Thunderbird 68.0(thunderbird.net)
thunderbird.net
Thunderbird 68.0
https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/68.0/releasenotes/
174 comments
You can use the HTML-only version of Gmail at the bottom of the page which loads in 300 ms or so.
Gmail view: standard | >basic HTML<It looks like keyboard shortcuts don't work here? I tried the new Thunderbird, but it looks like you (still) need an extension to change keyboard shortcuts and none of them work with v68 even if you don't mind third party extensions.
For anyone interested, I just put together a userscript with some rudimentary key assignments for the Basic HTML version of Gmail:
https://pastebin.com/raw/zyfHp5Vs
https://pastebin.com/raw/zyfHp5Vs
Don't forget html google contacts and html google calendar. Not optimized for desktop, but damn they are fast. The calendar also still parses natural language for new meetings using the bar, whereas regular google calendar dropped it from the looks of things.
https://calendar.google.com/calendar/m?pli=1
https://calendar.google.com/calendar/m?pli=1
I find it embarrassing that this feature needs to exist at all
The HTML version doesn't update when you get a new email. You have to refresh it to check. Also if you want to compose more than one email at once, or if you want to refer to one email while composing another, you need multiple browser tabs.
Such features could be added in a lightweight way with very minimal javascript, to the html version.
> The HTML version doesn't update when you get a new email. You have to refresh it to check.
This is one of the reasons I use it. I get in, catch up, get the hell out of dodge (close the tab), and then I don't have (yet) a(nother) gmail tab sucking up literally hundreds of MB of RSS.
This is one of the reasons I use it. I get in, catch up, get the hell out of dodge (close the tab), and then I don't have (yet) a(nother) gmail tab sucking up literally hundreds of MB of RSS.
Gmail is a free product, hence it has possibly low priority.
I am paying for it, as are many businesses.
Some % of Google's $30 billion quarterly revenue comes from Ads in Gmail. This does not include revenue generated from enterprise G Suite licenses.
My tuition pays for g suite.
It’s free for colleges. Your tuition pays for bloated administrative staff salaries.
The older versions were faster. Every new update becomes slower and more bloated.
http://tiny.cc/ggmm loads gmail fast
This seems longer than writing http://gmail.com or does it link directly to the html version
seems like it links directly. dunno why you'd go through a link shortener instead of bookmarking the actual page tho.
Perhaps due to preferences against bookmarking the customized url you get on that page? The shortest canonical URL I know to access html version directly is
https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html&zy=h
https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html&zy=h
I never left Thunderbird.
I never really got in what way gmail on browser was better.
They popularized tags instead of folders. Tags I get - I can toss emails into "todo" + "personal" + etc and remove it from other views, without deleting it, and without using up more space. Many local apps still struggle to support this smoothly, though it's gradually improving. Same goes for server-side support, e.g. on Fastmail a duplicate in another folder costs duplicated storage.
Other than that, dunno. Desktop email clients have basically always been faster to use IMO, and setup has been borderline trivial ever since imap/smtp discovery strategies became common.
Other than that, dunno. Desktop email clients have basically always been faster to use IMO, and setup has been borderline trivial ever since imap/smtp discovery strategies became common.
Also Thunderbird and Enigmail/PGP etc had been fairly solid for a long time.
> Many local apps still struggle to support this smoothly
Makes sense as the protocol they use to talk to the server doesn’t support tags.
Makes sense as the protocol they use to talk to the server doesn’t support tags.
Moving a message in a folder in Thunderbird makes a duplicate?
Most Thunderbird / desktop tag implementations are done by just copying the message to multiple folders (which achieves nearly identical behavior, which is great. It's just not usually optimized UX). And most servers don't deduplicate messages globally (I'm not sure why, tbh. probably there's some rational-but-depressing reason).
No, but you're moving it. Can you have the same message in three folders?
Ok I see what you mean, thanks
I can read email at home, at work, on my phone, on my tablet, on any other device that I can access.
My hard disk crashes? No problem, everything is in the "cloud". My computer crashes? I buy a new one and am up and running in no time without installing too much.
My hard disk crashes? No problem, everything is in the "cloud". My computer crashes? I buy a new one and am up and running in no time without installing too much.
One Thunderbird extension I miss is FireTray that let me minimize it to Tray. Number of new emails would show on the icon, so you never missed an email without it also getting in the way of my other work while alt-tabbing.
Birdtray extension (https://github.com/gyunaev/birdtray) does that work quite well, I'm so happy with it. It also lets you keep Thunderbird as a background process.
Thanks. This will make my life so much better - or return it to how good it was before.
Webmail could work great offline if we could store more then 5MB on the client.
> if we could store more then 5MB on the client.
I recently stopped using Slack because their web client started storing 600MB in local storage. If gmail did that too, it would be the last nail in the coffin. I absolutely do not want random (or not-random) websites using my computer to store their data.
I recently stopped using Slack because their web client started storing 600MB in local storage. If gmail did that too, it would be the last nail in the coffin. I absolutely do not want random (or not-random) websites using my computer to store their data.
IndexedDB should be a solution to this, but it's not as widely supported as localStorage.
Obligatory comment that Gmail has a basic HTML view that is substantially faster and less resource intensive, but not as pleasant to use:
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/
It loads almost instantly for me, and is quite quick to navigate.
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/
It loads almost instantly for me, and is quite quick to navigate.
Does anyone have the inside story to what happened that caused Thunderbird to stop being developed in the first place, and what led to its development being picked back up again? It's not really clear what happened in either case to me.
Since there were others interested in continued development, Thunderbird development didn't stop when Mozilla Corporation decided to scale down its level of support for the project. After a new way of arranging funding was set up (through Mozilla Foundation), there has been more visibility of development. (I don't know of actual metrics of development activity over time.)
Wild-ass guess: Some enterprise user determined that quietly funding it would cost less than rebuilding some bit of internal tooling that depended on it.
(cunningham, cunningham, cunningham, come forth and correct me!)
(cunningham, cunningham, cunningham, come forth and correct me!)
Mozilla Corp - which owns the Thunderbird project - decided to focus resources on the browser project and away from peripheral software projects like Thunderbird that were fading in usage and couldn't reasonably be seen to make a difference out in the world. In my humble opinion, Mozilla _should_ fund an open-source front end to the various cloud email hosting services.
I faintly remember that usage was actually growing when Mozilla took the decision to not invest further in Thunderbird.
Of course, in proportion, most people used webmail, I guess.
Some (very) quick internet search reveals the blog post linked below. Cannot remember if that coincides with the time the decision was made, though...
https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2015/02/thunderbird-usa...
Of course, in proportion, most people used webmail, I guess.
Some (very) quick internet search reveals the blog post linked below. Cannot remember if that coincides with the time the decision was made, though...
https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2015/02/thunderbird-usa...
Perhaps “fading is usage” is inaccurate!
