[HN Gopher] Thunderbird 140 "Eclipse"
___________________________________________________________________
Thunderbird 140 "Eclipse"
Author : TangerineDream
Score : 275 points
Date : 2025-07-07 17:31 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.thunderbird.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.thunderbird.net)
| yakattak wrote:
| I've been using Thunderbird more and more over the past few
| months. I'm glad it's finally getting some decent attention. I'm
| especially curious about the new account management in 140. I
| couldn't add my iCloud calendar easily before, hope this
| rectifies it.
|
| If you haven't given Thunderbird a shot yet, you should.
| CoolChum wrote:
| There is no mention of sync functionality. I regularly use 3
| different PCs and I cannot sync settings easily. It means I've
| give up using Thunderbird on all but one of the PCs.
|
| They've also made the usability worse in recent versions and are
| copying the insanely annoying context menus in Windows 11, which
| cannot be reverted.
| tommica wrote:
| Sync? Just connect to your accounts on each machine? Or are you
| using POP3 and want that to sync?
| dijit wrote:
| I guess they mean that they want their accounts to be synced
| (setup _is_ annoying tbh), but also things like signatures
| and so on.
|
| I normally just manage it myself and I'm extremely happy to
| do so, as I consider it like my dotfiles, but I understand
| where the parent is coming from - settings sync is becoming
| common. (Chrome is a good example).
| XorNot wrote:
| All I need out of it is a slightly sensible file based config
| scheme. Syncthing will do the rest.
| CoolChum wrote:
| You need to export the profile and re-import on each machine.
| If you make any changes on one machine you want to see it
| reflected on the others.
|
| The profile import is a bit iffy and there was some odd
| issues with downloading profiles over 2GB IIRC, the last time
| I did it (which was over 2 years ago).
|
| There seems to be a lot of focus on features that IMO that I
| couldn't care less about and some outright stupid UI
| decisions like the context menus being changed after 20 years
| for god knows what reasons.
|
| The result was that I just gave up and use Thunderbird on one
| machine and web-mail on all the others. I suspect I will just
| drop Thunderbird as a result.
| jacklbk wrote:
| Also gave up Thunderbird years ago because of the same reason.
| Just wanted something stable and chose Spark. Works on every
| device, not a problem for years.
| CoolChum wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestion.
| zx8080 wrote:
| > Spark: AI mail.
|
| To the hell with AI. I just need a stable email client.
| dangus wrote:
| No Linux client.
| lproven wrote:
| I covered that and the alternative in my Register piece. You
| might find that useful.
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/09/new_thunderbird_esr_i...
| CoolChum wrote:
| Thank you. I will take a look this evening.
| humanfromearth9 wrote:
| Sync could be implemented using special email and IMAP servers
| for storage...
| roflmaostc wrote:
| Since some months somehow the windows are weirdly aligned inside
| Thunderbird, like the attachment bar is cut off at the bottom. I
| might be connected to my Awesome WM but I haven't changed
| anything on this side.
|
| Anyone else noticed something?
| diggan wrote:
| The only thing I noticed from the previous update was that some
| view settings seemed to have been reset, otherwise no layout
| issues that I can recall.
| Tepix wrote:
| I love that Thunderbird is moving forward.
|
| That said:
|
| I tried to add a new mail account to Thunderbird after upgrading
| to version 140. Unfortunately, it shows an error message after
| merely asking for my name and my email address and then hangs in
| an endless animation.
| Vinnl wrote:
| I'm sure some Thunderbird devs read HN, but if you'd be
| interested in helping more people with this comment, I'd log it
| at
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Thunderbi...
| XorNot wrote:
| Is Oauth accounts with an authenticator working yet? I
| desperately want to use it at work, but we have O365 with Okta
| and Yubikeys in front of it, and Thunderbird can handle the Okta
| but won't prompt for a PIN for the Yubikeys.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| As a workaround, consider using
| https://github.com/simonrob/email-oauth2-proxy
| piskov wrote:
| Why instead of actual screenshots someone would use those
| abstract things?
| ctm92 wrote:
| When I see a website advertising a product without actual
| screenshots, I usually assume the product is absolute garbage.
| But that's for commercial products normally, not free software
| like Thunderbird
| ksec wrote:
| My thought exactly. But I gave up on Mozilla for a long time.
| So I guess I am not as surprised and raged about it.
| clickety_clack wrote:
| My thoughts exactly. I used to use Thunderbird back in the day
| and I would like to be able to go back to it. I can't even
| remember anymore what turned me away at the time. I'm always
| curious to see how it's progressing though, and screenshots of
| a modern UI would probably get me to download.
| wltr wrote:
| Maybe there's not enough workforce to do them... /s
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| I wanted to love Thunderbird, used it for years then a bug [0]
| literally deleted all my emails. I regularly see updates of
| people understandably raging on the ticket :( It's a bug that
| literally deletes user data from both the server and the client
| without warning. It's been open and confirmed for 17 years
| straight. It could happen to you. How is it not top 1 priority to
| fix it?
|
| [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156
| thundarr wrote:
| Because it has to be reproducible. Help make it reproducible
| and show that to the developers.
| nehal3m wrote:
| Hard to do when all your data is chilling in oblivion.
| bestham wrote:
| It doesn't have to be reproduce with real data.
| nehal3m wrote:
| Then the developers can do it
| PetitPrince wrote:
| So you expect the developer to create data ex-nihilo for
| a bug they don't know how to trigger ?
| nehal3m wrote:
| I explicitly do not, which is why my first response
| spells out that it's hard to reproduce a bug when all
| your data is gone. If it is the case that the bug can be
| reproduced without user data (as suggested by the person
| I responded to, not me), then the developers should be
| able to do that better than users can.
| thundarr wrote:
| You can take snapshots of the VM with the mail server. When
| the bug happens, identify the snapshot. Bingo.
| nehal3m wrote:
| You're assuming users affected by this bug have control
| over the VM running their mail server. I won't argue that
| it can't be done, but it's probably harder than we think.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| We don't know how to make it reproducible.
|
| What developers should do on such a critical and long
| standing issue is to offer an extension that victims can
| install to volunteer to track the bug. So they can click a
| button when things are fine to take a snapshot, and click
| another one when they encounter it.
|
| I would install that and be part of the solution.
| bartread wrote:
| If it was me running the project there's enough information
| in that thread to piece together an exploratory testing
| plan around the issue that might allow us to isolate it,
| and I'd set aside some time for the team to do that.
|
| Whilst obviously not lethal, this Thunderbird bug sort of
| reminds me of the Therac-25 incidents in the 1980s. Very
| occasionally the machine would give patients massive
| overdoses of radiation. This bug wasn't easy to reproduce
| (thankfully) and turned out to be due to a race condition.
|
| But of course, you can't find a problem if you don't
| investigate, and if it's a serious problem that's been
| documented then, as engineers, we can't just hide behind
| non-reproducibility as if it's some sort of magic shield.
| We have a responsibility to investigate and isolate the
| problem ourselves. If we don't do that we are effectively
| washing our hands of our own creations.
| berkes wrote:
| Not only that. Often mitigations can be placed even if the
| actual bug cannot be reproduced. Like many others in the
| thread suggested.
|
| I've encountered several impossible to reproduced bugs in
| the past. And what I (or my team) would then do, is re-
| architecture (refactor) some pieces of software so that we
| _could_ reproduce it. Like e.g. better logging, specialized
| layers /adapters/services, simpler logic, and -above all-
| better testability.
| CJefferson wrote:
| How about this bug, which I submitted 13 years ago and still
| isn't fixed. You can't search for "wedding" :
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=752844
|
| I've been amazed over the years this has never been fixed --
| it's very hard not to make jokes about the standard lifestyle
| of open-source programmers, that they don't consider this a
| priority (note: that's a joke, I consider myself an open-
| source programmer. I would hope that's obvious, but someone
| just bothered to sent me a mean anonymous message)
| bartread wrote:
| I don't know why you're getting downvoted for this. That
| seems like a pretty frustrating bug when generalised to
| other word stems. It's also pretty standard to prioritise
| exact matches when ordering search results so, again,
| frustrating.
|
| One of my biggest bugbears with Microsoft Outlook has
| always been that its search function is terrible. If you
| can't find an email then it may as well not exist, and
| that's been a real problem on a regular basis during my
| career - particularly latterly when I was in leadership and
| necessarily lived in my email and calendar.
|
| It's disappointing that Thunderbird has similar issues with
| such a fundamental function.
| _flux wrote:
| Indeed most of the time I already know the exact word I'm
| looking for; and most of the time I get non-exact hits
| making it so much more difficult to find the actual
| message.
|
| Perhaps there could be an option to disable stemming
| completely from the inverted index, which would be probably
| easier to implement than a post-search filter (which in
| itself doesn't sound very complicated..).
|
| But of course, it's open source, anyone could contribute
| :D.
| berkes wrote:
| The search in thunderbird is terrible compared to what we
| are used to today. Same for k9 (now thunderbird for
| android?).
|
| Not only is the UX a horror, its results rely on all
| sorts of technicalities. I, as a software engineer, can
| understand that a mail has to be downloaded in entirety
| locally in order to have it indexed and then show up in
| the results. And I understand that sub-sub directories
| aren't really a thing in IMAP, so searching this-dir-and-
| everything below is hard/impossible and so on.
|
| But mostly the search algorithms are poor. So much so,
| that I often rely on (rip)grep to find mails. Or in a few
| occasions wrote a quick bash/python horror to push all my
| mail into a meilisearch instance and then use this search
| engine to get the lists and filters that I would expect
| thunderbird to have.
|
| Yes. It's open source. So "go fix it" is a proper reply.
| But that doesn't make a complaint about the state of the
| search feature invalid.
| thundarr wrote:
| The filter/search feature in Thunderbird does not appear to
| have a way to search for exact matches. You want exact
| matches. First, identify if it can do exact matches and if
| so, expose to the user. Else, who wants to touch that code?
