
So, That’s It For Thunderbird - hornokplease
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/06/so-thats-it-for-thunderbird/
======
Silhouette
I'm not sure why this is a problem, really. E-mail is e-mail, and the great
thing about it is that it's been e-mail for years and it will still be e-mail
in many years' time.

Thunderbird is a decent native e-mail client. It does its job well enough
already. IME, it's been stable and robust for a while now. Lightning is fine
for basic calendar needs these days, too. Mozilla have hardly done anything
significant to this whole area for a long time anyway, and short of some new
protocol being developed or something like signed/encrypted mail becoming the
norm, I don't see that the tools require a lot of ongoing development either.

I'd be far more interested in improvements to Firefox or, if we're talking
about messaging, in having some kind of lightweight Exchange replacement with
the same kind of ease-of-use so I don't have to configure a million text files
on a Linux box to get a basic mail/calendar/contacts store set up. Personally,
I trust the likes of Google (or any other data-driven/ad-funded freebie
service) about as far as I can throw them, and they'll host my e-mail when
they pry the keyboard from my cold, dead hands. :-)

~~~
smsm42
Lightning is not really "fine" - it never properly worked for me properly.
Integrating it with Exchange is a nightmare. It is sad that it was never
brought to a level where you could confidently recommend it as Outlook
replacement, and now it never will be.

------
StavrosK
I just noticed today that Thunderbird was using 300 MB of my RAM, and was
surprised at how bloated it had gotten. I was going to blog about how my 2012
computer feels as snappy as my 2002 computer because of these sorts of things,
but I didn't get around to it.

There _must_ be a good case to be made about light, responsive software. From
the other posters here, I take it there's no light alternative to Thunderbird,
and I'll keep using it, but 300 MB of RAM for an email client is a bit
ridiculous.

~~~
heretohelp
Is a native, snappy email client something you'd pay for?

$20? $50?

What operating systems? Is there anything specific features/aspects/licensing
that would push you to $50?

If neither, (I assume free or close to it) why? How much time do you spend in
an email interface? How much is your time worth?

Cheers!

~~~
StavrosK
I would pay if it were something _amazing_ (i.e. not just a bit faster than
Thunderbird), probably around $20. I don't spend that much time on email, but
I hate the small annoyances of Thunderbird (when I delete messages a new,
empty one appears that can't be removed, it has no tray icon, it starts up
maximized and I have to close it every time, it has no decent "send later"
functionality, etc).

These are all things that Thunderbird doesn't get right. Also, search is
_completely_ broken.

~~~
dfc
It sounds like your "what to do when I mark a mesdsage for deletion" setting
is wrong.

What is a tray icon? Is that a windows thing?

~~~
StavrosK
It _is_ a Windows thing. I'm on Ubuntu, though, with Gnome 2, and it has one
too. They all have one, really.

~~~
dfc
The little icon biff-like that shows if you have new mail? I always thought it
was fairly useless. One or two active mailing list subscriptions and the icon
was always lit up.

PS: What is the signifigance of the italicized _is_?

~~~
StavrosK
It's more like "the little icon biff-like that prevents Thunderbird from
taking up space on your alt+tab bar when running".

The "is" was just emphasis.

------
dredmorbius
Long live mutt :)

In the "who's the user, whose the product" dynamic, I'm a bit confused over
what's what in the Mozilla empire. And while no, I wasn't a user,
Thunderbird's among the better and more complete email clients out there, I
don't see this as a good thing.

~~~
dredmorbius
Erm, "who's the product". Apostrophe miscue.

------
codesuela
Ihmo there isn't so much left to innovate in an email client and Thunderbird
is already a solid client so personally this message won't deter me from using
it

~~~
flatline3
I disagree -- nobody has of yet come close to matching Apple's Mail app. It
does a simple job exceedingly well, with a minimally impeding user interface.

The alternatives -- including Thunderbird -- are bulky and poorly designed. I
believe the wide migration to gmail is in no small part due to the extremely
poor showing of e-mail clients on Linux and Windows.

