I've started using Thunderbird again after months of trying literally every other solution on the market. I wanted to switch from Outlook and Gmail to something that is fast, has good keyboard support and a good message editor.
It's incredible how slow most of the email clients on the market are. What's even more incredible is that, apart from Outlook, none of the other clients offer a good way of editing tables properly.
But there's also a problem: I now have Thunderbird exactly how I wanted it, but it took a few hours to set it up and it required some technical knowledge: calendar, tasks, Gmail like smart search, multi language corrections. For a normal user, that might be off-putting. However, I think Thunderbird is gaining momentum again and will soon be back to one of the biggest player on the market.
Since I was more than willing to pay for a good solution, I've now redirected that monthly payment to Thunderbird.
I think Outlook itself is a big reason for why other email clients seem so behind. As a user, Outlook is great and I have absolutely no complaints about it. As a developer that occasionally has to work with the technical side of emails, Outlook is the biggest source of frustration due to its “proprietary” standard of content presentation, address book management, contacts etc. I have to write plenty of code specifically for emails to work with Outlook because they do not follow any open standard and they’ve created their own. And we can’t stay away from it because it’s definitelly the most used client in our field.
Seems like Microsoft is leveraging their position in the same way Google does with browsers and Apple does with hardware.
I'm on a Mac, and really prefer the native Mac mail client. It's fast, polished, and has insanely great search tools. But I keep Outlook running, too, because to properly and reliably deal with Exchange calendaring (esp with respect to coordinated online meeting setup), it's really the only good option.
Which means I have two copies of my work email corpus on my machine. And it's not small.
It’s great, but also super frustrating. Like how it will suddenly pop into focus every few hours (possibly showing your personal emails while screen sharing) or how message content sometimes just doesn’t display.
I don't know. My dad is an "average" user running Outlook as client, and he's currently complaining all the time because for some reason at least every second Windows 10 update wrecks the performance of Outlook so hard it sometimes takes minutes to start and upwards of 10 seconds to open an email. Not to mention the occasional crash.
I'm glad Claws mail exists; an ancient client but the only graphical one I could find that's actually fast and lightweight. Although Mailspring is pretty good as well and is not quite as slow as one might expect from an Electron app.
In the end I am really glad I have no need of more "enterprise" features in this area.
It's not that Microsoft is following in Googles footsteps, it's the other way around. Microsoft just gets to feel the other side of the stick for a change. Googles time will come too one day.
> I now have Thunderbird exactly how I wanted it, but it took a few hours to set it up and it required some technical knowledge: calendar, tasks, Gmail like smart search, multi language corrections.
If you haven't already, check out how profiles and the profile manager work, and maybe put your Thunderbird profile in a location you backup, or even sync with other devices if needed [0]. The ability to install Thunderbird on a new machine, point it to the profile directory and have it exactly as you set it up is just wonderful. I guess by installing plugins and configuring it, but not adding email accounts, you could even make a profile for less technically savy people to use and add their email acount to.
[0] One pitfall is that a profile can only get opened by versions as new or newer than the last Thunderbird installation that used it -- for this purpose I made an empty profile I can switch to just to update Thunderbird before I use my actual profile. There's probably a dozen better ways of doing this, but even this duct-tape method works fine for me.
On the other Hand the way Thunderbird profiles work you might have to do this only once a decade and not once every new device. At least this was the case in for me
I've been carrying over my Thunderbird profile to new computers since the 00s. It's just restoring a folder from backup, no obscure settings in the registry or hidden folders.
> It's incredible how slow most of the email clients on the market are.
It really is odd. I've tried a handful of clients, but the one I wanted to work the most was MailSpring. The UI was clean, it was supposed to be fast, and have great integration off the bat. I forget if it was my gmail, my student email (through gmail), or my hotmail account, but one of them would just refuse to connect. If I can only have 2/3 of my emails, I'm not going to bother. That was a few months ago, so maybe it's fixed, but damn.
Thunderbird works, but if they could have some easier customization, I think they could really take back some of the market.
I was a paid subscriber of Mailspring for a while, but it just completely grinds to a halt with large threads (>50 replies). It’s so unfortunate because the rest of the email client is very pleasant to use.
I’m still searching for a fast email client with great UX, but for now I assume they are mutually exclusive.
Great to see a headline like this again. But even if you had frozen Thunderbird how it was, it would still beat other mail solutions. I can live with Outlook/Exchange in my corporate environment, but it still cannot compete.
Gnome's Evolution is quite good as well and the built-in exchange support for both email and calendar via EWS works better than the thunderbird plugin.
I used to use thunderbird, but after several troubles with the exchange plugin (e.g. meetings on Fridays disappearing) and calendar not working properly I switched to Evolution where it just works.
> But there's also a problem: I now have Thunderbird exactly how I wanted it, but it took a few hours to set it up and it required some technical knowledge: calendar, tasks, Gmail like smart search, multi language corrections. For a normal user, that might be off-putting. However, I think Thunderbird is gaining momentum again
Thunderbird's problem is and always has been a lack of resources. Mozilla infamously bungled, underfunded, and then abandoned it (as a result of narrowing their focus from "the Internet" from their original charter and trying to redefine "Internet" to mean "the Web"). But even after the spin-off and independence, Thunderbird's lack of resources isn't helped by Thunderbird development being more difficult than it needs to be (read: seemingly unapproachable for many potential contributors).
"How to keep contributors when they are not even contributors yet" by Soledad Penades is incredibly relevant (moreso for its title than the actual specifics of the post content, but there are good lessons there, too):
Ten years ago, you could get folks who were willing to get dirty with XPCOM/XBL/XUL because they already existed in the wider Mozilla community, and the biggest problem was Thunderbird's build process and compile times. Nowadays, you have the same barrier wrt annoying build processes, but the pool of knowledgeable people is smaller since the XUL add-ons ecosystem has been decimated. Ultimately, Thunderbird will need to address its legacy use of XUL, but they already know that and seem to be working on it.
