So, That’s It For Thunderbird

http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/06/so-thats-it-for-thunderbird/

by hornokplease • 14 years ago

192 171 14 years ago

techcrunch.com

madrona• 14 years ago

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

smacktoward• 14 years ago

Mutt?

In seriousness, I'm not sure there is one.

rhizome2• 14 years ago

Native to what?

ngokevin2• 14 years ago

I think he meant as a desktop client.

ngokevin2• 14 years ago

Why switch now? It's not like they're deleting it off the Internet.

cooldeal• 14 years ago

Outlook ?

dredmorbius5• 14 years ago

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).

icebraining4• 14 years ago

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

ghshephard• 14 years ago

I run Apple's Mail.app and Outlook (for calendaring) side-by side on OS X 10.7 reading from a Gmail IMAP account and an Exchange Account. I prefer Apple's Mail.app - thought I had my doubts for the first few releases of 10.7 when it crashed continuously and got hung up on the Exchange Server with a "constant activity" task. As of 10.7.4 it's (mostly) returned to 10.6.8 stability. It's a viable alternative to Thunderbird/Outlook for mail reading on OS X. Though, honestly, if you are happy with thunderbird, I'm sure it will be many years before you need to consider alternatives.

Arelius• 14 years ago

Is there a good non-native one that's not tied to a specific provider either?

justauser• 14 years ago

Clawsmail or it's ancestor, Sylpheed. If you're one for a beautiful and flashy UI then these options are not for you.

Avshalom• 14 years ago

Opera's built in mail client is excellent. It's unfortunately baked into the browser, so while still pretty light (Opera's what 10-15 Mb) it's got a bit of irrelevent UI laying about in email mode. Still excellent though.

leif• 14 years ago

Used to use alpine, never could make the ui switch to mutt. Now I'm on offlineimap+notmuch+notmuch.el+postfix and I frigging love it.

osener• 14 years ago

My favorite combination is offlineimap+mu+mu4e. Mu is really fast, mu4e is a great reader and its interface is similar to Wanderlust (another great Emacs based mail reader) which is why I prefer it to notmuch.el.

http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/

http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html

ta12121• 14 years ago

pine (alpine)

ibotty5• 14 years ago

dead unfortunately. (and some things are very hard to integrated nicely)

mseepgood• 14 years ago

On Linux: Evolution

jeltz• 14 years ago

Has evolution improved much lately? When I last used it about 2 years ago it was quite buggy.

ssheth• 14 years ago

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

ecaron• 14 years ago

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.

dredmorbius5• 14 years ago

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.

dredmorbius5• 14 years ago

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

recoiledsnake3• 14 years ago

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.

lifeguard5• 14 years ago

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.

recoiledsnake3• 14 years ago

>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.

TimJRobinson4• 14 years ago

Every single time I've tried to use outlook I've found it so painfully slow its almost unusable. But I do have a lot of email.

Vivtek2• 14 years ago

This fascinates me. What does Exchange do that standard protocols don't? (In terms of email, I mean. I suppose Exchange also has calendaring and some workflow, right?)

toyg• 14 years ago

It's often extended in various ways server-side with custom logic, but the real advantages are in terms of ease of admin and, client-side, excellent and basically unrivalled collaborative calendaring.

There are better mail clients, but I've never, ever seen anyone doing collab-calendaring better than Outlook. (oh and google doesn't apply, most serious companies simply cannot use it for all sorts of legal or strategic reasons)

codesuela• 14 years ago

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

jemka• 14 years ago

Completely agree. I'll admit I immediately starting worrying about alternatives, but so long as they keep pushing out security patches, I don't see any reason for an alternative.

flatline32• 14 years ago

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.

morsch4• 14 years ago

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.

oz• 14 years ago

I've been loving Postbox. It's based on TB, but with a better UI and great Gmail/Google Apps integration. It has a free 30-day trial, and will import your accounts from TB seamlessly.

crymer11• 14 years ago

I'd argue Mail falls short of Sparrow, especially if you use Gmail. The UI is significantly less impeding.

kstrauser• 14 years ago

Since you mention OS X: I've been using Sparrow and I'm growing to really like it. It's the exact opposed of "bulky and poorly designed".

yaix• 14 years ago

Whenever you start a sentence with "Ihmo there isn't so much left to innovate in [tech field]" you already know you are probably wrong about it.

