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Mozilla Seeks New Home For Email Client Thunderbird
Reader chefmonkey writes: In a report commissioned by Mozilla to explore the next home for Thunderbird, two potential new hosts have been offered: the Software Freedom Conservancy (host to git, boost, QEMU, and a host of other projects) and The Document Foundation (home of LibreOffice). At the same time, the report discusses completely uncoupling Thunderbird from the rest of the Mozilla codebase and bringing in a dedicated technical architect to chart the software's roadmap.
Given that the two named organizations are already on board with taking Thunderbird under their wing, is this a new lease on life for the email program Mozilla put out to pasture four years ago?In December last year, Mozilla Foundation chairperson Mitchell Baker had argued that the organization should disentangle itself from the Thunderbird email client in order to focus on Firefox. It appears the Firefox-maker is all set to part ways with Thunderbird.
Given that the two named organizations are already on board with taking Thunderbird under their wing, is this a new lease on life for the email program Mozilla put out to pasture four years ago?In December last year, Mozilla Foundation chairperson Mitchell Baker had argued that the organization should disentangle itself from the Thunderbird email client in order to focus on Firefox. It appears the Firefox-maker is all set to part ways with Thunderbird.
One major advantage is that Firefox for Android allows ad-blockers. Chrome doesn't.
And yes, I know desktop Chrome allows ad-blockers. But there is a value in having both desktop and mobile in sync therefore I use Firefox on both.
Palemoon is a thing that exists. If you're a Windows user, it's clearly the best way forward for those seeking refuge from Mozilla's mismanagement.
I'm not sure what Thunderbird needs. As far as I can tell, it's fine. It's not buggy and all the features I want to use work. Other than security fixes, what more do I want out of a mature mail client?
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
I know there's a lot of Firefox-hate at the moment (with some good reason), but I use Firefox as my web-browser of choice on Android. Why? Adblock. No other mobile browser has add-ons like Firefox. And the ability to block ads really speeds up the browser compared to Chrome in any real-world situation.
It is a surprise. There are numerous browsers, but few (non-web) email clients. It's pretty much just Outlook.
Seems they have chosen to compete in the saturated browser market, rather than the email client market that has little-to-no competition, and is ripe for a new product that would help every business efficiently manage their day-to-day tasks.
WTF? I've been a happy t-bird usere since practically day one. I'd be curious to know what other unix/linux users are using for mail clients on the desktop. No, I don't do the web-mail thing and i'm not about to start.
C|N>K
How about go fuck yourself. Thunderbird is an excellent email client. Just because you happen to you gmail through a webpage or some horrid MS client doesn't mean it's not useful to someone else, moron.
Just because you don't do something doesn't mean that no one does. It turns out that many other people are not a copy of you.
I use Thunderbird because I prefer POP to IMAP when available. I don't need others snooping my email. But ignoring that Thunderbird is simply the best way to manage multiple email accounts.
Yes. I use Thunderbird at home and have used it for many years. It works, i.e., it allows me to send and receive e-mail, and doesn't seem to be terribly buggy. What more do you need?
There's very little maintenance or development that needs to be done. Which is probably why Mozilla is in a hurry to get rid of it. They can't figure out a way to fuck it up like they did Firefox.
Or let it be Libre?
Lightning has been integrated into Thunderbird for some time now.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
On gnome, evolution had a tight integration with the DE. But lack of maintenance made it a pain to keep using it. I'm not sure of the current state of the project.
I haven't used Thunderbird for a few years, but... it always seemed to me to be the best IMAP client out there - doubly so if you had more than one IMAP email account, which has been the case for me.
But while Mozilla hasn't mucked up Thunderbird to the same degree they have Firefox, a couple years back I decided to cut ties with any and all Mozilla products because of all Mozilla's little political and philosophical dramas.