More importantly, though, the problem Thunderbird needs work on is the same old problem from before: the headache of setting up a development environment that can actually perform a successful build, and how long it takes for that build to complete. The way that Zotero is built is currently pretty hacky, but nonetheless an example of how easy it should be to get a development environment set up. (In fact, it can and should be made easier than that, but just getting Thunderbird's build process to where Zotero is right now would be a huge boon to making Thunderbird something that potential contributors actually start considering as "approachable".)
What hurts Thunderbird extremely hard is Mozilla's inability to keep any embedding story live for more than a year or so.
Originally, Thunderbird and Firefox lived in the same CVS codebase, and the only difference to build Thunderbird was changing one line in your config file. When Mozilla moved to Mercurial, the Thunderbird code was left out of the repository on purpose, and so gained the annoying split-repository. Then Mozilla removed the ability to build the C++ code in anything other than a link-everything-into-libxul configuration. (Well, you could choose to have binary components live elsewhere, but the string APIs turn out to be completely different for pretty much no good reason--and mail code is obviously very string-heavy)
There was a plan to build Thunderbird on top of a vanilla XULRunner. Then XULRunner was killed off. Webrunner was next (I think), and that was then killed off again. Now I believe there's yet another thing, but of course Firefox has also shut off access to binary (C/C++) extensions, so if Thunderbird wanted to use it, it would have to rewrite ~1M lines of code.
> Then XULRunner was killed off [...] Webrunner [...] killed off
Yeah, and just to point out: in a profoundly stupid move. I mean, it was stupid then, too, it's just that now we have the evidence for it.
The constant refrain was that niche being a dead end. But the rise and proliferation of Electron (to the point that people bring it up to complain about it in places where it's not even on topic) and the success of Chromebooks (compared the failure of FirefoxOS for mobile; which itself was a leadership/execution error) both mean exactly one thing: those calling the shots on that decision and their supporters were flat out wrong. And so where is that crowd now? Mostly with their legacy and influence still being felt in every decision—and where those decisions contribute to Firefox being more marginal every passing year. Even if you forgive the original mistake, how is this not outright embarrassing for Mozilla Corp leadership?
Can I ask what it is you don't like about Outlook?
I've been a regular Outlook user for many years, and honestly I'm pretty happy with it. My only real pain is the lack of ability to easily export/import my mail accounts between machines, but that's something I do only every few years.
I did run Thunderbird on a low-power laptop some years ago, and did like it, but at the time it was nowhere near feature parity with Outlook.
> Can I ask what it is you don't like about Outlook?
The simple fact that it does not mark lines starting with '> ' as quoting is really off-putting.
At work, my co-workers are getting convinced that in-line replies are much better, but if the author (me!) uses plain-text only, all the other Outlook users will have a hard time reading my emails.
Actually, all about plain-text email is a pain in Outlook. I took more time to configure it (as good as it can) to send plain-text email, but now I read all my incoming emails as plain-text.
And to make it quote with '> ' in the beginning and make it properly work was a hell.
All in all, Outlook, to me, is the symbol of the Microsoft of the 1990s.
Bonus: with External Editor [1], I can use Vim (or any other editor) to edit my emails in Thunderbird. No way I could ever do so on Outlook.
Not the OP, not I've disliked mostly the slowness, modality and UI. It also never seemed to be capable to find the mails I was looking for... unlike other mail clients.
Compared to Apple Mail + Calendar + Contacts, it is a night-and-day.
I was full time on linux at a previous job where the company used Exchange. I tried davmail (for email, calendar, contacts), a combination of exchange imap + tbsync for contacts, calendar etc, but they all seemed a little flaky at best. The solution i settled on was Gnome's evolution. It was really seamless and everything worked just as well as using the Outlook app on windows/app. I went through the Gnome Online Accounts integration but you can add the account from within evolution as well.
I really like Thunderbird, but if you need to use exchange and are on linux I think there isn't a nicer option than Evolution at the moment. It plays nice with all MS services and integrates with the OS for contacts, calendar etc.
Ofcourse all of this only applies if you are using Linux and its possible evolution is annoying on non gnome systems (i haven't tried it outside of gnome). I think kmail also has exchange support but i haven't tried it.
I use http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ running locally and connect Thunderbird to it for Exchange email and calendar. I used to use the TB add-ons for this directly but they broke a couple of years ago with the XUL addons removals. The davmail solution means I just use lightning for calendar and the rest is all standard TB.
Not the OP. Several east coast-style execs I've worked with won't open attachments, but rather forward correspondence with attachments to their team. So for them to ever see the info, it has to be in an email body.
It depends on the field you're in I suppose. I use tables all the time in email, they're a very organised and quick way of presentning infomation, wth the benefit of colour coding. Someone can respond to the table by adding a column with their own thoughts on each item, etc. - very good for formal approval/discussion on a list of points. Why should someone be forced to use a separate file for simple HTML formatting?
Collaborating on documents over email feels like a hack. I definitely don’t share your experience but that seems like something which belongs on a wiki or at least in a git repo.
The point is to keep things as lightweight and transferrable as possible. I can send an HTML-formatted email to someone, and they can see it right away. Also, an email chain on a topic shows the development of the discussion over time. I'm in consulting so when dealing with clients there is a need to keep things lightweight.
Email is more of a 'record' than a 'document' - these are different things. Wiki and Git repos are more for building up a permanent body of work which will be referred to and built on (i.e. documents), rather than transitory discissions and a log of daily events (i.e. records).
