Thunderbird is a fantastic email client, and I'm glad that it has reached a sustainable point. I have worked with plugins just after the switch to mailextensions, and it's great to see that the community has been considered with the changes they have had to make.
However, I am disappointed that TNEF decoding has been removed from the roadmap. The plugin I have been maintaining for this purpose is very old and in desperate need of a rewrite. Honestly, it just needs to be in the core of the client at this point. It is unclear why Microsoft has not completely removed their proprietary mail format, and why admins keep switching it on for outside users is anyone's guess.
Yes, but for me it's more than a client. It's what the "cloud" future should look like everywhere.
If someone provided replicated imap stores, or even better Thunderbird supported replicating the imap store to a one or more encrypted backups, it would be heaven. Access is fast because it's cached locally, but available everywhere and safe from things like "Google locks you out of your account" because it's the cloud.
Thunderbird could do it now with email, calendar and notes. If we could extend that to a password store (like bitwarden), and document store (like Google docs), and a file store (like dropbox), we would be there in the open source world. It's a dream of mine.
An average of $21 is very impressive considering Thunderbird's position. I believe Wikimedia averages to about $15. Although I suppose its position is probably a large part of the comfort to donate more.
I'd be interested to know what their median donation is, assuming $21 is the mean (which it seems to be). I wonder to what extent that number is inflated by a few big donors (it might not be, I'm just curious).
Oh, interesting - this is actually about Thunderbird. I was expecting some AI startup founded by people too young to know there was already a Thunderbird.
Looked at the staff list for a product manager, or a UX designer ... eventually found "product and business development manager" (and "product design manager" and almost everyone else is an engineer. I'm guessing the product and design people are super overstretched and don't have a lot of sway. So that would explain why the UX is what it is.
Huh, I've always really liked the Thunderbird search; it's really fast, and the clickable date filter is so much easier than any other such UI I've tried. But maybe I search more by date-ranges than most people :)
What aspects of the UX do you think that needs improvement? For me the default layout (sidebar for email accounts and folders, upper frame for email list and lower frame for single email) looks very good. The pain is in finding the setting that I need to adjust and specifying criteria for searching emails. However if the improvement is only about making it look better, then I wouldn't buy it because "modern" designs consume more screen space and GPU. Better to have Hacker News than Discourse.
How odd. I think Thunderbird's search is it's most amazing feature.
Maybe that's because I'm a programmer. It can do a multi keyword stem search on literally gigabytes of emails, and return the results in 10's of milliseconds. It looks instantaneous. It's genuinely shocking to me how fast it's inverted index is.
And ... the results are accurate. It's so fast I sometimes have doubted it, and checked the result with grep. It's always right - and grep is much slower. Outlook in comparison, which is one of the few other desktop email clients remaining standing, is just terrible - it's search is slow, inaccurate and so feature bloated you never can be quite sure what corpus it's considering. And it corrupts itself regularly. But I guess comparing it to Outlook is setting a very low bar.
im curious which features you find powerful? as email clients go, it seems to be almost as basic as it comes, with many before it having far far more features.
This is good news to me. I gave Thunderbird another go just last week, as I wanted a way to reliably get my email OUT of MS Office (work), Proton, Gmail, etc. so I could have a local copy in a format (or formats) that I choose.
After I downloaded everything I ran `notmuch` on the lot. My end goal is to have some kind of locally hosted knowledgebase with nearly-instantaneous full-text search. Haven't figured out what comes next, but I'm grateful that Thunderbird made it pretty painless to get this far.
That's also what I use Thunderbird for. Taking control of my emails and importing/exporting them between email providers. I wonder if there is a version of such software that can run on a cloud server though.
I was about to say, if this is _too_ successful, Thunderbird may find themselves with a target on their back, so Mozilla doesn't have to keep fielding questions from users about how they can fund Firefox directly instead of general donations.
I’m always amazed at the staff numbers for these kinds of projects. I’m glad things are going well for them, but that really seems like a high employee count for such a simple project.
Thunderbird has a ridiculous amount of plumbing work to be done just to keep operational even without new features. Keeping up with the Mozilla codebase, on which Thunderbird is completely dependent, but at the same time, Mozilla no longer cares about Thunderbird’s needs, is probably double digit devs effort in itself.
Daily Thunderbird user for about 17 years. Has always worked well. The recent UI improvements are nice (on the eyes), but, I’m so used to the UI/UX, it just blends into the background.
