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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.
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.
Lightning has been integrated into Thunderbird for some time now.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
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.
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.
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.
This might be a good fit.
Try out Sylpheed.
It's available for about any operating system. I first started using it when I was running NetBSD on the desktop. The code is packaged for any freenix out there, and there's also a Windows binary.
It is unsafe to view HTML emails from unknown sources.
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.