I'd be interested to know which bits of gmail are slow for you. My personal experience is that it's so fast as to be unnoticeable in the things I do day to day (writing, searching, labeling, moving emails around etc.)
MailMate’s correspondence viewer looks great. The conversations add-on for Thunderbird keeps locking up for me, even when I’m in the middle of writing an email. Maddening.
You don’t need electron app. Chrome has built in support for creating apps from webpages. Tools->more tools->create shortcut and it will save the shortcut into your apps folder.
I like the Gmail keybindings. Only scrolling the message by lines is not available. (Scrolling the message by page is available.) Somehow, I like to scroll by lines...
I was following along until the electron part. Why spin up a whole new browser instance instead of, say tearing off a tab for mail from your existing browser?
Just FIY the winmail.dat (the horrible Microsoft email format) plugin LookOut (Fix Version) has not been updated for this release and unless someone jumps in to help Probably wont be updated. https://github.com/TB-throwback/LookOut-fix-version/
I was maintaining it but haven't been able to find time to work on the upgrade.
There was talk in the dev mailing list about adding TNEF support but that probably wont happen until 2021
Thank you for maintaining the extension until now!
Sadly the improperly configured Outlook clients are still not extinct in some of the organizations we work with. Does anyone know a good guide (with screenshots would be ideal) of the settings they would have to change?
Extra white space makes the window nearly twice the size for no apparent reason. I wouldn't say the new one is any clearer. Maybe even less clear, since the grey textual tips next to the fields have gone.
The old To/Cc design was really bad. If you have more than three addresses, then these three lines scroll. The only indication that there are more than three addresses is a tiny scrollbar all the way to the right. I recently sent an e-mail to more people than intended when editing an old message as new, because it had more To-addresses that weren't visible and I didn't notice the scrollbar.
The worst bit is that you can't even expand that part of the window to see more addresses at once! Need to include the whole team on this mail? Prepare to squint...
Now it needs some visual indication of a complete e-mail address in the To: line. Like a rounded rectangle 1px border around a complete e-mail address and some kind of hint, that you can enter more than one address.
There is a visual indication of a complete email addresses: each correct/complete email address is wrapped in a "pill", a light gray one (see OP screenshot). An incomplete email will similarly get wrapped into a dark red pill.
Your comment maybe indicates the gray is too subtle, or invisible to users with bad eyesight.
Agreed about the flat buttons sadly following the OS-cohesiveness-hindering flatness fad instead of adhering to standard OS styling which can be recognized across apps by users.
Disagreed about the To/Cc redesign, the new design is much more efficient when you have multiple recipients, making good use of horizontal space. The old design did lead to:
1. Tons of wasted horizontal space (as each line is a recipient, on each line you only use the few characters describing each recipient, leaving space on the right blank). And also, one-line-per-recipient leads to tedious vertical scrolling inside a vertically-constrained space (3 lines by default, and you don't want more, you want to preserve vertical space for the email body, not the header).
2. Impossibility to easily copy/paste all recipients. With the new design, it's now easy: select all, copy (and repeat once if you have a Cc field, okay).
There's a reason this To/Cc design is what most (all?) desktop/mobile clients do.
At least in the Mail.app on macOS, clear buttons are still used in the toolbar and the window bar when you compose a new message. I definitely think theres new thunderbird buttons are both a downgrade in terms of usability, but also because, aesthetically, I think they look way worse. The icon design is really quite bad. The "A" char is poorly rendered, the stroke width and proportions seem to be all over the place, and the italics "A" looks particularly bad.
Not a fan of the flat buttons but I strongly disagree about the single/multi line TO situation.
I doubt there will be a single person for whom Thunderbird is their first email/messaging type app. Most would have used something on their iOS or Android devices first at least.
All of them will be comfortable with multiple users in a single To line, while having multiple lines for multiple users will actually appear alien to them.
> Most would have used something on their iOS or Android devices first at least.
This almost equals to assuming that nobody is older than 25 or 30 especially because the no "single person" assumption. I started with UNIX's mail in a terminal, used a dozen of different clients on UNIX, Windows, Linux, Android, not all of them graphical.
I've been using Thunderbird probably since its very first day. My other client is K9 on Android. I think the address pills will be OK but I want to test their manipulation with keyboard and touchpad.
I wholeheartedly disagree. The new "To" field is much, much easier to use, and I'd be curious why you think it's the result of 'trade offs made under the mobile constraint'.
It's not a mobile constraint. Nearly every desktop mail client also uses a single To line.
I mentioned mobile because as far as discoverability is concerned, there is an order of magnitude more mobile users than desktop users, so the vast majority of users will have no problem understanding this concept.
And if you've been a desktop user long enough that you havent used a smartphone then you're probably used enough software that have similar patterns (and used email enoguh) that you shouldnt have trouble realizing that single To line means you can add multiple recipients to the same line.
"I've had issues editing email addresses in clients with multiple mails per line."
This was my first reaction when I saw the change - I really hope they get this right as it goes to the core functionality of Thunderbird. If email addresses can't be easily and accurately edited in the To field, it will be a real problem for me.
Clients tend to get confused about where one address ends and the next one starts. I'm sure there are ways to solve this well, but my personal experience makes me skeptical.
Yes, if that's how it's implemented... Gmail doesn't. They wrap your email address text in a button thing. Others prefer semicolons, or was it commas, or was it both?
Its just yet another thing I shouldn't have to think about
> I doubt there will be a single person for whom Thunderbird is their first email/messaging type app. Most would have used something on their iOS or Android devices first at least.
You'd be wrong. I, grudgingly, moved from mutt to Thunderbird after it was clear that email was turning into MIME-encoded web pages.
