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Mozilla Corporation cut Thunderbird loose ~ 2007, and the primary developer started his own commercial version called PostBox.

In their most recent version they added support for maildir in addition to mbox (a long requested feature on bugzilla).

The source code appears to be available for older versions, but I'm unclear if they are contributing back to the master repository anymore, or just a fork.

I bought it to support development, but I rarely use a client nowadays other than email provider's web client.

I wonder if anyone else has tried it?

Mozilla Corporation cut Thunderbird loose ~ 2007, and the primary developer started his own commercial version called PostBox.

In their most recent version they added support for maildir in addition to mbox (a long requested feature on bugzilla).

The source code appears to be available for older versions, but I'm unclear if they are contributing back to the master repository anymore, or just a fork.

I bought it to support development, but I rarely use a client nowadays other than email provider's web client.

I wonder if anyone else has tried it?

eM Client

Postbox

Fossamail, Sylphfeed, Claws, etc...

Mailbird

There's a commercial product called postbox. I don't use it, but I tried it a year ago and it seems to give a similar experience to thunderbird with a bit more polish https://www.postbox-inc.com/

https://www.postbox-inc.com/

have you tried the commercial version?

https://www.postbox-inc.com/pr...

Mozilla separated itself from the main Thunderbird developer in 2007 and he released Postbox 1.0 in September 2009.

http://scott-macgregor.org/blo...

https://www.crunchbase.com/per...

Postbox: Windows and OS/X only, apparently.

http://postbox-inc.com/

One of the links actually gives a specific account of what an app does that sounds like it'd be mighty useful, but is not compatible with the sandbox:

"Most importantly, we had to create another version of Postbox for the Mac App Store that removed features such as iCal support, iPhoto integration, and Add-Ons in order to comply with Apple’s Application Guidelines"

If you go back to the article Ament links to, their complaints are:

No free trials
No discounted upgrades
No free upgrades if the prior version was purchased after a specific date
No way to provide license keys that could be used on Windows (many of our customers use both platforms)
No volume discounts or site licensing
No access to customer information, which prevented us from validating orders, offering discounts, running promotions, newsletter signups, etc.
Unclear refund policies
Most importantly, we had to create another version of Postbox for the Mac App Store that removed features such as iCal support, iPhoto integration, and Add-Ons in order to comply with Apple’s Application Guidelines

None of these, save the last one, have anything to do with sandboxing. The last one does, but I don't understand it, because access to the user's calendar and photos are explicitly-defined entitlements that you can access, all you have to do is check a box in Xcode. A sandboxed app cannot access the filesystem of the computer, except for paths specifically named by the user in an Open or Save dialogue (the dialogue boxes are run by a separate daemon that passes the paths to the client application over IPC, so you can't futz with it to pick open more of the user's fs than they specifically let the application see.) Obviously this is deadly to bulk renamers, but I don't understand the complaint in the context of document creation, utilities or accessories, games, or really anything but document indexers -- which would have to just be sold the old fashioned way, on a website.

I wish they'd just get it over with and fully disown Thunderbird so that others who do give a damn can do something with it.

You seem rather unclear on the concept of open source. Anyone who cares can contribute to Thunderbird development. Anyone who has a better idea for its direction can take the code and fork it, even turn it back into a commercial product. And they have, there's a list of e-mail clients based on Thunderbird on Wikipedia, one of which is Postbox for $30.

Only in the minds of entitled armchair whiners does Mozilla paying salaries for Thunderbird engineers and even a messaging team for years somehow equate to "not giving a damn." The reality is there's little interest and clearly no money in a standalone e-mail client, and it's somewhat tangential to Mozilla's mission. As users moved to web mail and ISP-provided clients, Mozilla's various experiments to do cool collaborative and communication things with Thunderbird didn't have much impact.

(I've used the SeaMonkey browser-editor-mail-IRC suite since it was Netscape Navigator 2.0. SeaMonkey 2.11 remains a solid useful product with all the performance and memory wins of recent Firefox, and I really appreciate the talented few who keep it going with the aid of Mozilla's infrastructure.)

Or what about this one right here that many, many people have been asking for, but has been languishing for years because it's not "interesting" to developers?

IMO, Thunderbird stopped being industry-leading or interesting from a UI/UX perspective years ago. As one who uses it on a daily basis, it makes me sad.

Things like Postbox show that the code base can still function well and can be used with some UI/UX love, but since Postbox is a closed project, the majority of extensions, etc. cannot be used with it unless they are "Postbox-specific" versions. (Note, I am not knocking them for this, just stating the facts.)

I just wish we had the Postbox UI with the community of Thunderbird around it...

Postbox does. My new favorite email client. And it's written by Thunderbird developers and based on Thunderbird. But is not free...

It is definitely much better than TB2 on Windows and OSX too. Strangely, I still kind of prefer Postbox to Thunderbird even though it doesn't really add any features that I use, and I don't find it to be worth the purchase price. I guess it's a look and feel thing.

Go down fighting!

They will. The Mozilla license allows non-free distribution of it's code, that's how Postbox plans on making money. Thus Firefox can be distributed with Windows. But what happens when the day comes that they have to distribute some GPL software with Windows?

It's not the usability or functionality, that's all done (fairly) decently. There's little issues (eg: mail.app forces an SSL connection when connecting) which is really more of an inconvenience at when troubleshooting peoples mail problems. I troubleshoot mail/connection/server issues on hundreds of Mac's a month and have seen a lot of strange quirky bugs with mail.app. Issues with it not displaying mail, downloading mail from an IMAP subfolder repeatedly, extremely strange connectivity issues, issues with storing passwords on the keychain... I could go on and on, to be honest, it doesn't affect the majority of users - but it certainly effects enough users to keep me with a job. I generally just suggest Thunderbird, or for the Apple fanboys who refuse to part with mail.app when things can't be resolved, PostBox (PostBox) which is a retooled mail.app, offers some cool features though.

/rant :P