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Email Client Thunderbird To Stay With The Mozilla Foundation, Sort Of (mozilla.org)
Philipp Kewisch, writing for Mozilla: The investigations on Thunderbird's future home have concluded. The Mozilla Foundation has agreed to serve as the legal and fiscal home for the Thunderbird project, but Thunderbird will migrate off Mozilla Corporation infrastructure, separating the operational aspects of the project. [...] The Mozilla Foundation has agreed to continue as Thunderbird's legal, fiscal and cultural home, with the following provisos:
1. The Thunderbird Council (see footnote) and the Mozilla Foundation executive team maintain a good working relationship and make decisions in a timely manner.
2. The Thunderbird Council and the team make meaningful progress in short order on operational and technical independence from Mozilla Corporation.
3. Either side may give the other six months notice if they wish to discontinue the Mozilla Foundation's role as the legal and fiscal host of the Thunderbird project. In a conversation with Slashdot, a spokesperson of Mozilla acknowledged that the general sentiment is "Thunderbird code needs to be modernized and the dependencies on the Mozilla code framework need to be reduced. This may include re-implementing or migrating features to make better use of web technologies."
(Footnote: Back in 2012, Mozilla announced that it would reallocate most of the paid project members to other projects, handing off the responsibility for the project to the volunteer community that had formed around Thunderbird. This group met in Toronto in 2014 to discuss the future of Thunderbird and formed the Thunderbird Council, a group of individuals that has the power to make business decisions going forward.)
1. The Thunderbird Council (see footnote) and the Mozilla Foundation executive team maintain a good working relationship and make decisions in a timely manner.
2. The Thunderbird Council and the team make meaningful progress in short order on operational and technical independence from Mozilla Corporation.
3. Either side may give the other six months notice if they wish to discontinue the Mozilla Foundation's role as the legal and fiscal host of the Thunderbird project. In a conversation with Slashdot, a spokesperson of Mozilla acknowledged that the general sentiment is "Thunderbird code needs to be modernized and the dependencies on the Mozilla code framework need to be reduced. This may include re-implementing or migrating features to make better use of web technologies."
(Footnote: Back in 2012, Mozilla announced that it would reallocate most of the paid project members to other projects, handing off the responsibility for the project to the volunteer community that had formed around Thunderbird. This group met in Toronto in 2014 to discuss the future of Thunderbird and formed the Thunderbird Council, a group of individuals that has the power to make business decisions going forward.)
Thunderbird is the best of a bad bunch, but it hasn't improved in ten years -- and it needs improvement.
Firefox is dead at this point. It can't even compete with Chrome and what does Chrome offer exactly? Multicore tabs so CSS and javascript can bring even i7's to their knees. Great.
My desktop feels like it's been standing still for the last ten years, where it hasn't been going backwards. This is across OSes, applications, windows managers and fricken monitor resolutions come to think of it. And suddenly wepages have iframes again. Tablets were a mistake.
That Mozilla will fix Thunderbird to connect to my iCloud account? That stopped working several months ago and I haven't found a fix for it.. I've had no problems accessing my dozen other email accounts, but none of those are iCloud accounts.
KMail? meh...
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
The wonderful thing about SJWare is that it is equally shit for everyone.
I doubt it will happen now considering that Thunderbird has been in a no-new-features mode for years, but it's a shame they never got around to creating Thunderbird on Android. They've had Firefox on Android for ages and it does share some of the core code with Thunderbird (on the desktop version at least), so they wouldn't be starting from scratch on Android.
TRIGGRD!!
Sylpheed is the preferred open source email client.
...re-implementing or migrating features to make better use of web technologies
This has started alarm bells ringing in my head...
Rusty :P
What's that mean?
Thunderbird is a MAIL client. It deals with POP3, IMAP, SMTP. I already have a web browser. For security reasons I don't want a web browser anywhere near my email.
The "latest web technologies" on the web are a clusterfuck of security and privacy problems. They don't belong anywhere near email.
Remember when "this is an email virus" was circulated as a joke?
The "problem" with Thunderbird is that it's a very mature product. It has quirks, yes, but it is very near the pinnacle of what an email client should be. It handles loads of messages (I've seen hundreds of thousands in a single folder) and accounts very well. It is easy to migrate from one machine to another. It is a cross-platform program in the sense that the exact same code base is used for all major platforms and behaves almost identically. It has calendaring and can integrate with Google services at no cost. It makes Outlook look like a piece of shit (hint: Outlook really is a piece of shit) and if there were some way to attach an Exchange account to it then Outlook would probably start to slowly die off.