| godelski wrote:
| That is annoying. I wish I could advance search or better,
| use regex. Luckily there are plugins.
|
| Worse though, in Apple Mail I'll search an email address
| because I got an email earlier in the week and the first
| thing it'll show me is an email I got from that person 3
| years ago with the correct result a few down. I really need
| a better email client for my phone...
| smokel wrote:
| Nitpick: not all bugs have to be reproducible to be taken
| seriously. Defensive programming, and adding extra logging
| could be a mitigation to avoid future problems, or to help
| fixing them in the future.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Kinda off topic, but I've been searching for good
| introduction and best practises for defensive programming,
| but never really found much. Any recommendations?
| smokel wrote:
| This is something where modern chatbots will probably be
| very helpful. From the top of my head:
|
| 1. Validate input, expect all external input (both human
| and machine generated) to be completely bogus.
|
| 2. Fail fast and early. If something seems off, crash
| straight away, and do not expect things to magically
| repair itself at a later stage.
|
| 3. Use pre- and post-conditions where appropriate.
|
| I'm not sure about the exact definitions of defensive
| programming, but static type checking, and possibly unit
| testing, might also be part of it.
| scott_w wrote:
| I don't know of any real posts on it, it just ends up
| being kind of a "assume it'll go wrong," then figure out
| how you know something has gone wrong and track it down.
| Your starting point is, after an issue is reported, add a
| load of logs around places that seem like candidates for
| the flow. Over time, you get a sense of where things can
| break and you add that telemetry ahead of time.
| tstrimple wrote:
| I feel like this is sort of like reading a book to get
| better at self defense. Yeah, you'll probably pick up a
| few interesting things that may be of questionable use.
| But when you train in martial arts, you often get to go
| through the motions and put the moves into practice. Even
| then "real" fights will feel quite different and a lot of
| the stuff you've learned will likely fly out the window.
| If you've been in real fights a lot, you've begun to
| internalize your training and your moves become more like
| instinct. It's quite difficult to go from book knowledge
| to instinct without getting beat up a lot in between I
| think. The real valuable lessons come from building
| something that breaks and getting to fix it yourself.
| sonthonax wrote:
| Yeah, parent comment is deeply unserious.
|
| Imagine you're writing trading software, you have an algo
| go haywire and it machine guns the whole order book, and
| then you refuse to put a "max order size" outside of the
| algo to stop it from happening again because you can't
| figure out why it happened in the first place.
|
| Try telling a regulator or your boss that was your
| reasoning.
| nativeit wrote:
| How many one-off band aids do you think should be applied
| for rare, never reproduced problems before you slap a
| "100% safe" label on it and ship it with the confidence
| of a bloated, cruft-ridden job well done?
| wavemode wrote:
| Are you arguing in bad faith, or do you just not have any
| practical experience dealing with complex systems?
|
| Even if the bug can't be reproduced, on the basis of
| multiple user reports the first step absolutely should be
| to add some assertions and logging around email deletion.
|
| The point is not to give it a "100% safe" label, the
| point is to start narrowing down possible root causes. If
| the problem recurs again, you'll have assertions ruling
| out certain possible culprit code paths as well as logs
| displaying the values of relevant variables.
| a0123 wrote:
| How do you fix a bug you can't reproduce?
| beart wrote:
| This issue comes up in my role a lot, where I am often
| dealing with various environmental conditions and human
| factors, plus multiple integration points between various
| software and hardware systems.
|
| The answer is that you keep working at it iteratively
| using a combination of logging, reporting, and defensive
| programming to systematically narrow down the possible
| causes. Sometimes you never arrive at a true root cause,
| but you get close enough that you can mitigate the
| problem and finally close the ticket out. At the end of
| the day, the customer/user doesn't care as long as it
| works.
|
| However, what will _really_ piss them off is telling them
| your hands are tied until they can reliably reproduce the
| issue for you. It 's important they understand that you
| are working on it, and typically they will go out of
| their way to help solve the problem when they feel taken
| care of.
| thundarr wrote:
| That specific bug needs reproducible steps. How would _you_
| try to work it out if it does not happen on your setup?
| smokel wrote:
| Why do you think it needs reproducible steps? It is
| obvious that the bug is still active, so in a way it _is_
| reproducible, just not in a systematic way.
|
| This happens more often, for example when many services
| work together in an asynchronous way, and in some very
| rare situation, unwanted behavior occurs. To fix that, it
| is often easier to _reason_ through the entire process,
| and to identify weak spots. It might even be a good idea
| to switch to a different paradigm to avoid certain bugs
| altogether.
|
| For this particular bug, _I_ would start by reading a
| lot, and ensurong that the bug is indeed not easily
| reproducible (by trying to make it reproducible of
| course). If that fails, I would continue to think about
| root causes for the bug, and possible workarounds that
| would work in theory. Then I would try to estimate the
| amount of work required, and the risk of breaking other
| things, and report that to those who like to decide on
| further actions.
|
| And of course, as I know very little about the inner
| workings of ThunderBird, I would simply ask ChatGPT o3 or
| similar for advice. It comes up with a plan that seems
| reasonable.
| jajko wrote:
| No it doesn't. If I waited every time for obscure production
| issue to be reproduced in lower envs I would be fired... many
| times for clear and obvious incompetence.
|
| Sometimes, you can add some additional steps, logging, change
| behavior in corner case a bit, either to get more
| understanding next time it happens or even mitigate it.
| Sometimes, you have plenty of tools and ways to act. In my
| experience, that sometimes is basically always if one cares
| enough.
| Nition wrote:
| Thanks for linking that. I've tried Thunderbird a couple of
| times in the past and quite liked it, but that thread has put
| me off using it forever.
|
| Even if the bug is fiendishly hard to track down and reproduce,
| you'd think there would be some additional safety checks they
| could add that would at least let it fail with an error message
| instead of actual data loss.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| See, you don't understand. Fixing the bug before reproducing
| it would violate the _process_.
| jraph wrote:
| Well, I do think the thundebird team should investigate and
| fix this. But it is almost impossible to fix a bug you
| can't reproduce and have no clue why it might be happening.
| brookst wrote:
| if (!user_requested_mass_delete &&
| delete_requests_past_second > 10) throw("we sure seem to
| be deleting a lot of stuff from the server")
| jraph wrote:
| I would not want my email client to be relying on such
| brittle and incorrect heuristics.
|
| A better workaround would be to keep deleted emails
| around for some time so users have the option to restore
| them if the bug triggers. But this has drawbacks such as
| potential privacy breakage (you meant to delete mails you
| don't want the chance that anybody sees it) or free disk
| space management (your local drive is overloaded and you
| want to urgently free up space) or ux confusion (this is
| a de facto trash but Thunderbird already has such a
| feature)
|
| Ultimately, what needs to be done is make the code
| robust, make sure there are no race conditions, etc.
| jamespo wrote:
| Just do a complete rewrite in rust, that will solve all
| the issues
| tomrod wrote:
| Honestly? It might.
| dbalatero wrote:
| Only by being a statistically different code base, unless
| you think this is a memory safety bug?
| huimang wrote:
| Looking at the various issues reported in this thread, it
| honestly seems that burning the entire codebase and
| rewriting it would be the best choice. Bonus points for
| using a modern systems programming language.
| stefanka wrote:
| Safety in rufst is not only about memory safety. It's
| also about avoiding unpredictable behavior.
| _bent wrote:
| reading through the report, it's not unlikely to be a
| race condition
| mattl wrote:
| Is whichever part of Mozilla that runs Thunderbird going
| to rehire the rust team now?
| goku12 wrote:
| Except the bug was filed in 2008. Back then, Rust was
| Graydon Hoare's personal project that Mozilla wouldn't
| start funding until a year later. Rust was written in
| OCaml and the famed borrow checker wouldn't be in place
| until 2010. The first public release was v0.1 in 2012 and
| the first stable release 1.0 wouldn't happen till 2015.
| The language was very different back then with sigils,
| garbage collection and green threading as language
| features. So this bug was already bugging people when
| Rust was just an embryo that was still years away from
| birth.
|
| Now even if we neglect the timeline, Rust only guarantees
| memory safety. If TB is deleting mails on the server too,
| then the corruption is happening over IMAP connections as
| well. Does that sound like a memory safety bug to you?
| Perhaps it is. But how do we eliminate the possibility of
| a logical bug that Rust won't protect you against, when
| nobody has any clue even now? And all that aside, if
| you're going to rewrite it in Rust, you might as well
| start a new project in Rust instead of porting an old
| design that may potentially contain a language-agnostic
| logical Heisenbug.
|
| I'm not trying to be hostile here. I started using Rust
| in 2013 (I have 12 years of experience in a 10 year old
| language, and a bunch of repos that I can't compile
| anymore unless I compile the compiler from old commits
| somehow!). I wouldn't use C or C++ for any of these
| applications - I simply don't have enough competence to
| avoid the kind of bugs that Rust protects me from
| (despite being a hardware engineer with more knowledge
| about memory management than about type system theory).
| Despite all that, statements like this will only cause an
| unwanted backlash against Rust. Not that you're entirely
| wrong, but some people are so offended by such
| suggestions for reasons that are still under
| investigation, that they start a crusade against Rust
| [1].
|
| [1] https://fosstodon.org/@goku12/114077011555069124
| amendegree wrote:
| The op is being facetious
| tareqak wrote:
| _Sometimes_ , treating a facetious/sarcastic request
| seriously helps _disarm_ the facetiousness. Other times,
| it does not.
| jraph wrote:
| At this point, answering to a "rewrite it in Rust"
| comment which doesn't go into details is a cultural faux
| pas, you just smile or roll your eyes and move on :-)
| amendegree wrote:
| English is my first language but I don't understand this
| use of "disarm".
| jraph wrote:
| You counter the facetiousness in a way it stops spreading
| and possibly even spark a constructive discussion is how
| I understand it (ESL though). I certainly observed this
| phenomenon myself (although as the person being
| facetious, I often feel like "I was joking, I actually
| agree, that's indeed what I was actually implying, but
| good you made it clear and explicit I guess")
|
| I guess you'd disarm the person being facecious rather
| than the facetiousness, like you'd disarm someone about
| to cast you a magic spell.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I guess you'd disarm the person being facecious rather
| than the facetiousness
|
| No, you disarm the facetiousness, the same way you'd
| disarm a trap. Disarming the person wouldn't make sense.