If you've been using Mutt, the concept of multiple recipients itself is a much harder process of discovery :)
Ironically, I am moving from Thunderbird to Mutt (NeoMutt actually). I find the elimination of HTML means it's actually easier for me to not get distracted by stuff I dont care about for email, which is interaction with real human beings, who are unlikely to be typing complicated HTML messages. Besides, with the right config (I'm still working on it), the HTML message is 1 shortcut away.
Unfortunately, my colleagues, who mostly use Outlook, employ HTML to its full extent when pasting in content to messages. ("Refer to the text highlighted in red.", "See the table for details", etc.)
Back in my BBS days, there was ANSI color with IBM-extended (CP437) block graphics to liven things up, so I can see it has gone full circle a bit.
Agreed the multi line To field was a frustrating user experience. From my office we were reliant on the addon MRC Compose as no-one would use it over outlook otherwise
Extra white space makes the window nearly twice the size for no apparent reason.
The old window was twice as big as it needs to be too, but I agree the new one is even worse.
I don't like the flat buttons either. I don't use macOS much, but the old ones with a subtle border look like they're native UI, whereas the new flat ones don't. A random image I found confirms that the old buttons and checkbox look the same as what the OS itself uses, while the new ones look very out-of-place:
The point of the huge window is that you have multiple steps and the window is sized for the largest one so it doesn't resize between steps. I'm also unhappy about the extra space but the window being larger than its contents makes sense here.
"The compose window now also takes up less space with recipients listed in “pills” instead of an entire line for every address.."
Yup, already hate it. I much prefer not looking through a list of buttons on the To line for the one I want to remove. Additionally, I can instantly see if I'm sending and email to my coworkers company or personal address without some damn tag after his name.
The integration of GPG into the client was a great move. The addition of dark mode is also good to keep up with the times. After all this while, the best thing I love about this release is the simplification of the To (and also CC and BCC) list into one field instead of being multiple rows (it was always painful to scroll).
I used to use Thunderbird as my only mail client for many years and still prefer it for personal accounts. I loved global search when it was launched, but that was not improved over time for accurate searches, especially for large mailboxes (I struggle to find mails with it in mailboxes that are a few Gigabytes in size).
Thunderbird has not focused on built-in MS Exchange support (especially including calendar), which, combined with environments where IMAP is disabled, makes it a no-go. I know of one commercial extension (Owl) that works with MS Exchange/Office 365, but that extension requires the purchase to be made by providing which email address one wants to use it for. It’s a privacy concern that the developer said they wouldn’t fix. So I’m stuck with Outlook Web Access at work (I refuse to use the Outlook client).
It is OpenPGP capability that is being integrated into the client, not GnuPG. You will have to import your keys from any existing GnuPG installation. Any new keys you add in Thunderbird will not be accessible to other things that use GnuPG.
In some of the screenshots the old version looked better than the new version, especially with regard to how everything nowadays needs to be "flat". It lacks the visual feedback of buttons, which can be "pressed in" and that can be annoying. Also I dislike how every button now seems to be bigger and everything needs to be in "tiles" instead of simple links or buttons.
I think in general I simply dislike "material design".
It's always seemed odd to me that on the one hand material design admits how important the physicality of an interface can be, as well as our spatial understanding of it, but on the other hand tries to eliminate the most established examples of those things. Why talk about shape and depth if you then eliminate shape and depth on the most important UI widgets?
I do think there's great promise to the core idea of treating data in our UIs like we'd treat, for example, pieces of paper on our desk, or pages in a book, but just more efficiently. For example I've always felt that a music app built around a paradigm of piles or boxes of songs, interacted with very physically and naturally to build playlists, would be wonderful (especially versus the current state of the iOS music app). However most of the time it's just flatness for flatness's sake, and an excuse for designers to go wild with minimalism.
I really wish TB would store mails in Maildir by default and operate on that storage according to the standard so that the local mailstore becomes compatible with other mail clients.
Right now one can manually switch the storage to maildir, but it is not safe to use that storage with other maildir compatible software.
Maildir only suggests the safe delivery mechanism that gets around lack of atomicity guarantees in filesystems by using the guarantee that a rename is atomic as a workaround.
It suggests a way to add metadata about messages through the use of flags added to file names, but doesn’t specify what these must be.
I don’t think, therefore, that Maildir as a standard provides enough to allow it to be relied upon for portability between clients (MUAs). That’s not to say a standard couldn’t emerge if there were some agreements.
Then you're creating a new format (sqlite is well known, but the schema won't be), which third parties can add support for; depending on your exact goal, this is probably worse than using an already-supported format.
for personal mail the advantage in Maildir is incremental backups acting on the file system level are efficient. With an mbox file or sqlite db the whole file has to be backuped and transfered again. Of course for backup/snapshot mechanisms working on the block level one big file does not matter.
Each email in its own file means a minimum of x KB on disk for each email, where x is usually 4. For people with thousands of emails that's very wasteful.
I would take a safe Maildir implementation over subtle (or sometimes catastrophic) data loss bugs any day. The one really serious problem I have with Thunderbird is that after being stung more than once, I feel like not only do I have to keep normal backups, I also have to retain old backups indefinitely, just in case a folder was corrupted silently a long time ago and I only find out months or years later when I need to search older messages.
Maildir, as opposed to emails stored in one big file, does cause some disk space to get wasted, but in past 10 years, it is immaterial. Even million empty emails, each taking 4kB of disk space, would take only 4GB in total. The small files aren't a concern for saving disk space: the big ones are.
Maildir has the advantage that searching, adding and deleting emails is very fast, much faster than if those operations were made on single big file. Worth it.
