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Mozilla Thunderbird Finally Makes Its Way Back Into Debian's Repos (softpedia.com)
prisoninmate quotes a report from Softpedia: A year ago, we told you that, after ten long years, the Debian Project finally found a way to switch their rebranded Iceweasel web browser back to Mozilla Firefox, both the ESR (Extended Support Release) and normal versions, but one question remained: what about the Mozilla Thunderbird email, news, and calendar client? Well, that question has an official answer today, as the Mozilla Thunderbird packages appear to have landed in the Debian repositories as a replacement for Icedove, the rebranded version that Debian Project was forced to use for more than ten years due to trademark issues. "Thunderbird is back in Debian! We also renamed other related packages to use official names, e.g. iceowl-extension -> lightning. For now, we need testers to catch existing issues and things we haven't seen until now," said Christoph Goehre in the mailing list announcement. You can find out how to migrate your Icedove profiles to Thunderbird via Softpedia's report.
Thunderbird functionality is now included in systemd.
I am the only person I know who uses a local email client, rather than gmail, and I run with a reasonably tech savvy crowd.
The idea of email that isn't used as profiling material for one of the biggest advertising companies on the planet appears to be dead. Along with it, as collateral damage, the idea of end-to-end encryption where the keys are yours rather than given to a large company for "safe keeping", and turned over to whichever government agency wants them today.
I think there are still some oldschool tech people like me out there, but if you randomly sampled the general population, I'd honestly be surprised if one person in a hundred was running their own email client rather than using a web interface to (most likely) gmail, or possibly some other similar web service. My anecdotally powered guess would be one in a thousand, maybe. Even small to mid sized companies are on gmail now.
Decentralization is dying. Centralization is winning.
For XUL and Npapi compatibillity puerposes.Debian should stand up to Mozilla and demand they don't cripple their software.
I thought Mozilla had stopped development on Thunderbird. If that's true, what's the advantage in haven't the Mozilla branded version? Not only why bother, but better to avoid it, because you can patch your own version.
Am I wrong, and is Mozilla actually doing some development, or at least bug fixing, on Thunderbird?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Mozilla isn't the only one who develops Thunderbird. It does also happen to be one of the most used open source applications in the world.
I am the only person I know who uses a local email client, rather than gmail, and I run with a reasonably tech savvy crowd.
Pretty much everyone I work with (ie clients) use outlook. The lowest people on the totem pole (e.g. retail store staff -- people who do not spend much time on the computer) are using gmail apps for work, or outlook online through office 365 -- but everyone in even routine admin positions on up through management is on outlook as part of office 365 or with the google apps connector.
Pretty much everyone i know 'socially' has email on their phone (ie via an app); and may use webmail or outlook depending if they have outlook. (Office Home edition doesn't come with it.)
Lots of people I know still use ISP mail as well via webmail, outlook, or their phone or some combination.
I personally have 2 mailboxes on outlook for office 365, and 2 more in IMAP on thunderbird (one ISP, and one hosted IMAP).
The issue as I see it, isn't so much that the 'local email client is dying' because its that POP/IMAP is dying. And that's not really a suprise... POP is outdated and inadequate in this connected world of devices and tablets and computers with everything in sync. And IMAP works... but is poor cousin to googleapps or outlook/exchange/activesync due to not handling contacts or calendars etc.
Meanwhile ISP mail is on the downtrend for a several reasons -- ... servers, ports, ssl? tls? imap or pop? where's the easy button?
- as people (intelligently) are realizing that being tied to an isp mailbox ties them to an ISP
- 2nd because ISP mail frequently has irritating limits like nothing working but the webclient unless you were actually connected to their network, or receiving works but not sending etc etc;
- 3rd it often has small mailbox sizes,
- 4th its anti-spam capabilities tend to suck compared to the big providers.
- 5th its harder to setup the client
I'd honestly be surprised if one person in a hundred was running their own email client rather than using a web interface to (most likely) gmail, or possibly some other similar web service
Maybe, but only if you only sampled home users AND didn't count using apps on their phones and tablets.
Decentralization is dying. Centralization is winning.
Yes..but that's a separate issue completely from clients vs web-based.