~~~
morsch
I'd kill for a desktop client that was as good as Gmail. I'm surprised nobody
has done a straight copy of the UI in a desktop deployment. Heck, you could do
it in Javascript+HTML in an embedded gecko/webkit.

~~~
thrownaway2424
Unfortunately copy of the skin of Gmail would not get you the gigantic honking
datacenters that make Gmail so much faster than Mail.app. Would you pay for a
client that looked like Gmail and performed like Mail.app?

~~~
morsch
The only thing I can think of where honking datacenters could conceivably help
is searching for things. All other things should be mostly unaffected. And I'm
not sure you need an entire datacenter to search through one person's email or
address book.

Spam protection is a more serious issue, I think. Both mail servers and
desktop clients do it. Mail servers, especially if they get feedback from
clients, have a huge advantage though in that they can learn from all their
users. The desktop client has to work with a single user's input; unless you
implemented some kind of p2p collaborative approach (which would be really
cool).

~~~
thrownaway2424
The day-to-day performance of Mail.app is orders of magnitude slower than
Gmail. Loading a thread with 100 replies in Mail will take several seconds.
The same thread in Gmail will load in milliseconds.

~~~
morsch
Yes, but that's just evidence that Mail.app is badly optimized, for that use
case anyway. You don't need a server farm to get a couple of hundred replies
to display quickly.

------
lifeguard
That's fine, Thunderbird is complete. Great features like labels, filters, and
tabs.

As an added bonus of FOSS, the code base can be forked into a new project and
continued by those who are interested.

~~~
jorgem
TB Search does suck, though.

~~~
lifeguard
No, it works fine. Why specificly do you think it sucks?

~~~
2muchcoffeeman
Really doesn't. My pet peeve is that there are 2 search bars. Search and Quick
Search. The main search doesn't really work well when you want to say, search
for emails sent by co-worker X.

You type in their name/email and you get this separate tab (so many tabs).
There are things like To Me, From Me, Attachment, People, Starred and a bunch
of statistics at the top. You can see a screen shot here:
[http://www.dagorret.net/wp-
content/uploads/2010/01/thunderbi...](http://www.dagorret.net/wp-
content/uploads/2010/01/thunderbird_result_search.jpg)

The regular search could be good for advanced searches. There are probably a
bunch of options for it somewhere. But for most searches you really want the
Quick Search which is some menu bar option.

Not sure what kind of design decision this is either. In Mail.app except for
saved searches, I usually try a simp search, if that fails, then there is an
option to try and refine it.

------
wslh
Our article about exporting e-mails from Thunderbird to Outlook has been one
of the most successful blog posts since 2009:
[http://blog.nektra.com/main/2009/04/14/export-messages-
and-f...](http://blog.nektra.com/main/2009/04/14/export-messages-and-folders-
from-thunderbird-to-outlook-outlook-express/)

What triggered the article was the unresponsiveness from the Thunderbird team
about ugly bugs we reported and they removed!

------
jcurbo
Too bad really, but probably coming for a while now. I use Tbird on Windows
(and Mail.app on OS X) with my email hosted at pobox.com. I have a gmail
account but I've never been a fan of webmail at all.

I miss Eudora :( Now that was a simple, fast, clean email client.

~~~
wanderr
Me too! Lightning fast. I actually run it still in XP Mode in Windows 7
(couldn't get it working natively) for my personal email (Thunderbird for
work, like to have a clean separation), even with that layer of emulation it's
the fastest thing ever. I also love the ability to alt-click on any field and
have the messages grouped by that. Closest I've found in Thunderbird (penelope
extension is awful) is the Nostalgy extension, set up so that ` toggles
between grouping messages by sender or subject based on the email you have
selected. Not as awesome and not as fast, but still super handy.

~~~
jcurbo
I would use it but I worry about using programs that are not being actively
maintained because of the risk of security vulnerabilities. Especially in
email where you can have a lot of risky inputs (spam, phishing attempts etc) -
even though I have great spam protection (thanks pobox) there is still a risk.
I'm not sure what I'm going to do on Windows yet... I'm trying Postbox and
it's nice.

------
ABS
someone please explain to the author what Open Source means and why Mozilla
pulling their own people off an Open source project doesn't prevent that
project from continuing