Waste isn't the issue with big folders; filesystem performance (especially NTFS, which is to say Windows users, which is to say ~90% of users) degrades pretty horribly when folders have tens of thousands of files. Even on Linux filesystems, having a folder with a 100,000 files in it was having issues.
FWIW on ext4 I benchmarked adding millions of files to a folder and compared with `xx/...` and `x/x/x/x/...` and found the performance to be basically identical between the options and didn't degrade with the file count.
The one thing that I did find is that deleting folders with many files was very slow. I guess that path wasn't well optimized. However even then you could deleted hundreds of files a second so for regular mail usage it likely isn't a major issue.
Only if you use filesystem that cannot efficiently store small files, either together with metadata or packing several small files together, and allocates a full allocation unit for each separately.
> * Dark mode (though I actually don't get why a GTK application should do this; well-behaved GTK integration should respect dark GTK themes already)
Maybe that has changed recently, but the UI of Thundebird, like Firefox, used to be primarily based on XUL, only relying on GTK for drawing certain "native" elements, so it wouldn't implicitly inherit the GTK theming.
I skimmed through the features and was very excited for the dark mode announcement. But that quickly went down the drain when I couldn't find how to force it from the setting, because I'm using i3wm, and there's no "dark mode" per se.
The other thing I'm wondering about is how this will integrate with OpenGPG, more specifically if it will allow the use with smartcards. And it looks like it planned ![1]
Great work Team Thunderbird. Been a fan for the past 5 years, will be for the foreseeable future.
Likewise. I know it is merely a cosmetic change, but it is just easier on my eyes.
For me Thunderbird is a way to slowly attempt to disentangle from Google. Thus far it has not been a disappointment. No welcome screen, no problem, there is an option for that. You don't want stuff to be compacted every time it starts, no problem; change one value to false. If only most programs were like that today.
> The other thing I'm wondering about is how this will integrate with OpenGPG, more specifically if it will allow the use with smartcards. And it looks like it planned ![1]
Actually smartcards were already supported when I tested alpha some time ago. Thunderbird used GpgME to talk to GnuPG and GnuPG talked to the smartcard.
The OpenPGP support is based on Enigmail (ginally merged in!), which has been a wrapper around GPG all along. GPG does all the actual cryptography in this setup.
Love Thunderbird, and super glad to see that its development pace is picking up again.
The only big thing missing now is a three pane view: there is this 17 (!) years bug on the topic, and hopefully somebody will pick it up soon (Before you say it, I know that I could contribute myself but I do not think my skills are up this particular task)
I just switched Linux distro last night (Ubuntu to Fedora) and downloaded the latest Thunderbird (v78). I thought the oversized, cartoonish UI was something inherited from the Gtk or Gnome version shipping with the new distro (which oddly didn't affect other applications).
Now I can see it was a change in Thunderbird, and I hate it. It's so clunky, that when enabling Large Text in Gnome (to make things more legible on the 1080p 14in laptop screen) Thunderbird looks disproportionately large compared to every other application.
I keep swinging between dislike and acceptance with Thunderbird.
It feels old, clunky and cludgy. And not in a good way (the way Vim is old, but still marvellous, or mutt is cludgy but still Just Works Everywhere).
The UI feels horribly out of place (on my vanilla Ubuntu), the UX is terribly inconsistent and after -I think- 10+ years of using it, I still have to search where to find stuff. Daily.
I've been comparing it with each and every option for the Ubuntu desktop and even webmail. Clients like Geary[1] or Roundcube [2].
Those are often unfinished; I guess mail clients are like many other software-challenges in that regard: it's easy to make the basics, the 90% that 90% of the people need. It's doable to make those basics really good (see all the webmail, electron mail and other mail clients). But it is really hard to do the last 10%, because each of the individual users has a different 10%.
And so, I find I love the UX of Geary and use Roundcube often for its simplicity and "Getting Stuff Done". But I also find that I keep going back to Thunderbird, because <insert some feature I use once a week> is only there. But, boy, it annoys me how cludgy and convoluted thunderbird then feels.
Edit: forgot to mention that a lot of the 10% things in Thunderbird are severely in my way, daily. I have an RSS reader - why is there one in Thunderbird taking up mental (and memory) space, I don't ever use the built-in IM (is it jabber?), the calendar and todo-tasks feature I don't use, but they attempt to manage my agenda/invites anyway, making me miss an occasional meeting even. I'm sure other people find the GPG being severely in the way (part of the 10% that I use often) or that archiving and offline features are clumsy, confusing and making people miss emails (another feature I often use).
Thanks for the suggestion. The demo looks really promising. Quite similar to roundcube, but a little slicker.
My mailserver is mailinabox, though, an opinionated mailserver setup, so replacing roundcube (which comes with mailinabox) with rainloop would mean migrating my server entirely. Guess that's the downside of using an opinionated mailserver setup.
I love the UI and I hope they never make any significant changes to it.
It does have many features and therefore you have to operate them if you need them. If you don't, you don't. I don't understand how they "hurt" you when you can't even see them.
I recently jumped from linux mint to Fedora...just to play because i haven't lived in anything related to redhat for many years (no offense to fedora or red hat, just formed a habit of ubuntu-derived distros like Mint)...anyway, i've always been a tunderbird user, but now that i am trying fedora i set it up with KDE...so figured I'd try kmail - which i had heard good things about. Well, my experience was ok/so-so as compared to thunderbird. Please don't interpret this as some start of a flamewar...i don't hate kmail by any means...it just felt like it was a similar to thunderbird but i don;t know less polished or with fewer features that were exposed. I'm sure that i have to give it more time to be fair, but so far kmail has disappointed be a little bit. I'm going to continue using it to see how things go. (Obviously my experience is not based on any evidence, nor is a formal review or anything like that...just early usage feelings.)
