
Mozilla Wants To Split Off Its Thunderbird Email/Chat Client - dest
http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/30/thunderbird-flies-away-from-mozilla/
======
ultramancool
I think this is the 3rd time I've heard Thunderbird is/is going to be
unmaintained and that I should avoid it, but I'm yet to see a good
alternative. Claws was crashy and didn't DPI scale properly on Windows, OS X
Mail had strange behavior with my IMAP server and I just wanted a consistent
UI with my Windows and Linux system. My next option is webmail but there's no
good IMAP webmail client that seems to be able to handle 8 accounts at once
with thousands of messages in each. The best alternative I've seen is probably
Alpine, a CLI based client, but that was difficult to use and seemed to
randomly send deleted characters from emails to clients, which was almost a
major issue on one occasion.

I'm just going to keep running Thunderbird until there are gaping security
holes, people say Thunderbird is bad but everything else is worse.

~~~
Karunamon
I've moved to Mutt/OfflineIMAP on most every machine I own, and it's worked
remarkably well. It's a CLI app, yes, but it outshines Thunderbird (and most
other GUI clients, for that matter) in a number of ways:

\- _FAST._ Mutt lets you process thousands of messages in short order. Mutt is
directly responsible for helping me dig out of a 50k deep email hole brought
on by years of GMail's approach (archive, never delete) in a few days of on-
and-off cleanup.

\- Plays well with others. Uses a bog standard Maildir format that anything
sane can read (including Thunderbird, so migration should be easy), provides a
very powerful hooking system which can do anything from verifying PGP
signatures to checking your spelling before sending to displaying attachments.

\- Sane defaults. Doesn't require a lot of in-depth customization to provide
the basics, and the bells and whistles are hardly out of reach.

\- You have a backup of your mail for free (by using OfflineIMAP)

\- Not hard to learn (at least for the crowd here). If you can use Vim, you
can be using Mutt at full speed in less than a week.

\- Search capabilities that blow nearly every other project out of the water
(regexes with some very cool niceties)[1]

\- Secure by design. Mails are rendered as plaintext, HTML is decoded by
piping messages through a program like w3m. Tracking bugs can't do their job,
spammers can't see that you've looked at their stuff, and you're immune to
whatever image decoding bugs crop up. (Though you can still view images, it's
an explicit process). Also, builtin GPG support.

I followed Steve Losh's guide[2] on setting it up.

[1]:
[http://www.mutt.org/doc/manual/manual-4.html](http://www.mutt.org/doc/manual/manual-4.html)

[2]: [http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-
mutt/](http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/)

~~~
ultramancool
How well does mutt work with multiple accounts though? Last I saw it seemed
more cumbersome than Alpine for that.

~~~
Karunamon
That I'm not 100% sure of. I know for receiving, you'd just configure
OfflineIMAP to deliver each account's messages into a different folder, and
just switch between them in Mutt, but I don't know how it would work for
distinct from-addresses, contact lists, etc.

Some quick googling[1] makes it look like you indeed do that first thing, and
then set up a hook to load a different configuration file when you enter the
folder for a different mailbox.

[1]:
[https://www.df7cb.de/blog/2010/Using_multiple_IMAP_accounts_...](https://www.df7cb.de/blog/2010/Using_multiple_IMAP_accounts_with_Mutt.html)

------
betteringred
They want to kill XUL for Firefox so they can be all fancy HTML. So they have
to kill Thunderbird, a XUL app.

In a few years the all new HTML Firefox will come out. My bet is that it will
suck. It will lack a TON of features that the existing Firefox has, but hey,
it's all HTML! And you won't be able to stick on the old one, because within a
week or two some critical security flaw will be discovered and eventually
(like six weeks later) they'll stop supporting those for old Firefox.

Initially the HTML Firefox will suck. When you take an app that's been worked
on for 15 or so years and then replace it's UI you're going to lose a TON of
features. They'll slowly reintroduce some of the most popular features
(hamburger menu will be priority #1!) but there will be a TON that they will
not reintroduce. Why? Because when they were first introduced a decade ago it
was a cool idea someone had, and no one knew how popular it would be, so heck,
why not implement it. But now they know that only 10 million or even 1 million
people use that feature, and they're only interested in 100 million user
features! If Google Chrome doesn't have it, it must not be important!

As much as people complain about XUL not looking native, wait for HTML
Firefox, it will take them forever to get where XUL was years ago.

They can't just kill XUL for Firefox though, they have to burn down the XUL
ecosystem first so they're just releasing a new Firefox, nothing to see here.

1\. They try to kill xulrunner as a project separate from Firefox. They try to
move everyone to firefox -app.

2\. They stop releasing binaries for xulrunner.

3\. They deprecate XUL extensions.

4\. They distance themselves from Thunderbird. They say it's better for
Thunderbird. Yeah right! Thunderbird is built on XUL, it's not going to be
rewritten in HTML any time soon, definitely not by volunteers. It's not going
to be able to maintain XUL either, and when Mozilla stops supporting XUL for
Firefox a few years after deprecating XUL extensions then Thunderbird will be
screwed, but hey, it's not our project! We abandoned it years ago!

So when the crappy HTML Firefox shows up, with way less features than the
Firefox of today, remember that this (Thunderbird) was one of the things given
up to have it.

But hey, donate to Mozilla! $5, $15, $25, anything helps. Because we already
make hundreds of millions of dollars and we do whatever is shiny and new,
screw the "community" of existing stuff. We're fighting for an open web!
(where you can use Gmail for email)

