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Posted by playfultones 16 hours ago

Help Keep Thunderbird Alive(updates.thunderbird.net)
482 points | 339 commentspage 4
ano-ther 13 hours ago|
As a lot of people in this thread advise against Thunderbird, what do you recommend instead (preferably for Windows as I am stuck on that)?
mrks_hy 13 hours ago||
I think they are just hating on Mozilla out of pure principles, but without any alternative.
PunchyHamster 12 hours ago|||
Thunderbird of now is more annoying and less convenient to use than when I last time used it in 2010's, before I moved to claws-mail.

And only reason using it now is cos of MS fucked up oauth2 method that is PITA to setup for any other OSS client as it requires the app to be added to their catalog and only thunderbird was big enough to get that

So I can understand the annoyance

dangus 8 hours ago||
To be honest while I’m not the biggest fan of Thunderbird I struggle to understand how this is true by any measure.

The program is pretty much the same as it was in 2010 from a UI standpoint.

My biggest complaints with it are that the profile configuration is not portable, and that the UI is too cluttered with features. I just want something simple that does all the important stuff and remains somewhat powerful.

PunchyHamster 3 hours ago||
Lol, no.

So thunderbird have 2 search bars, one on top, other in directory itself. The top one does what I'd expect browser search bar do, opens new tab and search everywhere, the bottom, again, inside a directory listing, I expect to search within directory.

If you type text, it does that, filtering messages in current view

If you type text and press enter, it does exact same thing the top one does, searchs everywhere, instead of the fucking directory I explicitly clicked and navigated to the other search bar

But fine, that's a quirk, you can get used to it... if not for how bad the opened search window is.

You get a list of messages where there is just enough text to not know whether you care about content of the message and whole thing fits like 4 mails (I get hundreds a day from various system stuff of hundreds of servers) and the ENTIRE RIGHT SIDE is empty and unused, and as it defaults to showing all mail, not mail in directory I was in, it's mostly useless. It also only shows last part of the path, not the whole dir mail is so instead of <A>/<B> dir you just get B

BUT WAIT THERE IS MORE. THEY MADE BETTER VIEW!

Just click on "Show results as list". Its just a list with a browser, same you get with normal directory browsing. It still wasted space, but it's at least usable

Let me just use the search to narrow down the list.... oh, it for some reason stopped searching in message bodies despise "body" option being selected and the same setting working in "main" directory search... and guess what enter does ? Of course, contrary to all good UI/UX design, it will run another tab with search that forgot your original query so when you might think you could narrow it down, nope

twelvedogs 9 hours ago||||
I just use geary, it's less annoying and does the job
salvesefu 6 hours ago||
team geary needs more love. geary works well for most day to day tasks with no showstopping bugs.
hk__2 13 hours ago|||
> I think they are just hating on Mozilla out of pure principles

Please don’t assume bad faith when the reality is that you don’t know.

jeltz 8 hours ago||
Please provide an alternative then.
hk__2 4 hours ago||
I’m not the one criticizing Thunderbird. I personally don’t use any email client on Linux; I just use whatever web interface the hosting provider has.
Avamander 4 hours ago|||
I've tried so many while doing a bit of research into MUAs and I can't say there are any alternatives that could replace it properly. But depending on your usage or if you're not a demanding user, there might be something out there.
cosmic_cheese 7 hours ago|||
For Windows the pickings are unfortunately slim. On Apple platforms I use Mail.app which has done its job quite well for decades but as of yet haven't found analogues for Windows and Linux.

Under Linux, Geary once held promise but has long since stagnated and is too basic.

jeltz 8 hours ago|||
As far as I know there isn't one. Maybe Evolution if they have managed to fix all the bugs it used to have. it is a sad state of affairs that we have so few useful email clients.
dangus 8 hours ago|||
I still use Thunderbird but on my Linux system that I just set up I would like to try something else.

Some options appear in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/software/comments/17r3twi/best_wind...

If you’re doing a new install and are generally fine with Thunderbird, Betterbird is a good option. It has additional good stuff that Thunderbird is lacking or took longer to get implemented/fixed.

What I don’t like about Thunderbird is that the profiles aren’t portable. It seems like every Thunderbird install is its own unique mess. I’d love to find something that allowed me to move the same configuration around between computers and platforms. I’m not sure if that exists.

I like how Thunderbird has the ability to handle mail, calendar, and contacts, but the implementation especially for calendar leaves a lot to be desired.

My favorite clients are Apple Mail/Calendar for their simplicity and being local-first clients but I’m using macOS less and less these days.

The “new outlook” that’s offered by Microsoft to consumers for free seems to be creepy and syncs your emails to Microsoft servers even if you’re using a third party client.

