
Thunderbird in 2019 - richardboegli
https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2019/01/thunderbird-in-2019/
======
kuon
I love thunderbird because it's the only email client that does everything I
want. I tried CLI clients, they are great and customizable, but CLI is a bit
bare for email (images, html, fonts...)

Things I'd like to see improved:

\- Native CardDAV and CalDAV support (there is caldav, but no discoverability
of calendars).

\- Native PGP.

\- Better search, the UI is horrible and the search string is hard to get
right (need fuzzy search and partial contact completion).

\- A bit of UX work, some preferences are just a nightmare to find.

\- Automation (auto tags, auto threading (for example, I get an order
confirmation from webshop X, and a while after a shipping confirmation from
webshop X, I want those to be grouped)).

\- Improved storage engine, thunderbird is often freezing to compress folders.

\- Critical bugd being fixed, like "imap"->"local folder" messages vanishing.

~~~
Boulth
Native PGP is something I'd be very happy to see. Enigmail is needlessly
complex with long setup wizards that frequently fail and a lot of legacy code
supported for old distros. Services such as ProtonMail show that focusing on
modern conventions and picking the right defaults can really bring encryption
to normal users.

~~~
teddyh
Have you tried the latest version of Enigmail with P≡P and Autocrypt
integration?

~~~
Canada
Yeah, it makes a real mess. It generates random numbers of key pairs for each
user, breaks subject line encryption randomly, and just generally sucks. I
hope it gets better, but it’s definitely not something you want to enable at
this time, I regret doing it. At this point it’s easier to have one person
help 50 people manually generate and exchange keys in an office setting.

~~~
Leace
I agree wholeheartedly! It's interesting that trying to make to process easier
actually made it hard for both novices and experts.

Too bad it's enabled by default and plagued by issues:
[https://pep.foundation/blog/enigmailpep-current-
update-1024-...](https://pep.foundation/blog/enigmailpep-current-
update-1024-fixes-bug-under-windows/index.html)

~~~
Canada
I really, really want it to work. I'm hopeful it will get better. I don't like
PGP keyservers, they aren't very reliable, I wish I could remove all the old
keys I've lost. And I don't like publishing my email address like that. Plus,
the most of my GPG email use is with keys from people I know that we've sent
each other directly. Overall I'm pretty satisfied with Enigmail running in the
old PEP-free mode.

~~~
Boulth
I'm also running PeP-free mode and I'm satisfied with it. I'm thinking that
maybe after initial configuration it just works so the problem is largely
setup.

As for keyservers even GnuPG is diminishing their role. Web Key Directory is
promoted as a replacement for discovery and updates of keys. Coincidentally
Enigmail will automatically fetch recipients keys using WKD when composing an
email. For example kernel is using it
([https://www.kernel.org/category/signatures.html#using-the-
we...](https://www.kernel.org/category/signatures.html#using-the-web-key-
directory)) so does ProtonMail.

------
StevePerkins
The last I heard from Thunderbird in 2018, the story was Mozilla making
preparations to divest themselves from the project and spin it off to "the
community" (a.k.a. Apache graveyard).

This post makes it sound like the Thunderbird team has been growing within
Mozilla during 2018, and is targeting another 75% headcount increase in 2019.

I mean, that's awesome, as someone who wants there to be a viable desktop
email client option out there. But geeze... what a muddled mess of messaging
and pivots from this organization.

~~~
RealDinosaur
The big problem I see is entrenchment... it's an app where nothing can change.
They can't go ahead and just do a Chrome 69 with it.

What I would love to see is a small team in Mozilla create a spin-off Electron
app, and do it well. Electron has a bad rap, but it's mostly due to being
misused. Electron can be used well (VS Code for example).

Mozilla LightningBird for example. I could get on board with that. Heck, I'd
probably help out.

Edit: Jeeze! You guys sure hate Electron. Just because a tool is misused so
often, doesn't mean it's a bad tool.

~~~
monksy
Electron apps are usually pretty terrible.

They have issues with:

1\. Memory usage and cpu usage (you're running a browser to run your
application)

2\. Platform look and feel (doesn't exist in javascript)

3\. Platform and windowing behaviors.

I agree with the other commented to you.. if it changed to electronic, I would
drop it as well.

~~~
RealDinosaur
Hence the spin-off app. A ground-up, UX focused app which does not have to
meet feature parity, would attract users who are already confused by email
clients.

This is a different target audience to the people who typically use
Thunderbird at this time.

For some people Apple Mail is enough.

~~~
ben509
TBH, anyone I interact with who is tech savvy doesn't use email, so I really
don't need those features.

~~~
untog
> anyone I interact with who is tech savvy doesn't use email

You live in a strange bubble.