Centralization of servers is winning because google and microsoft have pretty compelling products --- for the business (office 365 and google apps for enterprises). And its compelling for the home user too ... for free. Hosting your own email server is a right PITA and more work than its probably worth and far beyond average joe... and not worth the trouble even to most techies (been there done that). And some little hosting company offering 10 x 500MB mailboxes that only support POP/IMAP ... for $60/year that's harder to setup, gets more spam, search doesn't work as well, and fills up too quickly... that's not terribly compelling either. (Although that is what I'm currently using for my personal domain...but i recognize its shortcomings and can't give many solid reasons to do it compared to using google or microsoft.)
And all that's left is the privacy-centric mail services, but those cost even more... $60/year per mailbox instead of $60 per year for 10 of them... and really only truly appeal to people who really prioritize privacy.
I am the only person I know who uses a local email client, rather than gmail, and I run with a reasonably tech savvy crowd.
Strange, I don't know a single person who uses a shitty webmail client rather than something local (did you know you can use gmail via IMAP?), and I run both with tech savvy and non-savvy crowds. The latter required a family member or a an IT guy (home/work respectively), who installed them something user-friendly like Thunderbird, rather than Windows Live Mail or whatever Outlook is called this week.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
So I can get rid of gmail's cumbersome UI and that thing that replaced their old compose dialog.
No apologies
The IMAP spec hasn't changed in forever. Thunderbird just works. Why change it?
Thunderbird is their drink of choice.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Yawn.
Nope, won't do it. And sure as hell won't do it as long as I run my own IMAP server.
Ooooh! Lets talk privacy! My personal email will be hosted by me. Period. Lots o' them encryption acronyms, updated frequently. The company (huge) I work for manages email internally. Those guys are the sharpest people I know and damned good at what they do. So, explain why would I ever use as web client for private email?
I am still using kmail. It works fine, for the most part. I can GPG encrypt and decrypt emails, but it fails if I try to GPG sign an email. Before kmail, I used pine, and it was pretty easy to drag my pine emails into a kmail archive folder.
A dingo ate my sig...
>"I thought Mozilla had stopped development on Thunderbird.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Stable release 45.7.1 (February 7, 2017; 10 days ago[1]) [±]
The article and it's related items are not really discussing the details of the trademark choice. It sounds like Debian got an exception rather than Mozilla changing their policies. They probably just got a pass because it's a popular distro of a popular operating system.
For those of us who have to ship an unbranded firefox, this doesn't really help much.
Yea- I'm not using a centralized provider either. I have a small company (about 10 people) and we've had our own email server since 2006 with a few upgrades over the years. It's not that big of a deal, but I would like to ship a product (my company sells computers and accessories) that simplifies this for the masses. Something that just plugs into the network and auto-configures ideally. Some work is being done to this extent, but it's not ready for prime time yet. And the whole search sucks thing is probably got a limited amount of truth to it. It's most likely that the time out on the web server software isn't set right. With a self-host auto-configured device a lot of these issues could go away. Email just isn't that sexy and very few people are working on that perfectly automated solution. Those that are aren't doing it perfectly either. I'm hoping my company can eventually rip apart some of these peoples work on a new hardware and software base for an improved freedom/privacy angle (and unlike most we actually do give back significantly to the community and upstream projects)
This is a good question- its one I had myself after I had been using only Thunderbird for about a decade. Then I changed platforms and used some other clients, and recently came back to Thunderbird because my main machine died. I have to say that Thunderbird need work. Two items I noticed:
1) proper threading. Lets face it, the gmail "chat style" presentation is actually very good compared with digging through "sent" or separate mboxes
2) better integration with calendar/reminders/todos
Thunderbird is still a good client, and it is particularly good at fine-grained control (compare the number of available settings with the number in the Win10 mail client- the latter looks like a toy). However, it can be improved and brought up to date with new ideas that are now common currency in mail clients.
While Mozilla isn't the only one who develops it, Mozilla is in the process of requiring the Thunderbird project to be spun out and rely on its own infrastructure and funding. I know because I interviewed with Magnus and Jörg for the consulting project to setup the infrastructure.
Twitter post announcing the position: https://twitter.com/pascalchev...
Actual job posting: http://www.garysguide.com/jobs... (mirror, Mozilla has already removed it from their site)
Mailing list post from Gervase announcing the split: https://lwn.net/Articles/68506...
I thought Mozilla had stopped development on Thunderbird.