I’d also say you only need a truly local client if you have multiple email addresses. If you have just one email, let’s say you’re with FastMail or something, their web mail and mobile/desktop apps are great.

ano-ther 4 hours ago||
Thank you. Am moving away from Outlook and Thunderbird is my default option. Betterbird looks promising, so I'll give it a try (or some of the ones in the thread)
Skywalker13 13 hours ago||
Outlook Express

[]->

account42 12 hours ago||
The other day I cam to my computer with Thunderbird showing me a full page screen instead of my email list that I had open before. Not going to donate to projects that disrespect users like that - my computer is not your advertising space even if you consider your ads "helpful information".
Hasnep 11 hours ago||
I'm pretty sure they show it something like once a year, and it takes two seconds to close it, if you can't spare two seconds of your life every year for something you get for free then you were never going to donate anything.
squigz 11 hours ago||
I think it's more disrespectful to judge so harshly a company - that puts out wonderful, free, open source software - asking for donations 1 or 2 times a year with a message that is easy to close.
TekMol 13 hours ago||
I wish there was a system that lets users put up a donation that is released once a specific bug is fixed or a specific feature is implemented.

Wouldn't that be cool? The company would have a list of tasks with a dollar amount next to it.

I for one have been dabbling with a bug in ThunderBird for days now that drives me mad:

I recently created a folder in Thunderbird and called it "archive". No way would I have expected that this will lead me to a bug and will take hours out of my day: There seems to be no way to get rid of this folder anymore.

Things I have tried:

"Keep message archives in" in "Copies and Folders" is disabled. I tried temporarily enabling it, setting it to some other dir and disabling it again, that did not help.

I have disabled it in "subscribe".

I cannot rename it.

There is no "archive" folder in the web interface of my email provider, so if it Thunderbird somehow created it on the server, there seems to be no way to see, let alone delete it again in the web interface.

I tried deleting archive.msf on disk. That makes the folder disappear after the next start, but it is recreated after about a second.

I deleted folderTree.json and folderCache.json, that did not help.

j-bos 13 hours ago|
You can do that. It's called a restricted donation. If you make a donation with a cover letter or a check memoizing a specific purpose and the nonprofit accepts it, then by law they're legally obligated to follow through and use that money for that purpose. With bugs it's probably easier because you can just write the bug ID on the check.
cge 12 hours ago|||
MZLA Technologies, the organization that these donations go to, is not a non-profit.
antisol 12 hours ago|||
There are also a couple of bug bounty websites out there for exactly this kind of thing: you and others throw some money into the pot for fixing a given bug or implementing some feature, and coders can claim that bounty once they've written the code.

I've seen a few of these sites over the years but I can't remember the name of any RN. Search engines are your friend.

Ringz 10 hours ago||
I tried for a long time to work with Thunderbird, but what kept bothering me was that I couldn’t simply define keyboard shortcuts. In the end, I landed on AERC and created my own extreme Vim-style keyboard configuration (the idea is to look at the list of mails like looking at a buffer in vim) for it. I’ve never been this fast when it comes to email.

https://aerc-mail.org/ https://github.com/rafo/aerc-vim

wolttam 5 hours ago||
I was about to donate $5 until I saw the minimum is $7 CAD. What?
nubinetwork 3 hours ago||
> we don't run ads

Proceeds to run an ad. An ad for yourself is still an ad.

Why couldn't this be shown when I upgraded thunderbird, rather than at a random time of your choosing?

isodev 13 hours ago||
I wouldn't mind donating if they separate it from Mozilla and move it to Europe.
criticalfault 12 hours ago|
https://www.tb.pro/en-US/thundermail/

  Hosted Securely in Germany 

  Your emails are protected by strict EU privacy laws and hosted on infrastructure you can trust. With servers located in Germany, Thundermail prioritizes your privacy while ensuring reliable, fast delivery worldwide.
ahartmetz 11 hours ago|||
I don't see how it's different from Amazon or Microsoft datacenters in the EU, which are not safe from the US government. As long as the US parent company can somehow get at the data, it is obligated to do so when a US agency asks for it.
niels8472 11 hours ago|||
Looks like it's still owned by Mozilla/MZLA and thus subject to US jurisdiction.
addybojangles 9 hours ago||
Torn about this due to multiple factors...but I think the core reasoning remains: if it's a tool you like, there are actual people working on it, and if you want those actual people to stay employed and continue working on the tool, it's in your best interest to do things like donate and talk/share about them.
NoSalt 6 hours ago||
I have donated ... multiple times. I wish there was a way to keep the "Please Donate" from popping up if we have donated within the last N days, weeks, months, etc.
jrm4 8 hours ago|
"If you get value from Thunderbird"

I'm reading this and I'm feeling like, maaan, I wish you hadn't asked me that.

So, compare to Mozilla (which apparently they're not with anymore?) I actively use Firefox and probably more importantly, I remain very impressed with their ability to try to keep up with the times. They do fail at this sometimes, but over 20-30 years, that track record is solid.

Thunderbird? Ugh. I want it to be good, but I'm not so sure there's much of a point here anymore. My line in the sand was different colored multiple accounts which was trivially easy and then one day wasn't; moreover AI is really killing them there for me (in terms of taking something old like Claws or Neomutt and very easily customizing it a way that was too much of a pain before)

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