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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.
[Mozilla needs to be forked again] For XUL and Npapi compatibillity puerposes.[sic]
Mozilla is already forked for exactly this reason. But please read the WebExtensions FAQ before telling us again what you don't know about how and why Mozilla foundation intends to replace those previous-century APIs with something modern that benefits from an additional decade of experience with, among other things, security, privacy and performance issues. And maybe think about a thank you for opening the process up to public debate nice and early.
One point I would suggest paying particular attention to: Will I be able to do everything I can in a legacy technology? The answer is no. The details of that no are awfully important. This is for sure a place where educated feedback would be useful and most probably well received.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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.