Thunderbird was always the lesser entity within the Mozilla infrastructure, and there have long been influential engineers within the core Gecko development cohort who did not think that Gecko engineers should be attempting to do anything to support Thunderbird. (Of course, there were other engineers who would happily write the patches themselves to fix Thunderbird if informed they broke it, so this is by no means a universal opinion within Mozilla).
In and around 2012, Mozilla was deeply terrified of its sliding market share and felt that the best way forward was to move into the mobile market. The initial XUL-based Firefox for Android proved to be a veritable resource hog, which made Mozilla push a lot harder and faster both in ending its support for XUL, and in revamping its browser engine to work a lot better at mobile devices. One of the results of this effort was the attempt to make a mobile OS, running on the most pitiful smartphones, that would use Gecko as its main application environment. Thunderbird, being a large, featureful, monolithic application with a 15-year-old codebase [1], was (and still is) not really suitable for use on a mobile operating system, and it's probably easier to rewrite the code from scratch than to attempt to modify it for use on mobile devices.
The then-CEO (his name escapes me at the moment) of Mozilla in 2011 was a big advocate of the push to mobile, and continuing support for Thunderbird was the sort of distraction that looks like a big cost that it couldn't afford in a time of crisis. So it's not surprising that they decided to stop paid development, although the announcement came as a shock to the people working on it: one person had been hired with the expectation that he would soon be leading a time of people, only to find that he would become the sole paid engineer on the codebase.
Originally, when Mozilla made the announcement, they promised that there would be a skeleton crew that would do minimal maintenance of the project. A developer, release engineer, QA person, and a build engineer if I recall all the roles correctly. Over the next few years, the people who were still doing paid development were essentially told to stop working on Thunderbird stuff, so that even the skeleton crew promised proved not to last long. In the meantime, though, several community members (myself included) were providing most of the legwork to actually maintain the project.
One of the other things that Mozilla promised was that money donated specifically for Thunderbird would remain in a pool that could only be used for Thunderbird. It took a few years for the community (many thanks especially to rkent's efforts in actually getting this to happen) to actually get access to these finances, but by around 2017, we were able to finally start getting contracts for people to actually work on Thunderbird on a paid basis. There's actually no contribution from Mozilla, except for the free hosting it provides as well as the time that core Gecko developers are willing to spend on contributing to Thunderbird.
[1] In terms of oldest Mozilla code still in active use, Thunderbird has some contenders. There are several pieces that are essentially unchanged from the public CVS 1.1 revision in 1999, and some code I found that is substantially similar to the Netscape Classic code once on MXR--I don't know if that was the 4.x version or the abandoned 5.x version. Some comments in libmime have a date in 1997.
In and around 2012, Mozilla was deeply terrified of its sliding market share and felt that the best way forward was to move into the mobile market. The initial XUL-based Firefox for Android proved to be a veritable resource hog, which made Mozilla push a lot harder and faster both in ending its support for XUL, and in revamping its browser engine to work a lot better at mobile devices. One of the results of this effort was the attempt to make a mobile OS, running on the most pitiful smartphones, that would use Gecko as its main application environment. Thunderbird, being a large, featureful, monolithic application with a 15-year-old codebase [1], was (and still is) not really suitable for use on a mobile operating system, and it's probably easier to rewrite the code from scratch than to attempt to modify it for use on mobile devices.
The then-CEO (his name escapes me at the moment) of Mozilla in 2011 was a big advocate of the push to mobile, and continuing support for Thunderbird was the sort of distraction that looks like a big cost that it couldn't afford in a time of crisis. So it's not surprising that they decided to stop paid development, although the announcement came as a shock to the people working on it: one person had been hired with the expectation that he would soon be leading a time of people, only to find that he would become the sole paid engineer on the codebase.
Originally, when Mozilla made the announcement, they promised that there would be a skeleton crew that would do minimal maintenance of the project. A developer, release engineer, QA person, and a build engineer if I recall all the roles correctly. Over the next few years, the people who were still doing paid development were essentially told to stop working on Thunderbird stuff, so that even the skeleton crew promised proved not to last long. In the meantime, though, several community members (myself included) were providing most of the legwork to actually maintain the project.
One of the other things that Mozilla promised was that money donated specifically for Thunderbird would remain in a pool that could only be used for Thunderbird. It took a few years for the community (many thanks especially to rkent's efforts in actually getting this to happen) to actually get access to these finances, but by around 2017, we were able to finally start getting contracts for people to actually work on Thunderbird on a paid basis. There's actually no contribution from Mozilla, except for the free hosting it provides as well as the time that core Gecko developers are willing to spend on contributing to Thunderbird.
[1] In terms of oldest Mozilla code still in active use, Thunderbird has some contenders. There are several pieces that are essentially unchanged from the public CVS 1.1 revision in 1999, and some code I found that is substantially similar to the Netscape Classic code once on MXR--I don't know if that was the 4.x version or the abandoned 5.x version. Some comments in libmime have a date in 1997.
Thank you very much for being there and pushing forward the maintenance and development of Thunderbird.
It is a wonderful piece of software, the daily email driver for lots of us, and it would have been a huge pity if we had lost it during the crisis period...
It is a wonderful piece of software, the daily email driver for lots of us, and it would have been a huge pity if we had lost it during the crisis period...
Well, this is not the inside story, but what is known publicly. I'm just copy pasting from the Wikipedia article on Mozilla Thunderbird [1] since it has all the details with citations. Basically, Mozilla believed that email was a solved problem that didn't need attention while Firefox OS and others needed more attention. The code sharing between Firefox and Thunderbird also made management of change more cumbersome (it's still difficult on the Thunderbird side now, though it's better than how it was a few years ago).
> On July 6, 2012, Mozilla announced the company was dropping the priority of Thunderbird development because the continuous effort to extend Thunderbird's feature set was mostly fruitless. The new development model shifted to Mozilla offering only "Extended Support Releases", which deliver security and maintenance updates, while allowing the community to take over the development of new features.
> On December 1, 2015, Mozilla Executive Chair Mitchell Baker announced in a company-wide memo that Thunderbird development needs to be uncoupled from Firefox. She referred to Thunderbird developers spending large efforts responding to changes to Mozilla technologies, while Firefox was paying a tax to support Thunderbird development. She also said that she does not believe Thunderbird has the potential for "industry-wide impact" that Firefox does. At the same time, it was announced that Mozilla Foundation will provide at least a temporary legal and financial home for the Thunderbird project.
> Since the memo in 2015, Mozilla has brought Thunderbird back in-house in an announcement on May 9, 2017, and continues to support its development. The Thunderbird development team has also expanded by adding several new members and has undergone an overhaul on security and user-interface.