~~~
toyg
It happened before, with the transition from Mozilla Suite to Firefox. And
let's be honest: XUL was just lipstick on the pig that is cross-platform
development. HTML/CSS/JS are now fast enough to look like a slightly better
pig, so here we go.

Also, there's a generational shift underway. You and me could find crazy that
people would openly choose to use IDEs built on HTML/CSS/JS, but that's what a
lot of young folks are doing (Atom, VSCode etc etc). That's their world,
that's what they like. An entire generation now exists, who learnt to code
from web scripting rather than C or BASIC. They have taken over. It's just how
it is.

(this said, I agree that donating to Mozilla feels a bit silly, looking at how
much money they make from commercial agreements. It's like donating to Ubuntu
or RedHat.)

~~~
betteringred
I'm all for writing new apps in HTML, I think Atom and VSCode are awesome, but
I'm not for rewriting huge legacy apps to be HTML apps for no good reason. The
reasons given, that XUL requires maintenance that Mozilla engineers don't
enjoy doing, is a joke considering the amount of effort to maintain XUL is
less than 1% of the amount of effort to move Firefox to HTML.

No one has listed the ten awesome features that we're going to get from HTML
Firefox (cause there ain't many) or the 1,000 features (tons of little
details) that will be lost. If users listed their 10 biggest problems with
Firefox I doubt any of them would be solved by moving to HTML.

Imagine if instead of writing VSCode from scratch and releasing it alongside
Visual Studio Microsoft had rewritten the Visual Studio UI in HTML, abandoned
all the nonessential features, and abandoned the old native Visual Studio.

One might say that Mozilla will wait to release the new Firefox till it has
all the old features of the old Firefox, but that's not been my experience
with how teams work. They'll get frustrated with the rewrite and want to get
it out the door. "We can add those features later" they will say, and then
they'll never get added.

~~~
simpleigh
> The reasons given, that XUL requires maintenance that Mozilla engineers
> don't enjoy doing, is a joke considering the amount of effort to maintain
> XUL is less than 1% of the amount of effort to move Firefox to HTML.

Ah, but maintaining XUL means working on old code (which is boring), but
moving Firefox to HTML means working on new shiny code (which is exciting).

[https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html](https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html)

~~~
silon7
Killing XUL has the potential of killing Firefox. I bet the last good XUL
version will be forked.

~~~
smacktoward
And then the person who forked it gets to maintain it!

Lucky them.

~~~
vinceguidry
No need to be so snarky, he'll have all those other people out there who love
XUL to help him.

~~~
nickpsecurity
He's right. Mozilla, a $200-300 million a year outfit, currently maintains
their software including Firefox. It's a huge C++ application. People who code
XUL in their spare time, even a bunch of them, aren't likely to make a dent in
keeping parity between a Firefox fork and the main release. They'd likely have
trouble even porting it.

So, a fork is a rough solution and will have maintenance issues for an app
this size.

~~~
vinceguidry
I was being facetious.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Ah. You got me there haha.

------
bad_user
Thunderbird is still being actively developed by the community. I'm on version
42 beta and it's looking good.

This is what open source is about. It doesn't matter if the parent no longer
wants to maintain it. As long as there is interest, the product survives.

~~~
crististm
You've been brainwashed about the "community" stuff. Mozilla _is_ a
corporation. Linux is built by a corporation. Last time I checked, less than
18% of Linux patches were from independent contributors.

Everything big enough to be known by Joe average hobbyist is built by a
corporation.

Let's see the community in action taking the lead when Mozilla drops the ball.

~~~
ZenoArrow
What features are you missing from Thunderbird?

~~~
crististm
I use TB daily - I did not ask a for a feature that did not find. But for
several years it has been neglected. And the "open source community" did not
step up to the plate and fix the problem.