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/disarm
|
| > 2. ( _transitive_ ) To deprive of the means or the
| disposition to harm; to render harmless or innocuous.
|
| > [quotations] _to disarm a man 's wrath_
| goku12 wrote:
| I really can't tell them apart. My fault. But people also
| get too passionate about it sometimes.
| brookst wrote:
| Well, would you rather have a brittle heuristic lose all
| of your mail?
|
| My point wasn't that this is a great solution, just that
| it is very easy and almost certainly better than doing
| nothing for almost two decades.
| guerillagorilla wrote:
| A better approach might be to feed all of this into an
| LLM to have it figure it out. If it finds a bug and has a
| fix, reproducing it might be easier and a test could
| potentially be written.
|
| I don't think LLMs are the answer to everything, but this
| would be a good test for newer generations of LLMs as
| they're developed.
|
| Worst case- it deletes all of your emails, but that
| would've happen anyway, right? =)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > But it is almost impossible to fix a bug you can't
| reproduce and have no clue why it might be happening.
|
| No, not at all. It's very easy.
|
| This bug involves taking an inappropriate action under
| corrupted conditions. You don't need to know how those
| conditions arose. All you have to do is check whether
| they currently obtain, and - if so - refrain from taking
| the inappropriate action.
|
| For this bug, that looks like this:
|
| 1. When we're executing a "move"...
|
| 2. Before deleting the original messages...
|
| 3. Check whether the copies are identical to the
| originals...
|
| 4. And if not, delete the copies instead of the
| originals.
|
| At this point, the bug _can 't occur_. The "root cause"
| bug, where your buggy logic says that you copied a bunch
| of messages even though you didn't, can still occur, but
| it can no longer delete any messages.
| nativeit wrote:
| So...do it. Sounds like it'd make a great case study that
| would get a person tons of attention and praise on HN, a
| real feather to put in one's cap.
|
| Literally nothing stopping anyone in this thread from
| opening a PR with this reportedly "very easy" fix that's
| eluded developers for nearly two decades, and is so
| terrible folks swear off Thunderbird forever because I
| guess for email very basic rules for backing up data
| don't apply (or something?) and/or Gmail and Outlook are
| implicitly trustworthy?
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Did a developer ever try? Reading the issue, found only
| one person asking for test cases and trying to close it.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| One of the many comments on the issue notes that although
| the bug has reoccurred in every version of Windows, it
| might not get much attention from developers because it
| is catalogued as something specific to Windows XP.
|
| Nobody in the intervening nine years followed up by
| updating the bug's metadata, though. It's still "Windows
| XP only".
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > and is so terrible folks swear off Thunderbird forever
| because I guess for email very basic rules for backing up
| data don't apply (or something?)
|
| Well, this bug literally causes Thunderbird to delete
| your original copies of data during the backup process,
| so I'm not sure why backing up your data is supposed to
| be the solution.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I try to never underestimate the incompetence/lack of
| concern people can have when it comes to addressing major
| product issues, but if this has been open for 17 years
| and is so widely known, somebody has surely looked into
| it and determined it's not so easy.
| redeeman wrote:
| and then they simultaneously determined "yeah, we might
| eat your data. Lets not warn anyone about that AT ALL,
| lets keep the feature activated and let them users lose
| their data". This behavior ought to be criminal.
| yifanl wrote:
| It's not criminal, but you're entitled to a full refund
| of Thunderbird in the event it happens.
| saurik wrote:
| Just because something is free certainly does not make it
| ethical, and it doesn't even mean it should be legal.
| yifanl wrote:
| No, but they're rather limited in ways to reimburse you
| or offer "justice". Putting the Thunderbird team in jail
| doesn't help you out.
|
| Hell, what if the offending commit was 2 decades ago by
| someone who's cut off all contact regarding code since?
| redeeman wrote:
| nobody should fault the person who have coded the bug,
| unless someone can prove it was done on purpose. What I
| am suggesting is that the project as a whole has the
| responsibility to not just sit on data losing bugs for 17
| years without warning users.
|
| the fact that they choose not to, makes me perfectly OK
| with them being held criminally liable.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| This line of reasoning will eventually cause it to be
| treated as criminal, or at least as a civil tort. Then we
| will _all_ be worse off.
| redeeman wrote:
| an option I will be making use of now.
|
| And I know its not criminal, im saying it SHOULD be
| criminal not to warn people about this. its more than a
| decade
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Make no mistake - I am not absolving them of leaving this
| issue unaddressed lol just saying if it was easy they'd
| likely have handled it. It's probably difficult or they
| just don't know, so they keep putting it off and decided
| that not enough users are affected for real consequences
| (which is wrong to do)
| redeeman wrote:
| i fully understand it might be very hard to fix, but to
| know about it for that long, and not warn people or
| disable the functionality is unforgivable
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Totally agree
| godelski wrote:
| > Lets not warn anyone about that AT ALL, lets keep the
| feature activated and let them users lose their data
|
| How did you conclude this?
|
| IDK why the assumption is that safety measures haven't
| been created. You wouldn't mark the bug as resolved if
| you put in safety features, right? You * _ONLY MARK AS
| RESOLVED*_ after reproducing the bug and * _VERIFYING*_
| that it won 't happen again. Right? Dear god I hope this
| is what you do, because otherwise you are prematurely
| closing bugs.
| redeeman wrote:
| are you being for real? did you see anything as such in
| the bug listing? but even IF they did put safeguards in
| place, the fact that this is SEVENTEEN YEARS, no warning,
| functionality still enabled without ANY WARNING losing
| people data. unforgivable.
|
| How can you possibly justify this behavior? I understand
| they dont owe the world any software, fine, but dont
| knowingly publish stuff that KILLS PEOPLES DATA without
| atleast a warning
| godelski wrote:
| > are you being for real?
|
| Yes > did you see anything as such in the
| bug listing?
|
| Yes > but even IF they did put safeguards
| in place, the fact that this is SEVENTEEN YEARS, no
| warning, functionality still enabled without ANY WARNING
| losing people data. unforgivable.
|
| The software has change a ton in 17 years. Right? We can
| agree on this? (I mean it underwent a major revision in
| 2018, getting a lot of the codebase rewritten (like
| Firefox Quantum).
|
| So let's consider a hypothetical situation. Suppose the
| problem was resolved in the almost 2 decades of rewriting
| BUT you still do not know what caused the bug in the
| first place and, consequently, can't reproduce it.
|
| Do you mark the bug as resolved?
|
| Now let's not sit in the hypothetical setting and act as
| developers. Some safeguards have been put in place (you
| can verify by looking at referenced issues). You've
| solved similar, but are unable to determine if these are
| the same problems or different problems (again, see
| referenced or use the search).
|
| Do you mark the bug as resolved?
|
| Your sibling commenter implied they would. Personally, I
| wouldn't. Marking as resolved is a promise to the user
| that it is fixed. But I can't make such a promise. I
| can't make any strong statement until I can reproduce. So
| yeah, it seems appropriate to me that it is marked as
| "unresolved" with steps "needs reproduction." That is an
| entirely appropriate status to me. You try as hard as you
| can and you implement as many safety features as you can,
| but you don't mark as resolved until you can verify.
| Unfortunately, this means issues go stale. Hell, there'll
| even be some noise like if a hacker or even just your dog
| deleted everything. We wouldn't want to assume the user
| is dumb and lull ourselves into a false sense of
| security, right? But you can only do so much.
|
| * _YOU CANNOT CLOSE A BUG REPORT IF YOU CANNOT VERIFY THE
| BUG*_. That 's the policy they are using. You may use a
| different policy, but that's the one they are using.
| autoexec wrote:
| I'd agree with you that the fact that the bug is still
| open after 17 years isn't the problem, but the issue is
| that people are still (as of 10 months ago) running into
| the issue of their mail being deleted. If they'd secretly
| implemented "safety measures" as you suggest that
| wouldn't be happening.
|
| Looking at the timeline, it's possible that they've
| addressed a few of the bugs that result in data loss
| several years ago, and it's possible that the latest guy
| who ran into the problem within the last year triggered
| it in new ways or under new conditions but it's clear
| that the problem of thunderbird deleting messages from
| the server when copies haven't successfully been saved
| during a move operation wasn't solved by any "safety
| measures" 9 months ago and it's doubtful that it's been
| solved now.
|
| My guess is that because thunderbird ultimately doesn't
| bother to make sure that messages are successfully and
| accurately copied before it removes them from the server
| it'll only be a matter of time before someone else
| stumbles on some other set of circumstances which results
| in data loss when messages are being moved.
| godelski wrote:
| Reading the bug report it is unclear to me if the newest
| one is the same bug. There are also other bugs referenced
| that look to be fixed. > If they'd
| secretly implemented "safety measures" as you suggest
| that wouldn't be happening.
|
| But we can * _VERIFY*_ that measures were taken. In fact,
| easily! We can look at the references at the very top of
| the bug report! - Title: move/copying
| multiple imap messages to local folder bypasses offline
| store and redownloads messages. Need to preflight the
| move/copy. Status: RESOLVED FIXED
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=505456
|
| There are others that need to be hunted for but this one
| was trivial to find and was implemented pretty quickly.
| There are also other similar bugs that weren't marked as
| dupes. Some of these have been marked as resolved and
| fixed. That leads me to believe that they just don't know
| what exactly this bug is because they can't reproduce. It
| may very well have been resolved and new issues might be
| completely new bugs. I mean... it has been 17 years...