EDIT: I should have added that as much as i use (and admire) thunderbird, there are many gotchas, and it could benefit from many more adjustments and fixings. Also, i do like to live in a world that has choice, so I would be overjoyed not only for thunderbird to improve but also kmail and all other open source email clients. The more, the merrier!
One feature that I can't live without that is surprisingly rare is the ability to view full threads. In Thunderbird you can Right Click -> View Conversation (or something like that) and it will show you the entire tree of messages. This is invaluable for trying to understand messages in a long discussion.
But when I tried kmail I did like it other than that. However for now Thunderbird seems like the least-bad client in my testing.
KDE-1 was my first DE, (SuSE 6.x) and I used that for years, so I really know and used KMail. KDE-PIM was my favorite and long time the only piece of K- software on my otherwise gnome en (back during the kde3 drama, I threw it out and went full-gnome).
I tried KMail it a few months ago, knowing how I used to love it. It is still complex, full-featured and highly configurable. Three attributes that I don't necessarily think are good attributes. I tried it for weeks, but decided that if I'm going to use a mailclient that needs constant tweaking, research and work, I can just as well stick to Thunderbird.
It also still saves hundreds of megabytes not having any K software in gnome. And still, 2020, k-software looks like :brown-emoji: on gnome.
I think it'd take some serious investment, probably using something like Electron, to make a combined Webmail and desktop mail client that's good and modern. But if someone did that, it'd be really interesting.
I sort of think Google should do it with GMail, in fact.
Just curious, how does Archiving get in the way? I've always found it a million times better than basically any of the other email clients archiving processes.
I have two ways of archiving:
* Manuall mail older than 2 years off my server into a local storage. The process is somwhat clumsy, but works.
* Conssitently archive anything that is done, keeping inbox(0) using the "archive" feature in TB - hotkey 'a'.
I did find that often archiving in other mailclients, or in thunderbird itself (all using IMAP, no shared storage on my machine) makes thunderbird's search index break. about 20% of the mails in my archive are not searchable. Only after hunting down the "rebuild search index feature" can it be fixed.
The fact that such a feature exists, alone is worrying in several ways.
I had an IMAP account that, when deleted from the server (the company closed and closed their GSuite accounts), was rendered impossible to access from TB. But afaik the emails where there, given the space that the TB folder occupied on the hard disk.
I saw some conversations about how if you want to have a local copy of emails and be sure that server errors (or server dissappearance, as it was the case) won't affect your access to old email copies, you should manually copy them to the Local Folders section within TB.
Does anybody know what is the "best practices" for keeping access to downloaded emails and not lose them if the server closes? Should I be copying every email to the Local Folders storage?
I'm a major fan. I self host email, contacts, calendar, and Thunderbird is essential in my workflow.
Only issue is that the task descriptions don't render HTML and with all the crazy zoom meeting invites it is ugly. HTML in caldav is not standard but I would like the option since its a thing these days.
I second this. This is my number one usability issue with TB, that I use almost everyday.
Example: I recently (2 months) received, say, 150 e-mails from one person. During that same period, that person has also received lots (~300) of e-mails that are in my client: ones I sent, ones they were CC-ed, etc.
Now, I need to find that pdf they sent me some time ago. It would be no problem to scour the 10 or so message I received from this adress with a pdf attached (still doable without the mimetype).
TB lets me search messages that "concern" that person, but also gives me the ones they didn't send. Would a "sent by" be too hard to provide? Quick search works a lot better than the regular search for this, it's something I do multiple times a day. I sometimes spend more than 5 minutes looking for an e-mail, then give up, load zimbra, and I'm able to find the e-mail in 10 seconds thanks to the more granular filtering available there.
Thunderbird has three search methods: quick search allows you to filter by Sendor (unselect Recipients), but you can also do a more granular search using EditFindSearch Messages (Ctrl+Shift+F). I don’t use the other Ctrl+K search much.
This sort of thing should be a feature provided by the Desktop Environment so that you can set how each application operates for closing and minimising.
It also now supports Microsoft's modern authentication (i.e., their flavor of OAuth), which is now becoming annoyingly mandatory at more and more organizations.
Will this version let me compose text-only messages by default while still being able to switch to a HTML message when needed? You used to be able to shift-click reply to compose as text but that that stopped working in a previous update.
Shift-Click on Reply/Compose to switch from text to HTML (or HTML to text if HTML is your default) still works for me. If it doesn't for you, it's a bug.
Though since they inexplicably removed the reply-to-all button from the easily accessed tools in a recent UI update, this can be more fiddly now than it needs to be...
You should be able to do that, and it was the first thing I tried when it was removed by default. Unfortunately, it didn't work for me then, and having just checked again, it still doesn't work now (I'm on 68 for now, as the 78 update isn't being pushed to the regular release channel for me yet).
Edit: Apparently I was wrong and the replacement "Smart Reply" button does show up, but only sometimes depending on context. Since Thunderbird only shows it selectively now, I did not see that when I was checking before.
So I withdraw my criticism about removing functionality, and I replace it with criticism of changing user settings during updates, replacing a well-established feature with a subtly different one, and hiding controls that are currently not applicable rather than showing them as disabled. The fact that this comment thread exists is a pretty good demonstration of why these are bad ideas.
Calendar integration off the bat is essential for an email client IMO. Glad that it's being incorporated. Dark mode is also a nice addition. I'm rooting for Thunderbird, I want them to help bring back non-web email clients.
Thunderbird is one of the few email clients on MacOS that doesn't choke with huge GMail inboxes.
Thing that baffles me is that you need to install an extensions to have keyboard shortcuts for moving & copying messages with autocompletion, of course the one I was using broke with the latest release ("Quick folder move"). What's the favorite these days?