I argue that there is no such a community that will save TB after Mozilla
drops it.

Edit: Yes, the "search mail" feature that wasn't

~~~
ZenoArrow
> "I argue that there is no such a community that will save TB after Mozilla
> drops it."

Yes, I realise that was your point, but my point is what work is required? If
there's no work required, then there's no need for the community to save it.

It's an email client. So long as it sends and receives email, and can be
compiled for the latest OS versions, what work is needed?

~~~
facetube
Security updates, for one.

------
oneJob
If this was an open source "project", rather than a "foundation" whose mission
is to build a better web for its users, I'd say it was their call and that's
the beauty of OSS. This is not that.

This is another decision in a long string of decisions which are either not in
their users' interest, questionable, or poorly communicated and implemented.

If I were to give the benefit of the doubt here over the question of whose
interest this is in (Mozilla or its users) it is still being horribly
communicated (otherwise one might better understand why it's in one's
interest) and horribly implemented, to the point which I'm beginning to
question whether Mozilla, as an organization, is up to the task of building a
better web for its users.

Why not more discussion around Pocket, the new tab page, Thunderbird support,
etc. Why pop these decisions, fully made, on their user base? And why not, in
the case of XUL, incrementally replace features or develop in parallel until a
drop-in, validated solution exists.

To me, one of two things is going on. Either Mozilla is not acting in the best
interest of its users or this is amateur hour. Both scenarios suck.

~~~
mhurron
How is focusing on Firefox not inline with a mission statement of 'building a
better web for it's users?'

~~~
oneJob
It might be. But what about the discussion? Is focusing on a native mail
application not inline with their mission statement, given all the privacy
issues of late? And your point doesn't address the issue of implementation.
Firefox is one initiative out of many initiatives in Mozilla's portfolio. And
the web is not the browser. So I, personally, would say no, focusing on a
browser to the exclusion of all other aspects of the Internet is not inline
with that mission. But, I'm one of many users, and without open dialogue, it's
impossible to say whether other Mozilla users agree with me.

~~~
Certhas
Do you realize that this discussion is going on right now, in the open, on the
appropriate mailing list?

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.governance/kAy...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.governance/kAyVlhfEcXg/Eqyx1X62BQAJ)

Take Andrew Sutherlands email for example, that directly, out in the open,
discusses the very points you raise:

[https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.governance/kAyVlhfEc...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.governance/kAyVlhfEcXg/vGTwtsXpBQAJ)

"The problem with Thunderbird is not that it is a mail user agent or that user
agency in messaging is unimportant. The problem is that Thunderbird has had a
serious technical debt problem since the day its code-base transitioned from
Netscape. Its low-level integration with Gecko has been a maintenance burden
for Thunderbird developers and non-Thunderbird developers alike.

The Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation put serious financial resources
into trying to address both of these problems with the creation of Mozilla
Messaging. The idea, as I understand it, was to attempt to alleviate the
burden on Firefox development by separating Thunderbird development while
simultaneously providing Thunderbird with people and resources to attempt to
address this technical debt."

"An important question that falls out from all of this is and your original
question is: which is more important? Mail user agency or Thunderbird the
product, especially if there are serious opportunity costs related to
Thunderbird?

Within the funded efforts of the Mozilla Corporation[2], mail user agency has
not been abandoned and continues to be advanced as part of an open development
process."

~~~
oneJob
I agree a discussion of a kind is occurring. My reply was specific to the
comment it addressed, in that, the comment did not fully engage with my
initial comment and instead cherry picked one part of it. A more fully formed
response, much like yours, wouldn't have elicited my above response. Context.

------
jacquesm
Thunderbird has been my email client ever since I used unix as my day-to-day
platform and it's a real pity that Mozilla stops maintenance but on the whole
it doesn't _need_ that much maintenance. It just works, I don't think I have a
wishlist of features or any bugs that are so bad that they need fixing.

Just keep it as it is and I'm perfectly ok with it. If mozilla did the same
with FireFox a and would focus on long term stability and bug fixing rather
than grafting new parts onto it and re-writing old parts that are working just
fine I'd be OK with that too. (The default seems to be that bugs are not fixed
before the part of the code base that contains them is replaced by something
new which in turn also contains bugs.)

~~~
mhb
_I don 't think I have a wishlist of features or any bugs that are so bad that
they need fixing_

The forwarding/replying in plain vs. formatted text is pretty annoying.