| and TB has undergone significant rewriting. Don't you
| think that the software changed quite a bit in that time?
|
| Which all I'm trying to argue is that they didn't just
| sit on their asses and do nothing for 17 years
| bachmeier wrote:
| You know what else they could do? They could disable a
| feature that deletes large volumes of email the user
| doesn't intend to delete.
| Tepix wrote:
| Sometimes you want to delete a whole bunch of mails,
| don't you?
| bachmeier wrote:
| I've updated my comment for clarity. The bug (which I've
| never encountered in more than 20 years as a Thunderbird
| user) is that users move messages to a local email
| folder, but the messages are deleted from the server
| without actually downloading them. At a minimum they
| should disable that operation. The guy that originally
| reported it worked at Sun and lost hundreds of work
| messages as a result of this bug. AFAICT the user
| wouldn't be affected if they did a copy of the messages
| and then manually deleted them from the server folder
| after confirming the copy was successful.
| mattl wrote:
| I don't remember the last time I deleted an email. I've
| marked things as spam, archived things but not deleted in
| a long while.
| tssva wrote:
| I delete email everyday.
| godelski wrote:
| > it is almost impossible to fix a bug you can't
| reproduce
|
| It's _also_ impossible to mark a bug report as resolved
| if you can 't reproduce it.
|
| You could have fixed the bug (especially since a lot of
| TB was rewritten) but if you can't reproduce the bug you
| wouldn't know it was solved only that people stopped
| reporting it. This is actually a common occurrence with
| long standing bugs.
| a0123 wrote:
| How do you fix a bug you can't reproduce?
|
| It's a genuine question because I'm puzzled here.
|
| A very small number of users have this bug (and tbf, it's a
| really bad bug), and are unable to consistently reproduce
| it and it seems none of the developers have been able to
| (the seemingly random nature of the bug occurring is not
| helping). How is it supposed to be fixed?
| tobias3 wrote:
| You add more and more diagnostics (e.g. logging) in that
| area till you manage to track down the bug. Over several
| years this should be possible. At that point you can
| either fix the bug directly or do it properly by first
| reproducing the bug (in a test) and then fixing it.
| inanutshellus wrote:
| How do you _close_ a bug you cannot reproduce?
|
| Said another way - If they can't reproduce it, they can't
| close it.
|
| They may well have fixed it already, but without a way to
| reproduce it the only prudent behavior is to leave it
| open and wait for the next diagnostic file to be
| uploaded.
| naasking wrote:
| That's not the _only_ prudent behaviour, as the OP said,
| the prudent behaviour is to add more diagnostics and
| guards against the conditions that lead up to the bug.
| godelski wrote:
| Okay, let's assume more diagnostics and guards were
| added.
|
| Now re-answer the above questions with these assumptions.
| - How do you fix a bug you can't reproduce? - How
| do you *close* a bug report when you can't reproduce?
|
| Being generous here, we're assuming there's 17 years
| worth of diagnostics and safety guards added but through
| that time the bug still isn't reproducible. Let's try to
| answer the questions under these assumptions.
| naasking wrote:
| If you've added guards and diagnostics, then you close it
| until someone else files a follow-up, then it can be re-
| opened. There's no sense keeping it open unless there are
| ongoing reports of the issue.
| justin66 wrote:
| There are users in the comments here reporting the issue
| affects them.
|
| Would some noble purpose be served by closing the
| existing issue in the hope that they'll complain via more
| official channels?
| godelski wrote:
| Hopefully those people will report the issue in the bug
| report and try to help the devs reproduce the issue.
| Especially since it is linked.
| godelski wrote:
| > There's no sense keeping it open unless there are
| ongoing reports of the issue.
|
| I think you've misunderstood. There's other options.
|
| Let's consider this from a failure analysis standpoint.
| Here's our options - You have incorrectly
| marked issue as solved - You have incorrectly left
| the issue marked as unsolved
|
| * _Which error case would you rather have?*_
|
| The classic example of this design choice is with a safe.
| Let's imagine you are building a safe. If the safe fails,
| would you prefer that it fails into a state that is
| unlocked or into a state that is locked? The answer isn't
| so obvious, as it actually depends on how it fails,
| right?
|
| A very common example is when designing skyscrapers. The
| choice is that when a skyscraper fails, there is a strong
| preference that it falls in on itself (think 9/11). Why?
| Because if it falls to the side then it takes out other
| buildings and can create a chain reaction (a related
| famous example being housing in Industrial Revolution
| London and fire...)
|
| Your action is a valid option, but it is not the option
| that I would chose. I think what they did was perfectly
| fine. They left it open (to avoid tricking anyone to
| thinking it is solved when the status of solved is
| actually unknown) and marked with additional information
| about lack of verification/reproducibility. Essentially,
| it is marked as stale.
|
| So we're back to the earlier question: -
| How do you *close* a bug report when you can't reproduce?
|
| Or we can frame differently: "How do you close a bug
| report if you have no indication that the bug was
| resolved _nor_ exists? "
| justin66 wrote:
| For starters, put a lot more effort into reproducing it.
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| > How do you fix a bug you can't reproduce?
|
| You strangle it from the edges.
| ghosty141 wrote:
| Its not unlikely that similar problems exist with other mail
| programs but since they are closed source you dont see it
| saurik wrote:
| People would still complain about them on forums, often
| ones run by the company who makes the client! I'm often
| reading threads of issues on Apple's public support forums.
| Being open or closed source has nothing to do with hearing
| about problems.
| eisa01 wrote:
| Closed software doesn't have open bug trackers, so
| there's no systematic way to find out.
|
| An acquaintance of mine were twice hit with a bug that
| corrupted Word documents stored on iCloud if editing on
| her iPad. Searching online yielded others with the same
| problem from more than one year ago...
| godelski wrote:
| I was able to find complaints fairly easily. I had them
| listed but HN ate my comment. Search "Missing emails"
| instead of "delete all emails" as the latter tends to
| provide instructions about how to bulk delete.
| > Being open or closed source has nothing to do with
| hearing about problems.
|
| Also, pay attention to observation bias and userbase
| bias.
|
| If my dad faced this issue, he'd never post online. He'd
| call me or go to a computer repair shop. That's what your
| average user will do.
|
| Open Source users tend to be a bit more tech savvy.
| There's that famous article about Linux gamers reporting
| way more bugs than average users and how it can be
| accidentally misinterpreted as "why develop for linux?"
| These frequency biases are a big part of this. Pluus, OSS
| tends to do better bug tracking.
| godelski wrote:
| > you'd think there would be some additional safety checks
| they could add that would at least let it fail with an error
| message instead of actual data loss.
|
| My guess is that these would exist, and do.
|
| I think you've just made an assumption about a bug that was
| reported 17 years ago. Assuming nothing has been done since.
| It looks like they can't reproduce it, * _making it
| impossible to mark as fixed*_ even if it was. But I wouldn 't
| assume nothing was done.
|
| Also remember that Gmail, Outlook, and others are in play
| here. They also maintain trashed items for 30 days, making it
| easy to recover. As the provider, they shouldn't make it easy
| to mass delete things either, right? TB is just the
| interface, frankly, I'm not sure I know how to permanently
| delete emails with it. I'm not sure I can. But the
| interaction here should result in multiple lines of defense.
| Jaxan wrote:
| Oof that is bad.
|
| > How is it not top 1 priority to fix it?
|
| Maybe because it is very rare? I have been using thunderbird
| for 10 years now on various OSes and never had issues.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| It happens to me regularly. You can fix it by redownloading
| the message from the server using the "repair folder"
| feature, and I have backup, but it IS infuriating.
|
| I have no good alternative to thunderbird, it does so much of
| what I want. But this bug is awful.
| atoav wrote:
| I have been using TB on all operating systems with 8 or 9
| users since 2006 and I never even once encountered this
| issue.
|
| As a software developer fixing stuff like this is only
| possible if you can reproduce it or otherwise get logs,
| telemetry and similar things, otherwise it is pretty much
| just guesswork.
|
| Granted given the severity of the consequences I would've
| chosen a more defensive move-strategy (e.g. one that
| deletes mails only once they have been copied verifiably),
| but that would have significant performance impacts in the
| 99.99% of cases where it works, so finding the real problem
| is preferable.
|
| The truth is that if this happens to you regularly, that
| you are probably the _prime_ person to gather more data on
| this. Call it giving back to Open Source software.
| jraph wrote:
| > I have been using TB on all operating systems with 8 or
| 9 users since 2006 and I never even once encountered this
| issue.
|
| Same but I never move my emails to local folders.
| severino wrote:
| > You can fix it by redownloading the message from the
| server
|
| But OP said it also deletes the message in the server, so
| it may be a different bug, right?
| Aachen wrote:
| Note that this is why you use copy, check, then delete,
| instead of just "move" data, whenever it's important that
| the process works correctly
|
| Even if the software doesn't have known bugs, I do it if
| the data is important enough and especially if I were to
| not have a backup (for example, because the storage
| provider takes care of backups and redundancy. I
| personally like to have another copy that I manage
| myself, but how many people have their IMAP emails or
| Spotify playlist data backed up for example? I do, but
| not many people I think)
| Xss3 wrote:
| No. The bug happens with copying.
| krastanov wrote:
| I have the same infuriating issue. Still using thunderbird
| because of principles, etc, etc.
|
| But this does seem to be a different issue from the one OP
| mentioned. Seems to be actually this one:
| https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/thunderbird-
| searc... (with suggested solution)
| Yizahi wrote:
| It's like a car whose engine randomly shuts down with a very
| low reproduction rate. Except with cars when this happened GM
| has recalled 30 million cars and paid billions of fines.
|
| Emails to email client is an engine to the car. It is
| pointless without one and it is THE purpose of it. All the
| rest of functionality like fancy UI, filter, notifications,
| editor is meaningless if your emails were deleted without
| recovery. Even car without engine is more useful than email
| client with empty DB.
