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Replacement For Mozilla Thunderbird?
maxcelcat writes: I've used Thunderbird for about a decade, and Netscape Mail before that (I have an email from 1998 from Marc Andreessen, welcoming me to Netscape Email, telling me different fonts can add impact to my emails). Thunderbird has served me well, but it's getting long in the tooth. Given the lack of development and the possibility that it's going End of Life, what should I use instead? I have multiple email accounts and an archive of sixteen years of email. I could get a copy of Outlook, but I don't like it.
Things I like about Thunderbird: Supports multiple email accounts; simple interface; storage structure is not one monolithic file; plain text email editor; filtering. Things I don't like: HTML email editor; folders are hard to change and re-arrange.
Things I like about Thunderbird: Supports multiple email accounts; simple interface; storage structure is not one monolithic file; plain text email editor; filtering. Things I don't like: HTML email editor; folders are hard to change and re-arrange.
Claws Mail is a good option. It might not have all the features that Thunderbird does, but the important things are that it's FLOSS, supports encryption, and "just works".
Alternatively, just use webmail. These are the best options: https://www.privacytools.io/#e...
Windows Live Mail is a surprisingly feature-rich and lightweight free mail client for Windows. I used it for several years before switching permanently to webmail. It's written by Microsoft and supports multiple mailboxes. It may even import your mail history depending on your export options.
http://windows.microsoft.com/e...
Mozilla is just going to stop supporting it. From the original announcement, basically Thunderbird has its own development group that has diverged from the Firefox clan enough that it doesn't make sense for Mozilla to keep adapting to it. Thunderbird development won't stop, and works fine. No need to switch.
I love Gnus[1] and have used it for years. However 2016 may not be the year of Gnus on the desktop.
[1] It does everything the article asks for: plain text composition, multiple feeds/accounts, filtering, not one monolithic file, folder flexibility, ease-of-use ... oh, wait. Hold the phone on that last one. There is, um, a learning curve.
A project can only be considered "open source" if anyone can push changes to its code repo without any oversight at all.
What the heck are you talking about? You want the Wikipedia version of "open source," the source that anyone can edit? No thanks -- that's asking for trouble. I'll be stuck getting "patches" by random vandals.
The correct term in that case is "source-available", not "open source".
Most of what are typically called "open source" software projects aren't open at all.
No, the well-established definition of "open source" (as even Wikipedia can tell you) is that the source or design for something is publicly available and can be edited/modified freely by end users.
It simply means the source is "open" (i.e., available to see and edit), as opposed to "closed" (i.e., unavailable and buried in a proprietary binary or something).
There is typically a small group of maintainers who control all changes, even if anyone can see the source and submit patches.
And I'm generally grateful for that. Those maintainers serve to check the changes and ensure they might actually improve the product, rather than being detrimental to it.
I, and most others, can't commit directly to the Thunderbird source repo
You got a problem with that? You don't think the direction of the project is going in the right way? That's fine -- FORK. That's what open source allows.
I'll be the first one to admit that there are plenty of projects where I've heard of overbearing or wacko maintainers who have weird ideas about what the project should or shouldn't do. Those people can be a problem, and they can hold things back.
But if that's so much of a problem as to significantly degrade the quality, then you shouldn't be the only one complaining -- so team up and fork. If people like what you're doing better, they'll go with you.
Maintainers with too much power can definitely be a problem. And, from what I hear, there can be a lot of dysfunction in the open-source community at times. Maybe widening the pool of active participants and decentralizing power could be useful in many projects. But I *really* don't think the solution is to allow *anyone* to make changes without *any* oversight. That sounds like a recipe for disaster.
I think you've got it backwards.
It's not that Google "deals with tags" in some new and novel way, it's that the underlying protocol, IMAP, has no support for any such concept at all. IMAP just has folders and the unstated assumption is that a given piece of mail is only ever in one folder. However, Google made tags look like folders to IMAP clients, but of course, they are not actually folders.
Thunderbird isn't approaching end of life. If anything, it is about to open up. The TB developers were frustrated by having to maintain compatibility with Firefox technologies that don't really apply to TB. They, the developers, were the ones who suggested Mozilla let them go to another entity. This isn't about finding a replacement for a dieing Thunderbird, but for Thunderbird being able to chart its own direction free from Firefox influence.
This is a good thing, a very good thing!
1521.
Gmail has one of the most broken IMAP implementations out there. I don't want 50 copies of each e-mail draft in my web mail interface cause Google can't fucking implement IMAP.