~~~
perlwle
Press shift + reply / forward in thunderbird. Is that what you want?

~~~
mhb
That is what I use, but now I can't remember/recreate what I didn't like about
it.

------
fdik
In short: this is not true.

We are in discussions with Mozilla how to safe Thunderbird and make it
sustainable. There is a commitment from Mozilla to make that happen.

Thunderbird will continue being maintained.

Volker Birk p≡p foundation [http://pep-project.org](http://pep-project.org)

------
Cyph0n
That's really sad to hear. It's the best anti-Outlook as far as I know. The
best solution imo is to just let the community take over.

~~~
seszett
> _It 's the best anti-Outlook as far as I know._

I don't know about Windows, but on Linux... I try every so often to use other
clients, but Thunderbird is still the only one I can bear.

For some reason there's always something that doesn't work with Gnome or KDE
clients, keystore stuff that doesn't let me save my passwords, or seems to but
doesn't actually remember them, or some indexation service insisting on taking
half my CPU, or...

And the desktop-agnostic clients are ugly and lack features.

So through all this time, I've both hated Thunderbird and considered it the
only usable client. I really wonder which one I'll switch to in the future.

~~~
krisdol
I'd give evolution another shot. I find it to be the only enterprise-ready one

~~~
creshal
If by "enterprise-ready" you mean "slow, bloated, and byzantine", then yes, it
fits that ecosystem perfectly.

But despite being a single-threaded, half-XML-half-C cancerous pile of dirty
hacks, Thunderbird is still faster and more stable – not to mention more
extensible – than Evolution could ever hope to be.

~~~
tormeh
God, I hope the Unix people abandon C and start using Rust. It's going to
raise the quality of open source desktop applications so much. Or, well, it'll
at least be the first clear improvement in many decades.

~~~
feld
Are you so daft to think that the rust compiler is written in something other
than C/C++?

~~~
ionised
I don't know much about Rust but the Wikipedia page says the original Rust
compiler was written in OCaml, and that the new compiler is self-hosted and
written in the Rust language itself.

~~~
feld
"OCaml comprises two compilers. One generates bytecode which is then
interpreted by a C program."

Just look at its source, there's C everywhere.

~~~
the_why_of_y
The OCaml bytecode interpreter is implemented in C. The OCaml compiler
generating said bytecode is implemented in OCaml, as is the other OCaml
compiler that generates machine code.

------
kriro
What are viable alternatives (FLOSS+Mail+Calender+GUI)? I've used Evolution
before and it was pretty good, I guess I'm switching back to that (more
importantly I will have to switch my parents' computers as well, they have
happily migrated to Linux). Claws also seems good at first glance. Have heard
KMail and Trojita mentioned before but I'm not sure how much overhead having
Qt for them would be (so basically ceteris paribus I'd rather have something
GTK as Xubuntu is my distro of choice).

I guess Exchange integration would be needed eventually but I could work
around that if need be. Linux and OS X support preferred, could live with
Linux only.

~~~
lottin
Why do you have switch? If it works for you, you can continue to use
Thunderbird.

------
castell

      [...] Thunderbird, the free email, chat and news client 
      it first developed in 2004 [...]
    

In 2004 Thunderbird spun off the Mozilla Suite (Browser, Mail, WYSIWYG HTML
editor, IRC-chat client), like Firefox.

And Mozilla Suite is based itself on Netscape Suite, that AOL donated as open
source code and formed the Mozilla Foundation (Mozilla was the internal
codename of Netscape).

The Netscape Suite was a complete rewrite of Netscape Navigator 4. That long
rewrite phase and the choosen technology (XUL, XPCOM, etc) contributed to
loosing the Browser war agaist IE 5/6.

Thunderbird barely changed since 2004. Back then it was a direct competitor to
Outlook Express.

~~~
hyc_symas
Anyone got the source to Navigator 4 still? I'd rather use that.

------
wslh
For e-mail Sylpheed was always an alternative:
[http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/](http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/)

~~~
wiz21c
I use claws. Very simple, very efficient, very robust (well I just use textual
email mostly and in a very one-person way, that is, I've got a few mails a
day, mostly from less than ten mailing lists)

------
joonoro
Funny I should see this today, I spent yesterday afternoon reading articles
about Thunderbird and other mail clients and ended up migrating from
Thunderbird to mu4e [0] (purely for reasons of usability).

If this is true (and there is some reason to doubt it, as this isn't the first
time Thunderbird has been declared "dead"), and considering that Geary is no
longer in active development either (maybe the Elementary OS guys picked it
up?), Mailpile [1] might have a chance to fill that gap. Other than that,
there's always Claws Mail [2].

[0]
[http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html](http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html)

[1] [https://www.mailpile.is/](https://www.mailpile.is/)

[2] [http://www.claws-mail.org/](http://www.claws-mail.org/)

~~~
edwintorok
I've also seen 'notmuch' recommended as email interface for emacs. Did you try
it and could you compare it to mu4e?