~~~
wmf
Someone please explain to ABS that open source isn't magic and in many cases
the community does not have enough resources or will to continue development
of a product (see Camino).

~~~
ABS
You are missing the point. It's quite possible no one will pick it up but
that's completely different from saying, sarcastically, "But it’s not
stopping? Right".

What the above is is ignorance of what it means to develop open source code.

EDIT: an please let's try and stop this trend here on HN of replying to
comments ignoring half of them. I wrote "doesn't prevent that project from
continuing" not "it will definitely find other people to carry on"

~~~
pooriaazimi
It's TechCrunch, don't expect them to _know_ about software (not that any
other major tech publication, except maybe Ars, is any better than TC. Almost
none of their writers have the slightest clue about the software).

~~~
ibotty
there is lwn and (to a much lesser degree) heise.

~~~
pooriaazimi
Thanks. I didn't know about them and must check them out.

But now that I think about it again, I think I was a little harsh. There are
plenty of good news sites about Open Source software and community.

------
mrich
Funny, after a couple years of webmail I have just installed Thunderbird again
today since I wanted to have more powerful features. I was positively
surprised that it had improved quite bit.

~~~
fromhet
I also found that out the same way, and it was owerwhelmingly great!

Only that it was soulcrushingly slow. Firefox is quite snappy theese days
(especially with pentadactyl, mmhm sweet jezuz) but TB was always a hog.

------
ecaron
This is rather interesting, given that Mozilla had recently adopted the lead
developer from the Mozilla-based IM client Instantbird to incorporate chat
into TB15. Knowing the software is deadpooled, I wonder in hindsight if that
was a last-ditch effort to stay relevant or if that effort helped highlight
the inevitable decline/futility of desktop-based email.

------
ChrisNorstrom
I've been a HEAVY user of Thunderbird for 8 years now and I am very saddened
by this decision but I do support it. :(

One part of me saw this while reading the letter: "Google Chrome is whooping
our FireFox browser's ass and we need all men at their battle stations,
including people from the Thunderbird team. We've been neglecting Thunderbird
for so long that it's not like anyone's going to notice. After all, it took us
10 years to get Sunbird (Mozilla's Standalone Calendar Client) to version
1.0."

And the other part of me saw this while reading the letter: "The era of
desktop software is coming to an end. Most people have smart phones, multiple
computers, and use web-mail to keep it all in sync and accessible across all
of their devices. Desktop email client users make up a small percentage of
users and there's no reason for us to keep spending money and resources on
something that will one day be emulated by a web interface."

=== Things Wrong With Thunderbird That Will Probably Never Get Fixed (too
expensive / not worth it) ===

\- The biggest problem with Thunderbird is that it tries to be a bare-bones
email client with poorly integrated functionality in the form of third party
add-ons. What really makes email clients shine is when a lot of usable
features are tightly integrated with a very intuitive and snappy interface.
Thunderbird out of the box comes with so few features that it can't compete
well with web mail and when you do add on much needed features, they just get
generically "bolted on" to the interface. Sometimes in ways that just seem
unintuitive and backwards. And every time you update Thunderbird, ALL of your
add-ons are rendered useless and you have to wait days/weeks/indefinitely for
the addon to be updated. This is the biggest downfall of Thunderbird in my
eyes. You'd have to redesign Thunderbird and that isn't happening, it isn't
worth it.

\- By default Thunderbird tries to send all my outgoing mail through 1 smtp
account. This alone causes so many problems. Each email account should send
emails from its own stmp. Not doing so can mark your "from" field incorrectly
(has happened to me many times), trigger red flags (happened to me before) and
make other email clients mark your email as "Gmail thinks this message is a
scam".

\- The SPAM filter in Thunderbird is A.W.F.U.L. Let me repeat that A-W-F-U-L.
Despite training it for years it routinely misses the same spam, with the same
title, and the same content, while sometimes marking very important emails as
junk.

\- The time and date selector for Lightning is just atrocious to the point
where I hate having to use it. It FORCES me to set everything in military time
and makes date selection more cumbersome than it needs to be.

\- The tasks todo list for Lightning has never worked for me. Never.

\- Thunderbird is stuck to one device (desktop). Technically you can have
Thunderbird across a lot of computers by using IMAP instead of POP3 but that
slows down and cancels out a lot of your speed benefits.

=== Why Mozilla Should Fix Them ===

\- Originally I had typed up a HUGE list of things that desktop email clients
can do that web mail clients cannot. Upon further inspection I found that a
LOT of those features, everything from multiple accounts being displayed in
one stream and searching across multiple accounts is now available in gmail.

\- Email Clients allow me to have full control over my email inboxes and
contacts without having to feed them into gmail.

\- Email Clients give me a lot of options in how I can display, index, read,
and write email.

\- Email Clients allow me to search emails and contacts from across ALL my
email accounts (gmail currently has a limit of 5 accounts).

\- Email Clients allow you instant one click access to all your email accounts
with powerful and expandable features, an intuitive and lightning fast
interface, and god-like control over massive amounts of email accounts. For
business people, entrepreneurs, assistants, community organizers, and domain
owners email clients are a necessity.

\- The same way power-users like using Seesmic for twitter and facebook, and
people like downloading and using native apps over web based ones, the speed
and control of software is what's keeping me with Email Clients at the moment.

\- As soon as you have more than 5 email accounts to manage on a daily basis,
the speed of an Email Client wins out. Gmail only allows 5 multiple accounts
to be imported into your stream.

=== Why Mozilla Will NOT Fix Them And Instead Leave Thunderbird ===

\- Everything I mentioned above is slowly getting emulated by web mail. At the
moment gmail is the winner when it comes to email client emulation but in a
few years I can see an elegant php+mysql web based email client that not only
does exactly what Thunderbird does, but does it across all your devices. And
without breaking all your addons after every update.

TLDR: The end is near for Outlook + Thunderbird + Mail + Evolution + The
Others...

