Opposite stance: please, Mozilla, do not build mobile Thunderbird apps. That's tremendous effort, and IMHO too much for what you can do with the priority on Firefox, even with these new Thunderbird hires.
Focus on polishing and maintaining the existing Thunderbird the best you can with the limited resources you have for the project. You have a large existing userbase that will be extremely thankful for that.
I'm going to chime in and say I want Thunderbird on Android. Preferably with the ability to sync settings and data from and to my desktop and laptop.
Also, frankly, there are so many email clients out there for Android, that it's a pain trying to finding something trustworthy. Thunderbird would be something I can trust.
> please, Mozilla, do not build mobile Thunderbird apps
100% agreed. Thunderbird for many years was (or was perceived as) moribund and now that it's showing more signs of life people are pushing to add mobile clients as well as desktop? Are those people trying to kill it off?
Thunderbird is not maintained by Mozilla, and those new hires are not by Mozilla, so it should not affect Firefox. It might affect desktop Thunderbird, of course.
I'll add to the mix - there needs to be an equivalent of Thunderbird on Android.
Aquamail is the most feature complete service there was, and now it's been acquired.
A major Thunderbird and Firefox distraction was their shared codebase.
If the new Firefox can do what it can, maybe there could be another codebase that compiles well to multiple platforms, maybe even the first mainstream webassembly app.
Splitting focus to create a mobile client while the desktop client all their remaining loyal users actually care about lies moribund is a great idea!
But it just isn't thinking far enough outside the box. What they really should do is create an entire Thunderbird OS based on web technologies and XUL, and sell it to mobile phone manufacturers! It could be huge!
I'm full of great ideas. Have they considered that email client interfaces are hard to understand for your grandparents? Maybe they could make it look like your living room, with each piece of email a book on a shelf. And they could have a cute little animatronic talking bluebird that you could ask for help-- call it, I dunno, want something non-threatening... Thunderbird Bob!
I'm shocked that there's no mention of the need for reliable out-of-the-box synchronization with online calendars and contacts. (At one point, I tried all the available Thunderbird add-ons for syncing with Google's apps; none worked well for me.)
Even better than synchronization, I would love to have an alternative to existing online email/calendar/contact services.
If Mozilla were ever to offer its own paid email, calendar, and contacts subscription service, powered by open-source code, and backed with strong customer/data/privacy protections, I would sign up in a heartbeat.
I've spent a lot of time looking into this and am as frustrated as you. I'm building out a small consulting company based on Linux, and the basis of it all - email, contacts, calendars - is a fiasco. I went to Evolution as a client, which handles all of the above. Thunderbird does mail but its contact solutions require LDAP, not CardDav and its calendar solutions are bolted on, not integral. Linux devs spent a lot of time working on the "replacement for Outlook" in the early 2000s before giving up and spending their energy blowing up Gnome2's otherwise-perfectly functioning DE instead. My two go-to solutions on Linux desktops are Evolution, as mentioned, and the web client for Fastmail, which offers email, calendaring and contact sharing. Thunderbird is behind. There's a recent new add-on that purports to deal with carddav and caldav in Thunderbird, but it's still got a rough edge or two, and annoyingly, remains an "add-on" which aesthetically sends the wrong signal. On KDE, Kontact (encompassing Kmail, Korganizer for calendars and Kontact) works very well for my techie colleagues but is a bit weird for non-technical staff. I've also looked at Zimbra and the former Zarafa (now Kopano) and Kolab and some others, and Fastmail's web client remains the easiest and friendliest solution, while Evolution remains the best desktop client capable of handling IMAP/CALDAV/CARDDAV. It's annoying though. On Windows I'd just install emClient and call it a day (and would avoid Outlook, which I desperately dislike).
> If Mozilla were ever to offer its own paid email, calendar, and contacts subscription service, powered by open-source code, and backed with strong customer/data/privacy protections, I would sign up in a heartbeat.
Ditto. I use Apple products and accounts for this, but I recently set up both of my parents with Google accounts (buying them Chromebooks and integrating them with their existing Android phones and Gmail). I don't like having Google having so much of my parents' personal data, but the solution was cost effective and my parents are not on the front lines of the battles over internet privacy.
Apple is decent, but if I could choose an open-source, standards-based Mozilla offering for managing all this stuff I definitely would, for both myself and others.
Can someone explain? Honestly, because I have never fathomed: Why has calendaring and associated PIM-stuff been grafted onto email specifically? Is it a spill-over from the strange land of Outlook/Exchange? My Thunderbird does really decent service handling my mail. If I need to look at a calendar, I'd typically open a, you know ... calendar application.