~~~
joonoro
Did not know notmuch had an emacs interface, so no. I thought notmuch was just
a sort of backend like offlineimap.

------
bariumbitmap
Thunderbird appears to be the only email reader that gets close to supporting
mid:// urls.

[https://superuser.com/questions/681421/what-email-clients-
su...](https://superuser.com/questions/681421/what-email-clients-support-cid-
and-mid-uris)

It uses the "thunderlink:" protocol to support this. It does require some OS-
specific setup.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/thunderbird/addon/thunderli...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/thunderbird/addon/thunderlink/)

Linking directly to email messages as transparently as linking to webpages is
useful, and I wish it were more widespread.

------
a3n
I dislike every email client I've used. I dislike Tbird the least.

If Tbird doesn't survive this transition, I've thought in the past of using
something like Mutt, with <something> to display rendered html, and <something
else> to compose html mail.

And <yet another thing> for calendar access to my fastmail calendar.

Any suggestions for any of those things?

------
toisanji
I hope that Thunderbird continues to grow. What do you guys think of the
closed source product [http://postbox-inc.com](http://postbox-inc.com) built
on top of Thunderbird?

~~~
apocalyptic0n3
I've been using Postbox since 2012. It's a great client and while I've tried a
ton of others (Apple Mail, Thunderbird, AirMail, Sparrow, Dropbox Mailbox,
etc), I always come back to PostBox. It's stable, simple, has access to some
Thunderbird extensions, and just works like I need it to.

My only gripes are that development is inconsistent at best (v4 took far too
long to come out, in my opinion) and they seem to focus on features that don't
add much value to the client. But overall, it's a great client that I was more
than happy to pay for.

------
mark_l_watson
I still use Thunderbird on a Linux laptop, will continue to do so, but think
that this is a good decision.

I donate a bit of money to Mozilla occasionally and I would like to see their
effort go to working on privacy and Firefox.

------
makecheck
It's funny how Microsoft was once in court over essentially shoving browser
components into UI, and now this.

I wish that the features of web engines were more compartmentalized. The
"convenience" of a Thing That Does Everything will also introduce fragility
and bloat (and maybe even security exposures).

For example, I would probably love to call functions to lay out some
rectangles for me. I _know_ a web engine can do that really well, and I don't
even mind passing in CSS strings to describe what I want. The problem is, I
don't want "Internet in a box" to come with it; I just want the layout in that
case. It would also be a lot easier to identify problems and contribute
solutions if there was a way to "only" do X and focus on that part of the
engine to fix.

It would be awesome to be able to take _those_ kinds of low-level details, and
start really going cross-platform with them. Make a library that can finally
lay out _whatever the hell you want_ consistently across machines, that can be
patched into all existing UI libraries or other tools. Make a portable text
rendering and text layout system. Make a portable GL viewer. _But don 't tell
me that each of those things only works if I create an InternetInBoxView._
Instead, refactor InternetInBoxView to use those separate parts.

------
SwellJoe
When development "stopped" a while back, I tried to switch to alternatives.
Evolution is high quality, but doesn't fit the way I want to work...no matter
how many notifications I turn off, it always seems to find a way to be
annoying and invasive. There are no OSS webmail clients as good as Thunderbird
or GMail (even though I work on Usermin, and it is a competent webmail client
compared to other OSS options, we just don't have the resources to push it
forward enough to match native or something as amazing as GMail or Inbox,
especially since it is not our core business).

So, I will keep using Thunderbird, and hope that it keeps seeing occasional
updates. I assume it will...it's got millions of users. Surely some of them
are developers, with itches to scratch.

------
rogeryu
I'm using TB since two years, when Apple Mail failed to load after an OSX
upgrade. I wanted to move, preparing for moving to Linux later on. I have
several family members using TB on Windows. My mother used Eudora for years, I
believe seven years after development stopped. It never had a problem. I could
copy it to Windows 7, just copying the folder with the program files in it,
and it all worked.

How big is the risk if TB development stops altogether? What security risks
are there when you keep using it?

My mother cannot handle changing to something new anymore. So I guess I have
to take the risk.

~~~
72deluxe
I migrated from Thunderbird on Linux to OSX by simply moving the profile
directory and modifying the new configuration file to point to that directory.

Easiest migration I have ever done.

------
mverwijs
Anyone know how this impacts the e-mail functionality of Seamonkey?

(I've actually started using Seamonkey again on a whim. The last couple of
weeks. Somehow, browsing feels more snappy with Seamonkey than with Firefox.)

~~~
gryph0n
What a circle that would be !!!

Phoenix (later, again renamed to Firefox) was originally split off from
Mozilla/Netscape Navigator since the 'suite' was presumably slow.