After the browser took off, ignoring and missing things became the main objectives of Mozilla.
Flush with Google money, the voices of highly technical people with a mission were overpowered by the voices of professional non-technical people with an agenda.
I'm not even getting into the woke stuff, but Mozilla saw themselves as the "Open [insert new stuff]" stewards. They saw companies constantly building moats and ( understandably ) wanted to create an "open" alternative:
Remember the phone OS stuff? Pocket? Servo? Rust managed to survive before the axe came. Raindrop, VR stuff, even IoT..
Since they lost almost all relevance in the browser "market", management somehow "managed" to re-frame their identity to a company that creates cool projects about the latest trend and then lets them rot since they have no traction and eventually closes them.
Google does that too, but Google makes billions of dollars and can support all that "exploration", Mozilla doesn't and it will rot away until they close operations.
I use Firefox since the Phoenix days, and I like it btw.
> We began 2022 with 15 core staff, and now employ a team of 24 in these roles:
Product and Business Development Manager
Director of Operations
Product Design Manager
Engineering Manager
Staff Engineers (3)
Sr SW Engineers (2)
Sr Security Engineer
SW Engineer, Add-Ons Ecosystem
Sr UI/UX Developer
UI/UX Developers (2)
Android Project Lead
Android Developer (1)
Build & Release Engineers (2)
Full Stack Developer
Front End Developer
Community Manager
Marketing Manager
Bug Triager
Support Engineer
I've never seen "Bug Triager" listed as an advertised role. Isn't this a subset of what a product owner/manager typically does?
I tried using Evolution a few years ago, but repeatedly hit problems where if I deleted text while composing an email, "Undo" would not restore it. I filed a bug, which was eventually closed with "we've changed some things around that might have affected this issue, please try to reproduce when the next version is released".
Looking at their issue tracker[1], this kind of thing seems to be a common complaint, rarely resolved with an actual direct bug fix. Most charitably, I assume that Evolution is designed for a use-case or workflow I don't have.
Evolution is kind of a web client (like Thunderbird) too, since the message preview pane, including the parts outside the message body, is rendered by WebKit, the HTML for it is generated by evolution. Also the plain text messages go through HTML and WebKit too. Would be nice if these weren't the case though, because they necessarily aren't great for security.
Apple's Mail app is constantly losing it's connection to my various different work email accounts, but the annoying thing isn't that it's losing it, it's that it's not doing a good job of either telling me, or having me re-auth. I should probably give Thunderbird another try - specially since they're funding is up.
Yay! I haven't used Thunderbird much in a few years, but I'm very glad they're still around. Last I tried it, I was able to pay for a cheap plug-in to authenticate to Outlook365 and retrieve corporate mail through Thunderbird for a Linux laptop pilot for work. Very glad people still have an alternative to the Enterprise Empire.
I like Thunderbird, but on Linux I finally switched to Evolution because Thunderbird was an absolute RAM and CPU hog, and also, Google Calendar integration was flakey as hell. Thunderbird would randomly decide to not notify me of an event or decide to notify me way too late.
I would use Evolution if it didn't look and feel like the version found in early GNOME 2 Ubuntu, when they still used to ship installation CDs for free.
Aesthetics is as important a feature as supporting IMAP or having decent search. Which is why I'm still stuck with Fastmail's webmail, because neither Evolution nor Thunderbird seem to satisfy these criteria.
I like Thunderbird and use it all the time (it is ideal for my workflow with a couple of add-ons installed) but the developers should focus more on the application's performance. It loves to bog down my system.
[+] [-] piecerough|2 years ago|reply
Impressive!
[+] [-] JohnFen|2 years ago|reply
If they had included such goals, though, I'd be likely to stop donating money to them.
[+] [-] slyall|2 years ago|reply
https://bluemail.me/features-functions/generative-email/
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dugite-code|2 years ago|reply
However, I am disappointed that TNEF decoding has been removed from the roadmap. The plugin I have been maintaining for this purpose is very old and in desperate need of a rewrite. Honestly, it just needs to be in the core of the client at this point. It is unclear why Microsoft has not completely removed their proprietary mail format, and why admins keep switching it on for outside users is anyone's guess.
The plugin I mentioned is the LookOut (fix version): https://github.com/TB-throwback/LookOut-fix-version. Pull requests are really and truly appreciated.
[+] [-] rstuart4133|2 years ago|reply
Yes, but for me it's more than a client. It's what the "cloud" future should look like everywhere.