Security fixes and minor updates to keep it from crashing as systems evolve are all Thunderbird ever needs. Thunderbird was a mature product a very long time ago (in software development terms) and the main reason it keeps getting updated is because it shares a lot of code with Firefox and Mozilla is an organization that simply cannot resist fucking with things for the sake of fuckery and little else. The absolutely retarded "Correspondents" column introduction is a prime example of Mozilla just not being a good company anymore. Mozilla has become the Lennart Poettering of Web software: stupid decisions are "features" and closed with WONTFIX or NOTABUG. I stopped using their feedback system because they don't ever listen, so why bother? The one good thing about Thunderbird is that Mozilla has largely ignored it and that's exactly what Thunderbird users want, especially after the Chromification of the UI. Chrome's UI and options panel are both utter shit. Luckily you can turn the menu bar back on in Thunderbird and get the full options and functionality back.
Someone above referred to how lame it is that there's no Thunderbird for Android. Check out K-9 Mail; it's a lot better than the stupid mail apps that come with phones and if Thunderbird ever made it to Android it wouldn't be far off from what K-9 is. Also K-9 lets you import/export your mail settings so you can migrate it to a new phone easily.
To be taken seriously Thunderbird really needs native support for EWS and increasingly EAS. Nowadays it's getting harder and harder to use TB instead of Outlook because Exchange admins are quite happy to not enable IMAP.
There are workarounds for EWS such as DavMail but it's not brilliant (no fault of DavMail at all) but no solution where EAS only is enforced.
For people looking for EWS integration with Thunderbird... been using this for about a year now, without any issues:
https://github.com/Ericsson/ex...
Not sure what, if anything, can easily be done to support the EAS side of things.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Man I wish it was easier to use these two together, instead either Thunderbird can't login because secure login is enabled on gmail, or gmail constantly complains that I need to enable secure logins.
Thunderbird is the first software I install.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Thunderbird email does everything I need, almost as easily as I want. Don't own a smart-phone and fuck those who do. ! Some Thunderbird config issues at-1st-use -- a sloppy GUI -- but not as bad as POS-complexes byteboi/weinerdude squintsville/convergence types prefer. Change is bad: all change is all bad. Keepa you hands off the product ... or get your wrists broken. Go fuck with javascript or Gnome !
I used Thunderbird daily for almost a year until one day it just should working properly, it started to lose email probably because size of the mailbox folder got too big. Trying to find support for it was difficult, the project isn't on github and they still used some mailing list. It was also very inactive. Then I look around for Evolution, somewhat better in that it still works whereas Thunderbird does but it's definitely lacking in features. Overall mail client option is rather lacking for Linux.
It gets my mail, I read my mail, what updating does it need?
I switched to Pale Moon for browsing several months ago, and couldn't be happier. It's what Firefox should be (and used to be).
I used Thunderbird for about a year back in the mid-2000s, but it just seemed too heavyweight for me. I am not saying it is a bad email client at all. I just got tired of it and how slow it seemed. I switched back to what I used to use, and have been using it ever since. pine. Yes, you read that right. I run fetchmail to pull in several email accounts to my local one, and I use pine (alpine) to read them. It's fast fast fast. Sometimes it can be tricky to sift through some emails that are image/html heavy, but thankfully a lot have "view in your browser" link if I need it. And quite honestly, I don't have to worry about images/colors/etc. I can open all attachments easily, but that only really works if I am local. From work I ssh into my machine to check email, and it's all stored there so it's not cached on my work machine. In and out, fast.
It seems archaic to most, but it works and works well for me. Except for my brief stint using Tbird, I've run pine since the late 90s.
On my phone I use K-9 for mail, and it does a great job. But it's my backup, I try not to email that much from my phone.
If Thunderbird would look to update, they should do so without redesigning to keep current clients happy. The worst thing you can do is think you know better than your users about what they want.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
The main advantage of TB is that I keep MY mail on MY disks on MY system. I don't have to depend on some corporation to do it for me, and I can see my mail even if the internet is broken. If I want more safety, then I can COPY the stuff to the cloud wherever and in whatever encrypted or obfuscated form I like.
The UI works just fine. Yes, it could be improved, but all the "improvements" to the UI in the past 10 years were useless bloat and distractions.
The real danger is when ISPs block running mail server ports locally, and eliminate POP3 and IMAP, so you are forced to store your mail on their servers.
Thunderbird(s) are still Go! It's about perfect in my opinion.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
When I recently enabled two-factor authentication on my iCloud email, it broke Thunderbird.
There is a workaround - app-specific passwords.
Fixed Thunderbird for my iCloud email, anyway...
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I am able to use Thunderbird for our companies exchange server. Mail I connect through IMAP, calendar I use lightning with Exchange EWS, and contacts have native exchange ability. It took me about 30 minutes to get everything configured so it's not a real option for most users.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make