~~~
lmm
Seamonkey was faster in a matter of months. If you stop messing with a piece
of software, Moore's law soon makes it blazing fast.

------
bshimmin
The announcement from Mitchell Baker really is corporate drivel at its worst:
[https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.governance/kAyVlhfEc...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.governance/kAyVlhfEcXg/Eqyx1X62BQAJ)

This also seems like a shame. I'm not sure Thunderbird was ever a great
product, but it was always a decent alternative to worse things, and I
remember Enigmail being quite a good option as a relatively simple way of
signing and encrypting emails.

~~~
parennoob
If you think that's corporate drivel at its worst, you haven't seen much
corporate drivel. What's so bad about it? She is diplomatically trying to say,
"Hey, we don't have the money or resources necessary to support Thunderbird,
we're probably going to abandon it".

Open Source may be well and good but the engineers at Mozilla still have to
earn money for their families. Look at the Corporation's Financial Statements
([https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-
US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi...](https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-
US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Financials_2014.pdf)) - they don't exactly show a
company flush with cash that is pulling support for a product because they
don't like it or something.

I like Enigmail though, just as you do, and tried introducing my family to it.
Sadly that didn't stick :/

~~~
bshimmin
It's long, it's rambling, it uses phrases like "laser-focussed" (twice). Fine,
it's not corporatese at its absolute worst (there isn't a "synergistic" in
there), but it's also not going to win any awards for clear communication; it
could be every bit as diplomatic whilst also losing about 70% of the words.

I hope this isn't the end for Thunderbird.

~~~
hyc_symas
This is the real message, to me.

    
    
      Many inside of Mozilla, including an overwhelming majority of our
      leadership, feel the need to be laser-focused on activities like Firefox
      that can have an industry-wide impact.    With all due respect to
      Thunderbird and the Thunderbird community, we have been clear for years
      that we do not view Thunderbird as having this sort of potential.
    
      However, as I say, it’s clear to me today that continuing to live
      with these competing demands given our focus on industry impact is
      increasingly unstable.
    

So, their stated goal is market dominance for Firefox, period. Nothing else
really matters. Clearly they are failing at this goal, so they are focusing
their resources on it and discarding anything else.

------
geff82
So a foundation with a 300 million Dollar budget can't support the most
widespread free mailing software out there? A software that shares many parts
with the Firefox browser? This makes no sense to me. It's ridiculous that they
stop this project instead of going full stem forward to make it finally great.
They are not that far away to malomg it a viable free alternative to Outlook
(and they'd have happy followers)

------
newscracker
Just yesterday I had commented in a donation related thread here that it would
be nice to donate to Thunderbird as one of the causes that's important. [1] As
a long time Thunderbird user in an Exchange/Outlook environment, I'm
disappointed each time I hear news about its priority being pushed further
down.

The TechCrunch article says, "Apart from the fact that Mozilla had cut off
most development support in 2012, Thunderbird has become a somewhat
_anachronistic_ product." For any enterprise or business environment where
email still rules, calling Thunderbird "anachronistic" sounds misinformed and
insulting. Thunderbird may not have the market share of Outlook or the glamor
of smartphone based mail apps, but I'm sure those who use Thunderbird are
really passionate about what it provides and the extensibility that comes with
it.

One of the things I don't like about the Mozilla of the past few years is the
high amount of effort and time spent on Firefox OS. I don't want to put that
down, but Mozilla is trying very hard with very less traction on it and still
pushing onward.

Mitchell's message sounds like more planning is in the works to separate
Thunderbird and probably make it stand on its own. This will take some time to
plan and execute, with Thunderbird just languishing in the meantime. There
could also be a complete re-write of Thunderbird, which is not really a great
idea. I can see both optimistic and pessimistic views on what the future
holds.

When Mozilla Messaging was announced, I had high hopes for better integration
with Exchange calendaring and also improved search. All that went to nothing
in 2012.

If Thunderbird ends up as a separate entity that I can donate directly to,
I'll be one of the first to do so!

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10650432](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10650432)

------
INTPenis
I'm saddened because the only thing holding me back from using Linux full time
at work is the lack of a good calendar and e-mail application.

Of course thunderbird is insufficient for me who rely on Microsoft Exchange at
work but it could still be a contender to Evolution given the right
development focus.

Evolution, the number one alternative I know of today, has had shaky EWS
support from day one and in Fedora 23 on my personal laptop it's still not
fully resolved. Also I find its calendar option quite hideous actually, it
tries to mimic Outlook but that's not a good thing imho. The best calendar
I've used is Calendar.app on Mac OS.

Of course you can't blame anyone but us, the community. The one EWS plugin for
Thunderbird is pay-2-play and the one for Evolution is the one having all the
issues. So either Microsoft is hard to develop for or demand isn't high
enough.

