Does anyone actually have any problems with Thunderbird? I feel like it is "done" software. It works, perfectly, for all my needs. It's fast. It has great UI. It lets me read and write email.
The search is unusable -- wedding finds 'weds'. There is no way to do exact searching. I reported this 5 years ago, lots of other people have complained about the stemming, there has been no fix.
There is no support for outlook/exchange. Not saying it's trivial, but it's useful in the modern era.
IMAP folder support is very flakey, I reported some bugs but nothing got fixed.
The search is really weird. I had to install an extension to always filter by date but even then it's broken to the point where I have to open webmail to do real searches.
I'm trying to keep an offline copy of my inbox using IMAP. I changed every setting I could find (like no cache limit, download the entire message instead of just the headers, ignore message age, don't delete any messages) and it still wants to download entire folders from time to time instead of just the changes. Maybe I did something wrong but that's my experience with IMAP support. It's also pretty slow but that might be some Gmail limitation.
And thankfully, there's a Lucene-in-C (which I haven't personally had a need to use, but Lucene as a project is awesome), so the patch might not even be terribly large unless their current search implementation is splattered all over the app
The search is not unusable, I use it every day. It could be better though, and I get the feeling it could plan the query more efficiently too. I think it needs a better query syntax for those hard to find e-mails.
Yeah, the search box is just ignored by me - I use the 'quick filter' box instead, because it's possible to understand how the results match the query.
It may not be an "ideal" solution in that it requires a second program running, but given that you're working with a closed, non-standard protocol, that's kinda par for the course.
I feel the same way personally. I feel like I see tons of people complaining about it, but it's just what I want out of a mail client. The UI is a great, the GPG integration is great with enigmail, it's a very polished product.
Not only that, but making one based on web technologies that moves away from the native look and feel it currently has would truly be a loss in my opinion. I'd probably give Claws Mail and alpine another go, maybe even desktop outlook before I'd go to something Electron-esque. I already have enough shitty electron apps - I'm currently dealing with a really weird font rendering issue arising from Electron use in VS Code.
It's an incredible product as-is, but I feel like they are stuck between a rock and a hard place with moving forward and forecasting beyond the immediate future.
I don't see why a new implementation couldn't maintain the current UI/native feel outside of poor decision making.
I could see it as a net positive, with cleaner easier to maintain code base built on more recent tech that is more accommodating to younger developers.
If they could pull off what Atom.io/Github did for the old ingrained IDE world in a mail client, that would be incredible, IMO.
A few years ago I thought it would be nice to be able to compose an email in a new tab instead of a separate window. I found a Bugzilla entry proposing adding this to Thunderbird that had been open for several years and had had a couple community members offer to address it, look into it for a while, and ultimately give up. The way Thunderbird's UI is implemented was just too intertwined with the code to let this happen without a major re-work. I feel like this kind of a change should be easy to do in a well-designed application and likely would be for something written with technologies.
I use Thunderbird every day and am generally happy with it, but often when I come across some feature that I wish were changed and start digging into Bugzilla it becomes apparent to me that the Thunderbird codebase is old, convoluted, and difficult to work with -- the result of growing organically over many years. I could see a lot of benefits to a re-write. On the other hand, trying to match feature parity with the current version would probably take a lot more work than the author of that proposal is accounting for.
Working with big folders tends to be a bit error prone to me. I would like to synchronize my filters/settings across different devices. On MacOs it randomly hangs for tens of seconds and eats batteries for some people (me included).
So yeah, it's mostly done, but better virtual folder support, and a streamlined UI would both be hugely appreciated by me.
But, because it's mostly done, I also will just happily keep using it as it is now for the next three years, waiting for the rewrite.
Yes. Because the Thunderbird and Firefox codebases are diverging so much that instead of just maintaining Thudnebird people will have to maintain a fork of Gecko too.
What I don't immediately understand is why they can't just fork Gecko and continue using it for their own purposes. Apparently the needs of Firefox and Thunderbird have diverged, and Mozilla seem to have little interest in supporting Thunderbird any more, so is it a crazy idea to just separate the projects completely and avoid the whole issue indefinitely?