#DeleteChrome
And Lightning is buggy, prone to crashes, and scarfs up resources over time. It's horrific. I've tried it many times, on many platforms, and never had any success except, oddly, Mint. I think it was Mint? It came with Thunderbird and was pre-installed. That one worked just fine. I'm not about to switch my OS just to have an email client with built-in calendaring.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Web mail interfaces are only really good for quick responses, horrible in a phone screen.
If you want to write a really nicely formatted email you use a client.
IMAP keeps all clients sync'ed so what ever you do on one is the same on the others.
So if Mozilla gets rid of Thunderbird completely, what software will they have left that has actual users?
Firefox is the obvious one, but its users are fleeing left and right. The latest stats show Firefox is down to about 7% of the market on all platforms, across all versions.
Firefox for Android is basically not used at all. It's at 0.4% of the market. Yes, that's less than half of 1%!
Seamonkey probably has seen much less use than even Firefox for Android.
Firefox OS has probably seen much less use than even Seamonkey.
Persona never got anywhere at all.
Bugzilla is ancient tech, only used by legacy users.
Servo is a joke. Even for an "experimental" rendering engine, it's damn near useless.
Rust is nothing but hype. Its only major user so far has been Mozilla, and some high schoolers who tried it out on a weekend and put their mostly-incomplete libraries on GitHub to rot.
So with Thunderbird out of the picture, and their other software seeing minimal to no use, Mozilla will pretty much have no user base once the remaining Firefox users flee.
How do they expect to get lucrative search details when next to nobody is using their products?
How do they propose to survive as an organization with limited incoming funds?
People are using email clients all the time, that email client on your phone is using imap to communicate to your mail storage on gmail. I see very few people using their phone's browser to login to the mobile version of any webmail. I see phone specific native clients in wide use. Gmail's webclient is very good, but for certain use cases a dedicated client works better. And since gmail provides standard imap access, thunderbird works with it just fine.
Email client software is far from dead, and it would be nice to keep thunderbird alive.
Compared to gmail accessed via web, email clients offer slower startup,
In which world?
higher bug count
I'd suppose it depends which ones are you comparing.
inferior search tools
That might well be, it's not a feature I use much.
A crazily confusing configuration burden
It's clear that you are about 10 years past using email clients. You'll be happy to know that nowadays, just giving your address usually autoconfigure server options.
, create a deep disincentive to access email from any machine but your own,
True, but that I consider an advantage, except sometimes. For these sometimes, there is the smartphone. Also, a thing colled Thunderbird portable, where you can have your email in an USB stick that you carry with you, may be useful.
The rest of the rambling I don't fully comprehend. But I'll now state my dislikes of web based clients.
- Lack of autonomy. They depend on you being online. They mostly need a fast connection.
- Lack of control. They change the interface when they feel like it, and there is nothing you can do about it.
- Lack of space. Granted, the space limits are ample, but they are never enough. Not for me, at least.
- Lack of freedom. You are forced to use the mail address that they allow you, or pay for the privilege. If you want to change providers it's not easy to transfer all you messages to the new one.
- Lack of privacy. All your data, your contacts, everything is stored in the same place, for every interested party to peruse at will.
- Lack of flexibility. If you want to use several addresses from different providers, you are mostly toast.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Mutt under Linux (often via ssh or Putty). Some things just work well.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The problem is that many of the emails people get these days are formatted using HTML. So you need a decent browser engine in order to show many e-mails.
You might argue you do not need HTML in e-mails, that the message is the important thing. However, that is a discussion for another time, like ten years ago.
You must be happy to get all these replies.
Thunderbird is about the only full featured mail client available.
On top of that it's available on Windows and Linux and it works quite well, regretfully and strange enough there is still no Android client.
Kmail is another nice mail client for Linux users.
I would use it but for the impossibility to select which senders are allowed html.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
You're mad.
A local copy of your mail is the only reliable and fast way to access and especially organise mail, even more so for multiple accounts.
Webmail is nice for occasional use on a borrowed computer, for the rest it is a joke.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
They need to just integrate some of the already available cloud calendars.