~~~
jvdh

      Thunderbird is stuck to one device (desktop). Technically you can have Thunderbird across a lot of computers by using IMAP instead of POP3 but that slows down and cancels out a lot of your speed benefits.
    

You're still using POP3? You're about the second person that I know does that.

Your complaints about Lightning are misplaced. It's an extension, not part of
Thunderbird itself.

~~~
ChrisNorstrom
In my situation POP3 works best. I only check email on 1 device, my desktop.
Not my phone, not on other computers. I have 4 gmail accounts and 4 email
inboxes from my .com domains. I NEVER use my web host's webmail interface. NOR
do I want old email backed up into it. So I use POP3 to pull ALL of my emails
out of those accounts. I don't like leaving my email with gmail either. I pull
it out and it becomes mine. I own my email. I have my entire Thunderbird
portable folder with ALL of my emails backed up constantly.

=== Security Wise ===

If anyone somehow breaks into ANY of my email accounts I still have access to
all of my emails, they can't delete any emails, and they can't read any of my
emails. With IMAP they can just look through old confirmation emails and see
your username, go to that site, try to log in as you, click "I forgot my
password", and have it sent through email, log in with the new reset password
and change all your credentials to a new username, new password, & new email
so you can never log back in. Effectively creating a massive mess for you to
clean up. Email is the greatest failure point of your digital existence.

I've reached a point in my digital life when I realize how insecure I feel to
have so much information all over the place with ANYONE in the world able to
access it all just by knowing a password. With everyone claiming a stake to
own my digital property I feel the best way to truly be in control of my own
words is to pull my emails out completely and keep them locally. I want to own
my words, I want to completely control where they are and on what hard drive
they exist. It makes me happy.

------
madrona
Bah. What's a good alternative native email reader?

~~~
dredmorbius
My own preference is mutt, and I'm deadly serious about that.

KMail / Kontact is actually a very nice client / integrated suite (and it will
happily play either way). I consider it the best general PIM I've encountered
on _any_ platform.

Balsa and Thunderbird (GNOME).

~~~
icebraining
I prefer Sup to mutt. Labels instead of folders, indexing for super fast
searching, it's awesome.

~~~
dredmorbius
I've been meaning to try that. Ah ... it's in Debian repos now: sup-mail.

