Thunderbird Turns 20 Years Old | Hacker News Reader

Thunderbird Turns 20 Years Old

updates.thunderbird.net

49 pointspopcalc25 comments

I've been using Thunderbird as my default email client for about 15 years. Despite multiple attempts to switch to other clients, I always end up coming back to it. I’m not sure if it’s just out of habit or if it’s genuinely that good. One thing I really wish for is for "Send Later" to be a built-in feature instead of relying on plugins, which I find unintuitive for such a simple function. Either way, big kudos to the Thunderbird team!

Is "send later" a simple function? It's probably avoided, because it's unintuitive. I assume you need to have your client running at the scheduled "send later" time (unless there is some obscure SMTP extension), which is not a problem if it's running all the time. But possibly it doesn't match the workflow of a significant chunk of the user base.

It's a feature that's been in Outlook for many years. There's no reason TBird can't do it.

Outlook probably does send it to O365 server though, ('some obscure SMTP plugin' GP mentions) so it can guarantee sending it.

If you tell Thunderbird to send it later and then quit the client (turn computer off, whatever) - what do you expect to happen? Probably they would not implement anything other than 'it sends when next online after the send later timestamp', but that probably would catch people out and generate a lot of noise in bug reports.

I'm ok with "you need to leave your client open" as a requirement. I'm not a fan of "some people won't get it so no one can have it." Mozilla, however, loves that kind of reasoning.

Sure, but considering that kind of obscure/unintuitive (to some) requirement is just good product design.

And you might think you're ok with leaving the client open now, but then some time send later & forget about it or think it's happened, close laptop, and then it's not sent until too late.

Maybe Mozilla's considered and decided it can't deliver an experience it's happy with without a server component. Maybe it thinks a server component might be on the cards as part of some subscription thing, but some other things need to align first. Maybe it hasn't considered it at all.

But it's far from a trivial 'gah why won't they just implement this little isolated thing', imo.

Honestly this reads like a potential revenue source for Thunderbird...

I've been a happy user of Thunderbird since it existed. I can easily move all my emails off both my own self hosted email servers and commercial servers and know that I have multiple redundant backups and snapshots of my email folders. I use this to keep all that information off the mail servers so that when they get popped legally or otherwise I am not as exposed. Thunderbird also makes it very easy to PGP encrypt emails. PGP is not perfect but I am happy with "good enough". I've taught a couple law firms how to PGP encrypt emails so they have a fallback when their "Secure web portal" gets popped or has an outage. Many financial institutions are already very familiar with PGP albeit waving fists in the air in frustration with odd old weird libraries.

It may also be worth mentioning that Thunderbird supports addons similar to Firefox, including uBlock [1]. There is also Thunderbird for cell phones never tried it but purportedly also supports PGP.

[1] - https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-us/thunderbird/addon/ubloc...

If you don't, can you expand on how you're doing this? Is it simply backing up the Thunderbird profile?

I rsync the files in the directory that I specified Thunderbird should store all the folders and associated data. I restore it any time I rebuild my OS, also with rsync. That backup goes to a NAS which then gets backed up to multiple external SSD/NVME and one of those goes in my vehicle as a low-effort off-site backup.

I have been a Thunderbird user since very shortly after its birth. I don't claim to have been there on the first day, but it wasn't long after that. (crazy to think it has been this long - our perception of time is weird). The stand-out feature in its early days was the built-in junk mail filter that worked pretty well, and not being Outlook helped a lot.

In later years, the lack of support for MS Exchange was a drawback. I was a macOS user for a few years, and I needed to access Exchange for work email. MacOS allowed me to access both email and calendar when Thunderbird did not. There was a plugin, but it cost money[1]. Evolution did support Exchange well enough, but it was not as pleasant to use as either Thunderbird or Mail.app.

When I went back to GNU/Linux in 2017, I tried Mailspring for a while, which I liked for its similarity to Apple's Mail.app - but something or other didn't work the way I liked it, so I returned to Thunderbird.

I am glad it is still here, after all those years. I no longer need Exchange support, and with that nuisance gone, Thunderbird is still my favorite email client. There might be better ones, but it feels like switching my hairdresser or dentist. I feel at home with it, it works well for my needs.

So, Thank you to everyone who has made it real.

[1] - that is okay, but I was/am on a tight budget

As a newer user that most I did end up donating a bit :)

Thunderbird has helped me abandon the miserably slow Gmail web-client (that doesn't even load like 15% of the time) for a mostly clean email experience. Some of the dread of writing and reading email has definitely been reduced thanks to them, so I guess I owe them something..

(Not to say Thunderbird isn't without it's own issues, but it's been working well enough for me since switching.)

Question: if one were to reimagine an email client for today, what would it look like?

For me:

- I don't want to pay a monthly subscription (but I will pay for software)

- Semantic search ("What's the confirmation number for my flight next week?")

- Automatic categorizing and tagging based on my behavior (I hate doing this manually myself and taking an "action" for every single incoming email.)

- Lightweight (memory/CPU), fast

- Everything is cached and available locally, including search

- A better UI for long meandering threads: today I just get completely lost, especially when some people on the thread use outlook and others use gmail

- Information dense

- Calendar sync: view all events I've had with a person

Thought this was wrong, that I’d used it in the 90s. But just remembered it was its precursor Netscape Mail, then Communicator suite. :-D

Thanks for all the fish.

I just started using Thunderbird on Android and it's pretty sweet

I think im going to give it a go on Desktop

Thunderbird on Android is K-9 and in no real way related to desktop Thunderbird which is in essence XULrunner (a proto-Electron based around the Gecko engine and the XUL toolkit) with a mail user agent application running on top. Thunderbird on Android uses the System Webview which is based on Blink.

I just installed it. If you've already been a desktop user, they've made importing accounts pretty painless by having the phone app take pictures of qr code on your desktop. The UI is definitely less polished than K-9 on first impression but I suspect it will get better.

It would be great if it can sync junk training settings between the two.

I tried Thunderbird for a while recently. Maybe 2-3 years, my only desktop email client, mostly because everyone talks highly about it. However, I ended up going back to the regular Apple mail, which has its flaws but I still find substantially better.

Curious: what do you find better about apple mail? (I'm also an apple mail user and used to use thunderbird.)

Mail is better at moving messages from folder to another, by typing names, but I absolutely can't stand the way it handles attachments, and for this alone I won't touch it with a ten foot pole

Huge milestone. I still love this app. Would hope to see this story bring some devs to the project to make it even better.

I 'had to' use Thunderbird on my primary Linux desktop because there was no other alternatives mature enough and FOSS. Now that I switched to Apple Silicon, I'm much happier with Apple Mail and never looked back.

However I wonder:

- Is it still missing "minimize to tray" functionality without extensions?

- Did they fix the extension compatibility-lock issue? (Many essential extensions not being supported by the latest stable version)

(Edit: I'm curious why this was downvoted, I'd be happy to hear your thoughts! )

> Is it still missing "minimize to tray" functionality without extensions?

Yes. This remains the same pain point for me that it has been for years now. I hope they fix this at some point, but I've stopped expecting that it will happen.

Does Outlook have this?

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