The biggest problem, IMO, with the contacts system is how limited it is. You get two email addresses and two phone numbers per contact, that are pre-labeled "work" and "home", and that's it. It absolutely must have the ability to add arbitrary numbers of physical addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers to a contact, as well as give each field an arbitrary name. I cannot comprehend how it can't do this. Every other address book on the planet allows this. I have some contacts with 8 email addresses, 4-5 phone numbers, multiple physical addresses, all with custom names for what each of them are. So the fact that thunderbird can't handle this makes it unusable for me.
I've never understood why contacts can't be stored inside a mail folder, so that every computer you setup thunderbird on gets its address book synced..
> If Mozilla were ever to offer its own paid email, calendar, and contacts subscription service, powered by open-source code, and backed with strong customer/data/privacy protections, I would sign up in a heartbeat.
If they'd fix the security of their sync system, I'd do the same, equally fast. I definitely trust them more than I trust Google, and I wouldn't mind supporting them.
As it is, though, I bet that they'd integrate email, calendaring and their password sync, and there's no way I'll ever store passwords on a service which is able to snarf my password-encryption password simply my feeding me some malicious JavaScript.
Although, again knowing Mozilla, I guess that there's a chance they'd implement a whole different incompatible account system just for the lulz.
And I use DavDroid off of F-droid on my phone. Calendar sync and Contacts work great on my phone.
Calendar works great on Thunderbird .. contacts .. eh...last I checked there was a SOHO CardDav extension that was kinda garbage. Not sure if that's been improved yet.
Synchronization with calendars? A friend of mine wrote BirdieSync (http://birdiesync.com) for that purpose, and it was quite successful. Yes, it's not free, but some developers have rent to pay.
I also came here to write about K9. It's open source, it works well, it supports encryption (with the OpenKeychain app). I don't have much more to ask to it. I don't think it's worth investing on a mobile Thunderbird but to be fair, I'm pretty happy with desktop Thunderbird too. They could stay in maintenance mode and make sure that it keeps running on any new OS version it's released.
+1 k9 is really good, I think it would be a pity to split thunderbird resource on mobile front, maybe they can share resource (low level protocol libraries?)/public relation (i.e mutual refering) so that they core developers can focus on what they're good at.
My opinion is that developing an app for mobile and one for desktop is really two different set of skills and it's not because you've made an awesome desktop app that you will produce an awesome mobile app, vice-versa.
Unfortunately, this is not so much a problem with the quality of the client, but rather with the strangle-hold of big providers over the email system, but users will inevitably complain to the client developers about it.
I had been using K9 since 2010 or so, since there were only few mail clients supporting multiple accounts, but I always found it rather confusing to navigate around.
Especially the settings, there are Global settings, account settings, folder settings but didn't always show up in the menu.
I'm the sort of person who lives on the cli, I've been considering trying to port some of my emacs/gnus setup to my android device. I wonder how well it would work?
Since we're listing issues with K9: It's pretty easy to setup if you know what you're doing, but the lack of any sort of autoconfig for non-Gmail mail servers make it very difficult to give it to a normal user and have it just work. Thunderbird has a standard autoconfig file to do this, and there is an open issue on K9 to add support for the same format, but it's been open and stagnant for years[0]
You've gotten a lot of recommendations for K9, which I also like. But I went with Aquamail on Android, which has worked really well for me and I'm very happy with it. Actively developed and maintained, and very slick interface.
It's good, some options are placed at very counter intuitive places and it would be nice if they'd slap some material design on top of it. Other than that it's pretty nice indeed.
The only item on my wishlist is a tiny 100KB daemon with a status bar icon to watch for mail so I don't need to keep a 150MB behemoth open in the background all day. Otherwise Thunderbird is already more than I'll ever want from an email client. Calendars, contact managers, and other nonsense should really be independent programs cooperating via IPC.
I train users all the time on Thunderbird and to be honest, many people really dislike the UI/UX. Even though I'm primarily getting them to use it for security reasons, unfortunately so many of them really hate the transition from Mac Mail or Outlook. Working on that, rather than duplicate K9 Mail, would be my suggestion.
> They pointed out that they were Thunderbird users, but weren’t really into mailing lists.
There's some kind of irony in people wanting an email client not being into mailing lists. I wonder if it's because Thunderbird ought to handle mailing lists better than it does somehow, perhaps coming up with some innovative UI rather than trying to copy more popular proprietary (and these days mostly web-based) email clients.