From what I recall and read: sup is the ruby-based implementation of mutt. I
believe there are also forks of the mainstream mutt which incorporate
indexing, tags, and notmuch.

------
TimJRobinson
So what do you guys use for managing multiple email accounts well? I love
gmail.com but it still doesn't have an easy way to add multiple accounts to
the same interface so I'm stuck with the problem of constantly switching
between 3 google accounts just to read my email.

I used thunderbird for a while but it doesn't show or work with conversation
threads as well as gmail and it's search functionality is terrible (I always
had to open up gmail to find old email)

~~~
ohgodthecat3
I use thunderbird but you can do what you asked in gmail.

The steps I believe are:

1\. Forward All Email to 1 email address (you can use a filter to even forward
the spam if you don't want false positives getting stuck in an email account
you don't log in with often.

2\. Set up the ability to send mail as all the email accounts on your main
account (this is done in settings, i think it was under identities or
something)

3\. Select the option to (on reply) send email from the address it was sent to

With this you will also be able to send from any email account from your main
one.

~~~
TimJRobinson
Thanks for the information, unfortunately one is a Gmail account (personal)
and the other 2 are Google apps accounts (startup and side project) and I
don't think you can send mail looking like a user at a Google Apps address.

Also I don't really want all my email from these 3 services mashed together
into the one inbox as it'd be almost impossible to undo and it'll get messy
really quick.

All I really want is a side pane in Gmail similar to Thunderbird / outlook
which shows the 3 accounts and their folders with how much mail is in each
folder, then I can easily click on any folder to navigate to it straight away.

~~~
robbfitzsimmons
Google has the capacity to make this really easy; the fact that they haven't
makes me wonder how difficult it is to aggregate search and other data into
one user profile, as that seems like the primary argument against easy Gmail
(and thus Google) account mashups.

By far my biggest frustration as a 5-account, 3-OS (plus mobile) GMail and
Apps user is the client. Two personal accounts, an academic and side project,
and a professional one. Oy. Thunderbird provided some cross-platform
consistency, but was far too clunky to last in my workflow - not surprised it
died.

What I've done for the last six months (before recently experimenting again)
was keeping the six accounts completely separate and using Sparrow on OSX/iOS
as the primary means of access. It kept headers from getting all effed up with
Gmail aliasing, but was a real pain when I would occasionally have to log in
via web (signing in/out multiple times to check inboxes, etc.).

I've now decided to keep all non mission-critical forwarded to the same
account (for me 5 Gmail/Apps accounts, for you would be your personal and side
project accounts) and the professional account (Apps) separate. With Google
allowing a max of Gmail and one Apps account at the same time, this works
fine, so long as I'm willing to have my headers display stupid "sent by [me]
on behalf of [my other email]" text. Which I am at this point for a little
simplicity.

Agreed that an aggregator/navigator plugin would be killer (even if it just
forwarded you to an incognito tab with your mailbox, to keep you from having
to sign out of your main Google account) but the implementation details are
onerous/likely impossible.

------
ww520
Is there a good web-based email client? Like a html/javascript email client
that can talk POP3 & SMTP or IMAP. It's like a Thunderbird on the web.

Note I don't mean Gmail/YahooMail/Hotmail. Just a web-based email client that
can talk to multiple accounts using standard protocols. Some light server
storage support for buffering the POP3 mails would be great.