| II2II wrote:
| The big difference is a car with an engine that randomly
| shuts down is a life-and-limb safety issue. An email client
| that corrupts the database is extremely unlikely to cause a
| loss of life, even if the consequences are costly.
|
| That said, even if the bug is impossible to isolate, it
| sounds like the chain of events that leads to it is known.
| They probably should disable the feature until someone is
| motivated to fix or replace the code. I'm sure that would
| anger a lot of people, but someone angry about the loss of
| a feature is probably better than someone who is angry at
| the loss of data. Especially given that the feature seems
| to be something someone would use to archive their mail.
| Xss3 wrote:
| That may be but i immediately uninstalled Thunderbird from
| all my devices upon seeing that its low priority and
| unassigned.
|
| I wont be using any email client that can break and delete
| all my emails from local and the server. Why would i? It may
| be a lottery but it isnt one i want to play.
|
| The fact that they see this as low priority shows theyre
| morons.
|
| Who would say 'yes please' to an email client that might
| permanently destroy some of your most important data at
| random?
| Xss3 wrote:
| When i say they're morons, i mean it in terms of them not
| understanding the reputational and trust damage this can
| cause, via the thread, the low priority, lack of
| assignment, or word of mouth.
|
| Far too focused on the engineering POV than the optics and
| trust/reputation damage. My kind of moronic, but still
| moronic.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| I had email service expire on a domain and moved it to
| fastmail. Fastmail, obviously, did not have copies of the email
| I received before the move. But my phone did.
|
| When I updated the configuration in K-9, it contacted the
| fastmail server, found that the mail it had locally wasn't also
| present there, and immediately deleted all my local copies.
|
| That's not a "bug" in the sense of unintended behavior of the
| software, but it certainly seems like the software designer's
| goal is to hurt the user. I obviously didn't want that to
| happen. There is no scenario where I _would_ want that to
| happen.
|
| Email clients make some strange assumptions about what kind of
| actions make sense under what conditions.
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| You make a good point but this is not a "strange assumption"
| by any stretch. You see Thunderbird has a "move" action. It
| allows you to move emails from a folder to another. Now
| somehow, this is apparently NOT implemented as:
|
| 1. Copy from source to destination
|
| 2. Verify copy has completed without issue
|
| 3. Delete from source
|
| but... some other way? So when you try to move from a server
| folder to a local client folder by an innocent looking drag
| an drop, combine this with a poor network connection, a
| garbage tier legacy protocol like IMAP and decade old C++
| spaghetti code, and you get this textbook 17 year old
| severity 1 bug that will never get fixed.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Well, interestingly, Thunderbird insists that that is
| exactly the implementation they're already using.
|
| (see
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156#c69 )
|
| Of course, it isn't; they're relying on an unstable proxy
| for "copy has completed without issue" in preference to
| just checking whether that happened or not. Several rather
| angry users have pointed this out. It doesn't seem to have
| sunk in.
| berkes wrote:
| I'd wager that this is marked as "by design" because it
| technically follows some IMAP spec. What the app does, purely
| on a technical level, is correct.
|
| I've so often had debates and threads in issues where a
| developer entrenched in a domain has so much domain-knowledge
| (ie. tunnel vision) that "technically correct" or "by the
| spec" is the only correct way. I've been that developer in
| many cases too, in hindsight.
| humanfromearth9 wrote:
| This is exactly the kind of bug I'd throw at some AI
| bayindirh wrote:
| Which might hallucinate some more problems which doesn't
| exist in the first place?
| Daneel_ wrote:
| Or it might find it. You don't know until you try, but for
| a bug of this severity it's worth a shot!
| jl6 wrote:
| A useful use of AI might be to simulate thousands/millions of
| user sessions (via generating mouse and keyboard inputs),
| with instrumentation/logging switched on. Run them in various
| shapes of VMs until you hit the problem. Fuzz testing,
| basically.
| jamespo wrote:
| It's amazing that thread seemed to take 5 years before someone
| mentioned their IMAP server and basic configuration info.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Hopefully this prompted you to check your backups?
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| Can't even make a backup in the first place if they get
| deleted while you download them from gmail.
| RandomBacon wrote:
| It bypassed Gmail's trash folder?
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| Yup. "Move to trash" is a gmail thing, Thunderbird "move"
| uses IMAP directly.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I do hope that Thunderbird really fixes this issue really.
|
| It really is just bad rep and like the severity of this is
| pretty bad.
|
| Email is a really critical protocol so even if this is
| happening to only some people, it should still be fixed asap.
| kgwxd wrote:
| Yikes! I recently tried Thunderbird again because I was annoyed
| with gmail pushing AI subscription crap in the web UI. Guess
| I'll take that over this bug for now.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| I too think they should drop everything else and work on this
| bug. But an example of how these kinds of bugs are tricky:
|
| I have a similar bug at my job: Sometimes browsers delete our
| extension's database, or otherwise corrupt it. It's been an
| issue for years, but no one has been able to reproduce it. It's
| probably a 1 in 10 million bug.
|
| I think it's a hardware bug. My "fix" was to backup a small,
| but key, part of the database to a separate storage mechanism
| browsers let us access. When the issue arises we can now try to
| detect the missing data and restore part of the db.
|
| BUT! If this _is_ actually a hardware bug, there is a chance
| that this additional database write will cause this big to
| occur even more often, as we now have to write to storage twice
| as often!
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| 6 years between the initial bug report and someone from mozilla
| joining the thread, wow.
| sosborn wrote:
| I got bit by this a long time ago. Will never trust Thunderbird
| again.
| miles wrote:
| > On a several occasions (most recently today), Thunderbird has
| "lost" my mail messages that are in my inbox when I move them
| to a local folder. Effectively it corrupts the messages - they
| appear in the local folder as 1 KB messages with no subject or
| sender info. They are empty messages.
|
| Apple's Mail app has had a virtually identical bug since
| Catalina; Michael Tsai's article on the issue currently has 636
| comments:
|
| https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/11/mail-data-loss-in-macos-1...
|
| After witnessing the bug myself, migrated to Thunderbird with
| Maildir enabled[1] for long-term storage; have yet to
| experience the issue despite a large database (>300,000 emails)
| and daily IMAP import to local folders.
|
| [1]
| https://tinyapps.org/blog/202207100700_thunderbird_mbox_to_m...
| Insanity wrote:
| I was a thunderbird user many years ago. Seeing the article
| made me want to reinstall, and then this comment instantly
| changed my mind. Insane bug for an email client to have...
| krunck wrote:
| I've been using TB for personal and work since it's first day
| and never hit the bug. I've never known any co-workers to hit
| the bug. I'm sure plenty of other software that we use every
| day has similar severe bugs that occur just as infrequently.
|
| I'll keep using TB. I'll also make sure to look both ways when
| crossing streets and won't assume that cars are going to stop
| for red lights because my chance of getting hit crossing a
| street is more likely than getting hit by this bug.
| godelski wrote:
| I'm rather surprised by the comments responding to this. A bit
| by the comment itself.
|
| Why I'm surprised is... well... this is HN. We know that a bug
| like this is very rare, right? I mean otherwise who would ever
| use TB, right? But if it's rare, it's really hard to track
| down. There years of comments without people including system
| information. The reproduction steps themselves are "sometimes."
| It's HN, so we can assume users here program, right? How would
| you solve this use?
|
| FWIW, I've used TB on Linux and OSX for years and never faced
| an issue like this. The only one I've faced is sometimes not
| being able to connect to the server and having to resend an
| email.
|
| On the other hand, when using Apple Mail: -
| messages routinely doesn't show me messages I can see in TB.
| - Frequently sending messages from my phone doesn't go through
| or ends up double sending. - Searching will pull up
| emails from a year ago, prioritizing them over the email I got
| this week and was actually looking for (e.g. searching
| foo@bar.com). - I can't even tag emails!?!? - Do
| filters even work? Holy cow how do people live without
| filters!? How do you deal with spam? How do you deal with all
| those noisy needless messages and newsletter type of stuff that
| won't let you unsubscribe or comes from domains or addresses
| you can't block because emails you need come from the same
| addresses? - It straight up renders PDFs inline with no
| warning, helping spammers. - There's no folders and
| everything is just all jumbled together in a mess. How does
| anyone find anything?
|
| Idk, this is an annoying problem but I'd be surprised if I lost
| all my emails. I can recover deleted emails in Gmail and
| Outlook. Annoying, but recovering these (go to trash, click
| "restore") is far less time than what I'm saving on a weekly
| basis with TB.
|
| I know these problems aren't on all platforms but TB IME has
| saved me a ton of time compared to using Gmail, Outlook, or
| Apple Mail. Hell, fucking Neomutt is a better experience than
| those three, which is insane. Trying to use them is like trying
| to use the internet without an ad blocker. How are we so bad at
| email?
| ahofmann wrote:
| Oh, wow. When I have to use Thunderbird, I never move emails. I
| manually copy emails to a folder and delete the emails from the
| old folder after that. I forgot why I have to do this. Now I
| know again. A lot of people here are speculating that this bug
| must be very rare. I maintained like 30 Thunderbird
| installations for other people. This bug bit me at least twice.
| It can't be that rare.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| Could they just make it not suck? Like the search system falls
| apart if you have more than a few thousand messages in a folder,
| not all that many by today's standards. The address book doesn't
| let you sort the addresses by most recently added, which is
| important if you reply to craigslist posts which use numeric
| forwarding addresses. So once you have more than a handful of
| them the are impossible to tell apart. It automatically makes new
| archive folders by year (2023, 2024, 2025...) which is kind of
| nice, except it shows them oldest first instead of newest first,
| so you have to scroll way down to get to the current year. The
| progress bar on the bottom looks like there is constantly
| something going on, and maybe there is, but it never finishes.
| Messages sometimes fall through cracks so you can't find them in
| any folder but you can sometimes find them with global search.
| And on and on. Stop adding new features or messing up the UI
| further until basic functionality like this works.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > Like the search system falls apart if you have more than a
| few thousand messages in a folder, not all that many by today's
| standards.
|
| My Thunderbird installation tends a 20 year old work mailbox
| with tens of thousands of messages, and the search works the
| way I want even though I don't download the messages themselves
| to save some disk space.
|
| If you are using your installation for a very long time, your
| local caches might have broken at some point, because
| Thunderbird was _bad_ at that kind of thing, but now it 's not.
|
| For folder order, I can't tell anything about it, but 13 years
| of folders are just a wrist-flick distance on a 2K display, and
| shouldn't be much worse at an 1080p one, either. So, it might
| be fair criticism, but it's nitpicking.
|
| I never experienced "lost messages" for a very long time, and
| my progress bar is currently sitting empty, despite that
| installation is handling 5 busy mailboxes.
|
| You may need to delete some cache and local MBOX files and
| restart your Thunderbird, it seems.