~~~
ben509
We're not corresponding via email... ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Between github, SMS, social media, IRC & slack, video-conferencing, blogs,
RSS, etc., email has become the medium of last resort. I still get a lot of
email, but it's mostly automated notifications, and I usually have to log in
somewhere to actually recieve a document because email is insecure.

------
fouronnes3
Thunderbird still has a critical bug open that literally deletes your email. I
have been bitten by it once and lost hundreds of email permanently. Not fun. I
am subscribed to the ticket and every month or so someone posts an outraged
"me too".

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156)

~~~
classichasclass
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156#c141](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156#c141):
"This bug has lasted this long because there is no reproducible test case, so
thus no way for an engineer to diagnose the problem and test a patch."

I sympathize, but I'm not sure what you expect the team to do. The bug seems
highly intermittent even when it does occur and there doesn't seem to be
anything in common between the systems that are affected.

~~~
ben509
Normal troubleshooting for intermittent issues is to add logging and
diagnostics around possible areas it's happening and have users send in traces
when it bites them again.

~~~
classichasclass
Sure, if you have some idea what the set of "possible areas" are. If you read
the comments, it's possible there are several multiple overlapping bugs. And I
don't see a whole lot of traces from those afflicted.

I agree such bugs are at best obnoxious and at worst cataclysmic. But having
been on the receiving end of such nebulous intermittent reports myself, I'm
not going to simply conclude the team is incompetent or uninterested.

------
shmerl
I recently discovered this add-on:

* [https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/tbsyn...](https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/tbsync/)

* [https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/eas-4...](https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/eas-4-tbsync/)

An actual working atcivesync support for calendar and contacts.

With Exchange being still very pervasive in corporate environments, it's quite
useful.

~~~
amaccuish
Oh thank you! I really wish Thunderbird would support EAS/MAPI over HTTP/EWS.
They're so widely used and it's irritating to have to use the memory hog that
is Evolution.

~~~
amaccuish
Update: works really well, shame it doesn't do email at the same time, but I
guess it's a WIP. Cheers!

~~~
anuragsoni
As an aside, if using IMAP for the exchange account (as @shmerl suggests)
doesn't work for you, you might have better luck with DavMail [1]. I've used
it in the past before my workplace enabled IMAP access for exchange mailboxes.

[1] [http://davmail.sourceforge.net/](http://davmail.sourceforge.net/)

------
halfastack
Thunderbird is, hands down, my most used desktop app, if we're not counting
IDEs and editors. Definitely would recommend; Thunderbird is awesome.

~~~
kgwxd
Not counting browsers?

~~~
timbit42
Maybe they don't surf the web all day at work.

~~~
kgwxd
Reference; research; testing and debugging web sites in the 5 major desktop
browsers; communication and data entry apps required for work that have a
horrible desktop client, or no desktop client at all; etc. There's a lot of
useful, work related things browsers provide access to.

------
wongarsu
Glad to see UX on that list. Under the hood Thunderbird is incredibly
powerfull, but actually using it beyond the most basic workflows is mildly
painful. With competition from highly polished webmail clients with
autolabeling features I find it hard to actually recommend Thunderbird to
anyone unless they _need_ PGP (which is even more painful in Thunderbird, but
PGP in the cloud is a different threat model).

------
warpech
Thanks for this great news for people hungry for good desktop alternatives for
the abundant webmails. Please spend part of the effort on Lightning (the
calendar add-on).

------
belorn
As a daily user my personal preference almost align with their goals. I look
forward very much to the day that I can stop using mail-notification in Gnome.
The Thunderbird built-in system has seemingly broken polling feature (not sure
if it does anything when running minimized), and has no option to specify
folders that you want fast notification when a new mail arrives. I always miss
Gnome mail-notification when I am using Windows, and sometimes have my laptop
running Gnome next to the Windows computer just for this purpose.

The second feature I would very much like them to work on is search. It is
horrifically slow, seems to miss some mail (html only maybe?) and the result
window has terrible UI. You can't preview why the search found something so
either you run a more narrow search or manually go through each email it
found. There is also no threading in the result window so you lose a lot of
context.

~~~
clinth
Agreed. I love Thunderbird, and gave it a shot last year as my work email
client (exchange). Loved almost everything, but ultimately the search and lack
of threading sent me back to outlook web access.

------
xte
IMO the _real_ revolution might be a decision to integrate notmuch so to move
from a '90s-like UI/workflow to a modern era one so powerful that can easily
outshine webmails.

Also, with a proper maildir cloning support (mbsync like for instance) it may
give to the casual users the opportunity to have locally their messages.

Otherwise anything Mozilla can do can at maximum keep a zombie alive simply
because of lack of less ugly widespread and generic alternatives.