~~~
newscracker
Have you checked out Exchange EWS Provider [1], currently maintained by
Ericsson? This has been around for a few years [2], and when the developer
could no longer spend time on it, Ericsson took it over. The extension is not
perfect, but you can get some stuff done.

Another alternative is the DavMail gateway [3], which runs as a separate
(Java) program that sits between your Exchange server and Thunderbird. [I
haven't used this one for years ever since the Exchange EWS provider became
available]

[1]:
[https://github.com/Ericsson/exchangecalendar](https://github.com/Ericsson/exchangecalendar)

[2]: [http://www.1st-setup.nl/wordpress/poducten/exchange-ews-
cale...](http://www.1st-setup.nl/wordpress/poducten/exchange-ews-calendar-and-
tasks-add-on-for-thunderbird-lightning/)

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

~~~
waz0wski
I'm using [1] against exch2013 without any major issues.

Make sure your exchange environment autodiscover is properly configured, and
ensure you have IMAP available (for thunderbird mail) and the setup will go
smoothly.

------
vdaniuk
I've never been completely satisfied with Thunderbird and have tried to switch
multiple times, reverting to web clients every time. Now I am using Nylas N1
built on electron(imagine that!) and it looks very promising.

Also, arrogance of tech conservatives in every Mozilla or web tech thread on
HN is becoming unbearable.

~~~
grinich
Thanks for the kind works about N1! (I work at Nylas.) Feel free to send us
any feedback if you have ideas for how to improve the app. :)

~~~
vdaniuk
N1 is a game changer for desktop clients and I'd love to contribute. What is
the best place to send ideas concerning general product strategy? Tech
feedbacks goes to github, obviously.

~~~
grinich
You can just write me directly :) mg@nylas.com

------
salex89
It is a shame... But I am much more irritated, lacking a better term, with the
chronicall lacking of a proper mail client for Linux. Thunderbird is the best
as far as I used them, but I am not satisfied with the performance, UK and
features, especially considering Windows only counterparts.

------
ausjke
Sad to hear, Thunderbird has been my major and actually sole email client for
a few years, not a Windows user so outlook is out, do I have to use mutt from
now on?

On Android I use K-9 which works well, it seems for Desktop the web email will
be my only choice, not good at all.

~~~
ausjke
anyone used this fork: [http://www.fossamail.org/](http://www.fossamail.org/)
?

I don't mind paying for Thunderbird, hope someone picks up the development.
Firefox is great but there are alternatives, Thunderbird is great and _unique_
(across platform and an overall good product), I somehow feel Thuderbird is of
more use to me than Firefox itself.

------
zobzu
So people here just give webmails as alternatives...

Theres a reason people use thunderbird. Its the only non webmail, non mobile
client that has a gui, works on most platforms and doesnt suck too horribly.

People using it obviously don't care about webmail alternatives...

------
dboreham
The suits have been trying to ditch the email client since I worked at
Netscape (nearly 20 years). I remember sitting in a meeting with someone
asking "What's the email client for our mail server supposed to be --
Outlook??". My hunch is the same thing will happen this time -- it will
endure. Perhaps this is a play to get some of the big businesses that depend
on having a viable non-Microsoft/works-on-Linux email client to pony up some
cash?

------
OrdaGarb
It's a little troubling to see only one mention of PGP in the comments.
Thunderbird+Enigmail+GPG makes a highly functional way to send and receive
PGP-encrypted mail.

------
z1mm32m4n
I've been meaning to look into Nylas N1 for a while now, maybe now's the right
time.

I didn't see anything that stood out like a sore thumb when compared with
Thinderbird (except for maybe PGP), but it'd be really awesome if it had a
snoozing feature like Inbox or Mailbox.

[1]: [https://www.nylas.com/n1](https://www.nylas.com/n1)

~~~
grinich
We're working on that (and more)! You can see our roadmap and vote-up features
here: [https://trello.com/b/hxsqB6vx/n1-open-source-
roadmap](https://trello.com/b/hxsqB6vx/n1-open-source-roadmap)

------
grahamjperrin
I'm slowly switching from OS X 10.9.5 (Mavericks) to PC-BSD.

When Thunderbird doesn't work as expected, I might occasionally use Mulberry.

[http://www.freshports.org/mail/mulberry/](http://www.freshports.org/mail/mulberry/)
– neither a maintainer nor official support but still, it's fast and powerful.