Same for Lightning and G Suite calendars, but I guess this will be fixed upstream quickly.
Thank goodness, they’ve cleaned up the to: fields in the compose window at long last. I have been using Thunderbird on and off for a _long_ time, and the lack of UI polish in thins like that has been a constant eyesore.
Too bad that the formatting toolbar seems to have become visually “heavier”, with bolder lines in some icons. I’ll just have to see what the final product looks like on both my Mac and Elementary...
I switched to Outlook and found out my calendars and tasks from my Fastmail account were not supported (only Exchange accounts are now supported). If Thunderbird has now improved their calendar and task support, I will switch back.
It also looks like they added minimize to system tray, something else I found was impossible in Outlook.
I'm stuck on Thunderbird 60 because of Dorando keyconfig.
I like to read an email /then/ move them to folders.
Keyconfig lets me just tap a key and it manually runs the mail filters on that selected email. Otherwise I have to drag each email to its appropriate folder, which suuucks.
I was stuck on Thunderbird 60 for a long while for the exact same reason. I'm now using tbkeys on Thunderbird 68; it works great. https://github.com/willsALMANJ/tbkeys
Did Thunderbird remove support for older XUL-based add-ons like Firefox did? It’s unclear to me what the article means by “legacy extensions” - based on context it seems simply to refer to extensions that work in 77.
Set up a radicale server and and the calendars sync just fine. Add the cardbook adding and contacts do too. I guess thats what you mean by not first class?
AFAICT, Cardbook doesn't work with TB78 (https://gitlab.com/CardBook/CardBook/-/issues/574) . The built-in Calendar integration is real nice though - was able to pick up various CalDAV options well. Edit1: fixed link.
All of them use some sort of Webbrowser underneath. Thunderbird is using Firefox/Gecko, Geary is using GTKWebkit, macOS Mail is probably using Webkit. Note sure what Windows Mail is using. (Similar to outlook in my experice)
Outlook... is using Microsoft Word. (I mean technical it's just Offices' document rendering engine, but for meail it's equivalent as opening a HTML file in MS Word) (Also sends RTF mail for addresses on the same Exchange server)
Although I'd note that they strip down the HTML avialible. Emails can't execute Javascript. CSS is stripped down and must be in file. (Or completely inlined)
You limited to some very old Web technology in email. (Unless Google somehow managed to convince anyone else to support AMP 4 Email)
Good luck running a mail client - you know, a program that takes html documents and renders them, because modern email is html - without running a browser.
In any case, thunderbird essentialy has a lineage going back all the way to netscape navigator (at least spiritually), so it was doing this way before electron was cool.
Did they changed something on the interface because I used to change the order of the action buttons on the email pane (anwser, archive, spam, delete, etc.) and this can't be done now?
Don't underestimate the power of defaults and core functionality.
If gmail support PGP, you could start to really use it, since you could be reasonably confident the recipient could read the message even if they have no idea what PGP was. For a plugin they would have to actively look for it.
Unfortunately Thunderbird user base is tiny but it's something
Yes. It adheres to the original six levels of trust, generating a confusing UI that in practice nobody but three people used. Easy mode was still confusing, with details like does the button show "the current state or an option to switch to that state"? An alternative plugin, autocrypt, was actually a much better beginner-proof way of having pgp.
I still think TB 78 isn't enough, but it's a step into the the right direction, where we recognize that there's a brilliant system in pgp, obscured by outdated and even counterproductive security insights (such as the trust levels). It also is included by default, important for secure by default mail communication.
It used to be XUL, but since that was deprecated and Firefox doesn’t support it, for a while Thunderbird was still using it with a plan to switch out. The larger plan for Thunderbird is to use “web technologies” (meaning HTML, CSS and JS). IIRC, this move is already in progress.
You might appreciate the Thunderbird Conversations add-on, which displays threaded conversations. With this add-on, the message view looks similar to Gmail's original interface.
> Update: A few of you have asked how to make a contribution to Thunderbird under the new corporation, especially when using the monthly option. Please check out our updated site at give.thunderbird.net!
Side note on emails in-general: talking to my younger colleagues it seems that email is going away. We all, me included, prefer to use chats like slack for work and recreation (see discord) and email is used mostly for registrations and getting spam. It’s an obsolete format.
Mail is the lingua franca of online communications. It isn't going anywhere any time soon, if only because it it's an independent standard that does not rely on some single commercial entity to continue operating it. That is also part of the reason why all those other services still fall back on email for their registration mechanisms.
And the Mediterranian Lingua Franca also faded away. I tend to agree with the person you're replying to, 95+% of my email is automated things sending it, it's rare that I have an email conversation with anybody these days. I don't like this trend, because I value open standards etc., hell I still use IRC regularly. But its use as a person-to-person communication mechanism is definitely falling, in my experience. Also, most mailing lists I'm on have been steadily drying up for a several years now.
I'm sure for some people that is the trend. For others, email is still doing just fine. Personally, I don't much like the kind of proprietary message board applications that trade off locking up your communications in someone else's system for using a prettier UI. Almost any individual online communication that I care about, whether personally or for business reasons, is done either via email or via some sort of self-hosted system that isn't trying to replace email. And speaking only for myself, I have had many email conversations catching up with old friends online while we can't meet in person because of the virus situation. YMMV, and presumably so will a few billion other people's. :-)
Makes me sad to read things like this. Slack and Discord are centralized, someone else owns your identity and you cannot do anything about it. With email (and Matrix) you have the chance to own your identity (by having your own domain).
I think we need to do one better. Relying on a domain/instance/provider doesn't cut it long term, and you either host your own, but it's hard to personally commit to maintain it non-stop for the foreseeable future, or you pick a reliable instance. Centralized silos are generally very reliable instances, (see: gmail).