a3_nm2• 14 years ago

> Ihmo there isn't so much left to innovate in an email client

There is interesting innovation going on, for instance <http://notmuchmail.org/>; (and satellite projects such as <https://github.com/teythoon/afew>; and <https://github.com/pazz/alot>.

ibotty5• 14 years ago

thanks for the pointer to alot. as a vi guy i could not really get used to notmuch (too much emacs :D) so nice that you pointed me to them.

gkoberger• 14 years ago

I agree with you, with the caveat that you include "given its current trajectory." Is, say, Sparrow better? Maybe. Will someone release an awesome new email client in the future that's better than Sparrow and Thunderbird combined? Definitely. But with infinite time, Thunderbird will never become Sparrow (or Gmail or the next big email client).

Any further features for Thunderbird can be developed as an extension or as a fork (like, say, Postbox -- which is actually really more of an extension rather than a fork, as far as I know).

dfc4• 14 years ago

Enigmail should not exist! I never understood why GPG support was an addon, but smime was baked in...

ABS2• 14 years ago

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

wmf3• 14 years ago

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).

ABS2• 14 years ago

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"

dbcooper• 14 years ago

If you want to contribute to Thunderbird in order to improve its UX, then the "parity with Postbox" meta-bug would be a good place to start.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=737347

Silhouette• 14 years ago

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. :-)

dfc4• 14 years ago

Evolution can replace Exchange on the client side.

smsm423• 14 years ago

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.

lifeguard5• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

TB Search does suck, though.

lifeguard5• 14 years ago

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

mrich• 14 years ago

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.

fromhet2• 14 years ago

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.

mosburger• 14 years ago

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

wmf3• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

StavrosK8• 14 years ago

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.

heretohelp5• 14 years ago

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!

TazeTSchnitzel• 14 years ago

This is a rare case on HN where someone's username is quite relevant.

StavrosK8• 14 years ago

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.

smsm423• 14 years ago

I'd easily pay $100 for a perpetual license for a client that has as many capabilities as TB, plus does exchange calendars/address books right. I'd expense it then, of course :) And it would be worth every cent - while TB has many excellent features, lack of some more enterprise-y things probably cost me much more than $100 in time and effort over my career.

The thing is, however, $100 paid to closed-source software vendor never guarantees he won't be out of business or bought by some Novell that will promptly run it into ground in a year or two. With open source chances for product survival are higher - though, as we see here, are in no way guaranteed.

Just in case anybody cares, I'm currently on Mac OS X, but when I worked on Linux & Windows, I used Thunderbird too, and the same applies for both of these OSes too.

corford3• 14 years ago

I'd happily pay up to $80 for a robust, snappy, modern non-bloated email client that did IMAP very well. Preferably written in C or C# if it was for the Windows market or QT if it needed to be cross platform (I think half of Thunderbird's performance issues are due to it being written in XUL...)

Edit: I'd be happy if the developer of Sublime Text 2 decided to have a go at making a modern, cross-platform email client. Something tells me it would be exactly what I want.

EricDeb• 14 years ago

What I've never understood is what exactly makes a computer snappy. My RAM is never fully used, CPU percentage often in the single digits, Solid state drive - still I feel like it could be snappier. I wonder where the deficit is?

StavrosK8• 14 years ago

I have the same question. I press the shortcut for "open nautilus", it takes a bit less than a second to open. What's the holdup, Gnome?

At least, in Windows, explorer is pretty much instant.

chubot2• 14 years ago

The deficit is software. Hardware has gotten crazy fast, but software is struggling to make use of that speed in ways that are valuable to average users (e.g. reducing perceived latency).

At the risk of stating the obvious, a computer feels snappy when it responds to user actions (clicks, keypresses) quickly. That is a holistic problem -- one that concerns all parts of the system -- so it's hard to optimize. Software tends to evolve "within the lines"; it's hard to make changes that cross abstraction boundaries. But that's where performance is.

On the other hand, hardware has gotten faster unevenly. Disk seeks are the slowest thing your computer does besides WAN access, but those haven't sped up much over the last decade. Disk throughput (and size) have increased orders of magnitude faster than seek time.

But we're still using the same software abstractions (and the same software!) for these radically different machines. For example, stat() is still a synchronous call. In the old days it wasn't all that slow relative to CPU operations. Now it can take 30ms, which is 30,000,000 cycles on a 1 Ghz CPU. So arguably the default should be async.