~~~
andreasvc
There's RoundCube. I don't think it does multiple accounts though.

~~~
ww520
Excellent. Looks very nice.

------
nyar
Too bad, all the Thunderbird features they've been implementing have been
really positive. I can't say the same for Firefox...

Last time I tried the nightlies Thunderbird was coming together as a great
"Messaging" client - with IM, IRC, Facebook, GTalk support, filelink for
sending big files with dropbox.

It's just too bad, I don't find any of the new features in Firefox nearly as
exciting as those. Without addons it is still set up and functions pretty much
like phoenix does the way I have it configured. I never liked insert tab after
current - which is copied from chrome, never liked tab previews which slow
down ctrl+tabbing, despise the autoupdate service firefox installs now -
they're pretty much jamming firefox with all these useless and copied features
and stopping true innovation with Thunderbird.

------
corford
Well that sucks :(

I've used Thunderbird exclusively for all of my IMAP accounts (8 of them) for
years. I cache all my mail locally so I can get to it with or without an
internet connection and if I'm on the road and haven't got my laptop with me,
I can still get to all my mail via a web interface. It's the perfect setup.

I will be a very unhappy bunny if Thunderbird dies on the vine and all I'm
left with is Outlook or Windows Mail (neither of which have decent IMAP
support).

Damn you Mozilla!

------
larrys
Highly recommend this and one reason I'd be super upset if Thunderbird ever
vanishes:

<http://extensions.hesslow.se/extension/4/Quicktext/>

Allows you to do all sorts of templating within emails. A huge time saver.
Great for customer service any any type of standard replies.

(Anyone know of any other way to do this should TB ever vanish? Can you write
extensions for other email clients?)

------
jpswade
* CampaignMonitor[1] reports just 1.21% usage

* litmus[2] reports 2.4%

Not the huge market share that you'd expect.

[1] [http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/will-it-
work/email-...](http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/will-it-work/email-
clients/)

[2]<http://litmus.com/resources/email-client-stats>

------
beagle3
The thing that has kept me with thunderbird are the AdBlockPlus and
VirtualIdentity plugin. Does mail.app / opera mail / any other Linux client
have something comparable?

(Virtual Identity is a godsend when you have a domain; it lets you set up
identities on the fly while writing an email, and manages them beautifully and
helpfully for you)

------
malkia
It's my favourite newsgroup reader. What are the other alternatives (I'm using
it on OSX, Windows and Linux)

~~~
gecko
On OS X, your best bet for a _newsgroup_ reader is Unison
(<http://panic.com/unison/>), which quite honestly beat the snot out of
Thunderbird for that purpose a _long_ time ago.

I don't have good recommendations for the other two systems, though, sadly.

------
webwanderings
As an average user, there's just too much overhead in maintaining the desktop
client for personal email.

------
simonbrown
Is there a good free/paid webmail service that can be used with a custom
domain and has good security? As far as I know, GMail can only be used with a
custom domain if you convert your account to Google Apps, which prevents you
from using some Google services.

~~~
thelibrarian
I use Fastmail.fm for my email hosting (using my own domain), and recommend
them. They don't have two-factor authentication, but do have others, such as
one-time passwords. They have a lot of features over and above GMail too (such
as aliases and personalities), and much prefer them to GMail.

~~~
icebraining
Google Apps has aliases and catch-all.

------
jvdh
Hopefully this will open up some breathing space for serious open-source mail
client alternatives. I'm hoping for a revival of Letters.app
(<https://github.com/ccgus/letters>)

------
ssheth
I guess I will have to shift to Postbox .. which is a private variation on
Thunderbird.

------
damian2000
Damn. I just finished importing 18,922 messages from my old email app (the
dire windows mail). I've been running Thunderbird (Portable Apps edition) for
the past week... it's been excellent so far.

------
mosburger
I'm pretty sure Postbox (<http://www.postbox-inc.com/>) is based on
Thunderbird's source, no? I wonder that this means for them?

~~~
wmf
I guess now they'll have to do _all_ their development. But if they want to
hire programmers with Thunderbird experience I know where they can find
some...

~~~
wccrawford
It would be ironic if they scrapped TB to have more people working on FireFox,
and then lost all their ex-TB employees to other companies.

------
conradfr
We use it at work.

For sure, there are bugs never fixed and some features that would need polish.
I hope support will continue for some time.

------
recoiledsnake
Thunderbird is(was?) pretty good for what it did and was a good competitor for
Outlook about 5 or 6 years ago, but the POP and IMAP protocols and the servers
that implemented them were no good and never came up to the level of Exchange.

Thunderbird simply didn't have the other half of the equation, Exchange clones
failed to live up to their promise and Thunderbird floundered with the
introduction of Gmail.

With a powerful Exchange replacement on the server side, it could've
flourished as the client of choice.