They tried that one on, and learned that the TBird user community is much bigger and relies on it much more than anybody imagined. And that it is more representative of reality than some other wild-eyed adventures such as Mozilla-branded handsets.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I am still using kmail. It works fine, for the most part. I can GPG encrypt and decrypt emails, but it fails if I try to GPG sign an email. Before kmail, I used pine, and it was pretty easy to drag my pine emails into a kmail archive folder.
I am still using kmail. It works fine...
OMG, surely you don't mean Kmail 2 with its crappy database backend (mysql by default!), loaded with races and inconsistencies that you are 100% guaranteed to hit if you put any kind of load on it, and which contributed absolutely no new functionaly, only killer bugs? I used to love Kmail as a preeminent example of the fine work that open source development can do, until some insane incompetent became the project lead. I tried to tough it out for years, but basically, just lost my ability to handle email effectively, until I finally gave up and threw it away forever in favor of Thunderbird and Trojita, a promising new project that seems to be everything that Kmail is not in terms of precision, as opposed to the amateurish "vision" that sunk Kmail.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I am the only person I know who uses a local email client.
And I'm the only person I know who uses a MUA that doesn't speak any network protocols.
I too run a local email client.
In fact, I run pine (well, alpine). Yep, text based email.
Everyone I work with thinks I'm crazy. For me, it's what I need and I have used it for a long time.
For a few years back in the mid 2000s I ran Thunderbird, but it was still too heavy. And I couldn't get to my mail if I was elsewhere very easily.
I do have a few emails, and pull them into my local account with fetchmail. I can ssh in from work or elsewhere (even mobile) and check it. This means that I don't have to pull my mail into my work computer, or use webmail, which I really don't like. Attachments or URLs in an email are simple if I am at home, and can be a little problematic if I am remote. But it's a good tradeoff for blazing speed and simplicity. Archive off by month, I can grep my history quickly.
I know I am probably in a very remote few people who still use this, especially as my primary email. But I love it. Sorry Thunderbird.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
What I find annoying is how careless non-USgovernment institutions are about data collection by the US. Almost all of my colleagues use gmail and many of them use Google calendar, even though these services are known to be scanned by Google and disseminated to US authorities on request and under laws that are plain incompatible with our own laws. I'm pretty sure that's illegal where I live, yet nobody cares. In times of an official "America first" policy and known abuses of data gathering by US authorities, this is totally irresponsible.
Note that I'm talking about using US services for government work. No problem with using them privately, of course.
> I am the only person I know who uses a local email client, rather than gmail
Local email client is just a client for service. You know that you can use gmail with your local email client right? Gmail on the other hand is an ISP - exactly the same as in old days of using email client software. It is just like that today people prefer to use webmail over dedicated client. Well in fact they prefer to use their mobile email client (usually GMail) but still...
> The idea of email that isn't used as profiling material for one of the biggest
> advertising companies on the planet appears to be dead.
I doesn't. You can get email from like hundreds of other ISPs and it tends to work. Hell - you can even run your own email server!
> Along with it, as collateral damage, the idea of end-to-end encryption
WTF are you talking about? You can use GMail with end-to-end encryption. Just enable IMAP access and use whatever encryption scheme and whatever client you like...
Thunderbird is barely usable. It has 10 y.o. bugs making it crash and corrupt local database. It also has 5 y.o. bugs related to handling IMAP protocol and headers.
For open-source email client I don't see any need to use Thunderbid anymore. Need to run your own email service? Use open source server software and decent open source webmail client plus open source mobile client. Thunderbird? No thanks.
Good security can be only achieved if you store your data off-line, encrypted with a strong password. Also you should keep your computer free of viruses and keep it secure 24 hours a day.
If you want a “secure” Thunderbird, use a portable version, inside a TrueCrypt or VeraCrypt volume.
Or you can use Bersoft Private Mail or The Bat, which encrypts all stored email securely, besides handling encrypted email communication.
If you want easy access between different devices, and other fancy features, you better forget about security.
Real businesses want email that is both not scanned by [advertising company] and is under their domain. There are a number of email hosting companies around that do a fine job running email servers. Also, the Microsoft email services seem quite popular, though I do not sell these and don't ever plan on it. Email is just becoming a basic service like phone/electricity/water/sewer/etc... It just doesn't have any marketing zing and takes some technological experience to run, debug and support.
But, I can tell you for a fact, that even though many people use Gmail, normal email is alive and well, and it's useful, even if it is not gmail.
Unfortunately the version added to Debian main will be 7.0 while version 8.0 remains in unstable for the next 2 years