C is another abstraction that had a reasonable performance model when it was invented, but no longer does. It's hard for the average developer to have a decent (portable) model of a CPU these days, especially with regard to concurrency.

Chris_Newton• 14 years ago

The apparent lack of responsiveness we see with a lot of modern software is usually a product of three factors.

Firstly, architectures today tend to be multitasking and event-driven. A modern GUI application is usually built around an “event loop” that waits for various interesting things to happen, such as the user pushing a key or clicking a mouse, reaching a certain time, or receiving a signal from an external device. When an event of interest takes place, the relevant part of the loop will detect it next time around, and then run the relevant code to react.

However, if that code takes a significant amount of time to run, then the event loop won’t have a chance to react to anything else that is going on until the last event is dealt with. The catch is that things like repainting your application window because the user happened to move another window over the top of it are also handled by the event loop, so if you’ve got an application that is trying to check for new mail every five minutes but your network connection has dropped and it takes 30 seconds to time out, the application might be completely unresponsive to any other kind of user interaction during that time, and might not even redraw properly if you move other windows over it.

The usual solution to this problem is to introduce a degree of concurrency, so that any event-handling code that isn’t guaranteed to complete very quickly is executed in a new thread in parallel with the event loop. The loop itself is therefore immediately free to continue responding to other events, possibly kicking off still more new threads, as necessary. Unfortunately, there are significant overheads to coding this way, so a lot of simple applications don’t bother and just accept that they might become unresponsive now and then. And of course it’s always possible to make a mistake in the design, responding to a certain type of event that is usually dealt with quickly in the main thread without realising that under some circumstances it will take much longer.

The second factor is abstraction. We used to program pretty close to the metal, because you couldn’t get acceptable performance any other way. Today, we build on top of OS kernels, hardware abstraction layers, device drivers, virtual machines, run-time libraries, and who knows how many other tools, all stacked up and each composed of many layers themselves. The benefits of this approach are many: faster development time, more effective testing and more robust software, ease of porting software to run on different hardware or operating systems, and so on.

The downside is that every time you introduce another abstraction, you are potentially introducing an overhead, and those effects multiply. Even if your abstraction is say 90% efficient compared to programming directly to whatever lies beneath it, if you’ve got 10 layers of abstraction between the code you’re writing in your end user application and the hardware you’re ultimately talking to, the effect is to reduce performance by about 2/3. And there are a lot more than 10 layers between your average end user code and the hardware on most systems today, and some of them are far from 90% efficient.

The third and final factor is somewhat related: if development time (or, if you prefer, time to market) is more of a priority than raw performance, it’s easy to skip over the kind of optimization work that used to be essential to produce software that ran acceptably quickly and within the relatively limited RAM and permanent storage capacity available. It’s one thing to skip the fine details and hand-tweaked assembly language, which was often a very expensive activity in terms of time spent vs. resulting speed-up. It’s another thing to just throw in the first data structure or algorithm that comes to mind, often because whatever software development toolkit you’re using has a limited set of options available and maybe it’s not worth the time to code up something more appropriate, or maybe because as the industry has grown a lot of developers aren’t either formally trained or keen hobbyist geeks any more and not everyone knows about all the options. This is how you wind up with abstractions that are a lot worse than 90%, or that don’t scale well as the amount of data they have to deal with increases and assumptions that the hardware is “fast enough to make up for it these days” break down.

So, in summary, and in more of a cause-to-effect order:

1. The emphasis on reducing development time because of commercial pressures or other non-technical factors, combined with a certain complacency about the capabilities of modern hardware, means that not as much optimization tends to be done before code ships today. Sometimes this introduces a modest overhead, but it can be severe if a poor choice leads to scalability problems.

2. Even if the overheads of any one function are modest, we build modern systems from a stack of many abstraction layers, and their overheads multiply. The compound effect can easily be the equivalent of running on hardware from several years ago, even if no individual layer was grossly wasteful.

3. Because we tend to use event-driven architectures for a lot of modern software, including most GUIs, a single slow operation can block the whole event loop and effectively make the whole UI unresponsive indefinitely. More advanced architectures that would prevent this have significant development costs and aren’t always used for the same reasons as above.