Not to mention that Thunderbird did not have a source of revenue like Firefox
did.

~~~
lifeguard
I have been using IMAP on Thunderbird for _at least_ the past 5 years and it
has worked well. I even used to use Netscape's email client back int the day
and it worked well, too. Open source _email_ software is vastly superior to MS
offerings. Outlook is good group ware, who needs it on today's social web?

Exchange + Outlook are horrible and mostly used due to the power of
Microsoft's monopoly.

PS - I am an MCP and have administered Exchange in the past.

~~~
recoiledsnake
>Outlook is good group ware, who needs it on today's social web?

Almost all companies do? Or do you propose they use the public social web
instead of groupware like Exchange or Google Apps?

>Exchange + Outlook are horrible and mostly used due to the power of
Microsoft's monopoly.

What's horrible about them? Also, you don't need Outlook to communicate with
someone using Outlook, so I don't see much of a monopoly effect unlike with
Word or Excel.

If there's an alternative server and client software that costs much less than
Exchange and is easier to administer but has similar or more features, why
won't people switch? The lack of such server software is what killed
Thunderbird. After all, some are moving to Google Apps.

~~~
lifeguard
I will light a candle rather than curse your darkness! (I am not trolling and
welcome this discussion !)

>>Almost all companies do? Or do you propose they use the public social web
instead of groupware like Exchange or Google Apps?

Odd you equate google apps w/ exchange.

Most companies have an intranet that includes a wiki, evernote, or forum.
Also, many source code control systems include a knowedge base, wiki, and
comment system. Google docs + hosted domain gmail is easy to use, more secure,
more robust, and lower cost than Exchange + Outlook. The reason large
companies don't do this is they have sunk costs in Exchange and an admin who
likes it -- why change? But for start-ups and new companies it is a no
brainer. Licensing alone of Exchange (plus windows server with active
directory) is prohibitive. Most users have IM accounts on AIM, Skype, or Gmail
to use for chatting.

>>What's horrible about them?

UI, stability, security, documentation, user license agreement, required
system resources, remote exploits that grant admin rights. I'll run out of
space to list them all!

>>I don't see much of a monopoly effect unlike with Word

Good point, for example MS is appealing the verdict that it in fact abused its
monopoly position with Word vs. Wordperfect. It is more subtle when it comes
to Outlook. For example, the only workstations Dell sells come with a MS
operating system, that includes IE and Outlook (but you must pay for
Outlook/office after 2 months or something). Or staples. Or Office Depot.

>>why won't people switch

The power of mono-culture aka monopoly. It is well documented in the public
record that microsoft repeated abused their monopoly position.

This is beyond the scope of email clients, but look into:

Novel Networking (IPX), 3COM lanman licensing, Sysbase & MS SQL server,
Apple's UI lawsuit vs win95 that MS settled, IE & Netscape, Real media vs
windows media player, The Samba group trying to get docs , Word & Wordperfect,

>> The lack of such server software is what killed Thunderbird

Wow, ummm, no.

~~~
recoiledsnake
>The reason large companies don't do this is they have sunk costs in Exchange
and an admin who likes it -- why change?

The bigger reason that with locally hosted mail, you have accountability and
control over your own data.

>UI, stability, security, documentation, user license agreement, required
system resources, remote exploits that grant admin rights

I am sure Google Apps has none of those issues, except things like this
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4198080>

>It is more subtle when it comes to Outlook. For example, the only
workstations Dell sells come with a MS operating system, that includes IE and
Outlook (but you must pay for Outlook/office after 2 months or something). Or
staples. Or Office Depot.

That sounds extremely roundabout. A 2 month trial of Outlook is not going to
convince anyone to keep using it.

>Wow, ummm, no.

You have not provided one shred of reason to counter my point that, if there
was a Exchange alternative that integrated well with Thunderbird, it might
have been a success.

~~~
lifeguard
Linux & Thunderbird are much better for local email than MS Exchange. Exchange
sells MS server 200x licenses.

Web stuff is for groupware, but not MILSPEC.

Yesterday's Thunderbird is superior to today's Outlook as an email client.

I got tired at the end of my last reply.

