
Thunderbird 68.0 - hcl
https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/68.0/releasenotes/
======
slovenlyrobot
I switched back to Thunderbird sometime in late 2017, in part because I was
working from abroad with spotty Internet at the time. Since coming home, it's
stuck. The experience is so much better than waiting for a Gmail tab to "boot
up".

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

~~~
longtom
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<

~~~
slovenlyrobot
I find it embarrassing that this feature needs to exist at all

~~~
longtom
Gmail is a free product, hence it has possibly low priority.

~~~
wasdfff
My tuition pays for g suite.

~~~
godzillabrennus
It’s free for colleges. Your tuition pays for bloated administrative staff
salaries.

------
yowlingcat
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.

~~~
ttul
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.

~~~
Rondom
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...](https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2015/02/thunderbird-usage-
continues-to-grow/)

~~~
ttul
Perhaps “fading is usage” is inaccurate!

------
stevewillows
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.

~~~
ubermonkey
Doesn't MacOS Mail show the unread count in the Dock already?

~~~
stevewillows
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.

~~~
ubermonkey
Sure, I get that. But the menu bar gets so hella crowded...

~~~
pseudalopex
Bartender can help.

------
Improvotter
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.

~~~
blackhaz
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.

~~~
wott
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.

~~~
blackhaz
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.

~~~
stan_rogers
Phoenix forked from Netscape Navigator 6. The renaming to Firebird and then
Firefox were entirely about trademark conflicts.

------
skinnyasianboi
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.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Right click on menu/tool bar, Customise…

~~~
skinnyasianboi
Thanks a lot! Now it's perfect. I was able to hide mostly all of the UI
elements I will never use.

------
FreeHugs
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?

~~~
extra88
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.

------
criddell
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?

~~~
Mathnerd314
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](https://www.openhub.net/p/notmuch)).
Thunderbird in contrast is 1.2 million LOC
([https://www.openhub.net/p/thunderbird](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...](https://www.openhub.net/p/mailspring/analyses/latest/languages_summary)).
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/](https://emailclientmarketshare.com/)

~~~
jcranmer
> Thunderbird is at 1% marketshare, although the sparkchart is weird
> suggesting measurement difficulties:
> [https://emailclientmarketshare.com/](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.

------
wasdfff
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.

~~~
beagle3
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.

------
blacklion
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.

~~~
blacklion
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.

~~~
sashk
> plugin which allows to set different identities for different folders

which plugin are you using?

------
RandomBacon
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?

~~~
abdullahkhalids
> 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.

~~~
newscracker
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/](https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/)

------
johnnycab
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://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1201650)

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=541349](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=541349)

------
anotheryou
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.

------
betimsl
Make those round corners square much like on the FF and watch the downloads
grow and grow :)

~~~
mixmastamyk
Firefox went back to square corners, at least on Linux.

------
johnwish007
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.

------
dsego
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?

~~~
mcjiggerlog
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.

~~~
dsego
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.

~~~
koyote
What do you mean by 'no' columns?

Do you only want a single column? You can right click on each and unselect it.

~~~
dsego
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.

~~~
koyote
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.

------
interfixus
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.

------
__david__
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.

------
jadbox
How does Thunderbird and Evolution compare these days?

------
mixmastamyk
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.

~~~
josteink
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.

~~~
mixmastamyk
In another thread is mentioned they broke extensions to move to the new
interface. Guess they are holding back until settled. Fine with me.

------
unexpected
Thunderbird, Chandler....feels like ages ago.

~~~
pestaa
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)

~~~
kev009
Is it fair to say this is a good case study in the limits of Python and
dynamic typing for large scale projects?

~~~
pestaa
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.

------
paulcarroty
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](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary) \-
blazing fast modern app with nice UI.

~~~
curt15
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.

~~~
labawi
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.

------
nercht12
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.

~~~
IgniteTheSun
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.)

------
Endy
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?

------
josteink
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?

~~~
wilsonthewhale
there looks to be beta releases on the cardbook gitlab, so I would wait for
those to get promoted to stable.

------
Doctor_Fegg
> 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).

~~~
mattl
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.

------
Fire-Dragon-DoL
How does one sync google contacts into thunderbird? That's my main blocker for
using it vs Gmail

------
gandalfian
The unprotected button that shows you all your passwords in plaintext always
worry's me a little.

------
justin66
Have they fixed their serious-sounding data loss bugs that have been discussed
here in the past?

------
balaksakrionon
so what's the proper way to upgrade from version: 60.8.0 (64-bit)?

don't want to break anything

~~~
stanski
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.

~~~
wsmwk
Precisely. We wouldn't want to dump a .0 version on 25 million people - better
to get feedback first from a couple hundred thousand.

------
badfrog
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.

~~~
aetimmes
It appears to be a significant enough rewrite that no upgrade path from
previous versions is available.

~~~
wsmwk
It's not a rewrite. And users will be updated, just not yet.

------
TheRealPomax
But can it be minimized to tray in Windows?

~~~
TheRealPomax
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.

------
tony
(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.

~~~
Tharkun
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.

~~~
blowski
> 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.

~~~
Tharkun
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.