[Edit: OK, this is getting a few upvotes and no-one’s replied suggested cutting it down, so I’ll leave the whole post as it is. Sorry if anyone does feel it’s too long.]

ww5202• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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

ww5202• 14 years ago

Excellent. Looks very nice.

MitziMoto• 14 years ago

I've been dying for something like this. My ideal client is basically a clone of gmail, but one that connects through my local internet connection. I know gmail can do POP and IMAP, but it cannot connect to my workplace VPN. RoundCube definitely looks like a good start, I will check it out.

simonbrown2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

icebraining4• 14 years ago

Google Apps has aliases and catch-all.

thrownaway24243• 14 years ago

You can use fastmail.fm with your own domains.

estebank• 14 years ago

I'm not sure what services you are referring to, and I recall that being the case in the past, but I can't think of any Google product that doesn't work with Google Apps accounts.

sp3322• 14 years ago

You can create a new account with your new domain. Switching among google accounts is pretty easy now, it's just a dropdown in the upper right. You can load Google Docs or email or whatever just by picking an account from a menu.

icebraining4• 14 years ago

When I used Apps, I just created a new account and used a different browser window (in Incognito) to access Gmail.

simonbrown2• 14 years ago

What do you use now?

webwanderings• 14 years ago

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

malkia• 14 years ago

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

gecko• 14 years ago

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.

wslh• 14 years ago

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...

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

TimJRobinson4• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

TimJRobinson4• 14 years ago

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.

ChrisNorstrom4• 14 years ago

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...

larrys2• 14 years ago

"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 want to explain this a little further? IMAP is fast you only download headers.

ChrisNorstrom4• 14 years ago

Every time you label something, star something, move an email into a folder, mark as spam, or delete emails it would sync immediately and cause a little delay. This drove me insane as I was used to POP3's download once, interact with it instantly.

fusiongyro• 14 years ago

It's spelled "awful."

philwelch• 14 years ago

The problem is that Gmail is shit lately, which has gotten me to switch back to Mail.app, which isn't bad. It turns out IMAP reproduces approximately all the advantages of webmail.

jvdh2• 14 years ago

  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.

ChrisNorstrom4• 14 years ago

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.

olliesaunders• 14 years ago

I use POP3 as a way of storing a local backup of my gmail emails.

dredmorbius5• 14 years ago

Offlineimap is another alternative. It allows use of multiple clients in multiple locations off a central mailstore, while offering the speed and performance advantages of locally-managed email.

ernesth2• 14 years ago

> By default Thunderbird tries to send all my outgoing mail through 1 smtp account.

This is the sane default. Your average access provider gives you an smtp server. Your average mail provider, if it provides smtp, may give you an smtp server that will rewrite your enveloppe and worse that is not available everywhere. So the smtp server to use should depend on where your computer is, not which mail account you are using.

> 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".

See it is better to have only one good smtp server to configure to avoid those problems.

ibotty5• 14 years ago

that's plain wrong. look up spf (sender policy framework) if you want to know more.

pdkp• 14 years ago

As someone who has also been a heavy Thunderbird user for years, I have not had the same experience. If anything, same content/subject/sender email spam is where Thunderbird's spam filter shines for me.

I have two fairly heavily spammed accounts, one of which has a public email address. They consistently catch and remove same or similar content spam every day without issue.

In regards to false positives, it does happen sometimes. Although in most cases the emails that end up in the junk folder legitimately resemble a spam message. Almost any time a legitimate email has been marked as spam, which doesn't really happen all that often, unspamming it is sufficient to ensure the sender doesn't end up there again.

ChrisNorstrom4• 14 years ago

I get more false positives than false negatives. But when I switched to out Outlook 2007 for half a year (got my hands on free Office 2007 launch kit) That was the first thing I noticed. Outlook, at least for me, had amazing spam control right out of the box. Everything else was dreadful but the spam control was amazing. Then again, I tend to have email addresses from almost 10 years ago when I was 15.

Maybe its because I'm using a portable version of Thunderbird. Although it shouldn't matter.

larrys2• 14 years ago

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?)

corford3• 14 years ago

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!

nyar• 14 years ago

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.

jcurbo2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

jcurbo2• 14 years ago

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.

jpswade• 14 years ago

* 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-...

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

jvdh2• 14 years ago

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)

conradfr• 14 years ago

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.

damian2000• 14 years ago

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.

beagle3• 14 years ago

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)

So, That’s It For Thunderbird

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