------
hyper_reality
It's good to hear that Thunderbird is getting more resources. One UI bug that
I didn't see mentioned in the post though, and that shouldn't exist in 2019,
is that Thunderbird loses the scroll position of a tab when changing tabs. I
hope this will get fixed soon.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Lol, Thunderbird seemingly has plenty of major loss-of-data bugs (I lost all
my archives recently; synced up to the server -- that bug seems to be several
years old (but rare)).

I'd almost guarantee that your tab-scroll-position bug is fixed first. It
seems to be the way of things.

Thunderbird seems incredibly janky to me (unstable and easy to break, rough
around the edges). Maybe my experience is rare ... would love to see it become
solid and fast.

~~~
graeme
You lost everything and it was totally gone? Or did you have a backup and
restored?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Well I had a backup of sorts, domestic environment, but did lose data (yes I
shouldn't have trusted it).

Still haven't managed to debug so can't use Thunderbird properly yet; changing
app is a major upheaval after a decade or more [not quite continuous use,
tried Kmail, Opera, and a few others like Sylpheed, Mutt(!), in the interim --
after Pine, proprietary apps TB was my first desktop MUA].

So, I need to audition new MUAs (family friendly), then recover what I can.

~~~
Fnoord
Mailspring? [1] Its FOSS.

[1] [https://getmailspring.com](https://getmailspring.com)

~~~
shock
Only part of it is FOSS (the UI basically), the sync engine is closed source
and using Mailspring requires creating a Mailspring account FWIW.

~~~
jammygit
I wonder what's in their privacy policy. I don't mind paying but wish everyone
didn't use the same semi-copy pasted privacy policies for liability reasons.

Edit: typical 'your pii is an asset we transfer when we get acquired' clause

Information Shared with Third Parties. We may share aggregated information and
non-identifying information with third parties for industry research and
analysis, demographic profiling and other similar purposes.

Information Disclosed in Connection with Business Transactions. Information
that we collect from our users, including PII, is considered to be a business
asset. Thus, if we are acquired by a third party as a result of a transaction
such as a merger, acquisition or asset sale or if our assets are acquired by a
third party in the event we go out of business or enter bankruptcy, some or
all of our assets, including your PII, may be disclosed or transferred to a
third party acquirer in connection with the transaction

------
jcranmer
It's good to hear that people are interested in actually getting something set
up to track performance metrics, but I won't believe it until I actually see
it.

One thing I would add to performance metrics is that tests for very large
folders (of about 1M) should be added. I was talking with someone last night
who was complaining about how long it took to delete 200K messages from his
inbox, so it's not a wholly implausible metric. I just worry that people are
going to focus on metrics that go "oh, there's no issue with a 1K message
folder since it's all within the 16ms budget" without looking to see their
impact on 10K or 100K folders, which is where people really complain about
performance.

~~~
andris9
Issues with large (as in message count) mailboxes is a common thing nowadays.
Don't know about client side as I've been working on the server side for past
few years (see [https://wildduck.email/](https://wildduck.email/)). Clients
with large mailboxes cause a lot of issues both server implementation wise and
operation wise. For example some widely used IMAP server software dies if an
IMAP client tries to SELECT a maildir folder with >320k messages (every
message in the folder yields in some file system calls while SELECTing, it
takes some time and then the process that handles the client connection just
crashes due to some overflow or whatever). Also there's older versions of
Outlook (eg. 2010) that tend to sync state by FETCHing FLAGS of all messages
in all folders every X minute and causing huge amounts of traffic and so on.

~~~
jcranmer
I'm not terribly surprised. It's easy to forget that mailboxes are actually
databases, and at the scale of GB databases, you're going to start stealing
ideas from the database community on how to manage databases rather than
relying on the filesystem to act as a database for you.

Thunderbird itself does a nastily poor job of scaling to massive folders,
since it assumes that it can do UI-thread-synchronous operations like "get a
list of every message in the database." (And fixing it is _hard_... as I have
way too much experience with).

------
anuragsoni
Really good to see Thunderbird getting some attention and a dedicated
development team. I have to use Microsoft Exchange at work and Thunderbird
(i'm on version 60) with a couple of plugins, has been the client that has
worked best for me on linux.

------
pawodpzz
I use Thunderbird pretty much just for FiltaQuilla extension, which runs shell
commands when email matching some filter arrives. It would be nice to have
this functionality built-in and extended (e.g. email data could be passed to
stdin).

The biggest drawbacks is overall slowness (especially when syncing with
server) and search UI (which really needs to be condensed). BTW it would be
nice to have option to search for all mails involving some address by just
right-clicking the address, like in Mailspring.