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| The search is really limited by the storage backend Thunderbird
| is using. Would really love to see something with full text
| search support, like sqlite.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > Like the search system falls apart if you have more than a
| few thousand messages in a folder
|
| I'm in the inbox, I see an email with 'word' in the Subject in
| some of the most recent emails.
|
| I type 'word' in the search box and TB finds some emails from
| the years ago.
|
| It's even worse if it is 'word and some another word', in this
| case it doesn't even find anything.
|
| It's like the developers... aren't dogfooding their own
| product?
|
| Oh, yeah, we do now have TWO search boxes. Because that makes
| sense. And if you disable the topmost one, there is now 30px of
| wasted space you cannot reclaim. Because you definitely NEED
| that hamburger menu on the RIGHT side. On the desktop. On the
| 4k+ monitor. Riiight.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| The two search boxes is bizarre. It feels like two rival
| programmers each wrote a half-baked search feature and rather
| than management telling them "Unify your two approaches",
| instead they said "Just throw them both in there and let the
| user figure out which one they want."
| bachmeier wrote:
| My workaround for Thunderbird search is to open the Outlook web
| client, search for what I need, find it in a fraction of a
| second, do what I need to do, and close the web client.
| Terrible "solution" but the only one that works.
| isaachinman wrote:
| Check out what we're building: https://marcoapp.io
|
| Basically a cross-platform Thunderbird replacement whose sole
| goal is to "not suck". Full-text search is entirely client side
| (not via IMAP) and returns results in single-digit ms.
| kiririn wrote:
| >Full-text search is entirely client side (not via IMAP)
|
| Setting up server-side Xapian full-text search and disabling
| the crap client-side one in Thunderbird was one of the best
| improvements I made to my email usability. What makes your
| client-side search better? It's usually not speed I'm looking
| for, but rather precision, such as double quoted phrases
| (sorely missing from Thunderbird's client-side search),
| filtering by a mixture of things, etc.
|
| I wish more clients had an option for server-side-only search
| (looking at you, iOS Mail.app) and/or had a nice UI for it
| (ctrl+shift+f dialog in Thunderbird is janky but gets
| results)
| isaachinman wrote:
| We're using Orama for client-side search, which is best in
| class as far as we can tell, after quite an extensive
| period of research.
|
| It is able to use BM25, QPS, or PT15.
|
| We're still playing around with various weights/settings,
| but have seen fantastic results so far.
|
| What do you mean by "double quoted phrases"? Do you mean
| the ability to search for an _exact_ term?
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| It needs to be open source. If it's not open source, it's a
| trap.
| encom wrote:
| >not suck
|
| >web-tech
|
| Pick one.
|
| I couldn't find any info on whether this is FOSS or what
| license it uses.
| weberer wrote:
| >Experimental Exchange Support Natively set up a Microsoft
| Exchange account in Thunderbird by enabling a preference.
|
| Its cool that we don't need a third-party plugin for that
| anymore.
| zerkten wrote:
| It's incredible that this is only arriving in 2025.
| Davidbrcz wrote:
| God, the dark mode change reading is a blessing !
|
| See https://drgrizz.xyz/dark-mode.html why
| nosioptar wrote:
| > So please fellow developers, help spread the darkness to make
| the world more inclusive.
|
| He ought to practice what he preaches. Due to a combo of shitty
| eyes and dyslexia, I cannot read his site's dark theme without
| getting a headache.
| dangus wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're asking for that person to fix, it's
| just plain text and a plain dark background.
|
| You can also read the site in reader mode.
| giingyui wrote:
| If you have astigmatism dark mode is hell. Should be called
| nausea mode.
| Aachen wrote:
| First time I hear someone describe nausea from dark mode.
| Quickly looked astigmatism up on Wikipedia - isn't that
| something glasses fully correct? I think I've got this as
| well, but not sure, I've just always had glasses and take
| whatever they measure to be the best possible lens
|
| (Of course I critically evaluate the measurement, like
| one time I actually couldn't read faraway text with what
| they were proposing whereas I could with my old glasses.
| But I don't know the exact values or terms for the
| different defects, I think my eyes have at least three
| different issues including something about rotation as
| astigmatism apparently means)
|
| I guess what I'm asking is why you don't have glasses.
| Are they too expensive in your area, or the defect only
| very minor so it doesn't impede safety when driving even
| on highways? (Then I'm surprised you get nauseous though,
| since I don't when I read anything without glasses,
| regardless of dark or light mode.) Or if you do have
| glasses, is this still an issue while wearing them? If
| so, any idea why?
| giingyui wrote:
| I have glasses. They greatly ameliorate the issue, but
| not completely. My prescription is a single number which
| I don't believe has the necessary granularity (I think,
| intervals of 0.25) to express the exact prescription I
| need. I also suspect that astigmatism is a deformation of
| parts of the eye that cannot be expressed with a single
| number. It's possible I should have gone to an
| ophthalmologist instead of an optician in a mall but
| that's what I did.
|
| Also I generally don't wear the glasses unless I'm
| working (with a computer of course) or driving. I also
| have myopia, but both my astigmatism and my myopia are
| mild. The problem is much more severe when it's dark, so
| I always wear my glasses when it's dark and I very rarely
| wear them during the day. I must always wear them if I
| intend to use the computer for a long time, though.
| Especially if I'm staring at a terminal or whatever else
| with white letters on a black background. But I don't
| need them to read (black on white, not too far away) or
| to use my mobile (always closer to my face than my
| monitor).
|
| Judging the distance/speed of other cars during the night
| without glasses is simply impossible despite my mild
| prescription.
| Aachen wrote:
| This is very interesting, thanks for sharing details. A
| friend with strong corrections in their glasses always
| mentions they feel like they can't see much in the dark,
| not as much as other people anyway, but we've never been
| able to quantify it (that they don't see something that I
| do). That you always wear them in the dark sounds to me
| like it's indeed more important to correct this effect
| for dark backgrounds, which I had no idea about
|
| Another comment I saw in the meantime,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44520306, proposes a
| mechanism for why one might have what I'd call ghosting
| if it were a computer screen (apparently it's called
| halation for eyes). That that can lead to nausea or
| generally feeling like things swim together and you can't
| see as well makes sense, this might explain a lot
|
| I'll mention this to the friend and maybe we can do some
| tests in the dark with moving objects rather than just
| "can you see that thing there". Maybe after all these
| years we can get to the bottom of this issue they've had
| all these years :D
| giingyui wrote:
| It's not ghosting, it's halation as that bloke said.
| Bright things do not leave a trail, instead they are just
| blurry.
|
| If I see a white LED in the dark, the LED shows some sort
| of smear at a certain angle and with a certain length.
| The length of the smear decreases the closer I get to the
| LED. It doesn't change ever, even if days pass, because
| it's a static deformation inside my eye. It does not
| leave a trail if I look around or if I move the object
| with the LED.
|
| This also applies to white letters on a black screen.
| They are smeared at an angle. If I'm far away enough
| and/or the letters are small enough the smear is so large
| that they make it hard to read and make me nauseous.
| That's why I ended up buying the glasses.
|
| https://pixelbuddha.net/storage/51621/how-to-create-a-
| motion...
|
| This is an example. The trail is not as long but it's
| brighter. (Just googled "motion blur letters" - the
| effect is similar)
| Aachen wrote:
| Oh! I see, I guess the "then look at a bright surface"
| part of that other post made me think of that an image
| stays with you for a short time (a ghost image), but I
| get what you mean now
| nosioptar wrote:
| They could include a light theme.
|
| It seems pretty hypocritical that they're claiming a lack
| of dark mode is an accessibility problem while lacking a
| light mode.
| dangus wrote:
| Technically it's not really hypocritical because the
| author never claimed that a lack of light mode is an
| accessibility problem.
|
| I think it's also notable that websites being accessible
| isn't really about being tied to a specific theme, it's
| about being compatible with accessibility tooling and
| standards (screen readers as an example). There are
| plenty of CSS manipulation tools that can make a website
| look whatever way you want.
| nosioptar wrote:
| Then all that'd apply to sites not having a dark theme,
| undercutting the author's point because he could just use
| stylus to.make his own dark theme for sites.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| The person in question has a relatively rare medical condition,
| for most people dark mode reduces readability as a darker
| screen leads to more pupil dilation which causes halation.
| (which you can test out yourself if you stare at dark mode text
| and then look at a bright surface, you'll likely literally see
| a halo of the text).
|
| This is worse in people with astigmatism, which is about 35-50%
| of the population. Dark mode defaults, as on that website, need
| to die. Most of the time they're used because people use their
| digital devices like goblins in a cave and don't light their
| rooms properly, or configure their brightness settings
| correctly.
| justinrubek wrote:
| Surely this can't be that universal, right? I will have to do
| this test at some point. I have astigmatism but I find the
| default bright version of websites frequently painful to look
| at. I have no clue why but I need the dark versions.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| My strategy has been to use light mode all around but I
| have f.lux set to about 20% strength all day long. I also
| have my monitors dimmed a fair amount unless I want to
| display HDR. It also helps to have a bias light behind your
| screens if you can.