You could also take a look at the Thunderbird Council email archives (requires a login) [2] and the Thunderbird Engineering Council email archives (high posting volume). [3]
P.S.: I donate money to the Thunderbird project. Anyone who wishes to help out could send a little money solely dedicated to Thunderbird. [4]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Thunderbird
[2]: https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/thunderbird-council
[3]: https://lists.thunderbird.net/mailman/listinfo/maildev_lists...
[4]: https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/
> On July 6, 2012, Mozilla announced the company was dropping the priority of Thunderbird development because the continuous effort to extend Thunderbird's feature set was mostly fruitless. The new development model shifted to Mozilla offering only "Extended Support Releases", which deliver security and maintenance updates, while allowing the community to take over the development of new features.
> On December 1, 2015, Mozilla Executive Chair Mitchell Baker announced in a company-wide memo that Thunderbird development needs to be uncoupled from Firefox. She referred to Thunderbird developers spending large efforts responding to changes to Mozilla technologies, while Firefox was paying a tax to support Thunderbird development. She also said that she does not believe Thunderbird has the potential for "industry-wide impact" that Firefox does. At the same time, it was announced that Mozilla Foundation will provide at least a temporary legal and financial home for the Thunderbird project.
> Since the memo in 2015, Mozilla has brought Thunderbird back in-house in an announcement on May 9, 2017, and continues to support its development. The Thunderbird development team has also expanded by adding several new members and has undergone an overhaul on security and user-interface.
You could also take a look at the Thunderbird Council email archives (requires a login) [2] and the Thunderbird Engineering Council email archives (high posting volume). [3]
P.S.: I donate money to the Thunderbird project. Anyone who wishes to help out could send a little money solely dedicated to Thunderbird. [4]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Thunderbird
[2]: https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/thunderbird-council
[3]: https://lists.thunderbird.net/mailman/listinfo/maildev_lists...
[4]: https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/
I love Thunderbird. When it went out of active dev, I switched to Postbox, assuming that they'd really get to work on the client. They didn't. They made it look mildly prettier, but stripped away a few of the good features without adding anything of value (to me, at least.)
I spent some time hopping around clients and eventually landed on plain old MacOS Mail with an extension to put the unread count in the menubar. It wasn't perfect, but it was good enough.
On a side note, I don't understand why clients don't all allow plaintext composition and a menubar inbox count.
Anyway, it's great to see TBird back in active development. It's consistently been the best email client for my needs over the years.
I spent some time hopping around clients and eventually landed on plain old MacOS Mail with an extension to put the unread count in the menubar. It wasn't perfect, but it was good enough.
On a side note, I don't understand why clients don't all allow plaintext composition and a menubar inbox count.
Anyway, it's great to see TBird back in active development. It's consistently been the best email client for my needs over the years.
Doesn't MacOS Mail show the unread count in the Dock already?
Some people hide their Dock.
like Angostura said, some folks (me included) hide their dock. I probably haven't used the dock more than a dozen times this year. I use Alfred like we'd use dmenu (or whatever) with i3.
Am I wrong to think that Thunderbird development still seems so slow? As far as I understand, they put a new team in charge. But since January this is the first new release and it doesn't look like much has been added/changed:
- New app menu
- Preferences in a tab
- "Full color support"
- Better dark theme
- Attachment management
- "Filelink improved"
I've been using Thunderbird for a few years now and I still feel like it's just not as good intuitive as for example Apple Mail. You need addons to have proper threading support, it looks so ugly on anything but Linux (as it's a GTK app so you can change it), Exchange support is lackluster (I get constant disconnect messages even though it's fine just minutes later), and just generally using it is not convenient which I cannot even begin to describe.
I'd love to pay for Thunderbird if it makes for a proper development cycle with fresh updates that are actually useful.
- New app menu
- Preferences in a tab
- "Full color support"
- Better dark theme
- Attachment management
- "Filelink improved"
I've been using Thunderbird for a few years now and I still feel like it's just not as good intuitive as for example Apple Mail. You need addons to have proper threading support, it looks so ugly on anything but Linux (as it's a GTK app so you can change it), Exchange support is lackluster (I get constant disconnect messages even though it's fine just minutes later), and just generally using it is not convenient which I cannot even begin to describe.
I'd love to pay for Thunderbird if it makes for a proper development cycle with fresh updates that are actually useful.
Holy freaking cow - please no to this, and no to the thread below about "old annoying UI." Thunderbird is a workhorse. I process over 15,000 mails per quarter - manually. I write a lot, I read a lot, and Thunderbird is my home sweet home every day since the time I've left The Bat! at version 3 something. (The Bat is awesome as well but exists only for Windows...)
Thunderbird is the best e-mail client out there. It doesn't need a new UI, colors, animations, apps or any other bells and whistles. It looks great on Mac and BSD. Please, people, don't vote for it to be yet another Apple Mail or another "Web 2.0" or whatever is now considered cool or hip. I don't need that shit. I need a stable standard client that can handle Gigabytes of e-mail without corrupting files. I can rsync my own shit to back it up. I love being able to dig into custom settings manually. I can manage stuff myself. There are others people like me. Just don't get into my way and turn my computer into your computer.
Sorry, this has to be said. Thunderbird is awesome. Cheers, peace and love.
Thunderbird is the best e-mail client out there. It doesn't need a new UI, colors, animations, apps or any other bells and whistles. It looks great on Mac and BSD. Please, people, don't vote for it to be yet another Apple Mail or another "Web 2.0" or whatever is now considered cool or hip. I don't need that shit. I need a stable standard client that can handle Gigabytes of e-mail without corrupting files. I can rsync my own shit to back it up. I love being able to dig into custom settings manually. I can manage stuff myself. There are others people like me. Just don't get into my way and turn my computer into your computer.
Sorry, this has to be said. Thunderbird is awesome. Cheers, peace and love.
I wholeheartedly agree - Thunderbird is awesome, one of my favorite programs out of the ones I use daily, and has worked well for me for over a decade. I know of no alternative that is suitable for me.
While there is a bit of room for improvement, I dread the types of changes to Thunderbird that are so often discussed. Now that a generation has been raised on webmail, it seems that very few even understand the many benefits of Thunderbird or why someone would not want webmail.
I'm not the right person to try to teach people about the benefits of Thunderbird or educate them on why webmail is a scourge. Thank you for your comment - at least it will help people start to realize that there might be a silent majority out there like us that find great utility in Thunderbird and that aren't looking for a Gmail clone or a copy of the Apple equivalent.
-------
Edit: fixed typo.
While there is a bit of room for improvement, I dread the types of changes to Thunderbird that are so often discussed. Now that a generation has been raised on webmail, it seems that very few even understand the many benefits of Thunderbird or why someone would not want webmail.
I'm not the right person to try to teach people about the benefits of Thunderbird or educate them on why webmail is a scourge. Thank you for your comment - at least it will help people start to realize that there might be a silent majority out there like us that find great utility in Thunderbird and that aren't looking for a Gmail clone or a copy of the Apple equivalent.
