Bringing Exchange Support to Thunderbird

[lousken]

why implementing ews when it is already deprecated and will be removed in two years? https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/re...

[gerdesj]

EWS is the only realistic way for "not Outlook" to work - MAPI is not exactly an open API.

When EWS goes away so will rather a lot of customers, probably not enough to dent the bottom line (initially).

Then it becomes apparent that all email is equal and Exchange online becomes a footnote in history. Microsoft used to do email and then they shat the bed. All a bit embarrassing on the surface but not really.

Running email systems is a right old pain when all you really desire is data (and metadata) to mine and flog on to other data fetishists. Email is generally rather static and rather large in storage terms but it can yield gold from personal exchanges.

Ideally you get someone else to take the pain (AWS, Google and co - yes they get to mine but they bear the costs too) but ensure the marks use Outlook (and they do).

Then you change Outlook (loving the new Electron version) to store all credentials in your cloud. You use those creds to mine data within email held on other people's clouds. They front the cost of storage.

Smashing.

[babolivier]

As Sean Burke puts it on the related bug on Bugzilla (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1847846#c2):

> At present, EWS is our best way to enable support for both Exchange Online and on-premise installations.

> Graph API has been considered and may be considered again in future, but it currently provides narrower support than EWS and lacks some functionality for desktop applications. Even with the announcement that EWS support will be removed for Exchange Online, it's still valuable in the short term for enabling access for a wide userbase and in the long term for supporting users using on-premise installations.

[mairusu]

Because you basically have no other realistic choice for the time being when dealing with crap such as Exchange.

[shamiln]

Not everyone is using Exchange Online.

[hnarn]

Strategically this makes sense if the goal is just to get people to use Thunderbird, but ideologically JMAP support would be a lot nicer in my opinion.

[ocdtrekkie]

I imagine most of the work they accomplished here will be key in adding JMAP support in the future as well.

[Semaphor]

I recently tried Thunderbird instead of Outlook. It had the same issue as FF did before the quantum update: It's too damn slow. Switching between different folders with hundreds or thousands of mails has noticable delays, while in Outlook it's essentially instant.

[eholk]

If you're using Windows, in my experience Thunderbird is essentially unusable until you add a Windows Defender exclusion for your Thunderbird profile.

[riedel]

I have exactly the opposite experience. Using outlook for mail is such a pain to me. Particularly the search experience does not work (I use expressionsearchNG for thunderbird) . For calendars it is just the opposite so that I am currently running it side by side. One problem is I think the iCal bridge to the outlook server we have to use at work. The announcement unfortunately cannot change anything here. I used the EWS addon maintained by Ericson [1] for a while. But Mozilla I guess drove many Plugin developers away by breaking the interface rapidly. Now they are putting some stuff into the core again. I am not really sure if that is a good strategy. They should rather IMHO work on a stable interface.

[1] https://github.com/Ericsson/exchangecalendar

[avidphantasm]

Hate Exchange but glad they are doing this. Now maybe I can successfully send plaintext mail on Exchange when confined to Windows.

[cqqxo4zV46cp]

Yeah, and have your email appear significantly worse on a bunch of email clients all in the name of tech purism / nostalgia for ‘the old days’.

After I saw how usual it was for plain text email to be rendered in a fixed-width font, instead or something more sane, there’s no way I could justify doing it just because “HTML email is an abomination” or whatever.

[superkuh]

>in the entire 20 year lifetime of the Thunderbird project, no one has added support for a new mail protocol before.

Technically true but also every megacorp's OAuth2 out-of-band authentication implementation needs it's own special configuration (read workaround) per email client and Thunderbird has collected quite a few. These are not normal mail protocols: they're over HTTPS not IMAP or POP3 or SMTP.

This proclamation "no one has added support for a new mail protocol" is a good thing and this change is not good. Supporting proprietary setups is pragmatic and understandable but it's not good. This is only going to briefly mitigate the problems of email splintering into dozens of per-corporation variations while encouraging people to be okay with them in the long run.

[fabrice_d]

Employees have no choice when it comes to their corporate email provider, and this is not a hill to die on for 99.99999% of them.

On the other hand, being able to use Thunderbird as a client is a net win and a pragmatic move.

[wolverine876]

> every megacorp's

It's not just one of every megacorp, it's by far the most commonly used email in business, Microsoft's Exchange and especially Exchange online.

[bachmeier]

Not sure why the headline was changed. This is an article about Rust programming. "Bringing Exchange Support to Thunderbird" implies it's about Thunderbird and it's support for Exchange - something you won't learn from the article.

[pquki4]

Based on the first paragraph of the article which focuses on Exchange rather than language, I'd say the feature itself is more important than the implementation, and that's also what most users care about.