|
| My goal was to get rid of the 2pm eye twitch and I've
| mostly got it.
| Aachen wrote:
| If websites are generally too bright, you can save energy
| as part of increasing comfort by configuring your display
| to put out fewer nits (reduce its brightness setting).
| Usually people have the opposite problem, especially if
| there's direct sunlight on or near the screen, so that's
| probably what the factory default optimises for
| nticompass wrote:
| I've been using a fork of Thunderbird called Betterbird
| (https://www.betterbird.eu/) on Linux, mostly because I want to
| be able to minimize it to a systray icon. I know there are
| extensions like systray-x and birdtray, but I was having issues
| with these on Wayland. I wonder if this new version of
| Thunderbird finally added systray support on Linux/Wayland.
| kekebo wrote:
| I just switched away from it again after it got delisted from
| nixpkgs due to lack of development[0][1]
|
| [0]
| https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=25.05&from=0&size=...
|
| [1] Should be this one
| https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/351205
| gn4d wrote:
| >due to lack of development
|
| ???
|
| https://github.com/Betterbird/thunderbird-
| patches/commits/ma...
| dangus wrote:
| I won't switch to BetterBird because the person behind it seems
| off.
|
| Feels a bit like switching to TempleOS.
| gn4d wrote:
| >Feels a bit like switching to TempleOS.
|
| That's... not a bad thing, though? Terry was an extremely
| competent engineer and programmer who designed his software
| to be as user-friendly, well-documented, and performant as
| possible.
|
| I have conversed with Jorg, and he is blunt and fair in a
| good way (code itself is emotionless, after all). And, of
| course, he is highly competent. I have also conversed with
| several Mozilla teams, including Thunderbird, and the
| experiences were universally horrible, as in they lacked core
| competency. Naturally, YMMV.
| lucasoshiro wrote:
| > I wonder if this new version of Thunderbird finally added
| systray
|
| I'm waiting for this feature since when I used Thunderbird in
| Windows XP. At the time I used the MinimizeToTray addon...
| mvdwoord wrote:
| I have used Thunderbird in the past, but ultimately gave up.
|
| I am currently on google for my private email, and for other
| reasons tied into MS / Office365 anyway for my business so
| decided after having my business email at my internet provider
| initially, it all was just not worth the hassle.
|
| 95% of my business dealings is with companies that are on office
| 365, and especially the calendaring and RSVP'ing just kind of
| works in outlook.
|
| I am still keeping an eye out and hope to be able to move to some
| solution which unifies it all, preferably on a nice open
| standards, open source solution for email, calendaring, and
| contacts.. but the fact is that customers pay my bills, and I
| grew tired of all the account issues, syncing issues etc with
| trying to have it all in Thunderbird.
|
| I find it a sad state of affairs though, the amount of
| engineering time, energy, and money spent on building semi-walled
| gardens and at the same time building ladders to climb those same
| walls, all while never achieving an actually smooth experience
| between my various email accounts, my calendars, on my laptop and
| phone alike.
|
| Maybe some day.
| mrweasel wrote:
| From a business user perspective you need more features. From a
| home user I sort of want to have an even more stripped down
| email client.
|
| Thunderbird does at bit to much for my liking. The UI is a
| little messy.
| mr_tox wrote:
| impressive how, in 2025, thunderbird is still the best email
| client on osx
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| That's not been my experience, but everybody's needs are
| different I suppose.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| So we have "OS-native notifications" now. Does that mean we
| finally get a tray icon? Or do I still need to keep Thunderbird
| sitting in the taskbar for that?
|
| If not, I guess I'll be keeping birdtray installed for now.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Thunderbird is still the only calendar software I'm aware of with
| a "Multiweek" view instead of the awful "Month" view all others
| provide. The only calendar to have caught up to 20th century
| technology (Apple _almost_ gets it, but not quite).
| durakot wrote:
| It really hasn't though, doesn't even have multiple time zone
| support for events. They really need to fix that.
| tiahura wrote:
| Any sense on how JMAP support is coming along?
| pmontra wrote:
| > Manual Folder Sorting
|
| > Don't like the order for your custom folders? Just click and
| drag to arrange them exactly how you want.
|
| At last. Thank you.
|
| I've been using an add on for that for a long time. It stopped
| working about one year ago because of some change in TB. I
| managed to survive but I really look forward to the update to
| 140.
| throwaway7402 wrote:
| No thanks. We're still sticking with version 102, the last
| release before the ruinous "Supernova" redesign which nobody
| asked for, when it became apparent the project was being abused
| by "UX" kiddies looking to bloat their Github resumes. We're just
| thankful that some wiser developer had previously added the
| "allow-downgrade" option.
| jimbosis wrote:
| (In case you haven't heard of it and it proves helpful to you
| and/or someone else:)
|
| Have you heard of Epyrus?
|
| Homepage: http://www.epyrus.org/index.html
|
| (The download link is easily found there, as well as git
| repository and forum links.)
|
| It's based on UXP (the Unified XUL Platform) and is thus
| related to the Pale Moon browser (which doesn't bother me).
| I've been using it on Linux as a way to have an "older
| Thunderbird" look and feel, e.g., I have real scrollbars, and
| the "Send" button didn't mysteriously vanish from the Compose
| window with no way to get it back upon some "from the ground up
| redesign" upgrade.
|
| EDIT: Typographical error, phrasing.
| nosioptar wrote:
| If you want really old school Thunderbird, Seamonkey's still
| around.
|
| I only use the browser portion, so I can't say how good the
| email is.
| g105b wrote:
| Whenever Thunderbird makes its way to the front page of Hacker
| News, I always re-download it and hope that I can use it.
|
| Every time I've ever tried it (spanning around 30 installs over
| the last 15 years), I've uninstalled within a week to a month,
| due to sluggish UI, phantom unread emails, crashes, and text
| formatting issues.
|
| I do it because I believe that one day Thunderbird could be good.
| Today could be the day - I've installed it, added my accounts,
| and it looks like the developers have made some significant
| improvements. I'm not talking about fancy new features, instead
| I'm talking about the small nitpicky problems I've had whenever
| I've tried to use it.
|
| For example, this time I installed, I didn't have to go into a
| hidden settings menu (here be dragons) to make new emails default
| to the top of lists. My replies are now made above the original
| message. Fastmail doesn't throw a wobbly when trying to add
| email, calendar and contacts with the same password.
|
| Maybe today is the last time I install Thunderbird?
| Aachen wrote:
| I don't have any of those issues, besides perhaps crashes but
| the last one must be two years ago (I remember because we're
| always watching for exploits coming in). Maybe nobody else has
| these issues you mention either. If you want them to be fixed
| by the next time you install, have you considered reporting the
| issue and seeing if there is a volunteer is willing to fix it
| for you?
| beagle3 wrote:
| The only feature I am missing in Thunderbird is "group by sender,
| sort groups by latest receive date in group". I don't remember
| what client I used that had this (outlook, perhaps?) but for me
| it works so much better than other arrangements:
|
| You still see all the latest correspondence, but also immediately
| all previous correspondence from the same sender (if you expand
| the group) whether or not it's a reply thread.
| shmerl wrote:
| Thinking of trying it, when Mozilla finally fixes the lack of XDG
| base directory support. There was some recent progress on that
| old bug.
| blacklion wrote:
| <<Manual Folder Sorting>> -- first, they broke 3rd party plugin
| for that. Next, author (not member of official Thunderbird team
| or employee of Mozilla) of this plugin spent more than 1 year
| pushing this functionality into base.
|
| Now they highlight it as big deal in new release without mention
| volunteer author of this BASIC feature which should be in mail
| client FROM VERSION 0.0.1!
|
| It is pity, that Google Mail is <<good enough>> and it killed
| development of good desktop e-mail clients.
|
| Thunderbird is best what we have (Cross-platform), but still very
| bad, and after killing off XUL plugins cannot be easily modified.
|
| They exists for 21 year and now announce manual folder sorting!
| There is no support for Sieve (3rd party plugin? Dead after
| removing XUL)! There is no way to store folder settings as IMAP
| properties, and if I have two installations (on laptop and
| desktop, for example) I need repeat same setting or folders again
| and again -- including selection of identity per-folder (again,
| not native functionality but 3rd party plugin, thanks, it is
| alive now!). No true message templates (per-folder, per-action,
| per-identity), only lousy "signature", broken in-line quoting in
| plain text messages, etc, etc, etc.
|
| And it is best what I can use cross-platform :-(
|
| 21 years of progress and now we are here.
| alberth wrote:
| > It is pity, that Google Mail is <<good enough>> and it killed
| development of good desktop e-mail clients.
|
| You have to remember that when Gmail was launched it was
| considerably _better_ than most desktop mail clients at the
| time.
|
| It had auto-complete for who you wanted to email (prior you had
| to manually type their email address).
|
| It came with an eye watering amount of storage (1 GB).
|
| Worked from any computer (when POP was common and downloaded
| the emails locally to that desktop computer).
|
| And more.
|
| So it wasn't so much that Gmail is "good enough". It was more
| like desktop clients saw how much better Gmail was and didn't
| think they could compete - also given that Google provided the
| hosting as well which allowed for tighter integration -
| something a desktop app alone could ever do.
|
| Note: I'm _not_ saying I think Gmail is a great experience. For
| web, I personally really enjoy Fastmail and for desktop - I
| surprisingly have grown to like Outlook. What I am saying is
| that when Gmail was launched, it took a lot of wind out of the
| sails of desktop mail app creators.
| blacklion wrote:
| > You have to remember that when Gmail was launched it was
| considerably better than most desktop mail clients at the
| time.
|
| It was not better for me than old FIDONet GoldEd 2.8x! It
| didn't (and doesn't) support proper threads, it supports
| effectively only top-quoting, it didn't (and doesn't)
| understand mailing lists in any way, it didn't support
| forward-as-attachment in both ways (now it supports it,
| though). Its filtering is still much more cumbersome than
| even Thunderbird one, not to say Sieve, and can be done only
| from web, but not from Android client. It doesn't support any
| crypto natively, both PGP or S/MIME.