Changing the UIs within this particular family of software products has often given questionable results, confusing or upsetting the core user base for little real benefit. Other UIs built on JS and HTML technologies have so far tended to be slow and buggy compared to using native technologies on the desktop and mobile platforms. If the exercise is expected to take as long as 3 years with the available resources and the hope of getting back to more of a community-supported culture, that seems like a huge amount of work to essentially stay where you already were.
> What I don't immediately understand is why they can't just fork Gecko and continue using it for their own purposes. Apparently the needs of Firefox and Thunderbird have diverged, and Mozilla seem to have little interest in supporting Thunderbird any more, so is it a crazy idea to just separate the projects completely and avoid the whole issue indefinitely?
Short answer: security bugs. Gecko has too high of a code churn to maintain long-term support branches, particularly for people who have little knowledge of the components in question (e.g., SpiderMonkey). Forking Gecko might be a viable short-term strategy, but it's not at all viable long-term.
That makes a lot of sense if we're talking about using Gecko to render the contents of arbitrary HTML emails. However, this proposal seems to be about problems supporting the UI itself and proposing a move to some other JS+HTML rendering system as an alternative. At first glance, that appears to be a separate issue, other than both types of functionality possibly relying on Gecko today and rendering engines being quite large so using two different ones not being desirable.
Gecko is actually quite difficult to embed (Mozilla more or less gave up on there existing non-Firefox/Thunderbird embeddings around 2011 or so).
There's a lot of low-level interfaces and design decisions that filter through Thunderbird, for example networking interfaces. Once you talk about moving to a different rendering engine for the UI, you're more or less talking about ripping out ¾ of the backend code or so anyways.
Once you talk about moving to a different rendering engine for the UI, you're more or less talking about ripping out ¾ of the backend code or so anyways.
Right, but isn't the argument quite a few people are making here that moving to a different UI rendering engine doesn't seem to be obviously justified, given the goals of the project and its current situation? If the architecture is as inter-dependent and non-modular as your comments suggest, wouldn't that make changing significant parts of it even less likely to be successful?
At that kind of level, you might be better putting the whole project into legacy mode with emergency updates only, and just letting it carry on for as long as it's useful and then die of natural causes when the time is right. For the other goals mentioned in the original proposal we were talking about, if there's sufficient interest to support doing that much work then an entirely new project with no baggage at all seems like a safer and more realistic bet.
As a result of this thread I have tried the Nylas mail client which has a javascript UI, and I am very pleasantly surprised by just how smooth the UI is.
Honestly, if I could use it without a Nylas account I would very seriously consider it as a Thunderbird replacement.
From reading the original email thread it also looks like the Thunderbird guys are paying attention to Nylas.
VSCode and Slack are two other Electron apps with snappy UIs. Though I commend the devs on their snappy UIs, both those apps churn the CPUs and consume crazy amounts of memory. They absolutely kill the battery on laptops and make other applications unusable.
I do not want my mail client or any other app that should be always running in the background to be written in Electron.
That's a pity. Given that they are exactly aiming for mobile applications though I really hope they will keep these issues in mind though and make informed decisions on this.
Not only are security bugs an issue, as mentioned, but what about maintaining compatibility with changing platforms? Who will fix the bugs when future versions of Windows, MacOS, and Linux introduce growing numbers of 'minor' incompatibilities, and maybe major ones? What about changes in protocols, such as IPv6 (though mail protocols are mostly mature)?
If Thunderbird isn't updated, it will slowly die of bit rot.
Calendaring is excellent for a one-person effort (mostly one person, anyway), but still has issues around the edges (e.g.CalDAV doesn't work as nicely as macOS Calendar.app). It probably doesn't help that the server I have to use it with is half broken too; overall the experience isn't as good as Outlook + Exchange. But that's not only because of Lightning.
Overall the main problem is probably that not enough people can spend enough time on it. Which makes me hypocritical given that I'm not currently helping…
I agree about Outlook + Exchange. Plugins exist for thunderbird to integrate but they just don't have the same quality of experience. Simply using outlook is less frustrating for me.
The meeting attendance functions need some work. And I'd throw cash at a bounty if an attendance "solver" could be added (ala heres who has to come, here's my standard list of rooms, find me a spot which is unbooked)
It needs end-to-end encryption. This isn't hard to do. Add a field in the header for your public key. When receiving mail, store the sender's public key in the address book.
