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Mozilla Downshifting Development of Thunderbird E-Mail Client

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla will be announcing next week that they will effectively be taking away resources from Thunderbird's development. Mozilla believes it's better for the developers behind the open-source e-mail client to work on other projects, i.e. Firefox OS. They claim they will not be outright stopping Thunderbird." You can also read the letter at pastebin.

4 of 378 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I can't wait! by Anaerin · · Score: 5, Informative

    Want the "Reload" button back where it used to be? Right-click, "Customize", drag the reload button where you want it, click "Done".

    You're welcome.

  2. Re:Other options? by MobileTatsu-NJG · · Score: 5, Informative

    I think the hilarious thing about the "bug" is that there is an operating system in this day and age that can't handle upper/lower case in filenames correctly. I'm spilting the blame 50/50 between Windows and Thunderbird.

    Although this is a problem unique to Windows, it's not really a Windows bug. You can tell Windows to do the rename in those circumstances and it will. Thunderbird was the one that barfed.

    What happened was that Thunderbird was written to ask if a file exists before doing the rename. Windows, ignoring the case said "Yep!" and so it refused to do the rename. This is expected behaviour. The fix is just to check if the names are the same if they're both lcase'd, and to skip the existence check if it's true, then tell Windows to do the rename.

    This isn't really the sort of thing where a bug report would be sent to Microsoft.

    --

    "I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)

  3. Re:Good. by defaria · · Score: 5, Informative

    Already been done. Google DavMail. I use it everyday! It talks stupid Exchange protocols (BTW it's not Outlook protocols rather it's Exchange protocols) and converts them to industry standard protocols (like LDAP/CalDAV/SMTP/IMAP). This allows TB to connect to the Exchange server and everything just works.

  4. Re:Probably won't hurt anything......for now by vux984 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Why not use the web interface? Email is simple enough that in my experience there really isn't a lot that a native app can do that a good webmail interface can't.

    There are several things.

    #1 I like really advanced complex features like having multiple messages open simultaneously, the average web interface either doesn't support this or does it poorly.

    #2 I already have half a dozen browser windows and tabs open if not more. I -like- my email windows have a different title bar, a different icon in the task bar, etc. Having everything open via the web browser makes making sense of my open windows more of a hassle. Plus if i quit the mail program, all the mail windows close. Nice.

    #3 Hotkeys - yes some web interfaces have them, but its a mess.

    #4 Attachment handling - web clients are getting better but it still sucks, and its far worse if your internet connection is ever less than perfect.

    #5 Mass message handling... most web clients let you handle a page of email at a time.

    #6 Folders - yeah yeah... gmail has tags and they aren't bad either, but like being able to expand and collapse folders within folders within folders.

    On the subject of tags ...here's an interesting problem... migrate all your tagged mail from one gmail account to another one. This is painful as hell. I'm speaking as a Google Apps for Enterprises user here too... the paid version with phone support...

    Only way to do is via IMAP,... which treats tags as folders. So if you've got someone with 5GB of email who is really got into tagging, and every message is tagged 3 or 4 different ways, IMAP sees it as 40GB of email. Now fortunately google and imap are smart enough to check message IDs and as each "tag" item is downloaded via imap as a folder, and then pushed into the new account folder where gmail converts it back to a tagged item it doesn't create duplicates of the message which is great. But it does still have to process them all as if they were separate messages.

    Two small companies merged and two separate gmail accounts had to be consolidated...it took days. There was NO backend tool to do it "within the cloud", nope... every account had to be downloaded to a local workstation via IMAP and then pushed back up to the other account via imap... and every tagged item had to be evaluated separately for every tag on it...

    Google provides a "legacy mail migration tool" to allow new clients to migrate data from your old email system to the new one via IMAP... and this is the same tool you need to use to move mailboxes between two different gmail hosted domains... or to move mail from one mailbox to another one in general (e.g. when an employee quits... although I think there postini stuff comes into play here too... I haven't gotten that deep into it...)