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Comment by badmintonbaseba | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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