Then, when sending mail, if there's a public key for the recipient, then encrypt it. No user interaction is required.
> When receiving mail, store the sender's public key
You mean "the public key associated with the inbound email". You don't know anything at this point about how it relates to the person you're intending to correspond with, because the key could be MITMd.
Also, this approach does nothing to solve the fact that most people would prefer webmail and mail synced across multiple devices, which is an even more painful key management problem.
That's true, and my paper mail envelope could be steamed open, read, and resealed as well. I'm not saying this would result in perfect security, and anyone would be foolish to treat it as good enough to direct their U-boat fleet. But it would be pretty good for routine email.
As for the key exchange, if a user is worried about it, they could exchange keys in another way. The point about the built-in key exchange is that it happens by default.
> more painful key management problem.
It's only painful if you really need high security. I'd just like something better than postcard security.
Hmm. I can just about remember Jim Barksdale personally telling every employee that the new E2E encryption feature (PEM probably?) in Messenger had to be dog food tested. In 1997.
Interesting. Are you sure? I didn't remember a big re-write ever happening, and after poking around in the current codebase for a while I see lots of old code and familiar names. Are you referring to just the UI? The address book code (the part I had something to do with back then) looks very similar.
I think the point is that to keep the project relevant the underling aging Gecko underpinnings may be going away. This would cause the maintainers to have to take on maintaining their dependencies as well as the core project. I can totally understand this as a motivating factor here, however, I use Thunderbird as a local offline mail client. Though I see these are out-of-fashion these days, it doesn't make the need for this kind of software go away. I only hope a web-stack version of thunderbird still stores settings and content locally and hopefully outside of the browser (not going to say electron here, but similar).
> I use Thunderbird as a local offline mail client.
I think that the intention is to keep it that way. They're proposing mostly a reimplementation of the UI, from Gecko+XUL to HTML+JS, but also a reworking of the interface between frontend and backend code (I guess between the model/controller and view parts of the code).
The filter is slow in regular-size mailbox and almost unusable on my bloated gmail. I don't mind getting results progressively as the messages are scanned, but it runs on the UI thread and UI is horribly slow while the filter is working.
The search is just broken. It gives messages that don't have anything of search string in them and misses the right ones.
I agree on the search, but are you referring to the filter search box? or gmail filters? the filter search box is the main reason I didn't switch to any of all the other alternatives like mailbird. It helps me to avoid using the TB search.
On my OSX box (mbp) the context menus and popups are horridly misplaced and popup in random locations on the screen. For the popups the pointer is also often completely misaligned with the menu items requiring item selection to be clicked dozens of pixels away. I've also long given up throwing TB to a different display - text, UI sizing and menus explode and it becomes unusable on any other monitor.
Having said that it's still the best email client software I can find - UI issues aside.
It looks sort of retro 90s on the iMac but I grew frustrated with the Mail.app in Yosemite and switched to TB, which works flawlessly. The Mail.app in Snow Lion was very reliable.
1. Can I tag messages? If not, it is unusable for me. Once you get used to notmuch/sup type workflows, everything else sucks.
2. How good are its searches? Can I say I want all messages after a certain date, with a certain word, with no attachments (or with attachments > 100 KB, or with attachments whose name includes "xxxx")?
3. Does it support virtual folders, which essentially are saved searches?
1. Yes, tagging is supported in-client only. Tags are not propagated outside of the client.
2. Search filtering options are all there, however the actual search algorithm is mediocre as fuck. You'll probably eventually find the email you are looking for.
3. Yes, virtual folders are supported.
Overall it's a great, however clunky piece of software. I didn't realize the code base was ~20 years old, so I fully support them doing a new implementation. Thunderbird has been a great client for me for 5+ years but imagining it powered with fresh, up-to-date tech excites me even more.
I haven't used Thunderbird for a long long time, but the feature I was missing the most when I moved to Gmail ages ago was some sort of automatic categorization (machine learning) based on content of the emails. One application would be spam filtering, but I would actually appreciate if it could be applied more broadly to classify other emails.
Is something like that now available in Thunderbird?
Spam filtering has been in Thunderbird for a decade now (based on a Bayesian classifier, although it's not quite naïve Bayes). There is a capability to extend the classifier to problems beyond spam/ham classification for extensions.