-------
Edit: fixed typo.
Well, Thunderbird has been taken over by people who aim at 2 goals:
* replace internals with more Web tech (I say more, because Thunderbird unfortunately already used some);
* 'modernize' the interface.
So you can abandon all hopes and regret the time it was supposedly unmaintained.
* replace internals with more Web tech (I say more, because Thunderbird unfortunately already used some);
* 'modernize' the interface.
So you can abandon all hopes and regret the time it was supposedly unmaintained.
Will there be forks? I remember Phoenix forked from Firefox. 0.99 was awesome, then Phoenix became Firefox after they overloaded the browser with crap.
Phoenix forked from Netscape Navigator 6. The renaming to Firebird and then Firefox were entirely about trademark conflicts.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. I'm not using another email client because I don't want a dumbed down version. I simply want a less buggy and faster feeling Thunderbird. Just some polish here and there.
There are commercial email clients based on Thunderbird who fix some of the issues. https://www.postbox-inc.com/ for example
For Exchange support you'd need the OWL addon. Sounds like you should stay on Apple Mail.
I use Thunderbird on Linux.
There's also davmail
Using Thunderbird for a few weeks now, after a ~10 year break, and I'm quite happy. But I which it would be a bit more slicker without the Chat integration/Tabs on top/2 search inputs/lots of buttons and other UI elements. Maybe there is a way to customize it but I couldn't find it, yet.
Right click on menu/tool bar, Customise…
Thanks a lot! Now it's perfect. I was able to hide mostly all of the UI elements I will never use.
I have been using Thunderbird since forever and I am mostly happy.
I have 5 email accounts and access them all via Imap.
One thing that annoys me is that for some time now (after I upgraded to a newer Mint version? Not sure.) it is slow to start. Especially when I start it for the first time after a reboot.
Any ideas how to debug why it starts slow?
I have 5 email accounts and access them all via Imap.
One thing that annoys me is that for some time now (after I upgraded to a newer Mint version? Not sure.) it is slow to start. Especially when I start it for the first time after a reboot.
Any ideas how to debug why it starts slow?
To debug startup performance, I would see if having one account instead of five makes a difference. I haven't used Thunderbird for a long time but if the delay is due to slow responses from one mail provider in particular, perhaps you can set that account to be offline by default and explicitly take it online and check for mail after Thunderbird starts, while you check your other accounts.
Deleting old mail and "compacting folders" might help.
Vacuuming the sqlite files has helped me in the past:
Vacuuming the sqlite files has helped me in the past:
killall thunderbird
find ~/.thund_folder/ -name \*.sqlite -print -exec sqlite3 {} VACUUM \;
In the past, the file "panacea.dat" could get corrupted, and this was result in a working albeit very slow Thunderbird; deleting it would make it run quickly again.
(But .. don't trust a stranger on the internet telling you to delete a file. Do your own research)
(But .. don't trust a stranger on the internet telling you to delete a file. Do your own research)
Thunderbird startup should not at all be affected by it's proximity to reboot. However, Thunderbird startup can be IO intensive so anything impacting IO will affect TB start time.
Have you tried running it using strace?
I hesitate to ask this because I don't want to minimize the contributions of all the people working on Thunderbird, but why is making an email client so difficult?
Email is hard (I wrote a blog series on it at http://quetzalcoatal.blogspot.com/search/label/email-hard, and I haven't even touched anything beyond the message format!).
Some highlights:
* The MIME and message format specifications are often implemented incorrectly (particularly whenever you deal with non-ASCII text!), so you need a lot of logic interpreting the mess that people think is a valid email.
* IMAP is a database synchronization protocol that doesn't think it's a synchronization protocol, and isn't really well-suited for its tasks. That also means, once again, it's often implemented incorrectly, so you get to spend a lot of time working around server bugs. (There was one message where I managed to get 4 different results from 4 different servers on what its structure was!).
* The big webmail services (e.g., Gmail) often use their own extensions that they really want you to use. So you need to have custom code for big servers. And users demand feature parity, so you have to support it.
* By the way, you also need to integrate a web browser to display HTML email. Except quirks of email rendering abound. And there are severe privacy and security concerns too--you need to disable JS at the very least, and often times be very careful about network access so that people can't leak contents out.
Some highlights:
* The MIME and message format specifications are often implemented incorrectly (particularly whenever you deal with non-ASCII text!), so you need a lot of logic interpreting the mess that people think is a valid email.
* IMAP is a database synchronization protocol that doesn't think it's a synchronization protocol, and isn't really well-suited for its tasks. That also means, once again, it's often implemented incorrectly, so you get to spend a lot of time working around server bugs. (There was one message where I managed to get 4 different results from 4 different servers on what its structure was!).
* The big webmail services (e.g., Gmail) often use their own extensions that they really want you to use. So you need to have custom code for big servers. And users demand feature parity, so you have to support it.
* By the way, you also need to integrate a web browser to display HTML email. Except quirks of email rendering abound. And there are severe privacy and security concerns too--you need to disable JS at the very least, and often times be very careful about network access so that people can't leak contents out.
Mostly it's just a lot of code. Notmuch only does index/search for email and it is 46k LOC (https://www.openhub.net/p/notmuch). Thunderbird in contrast is 1.2 million LOC (https://www.openhub.net/p/thunderbird). A fair amount of that is detritus from being an ancient project, or else is shared with Firefox as the browser toolkit, but handling email and all the dialogs etc. are quite complicated. Mailspring uses Electron and is 218k LOC (https://www.openhub.net/p/mailspring/analyses/latest/languag...). You get the idea
And nobody wants to start a new one, because the majority of people use webmail or the mail app on their phone. Thunderbird is at 1% marketshare, although the sparkchart is weird suggesting measurement difficulties: https://emailclientmarketshare.com/
And nobody wants to start a new one, because the majority of people use webmail or the mail app on their phone. Thunderbird is at 1% marketshare, although the sparkchart is weird suggesting measurement difficulties: https://emailclientmarketshare.com/
> Thunderbird is at 1% marketshare, although the sparkchart is weird suggesting measurement difficulties: https://emailclientmarketshare.com/
Analytics is usually counted by displaying invisible remote HTTP images and looking at the user-agent of the HTTP request. Thunderbird blocks all HTTP requests in email by default for privacy reasons, which means it's systematically undercounted in these surveys.
Analytics is usually counted by displaying invisible remote HTTP images and looking at the user-agent of the HTTP request. Thunderbird blocks all HTTP requests in email by default for privacy reasons, which means it's systematically undercounted in these surveys.
I wrote a basic one, and I think the answer is that there are just so many moving parts (many of which I didn't attempt).
- mail transfer and delivery (IMAP/POP3, SMTP)
- organization, folders, tags, database, search, indexing, etc. Performance becomes a big issue.