------
meshko
That is so [potentially] sad. I hope Thunderbird finds a nice home. Stupid
Google, why did it have to kill Mozilla?

------
tmalsburg2
I use Thunderbird's calendar and think that this is good news. Thunderbird has
been in a sad state for long time. It is slow, buggy, and behaves
unpredictably. I hope this will create the necessary momentum for a new
project or at least a new approach to developing Thunderbird further.

------
floor_
You can't put in emails chained together with a semicolon. So I posted a bug
report about address field parsing being broken. I was told that it was
working as intended and was completely sandbagged. I don't have too much
respect for the dev team right now.

------
shmerl
I switched to KMail around the time when Mozilla announced that they stopped
active development of Thunderbird. Lack of any desktop integration in KDE
(like new mail icon in notification area) contributed to that.

------
dorfsmay
That's sad. I like Firefox and use it a lot, but I need Thunderbird a lot more
than I need Firefox. There are other good browsers out there, I don't know any
other good email client.

------
logn
There aren't many serious alternatives to Thunderbird. I think that the
project falls squarely within Mozilla's mission statement:
[https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/about/manifesto/details/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/about/manifesto/details/)

Most of their reasoning about this decision revolves around it being a
distraction from Firefox. Maybe they should update the manifesto to put web
browsing as goal #1. As it stands, it talks about the Internet, but the WWW is
clearly their priority.

------
timbit42
Would LibreOffice adopt it? Microsoft Office has Outlook.

~~~
executesorder66
I really hope so. The Document Foundation seriously has their shit together.
Having them take over would be a major win for open source email clients.

Forgot to add: Is there any official way (besides sending an email) of getting
them to consider it?

------
Ono-Sendai
Bad news if true. Why would a not-for-profit foundation not support core
productivity software used by 10M+ people?

------
stonogo
This was inevitable. They never did figure out how to sell ad space or
corporate bundles in Thunderbird.

------
usrusr
So many words to say "an email client does not generate search engine
traffic"...

In this age of abundant js transpilers it's kind of surprising to see XUL not
being one of the many valid X for "compile X to JS+CSS", but it kind of makes
sense, giving the limited scope of XUL.

------
akerro
>Many inside of Mozilla, including an overwhelming majority of our leadership,
feel the need to be laser-focused on activities like Firefox that can have an
industry-wide impact.

Can we have another alternative for pocket built-in?

------
vamur
Both Thunderbird and XUL are slow, so good riddance. Hopefully, dropping these
and 32bit support will allow Mozilla to concentrate on improving Firefox
performance. And add Wayland support in Linux as well.

------
slyrus
This is the path to "rustigator"?

------
pyabo
I thought that it was unmaintained now!

------
bovermyer
Thunderbird is still a thing people use? That's probably the biggest news to
me.

~~~
g8oz
I suppose you use webmail supplied by a corporation. With all your old
messages available for scanning when they or the government see fit. Some of
us are not okay with that.

~~~
bovermyer
You suppose incorrectly. Leave your assumptions at the door.

I use Fastmail as my email host, and Airmail as my client. I have one eye on
Nylas N1 as a potential future cross-platform email client.

------
coderdude
I hope someone picks up the reins. I install TB on every OS I have. I prefer
it. I damn near require it for its cross platform consistency. Anything but
Google or Microsoft (and I like both of those companies).

@bad_user quells my fears.

~~~
josephmx
Have you tried the browser based Outlook 365? It's actually very good, I
prefer it to desktop Outlook (though never really liked Thunderbird)

~~~
coderdude
I haven't tried it but I haven't heard anything bad about it either. Thanks
for the lead.

------
dspillett
Your link redirects people to a "no hotlinking" image when used directly. For
those affected: if you find the page in Google by searching for "The CADT
Model" it does let you see the content via that route.

~~~
danellis
What is the point of that?

~~~
tedunangst
jwz doesn't like HN.

~~~
cpach
Yup, I’m afraid I forgot about that.

[https://twitter.com/sloverlord/status/665653521560174592](https://twitter.com/sloverlord/status/665653521560174592)

~~~
dspillett
I wonder what the history is there...

Though to be honest I really don't have time to look into it, if he doesn't
want us there then fine I'll add that domain to those in my "causes
irritation" blacklist so I don't waste time on it in future.

~~~
cpach
Let's say he's not the most patient person alive. I guess he sees HN as the
new Slashdot.

------
tdkl
eM Client[1] is an excellent, rather less known client for Windows systems. It
supports *Dav out of the box which is rather rare on Windows.

[1] [http://www.emclient.com/](http://www.emclient.com/)