Interestingly, scam detection (rather than spam filtering) is a simple hardcoded rule, which looks at whether the send headers match up. I've received more than a few genuine emails marked as potential scams because they were sent from a rebranded mail provider.
If it's done, it isn't going away, just keep using the same binary forever.
If it isn't done—i.e. if it needs porting to new platforms, security patches, bug fixes, etc.—then there needs to be people who interested and invested in the codebase, both at Mozilla and the OSS community. Which means having a path into the future.
Very hitchy and slow with large folders, particularly in search. I find the search usability very poor. Some dumb defaults like the quick filter searching on Sender for a folder that's a Sent folder, instead of Recipient. Gigantic memory leaks for me under Linux. (If I leave it open for a few days it'll go > 10 gigs of RAM, that bug's been unresolved for me for over a decade.) Buggy network probing when setting up a new account aimed at an IMAP/SMTP server. Doesn't autofit images to the window size when I'm pasting them into a new email, so with big pictures it's a big hassle to scroll around and manipulate the document. And those are just off the top of my head.
I do. I'm only using it with about 7 mailboxes, none of which are terribly huge. It frequently stalls for an entire minute or two, has bizarre behavior and interactions with gmail when I'm writing long emails which gunk up conversations, configuration of mailboxes and SMTP servers are fractured all over the place, and search is only slightly more useless than reddit's search.
Based on some chatter here recently, I just recently switched to trying out Claw, it hasn't been too long yet, so I don't know all of the issues yet, but at least it was easy to setup and is really really snappy and uses about 1/3 of the RAM.
delete panacea.dat (google before hand; I'm evil as far as you know). I had the same experience as you, eventually traced it down to a borked panacea file, deleted it, and everything is perfect again.
Since this thread is (probably predictably) "what I don't like about Thunderbird", I don't have the problems that others are having with the search algorithm per se; but, after finding mails, it refuses to show them to me. It correctly shows me snippets from the mails that it finds, but, when I try to access those mails, it just shows me a blank window.
(It also refuses to acknowledge deleted and created folders on my work account, but, not knowing the actual cause, I am very happy to suppose that the blame lies on some administrator at work making some hostile-to-non-Outlook-users change in OWA setting.)
I like it, and it is usable. But I don't use it because I want to be able to have the same email interface wherever I go (my Android, laptop, TV, and PC). I think it would be a good idea to have a portable / web version. It could be one more thing that keeps Mozilla alive / ahead (speaking as an outsider / user).
Hum, it would be interesting to know how you use it (with respect, I'd suggest you have very basic email needs). For me Thunderbird is badly broken. This is not the place to list bugs, issues, limitations etc. in any detail but there are very many indeed (so I'll only provide a skeletal outline of them here).
Frankly, on occasions, I find Thunderbird is unusable for some jobs and I end up using either an ancient copy of Eudora Mail, or Outlook or other packages to get the job done (it's just about the most idiosyncratic software package I know).
Briefly, the key issues for me are:
1. The editor sucks, big time, to call it a HTML editor at all is stretching the truth beyond reasonable recognition it is so broken. (a) It's bug-ridden in the extreme (long emails with formatting are better edited outside TB and then cut-and-pasted back in when finished but this is only a partial solution for the obvious reason that the underlying editor will then screw up perfectly good HTML). (b) Bugs develop/manifest over time whilst actually editing a single email/email reply (seems to have memory leaks). The formatting is very limited—superscripts etc., etc. require add-ons, to be implemented. Today, HTML formatting is a trivial matter (or it ought to be) so why after decades hasn't Mozilla implemented such basic formatting within Thunderbird by default. (Moreover, heaven help us when we need to add proper math formulae to the mix—just forget the notion!) (c) Global typeface change(s) is so broken it's better to save one's work before attempting them, alternatively one has to cut them into a plaintext editor (notepad etc.) to all kill formatting and start again preferably in another decent HTML editor such as BlueGriffon (which, incidentally is also based on Firefox). (d) Text size and text spacing is likewise hopeless and also has to be edited outside Thunderbird then cut-and-pasted back in. (e) There is no Format Painter! (f) Nor is there an Add/Remove quotes level facility (AND THUNDERBIRD ACTUALLY CALLS ITSELF AN EMAIL CLIENT?)—not having proper quotes handling is like buying a vehicle without wheels! It's sheer crazy stuff.