- Email threading (conversations) is a whole thing.
- Email file format, MIME standards, parsing emails is a WHOLE thing. (What is an rfc822-formatted email and why I am getting them?)
- For non-text email, need an entire HTML rendering engine.
- The graphical user interface is not trivial, should be intelligently multithreaded.
- More features: spam filtering, encryption/digital signatures. Vacation replies. Address book. Calendar integration is a whole (optional) thing. Todo-lists.
- For some reason, Thunderbird has a live chat system.
It also seems to be the kind of thing where the last 10-20% is a lot harder than the first 80%.
- mail transfer and delivery (IMAP/POP3, SMTP)
- organization, folders, tags, database, search, indexing, etc. Performance becomes a big issue.
- Email threading (conversations) is a whole thing.
- Email file format, MIME standards, parsing emails is a WHOLE thing. (What is an rfc822-formatted email and why I am getting them?)
- For non-text email, need an entire HTML rendering engine.
- The graphical user interface is not trivial, should be intelligently multithreaded.
- More features: spam filtering, encryption/digital signatures. Vacation replies. Address book. Calendar integration is a whole (optional) thing. Todo-lists.
- For some reason, Thunderbird has a live chat system.
It also seems to be the kind of thing where the last 10-20% is a lot harder than the first 80%.
The IMAP standard is known to be vague in places and different servers implement it in different ways. Some server also have long standing bugs that a client has to deal with gracefully. And of course you still have to implement SMTP, POP3 and possible a bunch of different protocols for searching, address book and calendar synchronization.
Because in order to maintain backwards compatibility from 1971ish onwards, each new standard has been awkwardly shoehorned onto the previous standards. And even then lots of big email senders don't properly follow the standards, so displaying email correctly requires being able to discover and implement thousands of unwritten and undocumented rules.
In the case of Thunderbird, there is also shared code with Firefox, and so any core architecture and design changes in Firefox necessitate that the same be adopted in Thunderbird too, as quickly as possible. The mail client code is also very old. Last I recall, there was a plan to rewrite it completely using web technologies.
> The mail client code is also very old
The codebase in general is also quite a tangle, as newsgroups code (newsgroups are still supported!) is mixed with mail code. All past attempts to make the email composition window a tab, which is a deceivingly simple task, failed.
The codebase in general is also quite a tangle, as newsgroups code (newsgroups are still supported!) is mixed with mail code. All past attempts to make the email composition window a tab, which is a deceivingly simple task, failed.
Eh, newsgroups aren't all that different from email. The newsgroup message format is the email message format, just slightly stricter, and newsgroups can largely be treated as read-only folders (especially if you can equate cross-posting to something like X-GM-UUID mapping a message between multiple folders). It also turns out that many mail clients already support yEnc and uuencode--I've seen email scanners scanning yEnc attachments before.
The tangles come from poor separation of low-level protocol/parsing code with the front-end logic--there's no way to parse a message (or even decrypt it) without displaying it at the same time, for example.
The tangles come from poor separation of low-level protocol/parsing code with the front-end logic--there's no way to parse a message (or even decrypt it) without displaying it at the same time, for example.
My university still uses newsgroups and everyone uses Thunderbird as a client for that reason. It honestly works surprisingly well.
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Does anyone use thunderbird to manage rss feeds? I’m basically looking for a list view apple mail clone but for RSS (bonus points if full articles open in a readability-esk popup window).
Basically everything on the market for mac os is either depreciated or another 3 panel clone. Three panel apps are an ipad layout, I own a macbook. Give me a dense list.
Basically everything on the market for mac os is either depreciated or another 3 panel clone. Three panel apps are an ipad layout, I own a macbook. Give me a dense list.
newsblur. That's not the answer you were looking for, since it involves a server (self hosted, freemium / paid). But it's very good - not affiliated, just a happy user.
I used to use thunderbird for my rss feeds and like it a lot. However, the problems with that setup is:
1. If you have multiple machines, there is no way to synchronize what has been read.
2. If leave your machine off for any length of time, you may lose updates in that time (many sites only publish the latest 10 updates in RSS; were you flying and offline for 5 hours and 15 stories published during that time? you lost 5 of them).
It was reason 2 that eventually drove me to look for alternatives.
I used to use thunderbird for my rss feeds and like it a lot. However, the problems with that setup is:
1. If you have multiple machines, there is no way to synchronize what has been read.
2. If leave your machine off for any length of time, you may lose updates in that time (many sites only publish the latest 10 updates in RSS; were you flying and offline for 5 hours and 15 stories published during that time? you lost 5 of them).
It was reason 2 that eventually drove me to look for alternatives.
I wish Thunderbird could store folder settings on server, via IMAP Properties extension... It is only thing I miss in Thunderbird.
I'm not big fan of laptops, so I have three Thunderbird installations for one IMAP account: at my home workstation, my office workstation and on my neglected Laptop for rare business trips. And it is pain in the ss to setup identities, retention policies, columns visibility and order and such for each folder three times.
Yes, I have a lot of folders (about 100) as I'm subscribed to many mailing lists and sort my personal mail in different ways.
Filters could be configured only once, on server, thanks to Sieve, but all other settings must be repeated again and again.
I'm not big fan of laptops, so I have three Thunderbird installations for one IMAP account: at my home workstation, my office workstation and on my neglected Laptop for rare business trips. And it is pain in the ss to setup identities, retention policies, columns visibility and order and such for each folder three times.
Yes, I have a lot of folders (about 100) as I'm subscribed to many mailing lists and sort my personal mail in different ways.
Filters could be configured only once, on server, thanks to Sieve, but all other settings must be repeated again and again.
But now I'm afraid that plugin which allows to set different identities for different folders will break... And same for ManageSieve addon, as both of them don't get updates for long time, and if Thunderbird phase-out XUL addons, it will be very bad and painful.
> plugin which allows to set different identities for different folders
which plugin are you using?
which plugin are you using?
I've always wanted to use an application like Thunderbird, but haven't gotten around to it.
Reading the changelog, it seems like some of those features (like linking an attacent instead of re-uploading it) should have been features a long time ago. Am I misunderstanding something about it?
How is the development and status of the project overall? Is someone here knowledgeable enough about it to give a synopsis?
Reading the changelog, it seems like some of those features (like linking an attacent instead of re-uploading it) should have been features a long time ago. Am I misunderstanding something about it?
How is the development and status of the project overall? Is someone here knowledgeable enough about it to give a synopsis?
As I understand it, development for Thunderbird was recently ramped up again[1]. Some of the more "obvious" features might have been on the backlog for some time.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2019/01/thunderbird-in-...
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2019/01/thunderbird-in-...
>Reading the changelog, it seems like some of those features (like linking an attacent instead of re-uploading it) should have been features a long time ago. Am I misunderstanding something about it?