Not being able to move elsewhere is a lock-in issue (Matrix has an issue for decentralised identities [1]).
I don't see why we couldn't just attach our identities to a private key. Encrypt that private key and back it up on various online providers (using PAKE so that they never see it). Use those to authenticate elsewhere. Designate one, or multiple, providers as a temporary mailbox (rather: ask them to fetch content that you are a recipient of from a DHT). People would identify you with pet names they assign to you. You could publish your key in multiple places (in my HN profile, for instance).
I think of a DHT rather than a blockchain, because blockchains don't scale. Your user account could itself be a blockchain, though, stored encrypted in the DHT.
Not sure why I haven't found such a system yet? Secure scuttlebut seems to come close, but I mostly want an authentication and message passing system, that e-mail could be re-built upon, and bridged with.
I'm young and I really dislike slack. Sure, I agree email is shit but it is by far the best tool I have seen for this type of messaging. (Collaborative documents like Google Docs or Dropbox Paper being the other major async communication tool I value).
The major problems I see with slack and similar is that it is too easy to lose messages. If I click a channel, but get distracted before I can properly read or act on it, the message is effectively gone forever (unless I remember, or the next time I happen to open the channel). No other medium has the explicit "delete" (or archive or whatever) that email has. I find this way way way more useful than the "read" concept. Because read means nothing to me, even if I actually did read it (not that it was just present on my screen for a couple of seconds) it is incredibly likely that I forget about it.
Other things I like about email:
- Multiple clients let me use email how it works for me. I can control how it notifies me, how it sorts my messages and everything else I care about. Slack is ok, but I don't really believe that one size fits all. And I'm not sure that it even fits many people.
- I can send an email to anyone. I don't need to invite them to my workspace or channel or anything. Just enter an address and it is off.
> The major problems I see with slack and similar is that it is too easy to lose messages. If I click a channel, but get distracted before I can properly read or act on it, the message is effectively gone forever (unless I remember, or the next time I happen to open the channel).
If you push Command-LeftArrow (on Mac) it's like a back button for Slack channels.
This doesn't solve the problem. If I forget that I had a message I need to act on I'm not going to remember to go back. The problem is that slack is "done by default" where as email keeps it in my inbox until I explicitly say I'm done.
marketing/newsletter email devalue the format, and in my family most stopped to care about a "inbox". Hundreds of images tucked away on an IMAP server, uncatalogued - far from ideal.
A chat-view in email clients could counter the development, if messages from contacts have visual advantage over automated email. The Ivelope client was featured here before, but went quiet. DeltaChat tries to do it, Chat-over-IMAP is another campaign of vendors.
Problems like mailbox size, search and indexed view of attachments/content, expectations on privacy.. this friction will remain from a user perspective.
Which, at least for me, has never worked properly (I check after each update) and still leads to lags and timeouts in Thunderbird/Outlook. If they don't fix it till my protonmail's subscription expires, I guess I'm moving to another provider.
Why would it be "wise"? If you need secure mailbox free of direct surveillance by providers, you need to host it yourself using software you yourself checked and compiled.
Every time I hear about this recent "dark mode/light mode" fad I am reminded of a time when most software would use the OS's native and fully colour-customisable UI which let you have dark mode[1], light mode[2], rainbow mode[3], and everything in between[4], consistently across all applications with basically zero effort on the part of the application developers.
Yeah, and X resources let us Linux nerds choose freely as well. This is what we get now that every application ships its own implementation of everything, including GUI toolkit.
To be fair this is different for an email application because most email content assumes a white on black. This means that if you want to display the content in black on white it requires non-trivial and heuristic based fiddling.
Thunderbird has always followed my Linux GTK theme so I don't really know what you are complaining about.
On windows 10, I have dark mode enabled system wide, but I struggle with most third party dark modes, the contrasts between components is not thought out enough - or in the case of email, styled html emails sometimes don't work on a dark background
Is it possible to turn off the dark mode in thunderbird when the os system wide dark mode is enabled
Did they fix the bug where you have a Yahoo or AT&T account and change the password at the server and when you change the password in Thunderbird it gives you server errors?
I have native apps for email on the various machines I own (between phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops that's at least 5). And, in a pinch, I can still use webmail.
I'm not sure why "cloud" matters for email -- it's always been hosted on a server somewhere.
If you use POP for your mail client, your client downloads the mails from the server that then deletes them and you only have them on your computer (Unless you use Gmail that does some hybrid thing storing the old emails but marks them as read I believe)
POP3 doesn't automatically delete the emails it fetched (with RETR). It has to emit another specific command (DELE) for this purpose.
So, keeping or not keeping mails on the server is a matter of configuration in your client. I think all clients propose this choice and some will also add extra options like deleting only after a number of days since fetching.
On the other hand I can't understand how people can only use webmail. Do you only have one email account? I've got a personal email on a server I'm running, a backup gmail, a school/work account, and the root account for the email server. Even if I wasn't too lazy to set up webmail on my email server, I still wouldn't want to go to three different websites to check my email, I'd use a mail client to bring all of them into one place.
It's incredible how slow most of the email clients on the market are. What's even more incredible is that, apart from Outlook, none of the other clients offer a good way of editing tables properly.
But there's also a problem: I now have Thunderbird exactly how I wanted it, but it took a few hours to set it up and it required some technical knowledge: calendar, tasks, Gmail like smart search, multi language corrections. For a normal user, that might be off-putting. However, I think Thunderbird is gaining momentum again and will soon be back to one of the biggest player on the market.
Since I was more than willing to pay for a good solution, I've now redirected that monthly payment to Thunderbird.