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Mozilla May Separate Itself From Thunderbird Email Client (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A company-wide memo distributed throughout the Mozilla Foundation by chairperson Mitchell Baker argues that the organization should disentangle itself from the Thunderbird email client in order to focus on Firefox. She said, "Today Thunderbird developers spend much of their time responding to changes made in core Mozilla systems and technologies. At the same time, build, Firefox, and platform engineers continue to pay a tax to support Thunderbird." Both projects are wasting time helping each other, and those demands are only going to get worse. She says many within Mozilla want to see it support community-managed projects without doing the bulk of the work on it, and perhaps Thunderbird could be one of those projects. Baker stresses that no decisions have been made yet — they're starting the conversation early to keep the community involved in what happens to Thunderbird.
Thunderbird is a separate binary package from Firefox. It's not an Add-On. Sure, it uses XUL and the same underlying code. But, it's not like the old days with the whole Mozilla Communicator suite which included Browser, E-mail, Instant Messaging, etc. etc. etc... which was something akin to what their parent company (at the time) AOL was doing with their all-in-one client.
They want to murder XUL, because they think XUL is outdated and HTML5 is the best of the world, and implementing a small layer for servo will be too complicated and too big of a project to do it, so now they are "cutting the cords". First they announced that add-ons can't use XUL, then they killed xulrunner (which got not that much media attention), and now they want to get rid of thunderbird too. All because they think XUL is a bad technology and its all doable by HTML5 and javascript these days. Totally fogetting that HTML + js just needs a huge overhead to get native looking UI dialogs, and that XUL had tons of APIs accessible from javascript, all not accessible from the HTML platform.
What SRemick said.
AFAICT, the only people who like using webmail are people who don't actually rely on email.
Nobody can do this (yet) with a lame webmail client, nor even very well with Apple Mail nor Outlook:
- Manage six or more email accounts, with hundreds of mailbox folders
- Run rules or scripts automatically shuffling low-priority mail into those folders like discussion mailing lists, server error messages, and assorted bulk email that you personally don't classify as spam
- Receive mail in one inbox, and reply to extended threads with quotes from another
I won't even touch on digital signing and encryption.
Then there's the whole bit about who owns and have access to your email. I haven't personally read all of the fine print in Google's, Apple's, nor Microsoft's email service terms-of-service documents, but I suspect you're not guaranteed anywhere near the meager protection your money gets in a checking account.
What other cross-platform options are there? Nobody seems to be making any suggestions.
Nope - I use it extensively. As someone who gets emails on many different channels depending on who is sending them I want an offline aggregator. And no - I don't want to delegate that to Google.
I'd happily try any other multi-platform solution to this but so far Thunderbird, despite its limitations, is the best I've found. I'm open to argument though.
Option browser.urlbar.trimURLs in about:config, set it to false.
There's extensions for that, Lightning for CalDav and SOGo for CardDav.
FossaMail is a fork of Thunderbird made by the Pale Moon guys.
You are using Pale Moon instead of Firefox, aren't you?