Why would I want to share the details of where I'm going and who I'm seeing with anyone else?
A client-based calendar is exactly what I want. The only thing better would be a trivially installed calendar server I can host on my own systems with negligible effort, so multiple devices could more easily share the same details.
If I didn't want that sort of independence and control, for both calendar and mail, why would I still be using a product like Thunderbird in the first place?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
You must be new here. Beware: Dangers lurk beneath the surface and certain words should not be uttered lightly.
Everything is a clone of Mosaic, if you want to get technical.
I have Firefox and Chrome installed. For no objective reason whatsoever, I prefer Firefox. Don't know why. But I just like Firefox better.
Out of all the browsers, I like Gnome Web the best right now. If uBlock Origin worked with it, and it had good KeePass integration, I'd switch over permanently.
This might be a good fit.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, have a look at FossaMail. Forked from Thunderbird by the Pale Moon devs. Pretty much indistinguishable from Thunderbird. Download via FossaMail.org, install, (in Linux it's just an unzip-and-move process), copy the contents of your profile folder over, and you're up and running.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
It is unsafe to view HTML emails from unknown sources.
They can't figure out a way to fuck it up like they did Firefox.
To be fair to Mozilla, they watched Chrome usage sky-rocket with its someone horrid user interface so it probably made some sense to replicate it.
Seems like there's been an awful lot of hate exploding against the Mozilla folks lately, and it seems that a lot of it is politically motivated. Politics aside, there have certainly been missteps, but Firefox has worked well and I don't have much to complain about. I'm not especially happy about the recent bloat (I've never once used Pocket, for instance), but at least it has stayed out of my way.
Well, what do I switch to, then, haters? Do you have a better solution? I need a browser that offers this:
* A rich selection of add-ons (adblock and script controls are security features these days, and there are other useful extensions I use)
* Cross-platform (I use Windows, Linux desktops, and Android)
* Open source (even if I never have occasion to build or modify the browser, I want to be able to)
* Address bar is separate from the search bar (when I type in an intranet URL, I don't want a search query going out, FFS)
* Performs well enough for me (I've never seen the horrible performance that some people allege)
If someone comes up with something significantly better and offers all of the above, I'd consider giving it a try, but for now I'll stick with Firefox.
As for Thunderbird, I'm glad to see it being picked up... yes it works, but there are a few things that have long needed fixing (like the mystery progress bar on IMAP accounts).
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Keep in mind, The Foundation set up a whole sister company to Mozilla Corp., called Mozilla Messaging, to work on Thunderbird. They even got a nice office in Vancouver. But then David Asher, the Messaging CEO, and several other engineers just decided they'd rather work on something else. The decided to run a Lab, without telling the actual Mozilla Labs, until they released something.
Moreover, until TBird was officially booted, the 4-5 employees who were really dedicated to TBird (like standard8), were at the mercy of the Browser engineers to fix Gecko bugs. Browser engineer are brilliant, but basically dicks. They ignored Thunderbird, and they also trash talked the Services group, when things like FF Sync were being developed.
Then of course the Boot2Gecko project spawned out of nowhere with Andreas' post, and the new corporate heads decided to "streamline." They had hired a lot of business folk, including the new CEO, and they were all about handy-wavy visions and cohesive narratives encompassing everything Mozilla does. Tbird just didn't fit that narrative, despite its success and user base.
You're citing two e-mail clients that have the same origin.
I am aware of that, I used Sylpheed before moving to Sylpheed-Claws. I also know that OTHER e-mail clients also have proper threading, though I'm not as familiar with them these days as I am with Claws-mail. IIRC most 'nix clients do, I'm know Kmail and Thunderbird do.
Webmail interfaces that support a threaded display are a rarity.
Hmmph, thats another reason why people should user a proper client and not their web browser. Gmail does have a "Conversation view", I don't know about Yahoo.