If someone provided replicated imap stores, or even better Thunderbird supported replicating the imap store to a one or more encrypted backups, it would be heaven. Access is fast because it's cached locally, but available everywhere and safe from things like "Google locks you out of your account" because it's the cloud.
Thunderbird could do it now with email, calendar and notes. If we could extend that to a password store (like bitwarden), and document store (like Google docs), and a file store (like dropbox), we would be there in the open source world. It's a dream of mine.
[+] [-] waboremo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ijlx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dboreham|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crossroadsguy|2 years ago|reply
It's really powerful in many ways but god it's UX is still awful, especially the configurations. The search if pathetic!
[+] [-] slondr|2 years ago|reply
I've found it to be somewhat crash prone, for now, but the overall look and feel is a huge improvement.
[+] [-] lukasb|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unhammer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] renonce|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rstuart4133|2 years ago|reply
How odd. I think Thunderbird's search is it's most amazing feature.
Maybe that's because I'm a programmer. It can do a multi keyword stem search on literally gigabytes of emails, and return the results in 10's of milliseconds. It looks instantaneous. It's genuinely shocking to me how fast it's inverted index is.
And ... the results are accurate. It's so fast I sometimes have doubted it, and checked the result with grep. It's always right - and grep is much slower. Outlook in comparison, which is one of the few other desktop email clients remaining standing, is just terrible - it's search is slow, inaccurate and so feature bloated you never can be quite sure what corpus it's considering. And it corrupts itself regularly. But I guess comparing it to Outlook is setting a very low bar.
[+] [-] redeeman|2 years ago|reply
unless you mean the extensions?
[+] [-] desro|2 years ago|reply
After I downloaded everything I ran `notmuch` on the lot. My end goal is to have some kind of locally hosted knowledgebase with nearly-instantaneous full-text search. Haven't figured out what comes next, but I'm grateful that Thunderbird made it pretty painless to get this far.
[+] [-] _xnmw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] renonce|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fswd|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ktosobcy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Multicomp|2 years ago|reply
Only joking (I hope).
[+] [-] Sytten|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scns|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RachelF|2 years ago|reply
Thunderbird is way better than Outlook.
[+] [-] zokier|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrismeller|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhaway84773|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ipaddr|2 years ago|reply
Facebook had 80,000-90,000 employees before the purge
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] knadh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhaway84773|2 years ago|reply
The email space absolutely took off right as Mozilla narrowed its focus entirely onto Firefox.
You had a bunch of mail clients revolutionizing the space and then being sold for good money.
[+] [-] PedroBatista|2 years ago|reply
Flush with Google money, the voices of highly technical people with a mission were overpowered by the voices of professional non-technical people with an agenda.
I'm not even getting into the woke stuff, but Mozilla saw themselves as the "Open [insert new stuff]" stewards. They saw companies constantly building moats and ( understandably ) wanted to create an "open" alternative:
Remember the phone OS stuff? Pocket? Servo? Rust managed to survive before the axe came. Raindrop, VR stuff, even IoT..
Since they lost almost all relevance in the browser "market", management somehow "managed" to re-frame their identity to a company that creates cool projects about the latest trend and then lets them rot since they have no traction and eventually closes them.
Google does that too, but Google makes billions of dollars and can support all that "exploration", Mozilla doesn't and it will rot away until they close operations.
I use Firefox since the Phoenix days, and I like it btw.
[+] [-] sampling|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mercutio2|2 years ago|reply
If you get few enough bugs, sure, it’s a small part of one person’s job.
However, if you routinely get 50 bugs a day, say… it does not work to make bug screening anything but a dedicated role.
It’s a mark of success that Thunderbird gets a large enough bug flow to need a dedicated screener!
[+] [-] aidenn0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thristian|2 years ago|reply
Looking at their issue tracker[1], this kind of thing seems to be a common complaint, rarely resolved with an actual direct bug fix. Most charitably, I assume that Evolution is designed for a use-case or workflow I don't have.
[1]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution/-/issues/?search=un...
[+] [-] pabs3|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slondr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justsomehnguy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uneekname|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coding123|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xbadcafebee|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toastercat|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sph|2 years ago|reply
Aesthetics is as important a feature as supporting IMAP or having decent search. Which is why I'm still stuck with Fastmail's webmail, because neither Evolution nor Thunderbird seem to satisfy these criteria.
[+] [-] deviantbit|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] valeg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw7|2 years ago|reply