------
bad_user
First of all I’m very happy to see a community-driven Thunderbird that’s still
alive and kicking. I used Thunderbird before and I can see myself returning to
it.

Now I'm on MacOS and I use MailMate, see:
[https://freron.com/](https://freron.com/)

I wish Thunderbird would be more like it. It's simple, fast, uses Markdown in
its editor, has nice keyboard shortcuts, plays well with Gmail's labels, has
smart filters and works well with multiple accounts and aliases.

Seeing some of the comments, I’m surprised to see people putting emphasis on
Thunderbird’s calendar or missing CardDav support. Well, MailMate provides no
such support.

I.e. for calendars I simply use Apple’s Calendar, for contacts I use Apple’s
Contacts. I don’t need my email client to handle these.

That Thunderbird can do it, that’s cool, but I think Thunderbird has problems
in handling email that should be fixed first. And I’m glad to see them invest
in better Gmail support. I don’t even use Gmail as my personal account, but in
this day and age it’s a must and the features (like labels) will prove handy
for other email providers too.

------
com2kid
I just switched away from Thunderbird after I found out about a long standing
bug where the search index may not be updated sometimes, resulting in some
emails not being discoverable with search.

Not able to find emails in my email client is a 100% deal breaker.

Back to Outlook I go. It's search isn't perfect, but at least emails show up
eventually.

~~~
gerdesj
Not really a good reason for switching. Make sure you regularly rebuild your
search indexes in Outlook because I have several helpdesk calls that were
fixed that way (partial results, last seen in OL 2016) ...

------
polskibus
I wonder if Mozilla evaluates hiring teams in areas with lower avg income but
still reasonable quality of CS education like Eastern Europe, Russia, etc. to
get faster product development for the same donations.

------
sabas_ge
I actually like Thunderbird since when I discovered MRC Compose extension[0]
which provides a UI similar to Outlook in the To, CC and BCC fields. Having to
input one by one the email addresses is troublesome in my use case (lots of
addresses to manipulate when replying). It's a pity it isn't a default
behaviour.

[0] [https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-
US/thunderbird/addon/mrc-c...](https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-
US/thunderbird/addon/mrc-compose/)

------
starik36
Every time I am excited to try Thunderbird I am sent packing because of all
the features that are barely implemented or don't work well.

The practice of having plugins do core functionality is just not a good idea.
Things that 90% of the users use should ship in the product.

For instance, cloud Exchange support is lacking. I couldn't even login to my
work account, while other clients (Windows Mail, iOS, Outlook, etc...) have no
issues whatsoever.

The calendar is just awful. The contacts is completely bare bones.

Here is hoping the new folks breathe some life into it.

------
seanalltogether
Is anyone successfully using Thunderbird with Google calendar? I gave up on it
a couple years ago and just use the website, but I'd love to use it again if
possible. I honestly can't remember what issues I had, but I do remember near
the end I was using it as a view only feature, but for actually stating
hangouts or creating new meetings I still had to use the website anyway.

~~~
jfk13
It's working OK for me (via the Provider for Google Calendar add-on), though I
haven't tried starting hangouts.

------
shay_ker
An email client that doesn't have a mobile companion app is an immediate
thumbs down for me. I want a consistent experience for something as important
as email, whether I'm on a laptop or on my phone.

Sigh. That probably means Thunderbird mobile is going to take till... 2021?
2022?

~~~
wpietri
Could you say more about why that is?

For me it's like a Swiss Army knife versus my full kitchen. I use a basic
email client on my phone for on-the-go stuff (seeing what has come in, making
quick replies). But for doing anything serious, I want a full keyboard and
reasonable screen real estate. I don't think it's possible to have a
particularly consistent experience, so I'm fine with using a different client
on my phone.

~~~
shay_ker
I like special features of AirMail, for instance, where you can snooze certain
emails. If they only had a desktop client, then I can't snooze on the go on my
phone. And now I have to context switch and remember to delay certain tasks to
when I get to my laptop.

Email clients also sometimes impose some level of formatting, and I'd like
that to be consistent across mobile/web as well

------
phyzome
I'm still on Thunderbird 52 because the upgrade to 60 ruined my calendar. I
hope the next ESR version works better. :-/

I don't even use Thunderbird for email anymore, so I guess what I really want
is a standalone calendaring application that I can migrate to.

------
schnable
I have a couple family members that were heavy Thunderbird users. They
recently switched off it because it was chewing up CPU when in the backgound,
and the spam filtering doesn't really work. Glad to hear they are getting some
more engineers.

------
baroffoos
Amazing how they are working on speed when thunderbird is about 20x faster
than gmail

------
sublupo
one thing I'm really hoping for is more support for calendars. I see no way to
view / change the color of events. while I can add them to categories, it is
much easier for me to color code them.