[ktosobcy]

Submitted earlier the same with full title but didn't get any traction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40095870

[Zhyl]

What are you talking about, fam? Exchange support for Thunderbird is the entire second half of the article.

[WhyNotHugo]

I guess support for proprietary specifications is useful, but I really wish Mozilla would prioritise implementing standards like auto-discovery of email submission (SMTP) servers (rfc6186, 2011).

Currently, users have to manually provide hostname and port of their SMTP server, which is likely fine for those of us on this website, but not at all friendly for the other 99.9% of the human population.

The amount of effort require to implement all of Exchange is also probably orders of magnitude more than discovery of submission servers via DNS/SRV. I really don't get Mozilla's priorities.

[kwhitefoot]

> Currently, users have to manually provide hostname and port of their SMTP server

i don't think I had to do that when I added my Hotmail, Google, or Yahoo accounts to Thunderbird. I just used my email address at each of them. Are these treated as special cases?

[Schnitz]

Wow! 20 years or so ago, I remember working in IT and only a few of us ran Linux in otherwise fully Microsoft shops. Exchange was always one of these things that it was tough to find a good client for. We would have been over the moon!

[small_scombrus]

I'm over the moon about it now!

Using anything Microsoft on Linux is really painful, and they appear to be in the process of deprecating the web version of Teams if you're not specifically using Edge :(

[anonzzzies]

We had the same issue however I took a different path; I got the company to dump exchange and sharepoint. Things were happier from then on.

[ForHackernews]

> There was also no paid maintainership from about 2012 — when Mozilla divested and transferred ownership of Thunderbird to its community — until 2017, when Thunderbird rejoined the Mozilla Foundation.

What a scandal this was. A prime example of Mozilla's backwards priorities.

[afavour]

I disagree. The world moved to web/mobile app based mail. You’re allowed to not be happy about that (I’m not over the moon about it) but it’s the truth. It wasn’t worth Mozilla funding it.

[zozbot234]

Please include PST file import out of the box so that folks can seamlessly switch away from their Outlook installs without having to fiddle with Outlook itself. There is a free project for reading PST files, all it needs is integrating into the suite.

[DaiPlusPlus]

PST export using the Exchange module for PowerShell has been a thing since Exchange 2010, see "New-MailboxExportRequest": https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/exchange...

EDIT: Oh, nvm - it's on-prem only - huh... that's asinine.

[rdl]

This will be nice; I've been stuck using OWL for this purpose (which I think is the main extension; IDK if there's anything else.)

[AnonC]

Anything that doesn’t work well that you’ve seen with the Owl extension?

[packetlost]

We're desperately in need of SMTP/2 + IMAP5 or something

[jcranmer]

IMAPv4r2 came out relatively recently, in 2021: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9051/

(The big differences are IMAPv4r2 mandates a lot of necessary new features, like UID or UTF-8 support, and actually deprecated silly old stuff like MUTF7 mailbox names.)

[f_devd]

JMAP exists

[sega_sai]

It would be good to make Thunderbird a proper competitor to Gnome's Evolution when it comes to EWS.

[Scarbutt]

Is thunderbird search on par with gmail's search?

[promiseofbeans]

It's not bad - their time range narrowing graph thingy is really good, and I can normally find what I need. My main complaint is that my outlook calendars don't show up, so I can't search them for events.

[diarrhea]

It is the worst search I have ever used in any product.

[akvadrako]

It returns exact matches in chronological order, which is generally good enough.

[globular-toast]

I've been using thunderbird in exchange places for years. Yeah, it's shit, but that's exchange. I just try to limit my exposure. But I can see "invites" and that kind of stuff. What am I missing?

[Neil44]

Imagine if IMAP was slightly better and had a standard for calendar and contact objects.

[jaylittle]

Who the fuck cares? Exchange is dead. Office 365 is where its at. Move on Thunderbird team.

[gtech1]

Office 365 is dead too.

[counterpartyrsk]

> it’s no surprise that there’s demand among Thunderbird users to support Exchange.

Uh, I'm surprised. How many people actually love thunderbird? And to the extend it justified the development.

[promiseofbeans]

Enough to raise >6m in donations in 2022: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...

[ForHackernews]

> How many people actually love thunderbird?

I love Thunderbird and give them money every month. Name another good open source mail client.

[wolverine876]

Are you suggesting that no development is justified? I think we can expect that for any email client, there will be demand for one of the most popular email servers, and one that is required for most corporate use.

[vedmed]

Thunderbird is paramount to my workflow and has been for over a decade. If I did not have thunderbird I would be upset.

That said, loving a software requires a paradigm shift for me. I can't fathom loving something that is not alive. I do enjoy it, however.

[DrewRWx]

Do you have a use case you'd prefer they put their resources into implementing?