On the subject of encryption, S/MIME has broad client support (e.g. the clients shipped in all major desktop & mobile operating systems) and the security model is easier for most people to understand (WoT sadly often means “accept everything without checking” in practice).
What's missing is a LetsEncrypt-style effort to make it easy for people in non-managed environments to get and renew certificates. It'd be really nice if Mozilla & the rest of the industry chose to invest in that infrastructure and some usability improvements to make it more manageable.
This would be especially useful if it extended to browser integration so a user could trivially prove to a remote website that they had a valid signing certificate for a given address.
The biggest barrier I see to making a forum a core part of the community effort is getting buy-in from MOST of the contributors to the project currently. So, over the next week I’m going to try and get an idea of who is interested in participating and who is opposed.
What I've seen work really well in the past is one contributor to lead 'interfacing' with the community via the forum; announce releases, and just generally be a voice for the developers. Maybe you have this person already. Otherwise, if the funds are available, hiring a community manager type person is always as option.
I would love for Thunderbird to support Exchange 365. I use Linux at work but sadly we've got office 365 and use a lot the calendar built in. I have to use Evolution as its the only mail client that supports, and didn't really want to try ExQuilla.
Ten years ago I interviewed for the head QA and Community Manager position. I flew out, did interviews, got back, even received an offer for the job, but then I was told the offer was rescinded because they felt they didn't need to fill that position.
Ten years later, people don't know the project exists, it doesn't have a forum or community.
The biggest problem I have with thunderbird is that it fails to render some html mails properly. Above all, they should fix this problem first. Instead of creating a mobile app or whatever, they should get their existing client right. As of today, the 2 things that keep me from switching fully to evolution are (1) evolution's unfriendly keyboard shortcuts that, for whatever reason, I cannot change, and (2) nostalgy.
My biggest bug bear atm is damned tnef or the dreaded winmail.dat attachments.
Too many people we work with have been upgrading their exchange servers and outlook upgraded without bothering to check to see if they are sending out usable emails.
I hope hey don't only support enigmail for encryption but also S/MIME which is supported by both the native macOS Mail client and Outlook. We have to pay for a plugin at my job for Thunderbird that if I remember correctly lets us read encrypted mail, but not write it, unless I'm miss remembering.
[+] [-] ronjouch|8 years ago|reply
Opposite stance: please, Mozilla, do not build mobile Thunderbird apps. That's tremendous effort, and IMHO too much for what you can do with the priority on Firefox, even with these new Thunderbird hires.
Focus on polishing and maintaining the existing Thunderbird the best you can with the limited resources you have for the project. You have a large existing userbase that will be extremely thankful for that.
[+] [-] jerrac|8 years ago|reply
Also, frankly, there are so many email clients out there for Android, that it's a pain trying to finding something trustworthy. Thunderbird would be something I can trust.
[+] [-] ekianjo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fencepost|8 years ago|reply
100% agreed. Thunderbird for many years was (or was perceived as) moribund and now that it's showing more signs of life people are pushing to add mobile clients as well as desktop? Are those people trying to kill it off?
[+] [-] Vinnl|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j45|8 years ago|reply
Aquamail is the most feature complete service there was, and now it's been acquired.
A major Thunderbird and Firefox distraction was their shared codebase.
If the new Firefox can do what it can, maybe there could be another codebase that compiles well to multiple platforms, maybe even the first mainstream webassembly app.
[+] [-] hendersoon|8 years ago|reply
But it just isn't thinking far enough outside the box. What they really should do is create an entire Thunderbird OS based on web technologies and XUL, and sell it to mobile phone manufacturers! It could be huge!
I'm full of great ideas. Have they considered that email client interfaces are hard to understand for your grandparents? Maybe they could make it look like your living room, with each piece of email a book on a shelf. And they could have a cute little animatronic talking bluebird that you could ask for help-- call it, I dunno, want something non-threatening... Thunderbird Bob!
One more? Short but sweet-- Thunderbird Vista!
Really, the possibilities are endless.
[+] [-] venomsnake|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dorp|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cs702|8 years ago|reply
I'm shocked that there's no mention of the need for reliable out-of-the-box synchronization with online calendars and contacts. (At one point, I tried all the available Thunderbird add-ons for syncing with Google's apps; none worked well for me.)
Even better than synchronization, I would love to have an alternative to existing online email/calendar/contact services.
If Mozilla were ever to offer its own paid email, calendar, and contacts subscription service, powered by open-source code, and backed with strong customer/data/privacy protections, I would sign up in a heartbeat.
