably not in our interests.

The current strategy is probably aware of that, and maybe focusing on getting a foothold with "legacy" compatibility, while offering a replacement solution option at lower cost (probably not superior technology, nor superior reliability, though both are doable). Or maybe some strategy smarter than that. It will have to be very smart, because the awful company is very good and successful at competitive strategy, has much more funds, and is willing to invest heavily in the long-con.

Can't speak for today, but previously a lot of the protocol details required NDA contracts and licensing for client access, which is why many clients that did work was on a paid tier or plugin.

Given O365's relative success, I can imagine that MS has loosened the grip a bit.

An extension doesn’t have the sort of reliability, maintenance and security expectations that the main application itself has.

Complete support within the application itself doesn’t just include the effort to create the initial implementation but is also a promise to pour continued resources to maintain and fix issues as they arise over a period of time.

It's nice to see progress on Thunderbird after roughly a decade of stagnation and obscurity. I hope they improve the situation with DNS protocol records in terms of automatic domain configuration. I've configured them for a couple of my domains, and it seems no mail clients use said records, which is kind of silly as it seems to be one of the primary usages of subdomains or separate domains for actual mail exchange.

Also, glad to see the addition of Rust... might be interesting to see a revival of Servo for message display all around, since it can be more subtle than the needs for full web rendering of email.

As a long (long!) time user of Thunderbird I find these recent updates to the UI mostly annoying. I've stuck with TB because it didn't change what didn't need fixing.

I hope this can be configured to look like it was. Exchange and Mozilla Sync support are a welcome addition, though.

I like the new UI way more than the old one. It doesn't look as cramped.

The lack of information density is generally what I hate about modern UI design.

This is the reason I use mutt to keep my inbox organized. It's a bit spartan for an all-around email client, but when it comes to archiving and deleting mail, it's so much faster than any graphical client I've used. 50+ emails at a time on the screen and nothing else, just hitting a key to tag them and then committing the delete is great.

I get a LOT of mail. The information density in mutt allows me to accomplish a feat of organization that felt impossible for years in Thunderbird.

Preach! I'm using a computer, not a phone. I want to take advantage of the extra real estate and input precision.

You can control the UI density. Mine is usually set to the most compact setting and I really like the new UI (my only gripe would be the big blue button which could do a lot more).

I like the new UI look a bit more myself. But I get where you're coming from.

There's no update in app. I'm on 115.12.2 esr. How's Thunderbird's branches work, again?

>At present – Thunderbird version 128.0 is only offered as direct download from thunderbird.net and not as an upgrade from Thunderbird version 115 or earlier. A future release will provide updates from earlier versions.

> the Thunderbird Council

Cool name of the day.

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