Thunderbird 52.7.0 released(mozilla.org)
mozilla.org
Thunderbird 52.7.0 released
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/52.7.0/releasenotes/
94 comments
Try a new profile, vacuuming it, and/or moving ancient mail to separate folders.
Poor answers to performance problems like this is the number one reason why Firefox lost so much market share to Chrome. Until Mozilla and friends pay attention to user pain, no amount of "creating a new profile" will improve the situation.
Hell, you can search the entirety of the public internet in a fraction of a second, but a few hundred thousand emails locks up your machine for the better part of a minute? Maybe the Rust folks working on parallelism can spend a few sprints giving TB some love.
Hell, you can search the entirety of the public internet in a fraction of a second, but a few hundred thousand emails locks up your machine for the better part of a minute? Maybe the Rust folks working on parallelism can spend a few sprints giving TB some love.
Not had the problems you mentioned in ~20 years of usage (Netscape communicator), just brainstormed a few possible solutions. It has always been instantaneous for me.
For life of me I don't see how what you wrote deserves a downvote
I keep using Thunderbird because I haven't found anything better, but it's unbearably slow. I'd gladly jump ship to a better cross platform, featureful, responsive email client, but apparently they don't make these anymore.
There’s no money in email clients.
There is actually. They sell at least the following three email clients:
1. Incredimail
2. The Bat
3. Outlook
The sad truth. Likewise Linux desktops.
Don't trust random me on the internet (I'm dog, woof), google it yourself - but for me deleting "panacea.dat" made everything fast again.
I recently installed it and synced up 5 imap accounts, some with as many as 10 years of mail and its bloody fast. I recall trying it a few years back and was very frustrated that archiving a message seem to block the UI. That is no longer the case and now I’m very fast with it when using keyboard shortcuts.
I have 6 mailboxes I prefer to keep separate, and my email client history goes from Thunderbird to Postbox, then Thunderbird again, and then Spark.
Thunderbird was a good mail client, but the search is seriously broken. It's almost impossible to search Chinese at all, and when it searches Russian, some weird hits get mixed in, and some proper hits get ignored.
Postbox was very good overall, but every once in a while it would lose the whole cache, index, and sometimes even the whole downloaded history, and would spend a day chugging at downloading everything over again.
So for the last half a year I've been using Spark, and I'm pleasantly surprised by speed, search, and the feel of the app. Admittedly, there is no Windows version so it's not truly cross-platform.
Thunderbird was a good mail client, but the search is seriously broken. It's almost impossible to search Chinese at all, and when it searches Russian, some weird hits get mixed in, and some proper hits get ignored.
Postbox was very good overall, but every once in a while it would lose the whole cache, index, and sometimes even the whole downloaded history, and would spend a day chugging at downloading everything over again.
So for the last half a year I've been using Spark, and I'm pleasantly surprised by speed, search, and the feel of the app. Admittedly, there is no Windows version so it's not truly cross-platform.
Mu4e + emacs is pretty neat and quite zippy
You should take a look at notmuch [1]. It takes a little bit of time to get started (I recommend afew [2] for initial tagging), but I don't think I could ever go back to another mail system. It changes the way that you go through mail, no more folders: between tagging and extremely fast searches, there's no need. Just like an application launcher on modern desktops, there's no need to go through a big menu: press your search key, type what you're thinking, and there it is.
It doubles the size of your maildir with the indexing, which is a downside if you're crunched for space, but maybe that gives you an idea for just how much is indexed and how fast you can expect searching to be.
It's fair to say that the most popular interface for it is the emacs interface, which is great if you're already using emacs for mail because your workflow won't change substantially. There are other interfaces available, I have used one called alot [3] and find it to be very good as well.
[1]: https://notmuchmail.org/
[2]: https://github.com/afewmail/afew
[3]: https://github.com/pazz/alot
It doubles the size of your maildir with the indexing, which is a downside if you're crunched for space, but maybe that gives you an idea for just how much is indexed and how fast you can expect searching to be.
It's fair to say that the most popular interface for it is the emacs interface, which is great if you're already using emacs for mail because your workflow won't change substantially. There are other interfaces available, I have used one called alot [3] and find it to be very good as well.
[1]: https://notmuchmail.org/
[2]: https://github.com/afewmail/afew
[3]: https://github.com/pazz/alot
Tried that — it kept choking on the 80k or so emails in my inbox. Apparently mu4e users just have tidy folder organization schemes from what I was told on mail list. I got spoiled by gmail and never sort my mail. In fact my dependence on search is why I turned to mu4e in the first place. I just assumed a unixy toolkit would scale just fine (bad assumption!).
I’m using this setup too for quite a while now and overall, I’m pretty happy with it. But some HTML mail is barely readable. How do you deal with that?