I could keep going on about editor problems and mention the issues with inserting images etc. but that's enough for here.
Finally, summarizing the matter of the Thunderbird editor issues, I again mention the BlueGriffon HTML editor by comparison, specifically because it is based on the same Firefox code as TB is. This proves that the limitations within the Thunderbird editor ARE NOT in any way limited by the underlying Firefox code. It seems to me that as BlueGriffon is open-source, the simplest immediate correction Mozilla could do to Thunderbird to fix its horrible editor would be use this BlueGriffon code as is, as it actually works!
2. The Thunderbird UI is confusing for both new and older users alike. The issue of the UI is too involved to discuss here in any detailed way except to say TB's designers should look at one of the all-time great classic email client designs for guidance: Eudora Email. (Many of us would still be using Eudora in preference to Thunderbird if Qualcomm hadn't killed it off over a decade ago—even then, many still do use it). Why reinvent the wheel if you're going to break it in the process? For starters, you cannot even dock the windows in Thunderbird. Why on earth not? (One wonders whatever went on in the minds of the original TB developers.)
3. Thunderbird's implementation of MBOX mail format is severely broken (it is dead easy to lose mail permanently from crashed indexes, compacting mail etc. The fact that Thunderbird's MBOXes are essentially incompatible with other email packages that also use MBOX is a serious issue when it comes to large site usage, maintenance etc. The MBOX problem is one of the main reasons why Outlook is often preferred to Thunderbird in corporate environments (Microsoft may be proprietary but every man and his dog either knows about its PST mail files or has a utility to maintain or fix them—not so with Thunderbird MBOXes. Moreover, Thunderbird MBOX mail files almost invariably crash when they reach the 4GB size threshold (it's a very risky business and you'd better have a decent backup strategy if you want to risk it).
4. Thunderbird even [still] has bugs in the mail addressing department (the text goes red for some reason if one does editing on the email entry). This alarms users. Furthermore, even the method of entry of CCs, BCCs is unnecessarily different to other email clients. Why unnecessarily confuse users with a redesign just for the sake of it (for heaven's sake, it seems to me the only way this could ever have happened is that TB's original developer's had never used an email package before starting on the project). Talk about this as being peculiar is a gross understatement, unfortunately such inane thinking underpins much of the basic design (Thunderbird is a quintessential, truly wonderful, example of Rube Goldberg/Heath Robinson design principles!)
5. At various times, I have tried to fix Thunderbird's limitations by applying various add-ons, and after installing sometimes up to about 35 I've just given up. Some things were fixed, others not, and there were inevitable interactions between these various add-ons. I could write a lengthy article about what is (still) not fixable with any number of add-ons; essentially though, the underlying code is so broken and haphazard that no add-on is able to fix some problems. ONE SHOULD NOT HAVE TO RELY ON ADD-ONS JUST TO OVERCOME FUNDAMENTAL DESIGN LIMITATIONS.
6. Thunderbird is slow in almost every aspect of its operation—truly unbelievably slow when compared to other packages of similar design.
From what I've read in this Thunderbird Mozilla post, I have little faith that the end product will ever satisfy serious email users (especially if lesser used features are dropped) which seems to be the proposal. Likely we'll end up with another mishmash similar to the confounded MS Office ribbon (that'll alienate most of its traditional user base—after all, Mozilla has been a past master at incompatibility for many years (every new version of Firefox has at least broken some my favourite add-ons, then there's the horrid Australis interface, and so on). Unfortunately, at Mozilla, developer culture has always taken precedent over user requirements; it would be foolhardy to think current Mozilla culture will change with a new Thunderbird design (corporate culture is always too ingrained to change that quickly).
Finally, it seems to me, that if Thunderbird's developers are actually serious about producing a better design for the majority of users (other than their own pet design) then they should open a web site to that effect and allow ordinary users to discuss and thrash out exactly what features they want within the new design. Perhaps they should include existing forks in such discussions, FossaMail for instance.
In the meantime, I reckon developers of other email clients have very little to worry about.
Re the editor, the Gecko editor component has long been plagued with the issue that the module owner didn't really want to hold that position. For a time, the owner was completely hostile to anything Thunderbird, despite the fact that Thunderbird was the heaviest and most notable implementation of the editor.