[+] [-] zafiro17|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rectang|8 years ago|reply
Ditto. I use Apple products and accounts for this, but I recently set up both of my parents with Google accounts (buying them Chromebooks and integrating them with their existing Android phones and Gmail). I don't like having Google having so much of my parents' personal data, but the solution was cost effective and my parents are not on the front lines of the battles over internet privacy.
Apple is decent, but if I could choose an open-source, standards-based Mozilla offering for managing all this stuff I definitely would, for both myself and others.
[+] [-] interfixus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Freak_NL|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davehtaylor|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] briffle|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zeveb|8 years ago|reply
If they'd fix the security of their sync system, I'd do the same, equally fast. I definitely trust them more than I trust Google, and I wouldn't mind supporting them.
As it is, though, I bet that they'd integrate email, calendaring and their password sync, and there's no way I'll ever store passwords on a service which is able to snarf my password-encryption password simply my feeding me some malicious JavaScript.
Although, again knowing Mozilla, I guess that there's a chance they'd implement a whole different incompatible account system just for the lulz.
[+] [-] djsumdog|8 years ago|reply
http://radicale.org/
And I use DavDroid off of F-droid on my phone. Calendar sync and Contacts work great on my phone.
Calendar works great on Thunderbird .. contacts .. eh...last I checked there was a SOHO CardDav extension that was kinda garbage. Not sure if that's been improved yet.
[+] [-] ams6110|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alain94040|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avian|8 years ago|reply
I know that mobile is more than Android, but I find K-9 mail to be a really good, open source, mobile mail client.
https://k9mail.github.io/
[+] [-] pmontra|8 years ago|reply
If I can wish for something, fix this bug from 2009 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/thunderbird/+bug/3... (but originally from 2007)
[+] [-] allan_s|8 years ago|reply
My opinion is that developing an app for mobile and one for desktop is really two different set of skills and it's not because you've made an awesome desktop app that you will produce an awesome mobile app, vice-versa.
[+] [-] lucideer|8 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, this is not so much a problem with the quality of the client, but rather with the strangle-hold of big providers over the email system, but users will inevitably complain to the client developers about it.
[+] [-] tatami|8 years ago|reply
Especially the settings, there are Global settings, account settings, folder settings but didn't always show up in the menu.
[+] [-] sametmax|8 years ago|reply
It's still the lesser of all evils on mobile though.
[+] [-] arca_vorago|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JankySolutions|8 years ago|reply
[0] https://github.com/k9mail/k-9/issues/865
[+] [-] vog|8 years ago|reply
I've yet to find a very good contact list for Android.
... and a calendar that works remotely as good as the one of Thunderbird (Lightning).
[+] [-] robotmay|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mordae|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zafiro17|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teekert|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yxhuvud|8 years ago|reply
Give me a calendar and/or calendar integration that doesn't suck and I'd be really happy.
[+] [-] ForHackernews|8 years ago|reply
I'm making a regular monthly donation because I use this software every day, and I don't want it to go away.
My understanding is that normal donations to Mozilla don't go towards Thunderbird anymore.
[+] [-] robert_foss|8 years ago|reply
JMAP support would be nice too.
[+] [-] mcbits|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] secfirstmd|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrochkind1|8 years ago|reply
There's some kind of irony in people wanting an email client not being into mailing lists. I wonder if it's because Thunderbird ought to handle mailing lists better than it does somehow, perhaps coming up with some innovative UI rather than trying to copy more popular proprietary (and these days mostly web-based) email clients.
[+] [-] acdha|8 years ago|reply
What's missing is a LetsEncrypt-style effort to make it easy for people in non-managed environments to get and renew certificates. It'd be really nice if Mozilla & the rest of the industry chose to invest in that infrastructure and some usability improvements to make it more manageable.
This would be especially useful if it extended to browser integration so a user could trivially prove to a remote website that they had a valid signing certificate for a given address.
[+] [-] le-mark|8 years ago|reply
What I've seen work really well in the past is one contributor to lead 'interfacing' with the community via the forum; announce releases, and just generally be a voice for the developers. Maybe you have this person already. Otherwise, if the funds are available, hiring a community manager type person is always as option.
[+] [-] Faaak|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burnte|8 years ago|reply
Ten years later, people don't know the project exists, it doesn't have a forum or community.
[+] [-] optimuspaul|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wink|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stewbrew|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pixelbeat__|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dugite-code|8 years ago|reply
Too many people we work with have been upgrading their exchange servers and outlook upgraded without bothering to check to see if they are sending out usable emails.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|8 years ago|reply