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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.
1 - What does "end of life" mean in this context?
Nothing.
It is a mature (pretty) full-featured email client with a plugin architecture which is good enough.
2 - Lack of development.
See point #1
An ever changing system is an unstable system
The fact they do not require frequent updates, is maybe a good thing. Loook at Firefox. look at the bloat that has become.
SMTP /POP/ IMAP is just that, it has been defined years ago.
Any admin will tell you, a stable system does not need to be baby sitted or changed often. A stable system is just that. Stable, that includes the code.
I don't see any lack of development in Thunderbird (38.4 came out not that long ago), and I don't see any indication of it going EOL either. There isn't a lot of core development in the email part because as an email client it's pretty much feature-complete and open-source projects rarely make changes to stuff that's working well. Much of the work's been going on in extensions, and IMO that's a good thing because it makes it easier to concentrate on one piece of functionality at a time and if there's a problem with an extension you can disable it until it's fixed without losing all of TB at the same time.
I see no reason to stop using it right now. I'm not going to upset the client end of my email unless and until TB stops receiving security updates and bugfixes in a timely manner or someone comes up with a replacement for SMTP/IMAP that I find compelling and that TB won't be updated to support.
If you think webmail is an acceptable solution, you dont really use email, you use instant messenger.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
You seem to be one of the younger crowd who doesn't even understand why you should store your mail locally instead of counting on somebody else to keep it backed up (the "cloud"). Good luck using multiple clients with one local datastore.
I use thunderbird as well, and multiple email accounts. I also use the web clients you mention. What Thunderbird gives me, is a single place for all my email accounts and emails I have received from all of them. If I delete an email from gmail, and Thunderbird downloaded it, it stays in there. It is like a big archive for all my email and a central repository to go to for searching across all email accounts (it is easy to forget which account you dealt with a subject on). My iPhone mail app is unable to look back very far, and each gmail account can only look at itself via the website, so this searching through all my emails comes in pretty handy.
Mutt rules!
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
If you are just looking for a better Thunderbird, no such thing exists, so you can forget about it. There are other clients which may or may not be better than Thunderbird but change (even to something objectively better) will come with trade-offs (you'll immediately lose support for Thunderbird extensions, for example).
That said, the most straight-forward suggestion here (and the one I suspect you will get other than jokes) is to use a web-based email system like gmail. It just works and requires 0 maintenance from your part.
Personally, I use Thunderbird, and will continue to use it until it starts falling apart. It works well enough, and I don't care about e-mail that much to try to change right now.
The problem with Firefox isn't that there's change.
The problem with Firefox is that the changes are fucking idiotic. We aren't talking about one or two bad ones now and then. Far too many of the changes to Firefox are dumb, dumb, dumb!
Those are the kinds of changes that are unwanted, because they cause problems for users.
But users still want positive change.
They want bug fixes. They want performance improvements. They want support for new features and functionality that they desire.
This is another area where Firefox devs fuck up. They rarely make changes that the Firefox users actually want!
Firefox's approach to change is upside down. Firefox typically includes lots of unwanted changes, with very few wanted changes. That's what drives users away, sending Firefox's share of the market from the mid-30% range down to single-digits.
It should be the other way around. Firefox should include lots of wanted changes, and few to no unwanted changes. That would drive Firefox's share of the market up, as existing users would not leave, and new users would use it to get access to the new changes that they want to use.
Why do people constantly suggest a web console as a replacement to a native application? When you use gmail, the browser gets in the way, there is lag, you have to do things in an HTMLy way.... Web services are far more clumsy, and if I'm deaiing with hundreds of emails it's really nice to not have all those obstacles. Owning your emails is nice too.... my wife lost the last emails that her father sent to her because Microsoft decided she wasn't using her account enough.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Getting PGP encryption working on a gmail account is a nightmare.
I read the internet for the articles.
Keep an IMAP client synced. There, now you have local backup.
Man, I freaking hate these "Ask Slashdot" questions that people give wonderfully unhelpful answers like, "use webmail", "use the built-in Microsoft client", and "no development, no problem!"
I have been trying to get rid of Thunderbird for a while now. Every time, instead of saying, "Oh, you should try this client", they come up with brilliant responses like the above. Webmail, seriously? The built-in MS client, really? Why do you need to change, really? Thunderbird is slow as a dog on Windows 8. Yeah, seeing as it's 2015, a text email client isn't an option. All of you who are still on text Linux - I salute you. Now utilize your brain the size of a planet to tell me what the graphical, performance-based, non-bloat email client of today is. Like the man asked.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
We've lost the arms race for content over presentation in this medium. Pages with perhaps a kilobyte of text take over a megabyte to download and 10 seconds to render. Firefox is mortally wounded. Safari and Opera are hobbled. Chrome is a trojan horse.
Guys, I think the Gopher people were right.
According to which RFC is it forbidden to send HTML-only emails?
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