I’ve written an emacs function which opens the mail in firefox, but I’m not really fond of that as every remote content is loaded by the browser. Is there a way to stop that?
I’ve written an emacs function which opens the mail in firefox, but I’m not really fond of that as every remote content is loaded by the browser. Is there a way to stop that?
with the xwidgets functionality its possible to view html mail in fashion that looks pretty much like chrome/firefox inside emacs with webkitgtk sadly I can't seem to get that feature working on my emacs on funtoo or manjaro.
See. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mu-discuss/JqHEGycEy...
If you have any suggestions regarding this I'd love to hear it.
See. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mu-discuss/JqHEGycEy...
If you have any suggestions regarding this I'd love to hear it.
Use w3m to view HTML email. Does a great job even with tables.
I'm using the default mac client. Is thunderbird better?
I don't know the default OS X client so I can't go into detail, but I'd guess that one is better integrated with OS X. On the other hand, Thunderbird works cross-platform and allows you to choose any operating system without having to consider a new mail client, set it up and learn new ways. You could probably even copy over your data folder and resume working without any set-up (`scp -r ~/.thunderbird user@newpc:` would be the complete migration process, assuming it works between OSes).
You're correct. You copy the profile folder and set the default profile startup to be the one you copied (I think this was in the profile.ini file) and it is if you never left. I this this between mac, linux, and windows machines and it functioned perfectly every time including add-ons, settings, filters, and themes.
I this this between mac, linux, and windows machines and it functioned perfectly every time
What OS did the profile start on?
I copied my profile from Windows to Mac, and everything is fucked up. Because of the different line ending characters, as far as I can tell.
What OS did the profile start on?
I copied my profile from Windows to Mac, and everything is fucked up. Because of the different line ending characters, as far as I can tell.
> set the default profile startup to be the one you copied (I think this was in the profile.ini file)
The command I posted would copy the parent folder, including profile.ini, but yeah it's pretty much the same thing.
> I this this between mac, linux, and windows machines and it functioned perfectly every time including add-ons, settings, filters, and themes.
Cool, that's good to know for sure!
The command I posted would copy the parent folder, including profile.ini, but yeah it's pretty much the same thing.
> I this this between mac, linux, and windows machines and it functioned perfectly every time including add-ons, settings, filters, and themes.
Cool, that's good to know for sure!
I switched. Better search, better tagging, customizable layout, better peformance (apple mail often had problems with syncing flags and folders for me)
mailmate is a far better mail program than the default mail program on OSX. worth every penny.
Just started using it and finally dropped Airmail. I don’t know why didn’t do it years ago!!!
[deleted]
It still feels like the 90s software.
I agree, in a positive way. It feels fast, no-nonsense UI and takes as little space as possible on your harddrive. Much better than 2000s software where internet connection is a must, UI is as pretty as possible without considerations for the user and often is 200MB for a simple todo list manager.
And that's good.
Thunderbird is still the best crossplatform, multi account mail client around. Everybody migrated to webmail, but for those old grumps of us who still have multiple email accounts, and maybe even follow some newsgroups, tb is still the best player in town.
Thanks tb team for your work! I love you all!
Thanks tb team for your work! I love you all!
A proper mail client also seems essential for taking part in mailing lists. I used to use gnus but got too frustrated at people sending me email in stupid HTML formats that I couldn't read. Thunderbird is the easiest thing to use that behaves like a proper mail client but also deals with the garbage from bad clients like Outhouse etc.
This may or may not help, but ex. mutt lets you read HTML mail by running it through lynx/elinks/w3m [0], and I've had great success with this in a mostly-Outlook environment. I expect you could do the same thing with other clients.
[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mutt#Viewing_HTML
[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mutt#Viewing_HTML
Mutt is terrible for imap on a laptop, it hangs and loses changes when the connection dies. Or has this been fixed?
I don't know if it's been fixed, but I recommend pointing mutt at an offline copy of your mail instead of directly at an IMAP server. Use isync or another program to sync your mail.
When your mailbox is many gigabytes and you have small SSD, this is out of questions. Using IMAP allows only mail headers to be locally preserved.
This doesn't really work if you have multiple systems you want to access your mail from. There's no way to keep those systems in sync with each other, some folks fake it with dropbox-like services, but that's honestly not much different than just pulling over imap each time you open the mta...
I use offlineimap[1] and it absolutely does work. It keeps everything on the IMAP server while giving me a local copy to work from. It's super simple to setup and use, and I'm really happy with it.
[1]: http://www.offlineimap.org/
[1]: http://www.offlineimap.org/
Interesting, I might have to give this another go. For my work mail, I use mbsync to store it locally, but I only have one system doing that. Personal email is a different matter, especially since some systems accessing it (e.g. my phone via K-9) would like to know if a mail has been read on another system (e.g. one storing mails locally). Does offlineimap handle that situation?