Filelink is a specific feature which allows pluggable storage providers (e.g. OwnCloud) to be used to transparently provide a link to a large file within the email body. It's not a feature that other clients I use support and therefore I'm a little unsure as to why this "should have been a feature a long time ago".
I don't see why you couldn't have just copy/pasted the link - this seems like a minor UI improvement.
Filelink is a specific feature which allows pluggable storage providers (e.g. OwnCloud) to be used to transparently provide a link to a large file within the email body. It's not a feature that other clients I use support and therefore I'm a little unsure as to why this "should have been a feature a long time ago".
I don't see why you couldn't have just copy/pasted the link - this seems like a minor UI improvement.
> How is the development and status of the project overall? Is someone here knowledgeable enough about it to give a synopsis?
It's a stable project. I would continue using it if it never got updated again but remained working on the latest versions of Linux distros. It's an email client. It's text. It just needs to not break, and remain as fast as it is now.
It's a stable project. I would continue using it if it never got updated again but remained working on the latest versions of Linux distros. It's an email client. It's text. It just needs to not break, and remain as fast as it is now.
IMO, it could do with a lot of improvement. Search doesn't work very well on larger mailboxes, and filtering search results needs a lot of improvement.
For it to be a bigger contender, I also strongly believe that it needs native support for MS Exchange for email and calendaring (not just relying on IMAP for emails, since IMAP is blocked in many organizations that have switched to Outlook or Outlook365 with 2FA).
P.S.: Just to add further, I donate to Thunderbird regularly. [1]
[1]: https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/
For it to be a bigger contender, I also strongly believe that it needs native support for MS Exchange for email and calendaring (not just relying on IMAP for emails, since IMAP is blocked in many organizations that have switched to Outlook or Outlook365 with 2FA).
P.S.: Just to add further, I donate to Thunderbird regularly. [1]
[1]: https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/
I am another long-term Thunderbird user and for most parts, it just works. However, there is a bug related to Global search [CTRL+K] which has still not been fixed, and is extremely frustrating, as it breaks the function of searching all mailboxes. None of the remedies work, or rather they are temporary fixes ie. deleting global-messages-db.sqlite and rebuilding the index, recreating the profile etc.
The problem seems to be related to either the size of the database or the number of messages contained in the folder i.e. 10K+ messages. A meta thread exists in bugzilla related to (Gloda) Global search. There are also various support queries on the topic.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1201650
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=541349
The problem seems to be related to either the size of the database or the number of messages contained in the folder i.e. 10K+ messages. A meta thread exists in bugzilla related to (Gloda) Global search. There are also various support queries on the topic.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1201650
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=541349
The switch to web extensions worked better than I feared for firefox. For thunderbird I can only hope the official release will cause some ports of old extentions, I'm missing a few quite dearly.
One that luckily made it: thunderlink. I can finally reference emails in my external notes/todo with a link to it.
One that luckily made it: thunderlink. I can finally reference emails in my external notes/todo with a link to it.
Make those round corners square much like on the FF and watch the downloads grow and grow :)
Firefox went back to square corners, at least on Linux.
I've been using Thunderbird for several years, I got really annoyed with the Windows mail app and Outlook for countless problems. Thunderbird has always been very simple and works great and clean.
Recently - I think version 60 or so, broke minimize to tray, very annoying. But someone fixed it and came out with a new version. It's a feature that must be included in Thunderbird from the get go.
Another great feature is being able to copy a profile folder over to Thunderbird from another machine to another and I have all my emails bang up to date.
I never thought I would use Thunderbird.
Recently - I think version 60 or so, broke minimize to tray, very annoying. But someone fixed it and came out with a new version. It's a feature that must be included in Thunderbird from the get go.
Another great feature is being able to copy a profile folder over to Thunderbird from another machine to another and I have all my emails bang up to date.
I never thought I would use Thunderbird.
Are there plans for an interface which splits into vertical columns, like Apple Mail, where the left sidebar has the list and the preview pane has more vertical space to comfortably read the content?
This has exited for a while. Not at my desktop to find the setting at the moment, but I've been using it since I found it a few months ago.
If you mean just a vertical split, that's not what I want. Because the message/thread list is still a table with columns (Subject|Correspondents|Date|....). Not sure who thought a table is needed here, I don't need to sort by any of it, I just want my latest messages. If I want to search for something I can use the search feature.
What do you mean by 'no' columns?
Do you only want a single column? You can right click on each and unselect it.
Do you only want a single column? You can right click on each and unselect it.
I still want to see all the info, but in a different format. Look up screenshots of apple mail and you will see what I mean.
So you want to have multi-line rows containing all the information as opposed to a single row?
That's probably not possible as far as I know of.
That being said, having a single row is much more information dense and of course easier to sort. Thunderbird is more of a power-user mail client than Apple's. It's much more old-school and not as 'pretty' of course.
That's probably not possible as far as I know of.
That being said, having a single row is much more information dense and of course easier to sort. Thunderbird is more of a power-user mail client than Apple's. It's much more old-school and not as 'pretty' of course.
There's no way to make a short summary appear below the subject in Thunderbird's left panel (like it is in Apple Mail). However, if all you care about is the subject, you can hide all of the other columns in the table, and that should get you most of the way there. But that's about the best you can do.
Running all my mail on TB since it was Phoenix. Carried everything across over numerous machines (and servers) since the early noughties, and never really a glitch. Including the original import of earlier history, my mail archive is largely intact back to 1996.
This has a lot to d with TB's dependable offline retention and the easy copying between accounts, be they IMAP, local storage, or - remember? - POP3.
I never understood why the world so willingly let Google and suchlikes gain dominance with their tacky free offerings and silly webmail.
This has a lot to d with TB's dependable offline retention and the easy copying between accounts, be they IMAP, local storage, or - remember? - POP3.
I never understood why the world so willingly let Google and suchlikes gain dominance with their tacky free offerings and silly webmail.
FYI, this seems to be the version where every old style extension stops working. For me that means Nostalgy, Enigmail, and Colored Diffs are incompatible, 2 of those are so essential that it's not worth upgrading until they work.
But it looks like you can set `app.update.enabled` to `false` in the config editor and keep the status quo until things settle… Even if this one (68.0) doesn't auto update, 68.1 will.
But it looks like you can set `app.update.enabled` to `false` in the config editor and keep the status quo until things settle… Even if this one (68.0) doesn't auto update, 68.1 will.
How does Thunderbird and Evolution compare these days?
Been using Thunderbird since it was called Netscape Mail. Thanks for all the fish.
Wonder why it is so out of date on Ubuntu? Am on version 60.8 under 19.04.
Wonder why it is so out of date on Ubuntu? Am on version 60.8 under 19.04.
Thunderbird ships alongside Firefox ESR releases, based on the ESR Gecko branches. The version matches the Gecko version.