I will also point out that there is actually some fairly deep integration code within the Mozilla editor with Thunderbird's compose backend (particularly in regards to the need to generate inline embedded images). There have been attempts to replace the editor with a more functional one in the past, but they all came to naught.
Thanks for that reply. That makes sense. My comments about the editor were deliberately made from the perspective of the end user. Whilst I used hyperbole to emphasize the fact that the editor was the main culprit, I agree things usually are not that simple.
However, the key point I was trying to make still stands which is that irrespective of the state of the underlying code/Gecko editor components etc., etc., for some reason third party developers (here BlueGriffon's developers) have managed to tame the code in a much more successful way than Mozilla itself has done. The implication being that as principal developer Mozilla should have been able to do a better job than third party developers should. Thus, it amply demonstrates Mozilla's lack of commitment to the Thunderbird project per se (and that this has been so for a very long time (ipso facto, so have the bugs/problems) without Mozilla bothering to attend to them).
I am not a Thunderbird add-ons developer/TB code expert so there's little point me attempting it, but it would be very informative to find out why the BG editor works and the TB one is so brain-dead. As I see it, it's important to cut to the core of these problems if for no other reason than to show the skeptics or those who've simple requirements and find little or no problem with TB that there are real longstanding problems with Thunderbird and that some of us are not just being argumentative for the sake of it.
I guess we all have our opinions but if you are composing long emails with intricate formatting I'd suggest you're doing it wrong. Email messages should be short, and preferably plain text. You have a little more leeway than in a tweet, but more than a paragraph or so and you lose the reader. I see this so often -- people will send me a treatise in email and I simply cannot comprehend that much text on a computer screen. So it's either print it, or skip it. Guess what happens most often?
If you need to write something lengthy and heavily formatted, do it in a Google Doc or blog post and put a link in your email.
With respect, it is some time since I've read the various email RFCs (822/2822/1123 etc.), but I cannot recall any of these email standards saying that emails (a) have to be short and (b) that formatting doesn't matter. In fact, there are numbers of RFC standards that actually specify the standards for text formatting, for example, the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) standards have allowed 'rich text' formatting in emails for years now.
Thus, to be compliant, email clients should comply with these email standards—this means their editors should also format text to those standards. I contend that there is indisputable evidence that Thunderbird does not fully comply with these internet standards by a considerable margin (nor has it ever done so). Moreover, in parts, Thunderbird is so bad/non-compliant that it is essentially not fit for purpose.
This has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that some users will only ever use a subset of those features [standards] when composing emails.
As long as users comply with the email standards, they are entitled to use any formatting they so desire. Whilst many emails are short, the fact is that there are those who often send highly formatted emails of many pages in length.
As fauigerzigerk says, in many instances, attachments are often not suitable so they must be sent in-line. This then requires the editor to handle in-line text/images etc. correctly (Thunderbird does not do this without fault).
It's exactly the other way around for me. Any text that isn't directly in the email will either get ignored or I won't reply in as much detail as I would have. It's much more difficult to quote selectively from attached files so I don't do it.
And printing is about the most horrible thing ever invented. I only do it under threat of financial loss (return labels, letters to tax authorities). There's nothing as broken as printing. It never works flawlessly and I can't focus on printed text anyway.
Printed text has no search, no copy and paste, no changing font sizes or brightness, no hands free reading, no place to put paper without it getting fatty or full of coffee stains.
So I guess the conclusion has to be that there is no general right or wrong when it comes to the length of text in email. I depends on who you are sending it to. I pity whoever has to correspond with the both of us :-)
A paragraph or so these days is best sent in chat. We use email more for reference stuff in our setup (because searching for references in chat is terrible...)
Chat is for when there is someone on the other side listening, it's like a conversation but in text. Email is for when there is more asymmetry, the other person may or may not be there and an immediate response is not expected (shouldn't be anyway).
Search could be smarter (and faster). Also I remember I had to do something tricky to make search default to "date" sorting instead of "relevance", and that should really just be in the preferences dialog somewhere.
Search is a generation behind Mail.app's search. It's pretty heavyweight and goes into the weeds wrt performance after a few weeks of uptime. It needs emacs key bindings.