[deleted]
I don't know anyone who uses Mutt directly for imap.
Every guide I've read recommends using imapsync and msmtp for sending.
http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/#getting-e...
Every guide I've read recommends using imapsync and msmtp for sending.
http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/#getting-e...
Yes about mail lists. It seems Research Software Engineers these days can't cope with periodic bursts of tens of messages a day on a list. Moving to Slack left behind sme long experience coping with hundreds a day for maintenance/support.
Anyhow, Gnus can render "html" articles; `mm-text-heml-renderer' defaults to the built-in `shr' in Emacs 24.
Anyhow, Gnus can render "html" articles; `mm-text-heml-renderer' defaults to the built-in `shr' in Emacs 24.
At the moment I am using Wanderlust, to help with the html I have set it up so I can open them in firefox.
Opening HTML mail in a browser is risky due to all the scripting possibilities ... Thunderbird's HTML component allows no scripting and disables loading (remote) images (tracking when I hope the mail) how do you deal with that in such a setup?
(Actually use evolution, but would like to switch to something smaller ...)
I have the "Message Body As" setting set to plain text. This either will display the text/plain part of the message or will render the HTML using plain text markers (* * for bold, / / for italics, _ _ for underscore).
IME, it works out rather well for most HTML emails I receive.
IME, it works out rather well for most HTML emails I receive.
In which email client? I regularly get email that is almost impossible to read, unless I load remote images.
In Thunderbird. Most of the HTML email I receive is mostly formatted text which Thunderbird's plain text view works well on.
Are the problems you're describing due to content within the images themselves, or due to placement of the text relative to the image?
Are the problems you're describing due to content within the images themselves, or due to placement of the text relative to the image?
I've banished myself to mobile. I am trying out k9-mail and open keychain on Android. They are both available on f-droid and seem to work well. Open keychain is so much easier to deal with than what I remember of enigmail on the desktop.
> I am trying out k9-mail
K9mail doesn't nest reply threads[1] which is must have feature for me. Otherwise yes k9mail is good.
[1] https://github.com/k9mail/k-9/issues/763
K9mail doesn't nest reply threads[1] which is must have feature for me. Otherwise yes k9mail is good.
[1] https://github.com/k9mail/k-9/issues/763
OpenKeychain is currently the best way to manage PGP keys on any platform. I don't know why there's no good UI for the desktop, Enigmail is a distant second.
> Thunderbird is still the best crossplatform, multi account mail client around.
Have you tried Sylpheed? https://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/
Have you tried Sylpheed? https://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/
Not the OP but yes, and Clawsmail. Still keep coming back to Thunderbird. There are so many useful add-ons it's hard to leave. And add-ons are easier to write.
You stay up-to-date with Thinderbird releases? I do and I think about 1 in 10 of the ads-ons I have installed still work.
What add-ons do you use regularly?
"Nostalgy" is the key one for me. Folder filling and navigation from the keyboard only. If you know emacs and helm, it has a bit of its feel.
> Everybody migrated to webmail
That is so far from the truth it isn’t even funny. Outlook reigns in corporate and phones have native clients. Hell, i am still waiting for POP3 to die.
That is so far from the truth it isn’t even funny. Outlook reigns in corporate and phones have native clients. Hell, i am still waiting for POP3 to die.
Amusingly, I try to use Outlook through the web client (OWA), because using the thick client would require me to pull out a Windows machine and that's just a pain.
I really prefer Seamonkey's Mail cleint (it has the same roots as Thunderbird), especially since you can always switch back to an good old desktop-like theme. Has been rock-solid since 15 years.
I used that for a while between the time the Mozilla Application Suite was discontinued till when I started using Firefox and Thunderbird. IIRC, I switched because the browser was having problems rendering certain websites that Firefox did not.
How well does it work today? Does the mail client have the ability to sign up for RSS/Atom feeds? Does it have a calendar built in? What about chat? (I guess I'm one of the rare Thunderbird users who actually uses all of those features).
How well does it work today? Does the mail client have the ability to sign up for RSS/Atom feeds? Does it have a calendar built in? What about chat? (I guess I'm one of the rare Thunderbird users who actually uses all of those features).
Mostly to avoid service vendor lockin, I'd like to switch back to Thunderbird -- after I have a solid plan for replicated local backups, under my physical control. Is this practical with IMAP, or would POP3 be the way?
I agree, I've been using it for more then 10 years now and migrated between multiple machines and os platforms, all while holding onto several email accounts for historical needs.
That said, I also feel it is one of the worst calendar clients around. I've used lightning, I've tried the calendar plugins for google, things just don't work.