Gecko 60 was an ESR, as is Gecko 68. So Thunderbird 68 is the next major release after Thunderbird 60. Until today, Thunderbird 60.0.something was the latest release, and Ubuntu is not so out of date.
Gecko 60 was an ESR, as is Gecko 68. So Thunderbird 68 is the next major release after Thunderbird 60. Until today, Thunderbird 60.0.something was the latest release, and Ubuntu is not so out of date.
60.8 was released on July 9th 2019.
They skipped 61-67 and released 68.0 today.
60.9 is out in a few days. 68.1 will be the upgrade to the 68.x branch.
They skipped 61-67 and released 68.0 today.
60.9 is out in a few days. 68.1 will be the upgrade to the 68.x branch.
I'm on Ubuntu 19.04 and I thought I was running version 68.
But yeah. It's 60.0.8. For a second I was wondering what this whole announcement was about.
But yeah. It's 60.0.8. For a second I was wondering what this whole announcement was about.
In another thread is mentioned they broke extensions to move to the new interface. Guess they are holding back until settled. Fine with me.
Thunderbird, Chandler....feels like ages ago.
Dreaming in Code is one of my favorite programming books, it documents the development history behind the very ambitious project Chandler. Highly recommended.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32475.Dreaming_in_Code
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32475.Dreaming_in_Code
I'm just about finished with this and wow, all I can say is that I've LIVED that experience. Great intentions, plenty of work, and somehow, we just couldn't get it out the door. Chandler did finally make it: http://www.chandlerproject.org/ though... but that story is such a good read.
Is it fair to say this is a good case study in the limits of Python and dynamic typing for large scale projects?
I'm not sure static typing or a compiled language would have helped much. The scope of the undertaking was certainly enormous, but it was so ahead of its time in many aspects. It tried to combine an email client, calendar, scheduler, note-taking and more; any one of them would have been a serious task. Furthermore, they had to develop additional protocols and formats for reliable communications, and you may recognize them: CalDAV & CardDAV. The main software project could not withstand the changing requirements and complexity.
I have read the book, and I don't think it's a case study of Python - it's a case study on releasing an MVP. Chandler tried to do every.single.thing right out of the gate, and got bogged down. What would have happened if it just focused on email?
... Sylpheed, Eudora, mh...
... Evolution, pine, mutt ...
I still use Gnus for mailing lists and Thunderbird for all direct email. Almost 20 years ago I spent more than 2 whole days to configure every detail of Gnus to my liking and still use the same configuration mostly unchanged.
We can date ourselves by what email clients we have used!
My main issue with Thunderbird - old annoying UI, seems like designed in begin of 00's.
So I've switched to https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary - blazing fast modern app with nice UI.
So I've switched to https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary - blazing fast modern app with nice UI.
I've tried that too and agree that it has a slick UI. However one inconvenient design choice is that it stores all the messages (headers and bodies) in a giant sqlite database. Sure, full text searches and Gmail-style multiple labels per message are easy to implement this way, but a multi-GB single-file database is harder to back up efficiently and might be less robust than a maildir-type backend, which other clients such as Evolution use.
To be fair, an sqlite DB, assuming reasonable SQL practices, has a better chance of not getting corrupted than nearly any other type of mail storage you could find.
Sqlite also supports online backups from command line.
Sqlite also supports online backups from command line.
The thing about Thunderbird's "old annoying UI" is that it's incredibly compact. It fist 3 to 4 times the information in the same space. That looks ugly when you are used to the modern web trend of lots of padding and whitespace, but the ugly way is just way more practical to me. It's the reason I use Thunderbird and not Apple Mail.
Your reason to not like it, is my reason to keep it.
I hate the blown up bs UIs of today.
TB does what it's supposed to to and looks like it.
I hate the blown up bs UIs of today.
TB does what it's supposed to to and looks like it.
I wish Thunderbird would show me the email address of the sender without requiring that I open the email. That way I could check for spammers and fakes posing as friends. I've searched for such a feature and haven't found it yet.
Control-u shows the message source - you can see the email address there without opening the mail.
(For a little bit of security when opening an email, one can also turn javascript off in Thunderbird. I've never seen why anyone would javascript in email - anything requiring javascript would probably be better done in a browser in my opinion.)
(For a little bit of security when opening an email, one can also turn javascript off in Thunderbird. I've never seen why anyone would javascript in email - anything requiring javascript would probably be better done in a browser in my opinion.)
I upgraded from Thunderbird to Interlink (the UXP equivalent) when WebExtensions became the Mozilla demand. Since then I've had no complaints. Is there any valid reason to consider trying the program again?
I was about to try this out (migrating from Thunderbird 60.0.8 in Ubuntu 19.04)...
And it seems the Cardbook-extension is no longer supported.
Without that, what is the preferred way to get remote CardDAV support for contacts?
And it seems the Cardbook-extension is no longer supported.
Without that, what is the preferred way to get remote CardDAV support for contacts?
there looks to be beta releases on the cardbook gitlab, so I would wait for those to get promoted to stable.
I have been using TbSync and it works well. Even works for Google and iCloud accounts.
> Add-on support: Add-ons are only supported if add-on authors have adapted them
What does this mean? I'm wary to upgrade if it'll break the add-ons I rely on (one of which is unmaintained).
What does this mean? I'm wary to upgrade if it'll break the add-ons I rely on (one of which is unmaintained).
Every addon has a max-version field, hopefully just that (given the leap from 60.x to 68.x) but also possibly the same thing with Firefox where a bunch of addons just died.
How does one sync google contacts into thunderbird? That's my main blocker for using it vs Gmail
The unprotected button that shows you all your passwords in plaintext always worry's me a little.
Have they fixed their serious-sounding data loss bugs that have been discussed here in the past?
so what's the proper way to upgrade from version: 60.8.0 (64-bit)?
don't want to break anything
don't want to break anything
The release notes state that the next release (68.1) will be an update from previous versions. 68.0 stands on its own.
Kind of an interesting way to do it but I suppose it lets the most eager folks dip their toes. Sounds like you're better off waiting for 68.1.
Kind of an interesting way to do it but I suppose it lets the most eager folks dip their toes. Sounds like you're better off waiting for 68.1.
Precisely. We wouldn't want to dump a .0 version on 25 million people - better to get feedback first from a couple hundred thousand.
i see, thanks
Be wary - my boss is quite upset that this latest version seems to have broken a number of his plugins.
Yeah, this has to do with them phasing out the old extensions. They are trying to shift over to web extensions completely. It's not quite done yet though.
i installed the new version (while retaining the old version 60.8) on my mac, but none of the accounts / settings / etc. have been transferred over. Trying to figure out how to export and import into new version but have not found out how so far
Is there any particular reason this version is getting so many votes here? A quick skim of the "What's New" section didn't seem like there was anything revolutionary.