GMane.org [1] provides an NNTP (newsgroup) interface [2]. You can more easily set the automatic expiry rules for a newsgroup.
Careful configuration of the sending/reply address should let you reply to the mailing list by email as normal, or there may be a way using NNTP -- the documentation on the GMane website is missing, as they're rewriting the service.
Not a one. Have run it for years and years and years, overloaded with extensions. It has never failed me.
But this! The post outlines a three year timeframe. I do not believe it. I believe Mozilla will be gone before three years, and Thunderbird with it, one way or the other.
They are rewriting Firefox out of any relevance. They had a distinct product with unique features. It has been loosing uniqueness, usability and mindshare ever since they began shadowing everything the Google guys did. Now they're going all in, turning the thing into a functional Chrome clone. Once the user base drops below a certain percentage, there will be no point for anyone in sponsoring the show any longer.
Me, I was a loyal user since the Phoenix days. I have recently Firefox. It is not unusable yet, but it will be in about half a year.
I also started with Phoenix, and I share your dissatisfaction with the direction of Firefox; but its transformation into a Chrome clone, while regrettable, is not a new thing. Is there some recent change that you think makes the dissolution of Mozilla (not just the Firefox project!) particularly likely?
For what it's worth, I like the proposal, in large part because it is a rewrite with an aim to implement a full-featured cross-platform mail client. Something fresh but with the spirit of Thunderbird and consistent with the Mozilla credo appeals to me.
But to answer your question, I and several others I know whom use Thunderbird consider it a "least awful" choice. It's less complicated, opinionated, and buggy that Outlook. It's cross-platform unlike some of the other top-tier options. And it's less centralized, surveilled, and inverse-productized than third-party web-based email such as Gmail. It supports multiple accounts, through add-ons it supports GPG, it blocks bad HTML in messages, and for the most part it works well enough.
However, yes, I do have a lot of problems with Thunrderbird, ranging from daily annoyances to minor pet peeves. Reviewing my Bugzilla votes would be exhausting, but some highlights:
As others have pointed out, the search functionality is poor. It's slower than alternative clients (e.g., Opera Mail) and less accurate. It also opens to a low-value "search results" view rather than a list view. ( See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=580252 ) It's not easy to quickly execute a search on the current folder only. The full search is so frustrating that I am in the habit of using the quick-filter bar (control-shift-K) because it works as I feel an e-mail search should work, but woe to the user who has "Body" selected in that UI control since the filter function does not use the search index. Also, why does ESC hide the quick-filter bar?
Addressing is slow even on extremely fast workstations, to the point of routinely causing me to need to correct addressing errors. However, they recently fixed bug 1012397 so that resolution will occur after a blur of an addressing field. Yay! ( See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1012397 ) Though other composition / addressing quirks such an improper initial focus on the composition pane still remain. ( See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=329482 )
The email composition window is often slowed by activity occurring elsewhere within Thunderbird. If Thunderbird is working on moving a bunch of messages, for example, it can sometimes struggle to keep pace with typing in a composition window, on workstations with 8 or 16 modern CPU cores and NVMe SSDs.
All told, I would also be more or less happy with ongoing improvement to the existing product. But I understand that may not be viable if the underlying technologies start fading away.
" <...> [Thunderbird] consider it a "least awful" choice. It's less complicated, opinionated, and buggy that Outlook. It's cross-platform unlike some of the other top-tier options. <...>"
Absolutely correct, it's why we have to put up a strong clear-cut case now to ensure the developers know exactly what we users want. To do just that will, on occasions, require us to be very specific.
We should not be the slightest bit shy about complaining.
What I want is a GMail client on premise. An open source clone of the GMail Android app or webapp running in Electro or Servo. GMail has a perfect conversation-style UI. Even today Outlook, Windows Mail, Thunderbird have no equivalent conversation view (just hacked together additions that don't work). Also GMail introduced the concept of tags instead of lame folders (an email can be tagged with several tags). Also GMail syncs notes and calender with CalDAV and other open protocols. It works fine out of the box with iOS. Even the notes app syncs data to GMail IMAP out of the box.
The old Opera 12 browser featured such a similar HTML based email client. Vivaldi promised such a email client, but no news for years.
Thunderbird is like Outlook Express aka Windows Mail (Windows Vista/7/8) (both deprecated), Outlook's little brother.