That said, I also feel it is one of the worst calendar clients around. I've used lightning, I've tried the calendar plugins for google, things just don't work.
I've been using Mailspring for a couple of months now on Linux and it's been a very good experience. I think it's better than Thunderbird if you are more used to webmail clients.
With the latest job I went from work GMail to company-hosted (and thunderbird) for the first time. I'm pleased to report it is far better than I feared. Thank you, Thunderbird!
I love Thunderbird, I have used it at several previous jobs and I'm finding joy in email clients again as I now actively avoid using the web client for gmail. I have never understood people's gripes with the client, but maybe I'm just not a power user.
Seems like Mozilla could be a trustworthy mail provider as well.
Seems like Mozilla could be a trustworthy mail provider as well.
Nice to see win XP continues to be a supported platform.
Thunderbird uses Firefox ESR as a base. Firefox ESR supports Windows XP while it is at version 52.x. Firefox ESR will move up to 60.x in August 2018 at which point neither Firefox nor Thunderbird will support Windows XP any longer.
Honest question - why?
There are kids enlisting in the army now that were born after XP was released.
There are kids enlisting in the army now that were born after XP was released.
What matters is not when Windows XP was originally released, but when its official support ended, which according to Wikipedia was on April 2014. Both Firefox and Thunderbird supported Windows XP for a few more years after that (since Windows XP was and is still popular even after its official support ended); version 52 of both (which is an ESR release) is going to be the last one with support for Windows XP.
The operating system support doesn't change within a major release, which is why 52.7 has the same operating system support as 52.0.
The operating system support doesn't change within a major release, which is why 52.7 has the same operating system support as 52.0.
> What matters is not when Windows XP was originally released, but when its official support ended
Well, or when a serious replacement arose (because XP was aging at that point). Vista was quite alright if you had a beefy computer, but for the majority I guess it took until 7, which would be July 2009.
Not saying you're wrong or that support should be dropped, I'm just not sure end of support is the best date to use.
Well, or when a serious replacement arose (because XP was aging at that point). Vista was quite alright if you had a beefy computer, but for the majority I guess it took until 7, which would be July 2009.
Not saying you're wrong or that support should be dropped, I'm just not sure end of support is the best date to use.
I think end of support is a pretty good metric. If Microsoft won’t keep the underlying platform safe, one could argue it’s ethically problematic but to continue to encourage people to use it.
XP Embedded has security updates until 2019, https://www.pcworld.com/article/2310301/windows-xp-registry-...
I was about to make a snarky comment here but... yeah, if you’re still connecting an XP machine to the internet, you’re asking to be pwned.
> There are kids enlisting in the army now that were born after XP was released.
Does the army accept 16-year-olds?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP
"It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and broadly released for retail sale on October 25, 2001."
Does the army accept 16-year-olds?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP
"It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and broadly released for retail sale on October 25, 2001."
You have to be 17, so I guess we still have a couple months, my bad.
But sad it only goes back to Mac 10.9.
Actually I wonder why. Probably using GTK or something that only supports newer systems, but still too bad.
GTK doesn't have anything to do with that; Thunderbird and Firefox use native widgets to implement XUL on macOS. It's mostly a platform decision based on numbers of users and if there are any technical pain points supporting earlier SDKs.
Love it, it has been my favourite email client since the Netscape days.
Don't forget to donate.
Don't forget to donate.
On the same page. Have gone through endless flavors of Linux, Win and OSX by simply copying the emails folder from system to system for close to 20 years now - and never lost one email. To say I appreciate this piece of software would be an understatement.
I've been stuck 31.7 for years because it's the only version which honours font preferences in OS X. Theme and Font Size Changer was useless after version 41.1. Someone please tell they've fixed this nonsense.
Did you create a bug or search for one?
I read that as "I've been stuck 31.7 years because it's the only ..." and did a triple-take on how old the software is and how long you've been using it. But no, Wikipedia lists it as "Initial release: July 28, 2003; 14 years ago".
Still very old to be in such widespread use, though. From where I worked to my grandma to my in-laws to the Linux poweruser that I am, a very widespread range of people use it. I am not 100% happy with it, but email is important enough that I want something stable (e.g. no bugs that either mess up my email server-side or stop it from working) and secure (both the connection and for viewing).
Still very old to be in such widespread use, though. From where I worked to my grandma to my in-laws to the Linux poweruser that I am, a very widespread range of people use it. I am not 100% happy with it, but email is important enough that I want something stable (e.g. no bugs that either mess up my email server-side or stop it from working) and secure (both the connection and for viewing).
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mozilla_Thunderbird... Thunderbird 31.7.0 was released on 12th May 2015.
Read what I wrote carefully, I misread it as "I've been stuck 31.7 years" ;)
I hope they focus on performance in coming revisions.