Thunderbird needs to be stable, not revolutionary. In this case, stable, looks the same, works the same is The Feature.
It has a lot of interested users
But can it be minimized to tray in Windows?
downvotes notwithstanding, this is an important function for a desktop mail client, and it got taken out early in its life. During the XUL era addons could effect minimizing to tray, but with the switch to web extensions, there is no way to achieve this anymore, and it's been a bane to all desktop users because you can't just run Thunderbird in a background mode that pops up desktop notifications anymore. You either have Thunderbird running, in the foreground, or it's not running, and then obviously it's not picking up your mail.
(I have not tried Thunderbird 68 yet, but have tried a fairly recent one last month, unknown version though)
Favorite interface for mail clients are Airmail (macOS), Mailbird (Windows), geary (Linux).
The thing they have in common is unified inbox, merging of threads, controlling signal-noise.
If thunderbird took that UX approach, had undo send, it'd be indispensable.
There are also small things, like google apps 2FA working out of the box, searching email, that for some reason haven't worked as well for me w/ thunderbird yet. I'm not sure if searching gmail is doing it through their API, or by downloading all mail, but I've had issues with that.
Favorite interface for mail clients are Airmail (macOS), Mailbird (Windows), geary (Linux).
The thing they have in common is unified inbox, merging of threads, controlling signal-noise.
If thunderbird took that UX approach, had undo send, it'd be indispensable.
There are also small things, like google apps 2FA working out of the box, searching email, that for some reason haven't worked as well for me w/ thunderbird yet. I'm not sure if searching gmail is doing it through their API, or by downloading all mail, but I've had issues with that.
Undo send? That always struck me as a silly feature. It just sends another email, one politely requesting the removal of the first.
Also, TBird does have a unified inbox. I've been using it that way for years.
As for search, I have 20+ years worth of mail in thunderbird. Search works. I mostly rely on the quick filter (which filters sender/subject), and occasionally switch to the full-fledged search feature, which can take a while depending on the complexity of my searches and how far back I want to search.
Also, TBird does have a unified inbox. I've been using it that way for years.
As for search, I have 20+ years worth of mail in thunderbird. Search works. I mostly rely on the quick filter (which filters sender/subject), and occasionally switch to the full-fledged search feature, which can take a while depending on the complexity of my searches and how far back I want to search.
> Undo send? That always struck me as a silly feature. It just sends another email, one politely requesting the removal of the first.
No, it delays sending by, say, 20 seconds so you can cancel sending it. It’s useful if you accidentally hit send. I think you’re referring to the “recall” option on Exchange, and you’re right that it never really worked.
No, it delays sending by, say, 20 seconds so you can cancel sending it. It’s useful if you accidentally hit send. I think you’re referring to the “recall” option on Exchange, and you’re right that it never really worked.
Ah thanks for clarifying that. That does seem like a useful feature.
If there isn't an option or plugin for this already, it sounds like relatively low hanging fruit. Might even be a good first project for someone who's interested in contributing to tbird.
As an aside, back in the days of dialup, I would compose a batch of mails offline, give them all a read-through, and then connect and send. My mails contained significantly fewer errors back then.
If there isn't an option or plugin for this already, it sounds like relatively low hanging fruit. Might even be a good first project for someone who's interested in contributing to tbird.
As an aside, back in the days of dialup, I would compose a batch of mails offline, give them all a read-through, and then connect and send. My mails contained significantly fewer errors back then.
That's what Outlook's "Recall" feature does (at least outside your organization), but "Undo send" can be set to delay email sending and give you a chance to say "Wait I didn't mean to hit that" before it actually leaves your computer.
Gmail's web interface also does this: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/2819488?co=GENIE.Plat...
In the top right, click Settings.
Next to "Undo Send," select a Send cancellation period of 5, 10, 20, or 30 seconds.
Gmail's web interface also does this: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/2819488?co=GENIE.Plat...
In the top right, click Settings.
Next to "Undo Send," select a Send cancellation period of 5, 10, 20, or 30 seconds.
> before it actually leaves your computer
Well, it leaves your computer as soon as you type on the keyboard; that's how it saves drafts. The Undo feature works by telling Gmail servers to send the email in X seconds. That timeout gets canceled if you hit Undo. Or at least I assume that's how it works. I'm sure it doesn't wait to send data to the Gmail server until timeout is over. If that were the case, your email would never be sent if you closed the tab during the timeout.
Well, it leaves your computer as soon as you type on the keyboard; that's how it saves drafts. The Undo feature works by telling Gmail servers to send the email in X seconds. That timeout gets canceled if you hit Undo. Or at least I assume that's how it works. I'm sure it doesn't wait to send data to the Gmail server until timeout is over. If that were the case, your email would never be sent if you closed the tab during the timeout.
Good point. "Leaves your outbox" would be a better way to put it.
Quick filter is a power user way to clean out email like a hot knife through butter. GMail is a good product but for this particular use case Thunderbird blows it out of the water. I felt, and still feel, that Thunderbird is for 'serious' email users.
Airmail is a fine client, and MailButler adds the missing features for me.
Thunderbird has Send Later ( https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/send-... for ) which the same as undo send.
Unified folders have been around for a while. 2FA has been around for a while. I think search is local, but it works well enough.
I haven't yet found an email client to replace Thunderbird/Airmail. All the new-fangled ones like Mailbird, Postbox simply leave out too many features to be useful.
Thunderbird has Send Later ( https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/send-... for ) which the same as undo send.
Unified folders have been around for a while. 2FA has been around for a while. I think search is local, but it works well enough.
I haven't yet found an email client to replace Thunderbird/Airmail. All the new-fangled ones like Mailbird, Postbox simply leave out too many features to be useful.
As usual, I came here to look for recommendations :)
I have been enjoying Mailspring[0], an OSS fork of Nylas Mail (RIP). I came across it while looking for the closest thing to Google Inbox (RIP also). Mailspring is cross-platform.
[0]:https://getmailspring.com/
[0]:https://getmailspring.com/
It's free, but not open source.
I thought this was the source? https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring
Or are you referring to the cloud aspects of Mailspring, like read receipts etc?
Or are you referring to the cloud aspects of Mailspring, like read receipts etc?
The UI is open source, but the mailsync engine it uses is distributed as a proprietary, closed-source binary.
I still nip into Gmail quite regularly, especially when I'm already in the browser or a tab is already open, but if I'm sitting at the desktop and need to compose an e-mail, at some point the default returned to alt-tabbing to Thunderbird.
No waiting around, no messing, blank e-mail window up on the screen as fast as I can hit CTRL+N.
Back when everyone switched to Gmail circa 2005ish, hitting CTRL+N quite probably meant a firestorm of random IO hitting a magnetic disk, on a machine with barely any RAM for cache. The equation has long since changed, and your reason to use Gmail might now be your reason to use a desktop client. Highly recommend giving it a shot