|
| Their are all features which I'm using daily (maybe, crypto
| is not daily, but still use sometimes).
|
| Only good thing is labels, which is more flexible than tree
| folder structure. And, yes, full text search, obviously, as
| it is Google product.
|
| As far as I remember, Thunderbird was not much worse than it
| is now, and it is supports most of this (though, quoting was
| and still is very weak, problem solved in FIDONet in 1990s!).
|
| To be honest, I don't remember what was situation with
| address book and address autocompletion from it in Thundrbird
| before GMail, maybe there was none (but I will surprised, as,
| again, it worked in old TUI-based FIDONet client for DOS and
| OS/2), but this feature is trivial to implement in desktop
| app, and it could use LDAP or another centralized directory,
| not only addresses collected from your mail.
|
| It was better than any web-mail, for sure, but better than
| desktop client? It is debatable.
|
| 1GB of storage is question of hosting, not client.
|
| Update: Add to it modern gmail hate to self-hosting mail
| domains, and I could say that Google kills email as
| federated, free, non-vendor-dependent system. It is not
| surprise to me, of course, but still.
| nothrabannosir wrote:
| How do you do Gmail style threading view in thunderbird ?
| They changed the game wrt email display and 20 years later
| I still don't know how to get thunderbird to do it.
|
| Gmail:
|
| - see all email bodies for a single conversation in one
| long list , like a DM in a messenger, with smart hiding of
| quoted text so you only see new content
|
| - in your inbox / archive view, mix both sent and incoming
| emails in such conversations, so I don't have to toggle
| between Sent and INBOX or Archive
|
| I would be happy with just one of these two but I genuinely
| can't hack it.
|
| I would personally go as far as to say: any email client
| which doesn't do this, is wrong.
| blacklion wrote:
| > How do you do Gmail style threading view in thunderbird
| ? They changed the game wrt email display and 20 years
| later I still don't know how to get thunderbird to do it.
|
| I hate it. It hides texts, and I lost answers in this
| view more often than I want to admit. If it is not ping-
| pong conversation (I wrote you, you answer, I answer at
| your last answer, etc), but discussion between 3+ people
| where different people answer to different messages,
| gmail view is total mess when you cannot understand who
| answer to what. As I said, it doesn't support threads,
| only messenger-like conversations.
|
| Any e-mail client which doesn't support tree view for
| threads is wrong.
|
| You can put answers to same folder that message your
| answer in (any?) sane e-mail client, Thunderbird is not
| exclusion.
|
| Update:
|
| > smart hiding of quoted text so you only see new content
|
| I've missed text hidden by mistake due to some formatting
| quirks more than once. It is solution in search of
| problem: proper quoting doesn't need any magic.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _You have to remember that when Gmail was launched it was
| considerably better than most desktop mail clients at the
| time._
|
| There was never a time when GMail was better than plain old
| Outlook, but this is coming from someone to whom IMAP has
| always seemed like a really terrible solution in search of a
| nonexistent problem. My email database is important to me,
| and worth managing locally, as this thread more than
| adequately demonstrates.
|
| Boss at the time: "You should quit using that old POP3 crap,
| and switch to IMAP. It's awesome." Boss a half-dozen times
| over the next few years: "Hey, can you forward me a copy of
| that email we got from XYZ a couple of years ago?"
| dieortin wrote:
| I don't see how IMAP would prevent you from having old
| emails
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| If you're going to keep them all locally anyway, what's
| the point of IMAP?
|
| (Admittedly my judgement was formed at a time when one
| user, one device was the rule. I suppose if mobile access
| to email is important, there's a good argument for
| keeping the data server-side. I solve that problem with
| VNC.)
| dieortin wrote:
| I'm not going to keep all of them locally, but that
| doesn't mean I lose access to any of them. I can
| instantly access all my emails from 20 years ago.
|
| As you mentioned I do access my email from several
| different devices, and each one having a different subset
| of my emails would be absolute hell.
|
| I'm curious, do you log onto your computer from your
| smartphone in order to access your email?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _I'm curious, do you log onto your computer from your
| smartphone in order to access your email?_
|
| Usually. If I'm going to be gone for more than a few
| days, though, I'll shut down the main PC and run Outlook
| from my laptop, which is set up to leave the messages on
| the POP3 server so they'll get copied into my master .PST
| file when I get back.
|
| 20 years means that either you maintain your own IMAP
| server and do a good job of it, or someone else does. In
| my previous company, there was always some reason why
| people couldn't put their hands on older emails.
| Meanwhile, my current .PST file goes back to 2007.
| nosianu wrote:
| > _It is pity, that Google Mail is <<good enough>> and it
| killed development of good desktop e-mail clients._
|
| Microsoft Outlook has a very large market share in the business
| world. There is an old and a new GUI design version, and you
| can run the app, or use it online.
|
| I don't like the presentation of the individual emails
| especially, I find the thread-view hard to understand,
| especially on mobile, but it works. Personally, I would have
| preferred the older folder presentation designs of 20+ years
| ago, for me this app is trying to be too clever - in both the
| old and the new GUI version. However, it is just so very
| widespread. I have to use it because everybody else in the
| company uses it.
|
| They support a huge amount of scenarios and edge cases that
| many businesses now depend on, combined with all the Microsoft
| server side and infrastructure stuff they have of which the
| emails are just a very small part now.
| blacklion wrote:
| Outlook is more groupware client, than e-mail. Also, to-
| quoting only (AFAIK, it is THE place where top-quoting was
| invented).
|
| Also, when I was forced to use it (to be honest, about 10
| years ago) it works terrible with IMAP (as opposite to
| Exchange) servers.
| encom wrote:
| >Google Mail is <<good enough>>
|
| I hadn't really used Gmail or Google products much, until I
| started at my last job, which was balls deep in the ecosystem.
| I _loathed_ Gmail. One of the worst email "clients" I've used.
| After toggling a load of stuff in its settings it was usable,
| but dealing with email was a low point of my work day.
|
| New job is Microsoft based, so Outlook, and I haven't used that
| in 20 years, so it will be interesting to see how enshittified
| it has become. I will have to run Windows on my work pc, which
| I'm not looking forward to.
| dieortin wrote:
| What was so bad about GMail? I've worked at some companies
| that use it and I liked it much more than Outlook.
| perdomon wrote:
| I have not used Thunderbird in 15 years, but I'm desperate for a
| decent email client. I've used Spark, Mailspring, Airmail...but I
| keep coming back to the MacOS Mail app. Any active users of
| Thunderbird who chose it over the default Mac mail client? Does
| it have a unified inbox for all your accounts? Dark mode looks
| neat, at least.
| kot-behemoth wrote:
| macOS Mail app is still the best native e-mail client in my
| experience.
|
| I have switched to Thunderbird full-time since I switched to
| Linux. Can confirm it supports unified inbox.
| perdomon wrote:
| That's good to know. The Mail app shortcut keys don't make a
| lick of sense, but I don't mind that as much as the inability
| to zoom in on images in a message. No pinch and zoom on an
| image is diabolical in the MacOS ecosystem. Do you miss
| anything about Mail now that you're Thunderbird full-time?
| Anything you prefer in Thunderbird over Mail?
| 3x35r22m4u wrote:
| It'll sound crazy: I've never used Macs, but the IMAP-based
| client was Outlook Express back in 2005-2010.
|
| 100% multi-thread download and synch of folder contents,
| instantaneous display of messages, super-responsive.
|
| I've tried a lot of clients on Windows and Linux and none of
| them get near the experience I had 20 years ago.
| ptx wrote:
| > _While we can't change the universe, you can now get the latest
| Thunderbird features as they land, instead of once a year. Switch
| to Thunderbird Release and enjoy monthly updates with the same
| dependable stability._
|
| Does this mean anything or is it some sort of marketing
| gobbledygook? We can _now_ get features faster by using the
| latest release rather than the ESR - but surely non-ESR releases
| have always been available, so this was always the case, not only
| _now_ suddenly?
|
| Also, the "dependable stability" we enjoy with the ESR release
| comes precisely from the software not constantly changing
| underneath us, i.e. from not getting new features every month.
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| A friendly public service announcement:
|
| From the Inbox screen on Thunderbird, hit Ctrl+Shift+F for a
| powerful search function
| casenmgreen wrote:
| I used TB for a decade or more, then in the end quit, because it
| was bloating too much. It was a browser doing email, not an email
| client.
|
| I then used Claws for a while, but came to really dislike it -
| lots of small UI issues.
|
| Then I wrote my own email client in Python, Postgres for store,
| Apache/HTML front-end. That's been fantastic. Python does all the
| heavy lifting, you need to design a decent database.
|
| Now I add features as I need them - few days I added the ability
| to specify how many times an email should be sent, when you need
| to spam the recipient for some reason (say, a company which is
| spamming you and is not responding in a reasonable or timely
| manner to GDPR requests).
|
| The basic client design I've not seen elsewhere - but I've not
| used many clients so it may very well exist. There's a single
| inbox of email, and you define sets, and a set defines what is
| shown. So you don't move emails around between folders, you
| define what's shown, and you can have multiple sets concurrently
| - so for example, "inbound", "last 24 hours".
|
| There are also a bunch of other small features which I've had in
| time for a long time but have never seen. For example, the
| from/to addresses have the localpart and domain separately, so
| you can order by domain. There's immediate in-page filtering,
| too, for each column, so you can just enter a few letters of what
| you know is the origin domain and bingo, there you go.
| redox99 wrote:
| I had to stop using Thunderbird because it's just too slow for
| me. And I have a pretty decent PC.
| Phelinofist wrote:
| I love Thunderbird, but the compose message window is just shit.
| It allows to sslect text type like body, paragraph and so forth -
| but it always resets to paragraph for me, which leads to weird
| spacing between lines.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-07-10 23:02 UTC)