Mozilla has announced it’s ceasing development on Thunderbird; one more version will be released, and it’ll be security updates from then on. “Most Thunderbird users seem happy with the basic email feature set. In parallel, we have seen the rising popularity of Web-based forms of communications representing email alternatives to a desktop solution. Given this, focusing on stability for Thunderbird and driving innovation through other offerings seems a natural choice.” Makes sense – I mean, there’s only so much you can do with something that needs to send and receive mail, and I can’t imagine Thunderbird having a lot of users. Strange, almost Microsoftian obtuse announcement, by the way.
I don’t like web e-mail clients. They are laggy, and inconvenient. Hopefully this “freeze” doesn’t mean they won’t fix major bugs anymore. Like this annoying bug for example:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=609346
It’s a pity though they won’t work on adding more features, like Carddav support and so on:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=546932
Other local email clients are a point of reference and ~competition for Thunderbird, not webmails… (that you can’t help mentioning and disparaging for some reason… and which are, BTW, a decent method of choice for most people, why they really picked up email in the first place)
If you want to spam or send 1000 000 emails/hr maybe they are laggy or inconvenient. But so are mail clients such as Thunderbird. For massive e-mail sending your best bet is to write your own e-mail client which is a trivial task.
For normal e-mail usage patterns I find web based e-mail to be very convenient. In fact, in last 14 years (when I got access to Net first time) I used exclusively web clients for sending and receiving emails. That way I can store my mails online, access my e-mails from anywhere, search tens of thousands of e-mails very easy and fast.
The only concern I see for web based e-mails is privacy. But since I don’t use mail for selling heroin, cocain and weapons is not a big concern to me. And even if I were selling weapons online, I would probably encrypt my e-mails and use IP address obfuscation.
Most web clients are tied to one mail server. And if you manage several of them – it’s completely unusable in comparison to normal desktop client. Also, in Thunderbird you can install PGP addons, while in common web clients it’s hardly possible.
Edited 2012-07-08 20:40 UTC
My mother is one of the Thunderbird users. I did a wise decision by already moving her stuff to Google Mail but she was obsessed with using desktop email client. I wonder how I am going to explain why she doesn’t need it…
I’ve already tried several times… I guess some people just need a desktop client for the sake of having a desktop client to sort the functionality some how. It makes it easier for them to understand “that www” is behind this icon and your “electronic mail” is behind that icon. 🙂
…
And as noted above me, there are some benefits of having a desktop email client like having a single UI for several different email providers. I can agree that it makes it easier for people to manage their mail too. Anyone who has used current Hotmail webmail service knows how bad the Hotmail’s UI is compared to any other webmail provider out there. Not to mention Yahoo. 😀
Edited 2012-07-06 23:08 UTC
So I wonder… what happens when you make that icon to be a link to Gmail?
Ragnarok will ensue, blue pigs with orange spots will fly high and low, pink elephants will stay sober and politicians will be trustworthy.
So that’s really a no-go area.
Sounds more fun than what we have now… probably even more sane.
Same here, my family got used to Eudora, then Thunderbird. There doesn’t seem to be any way to move them to Gmail as they are like “But i can’t read my e-mail if internet goes out!”
And they are right.
What will they do if Google decides to terminate their account?
Or if they e-mail account gets hacked?
People place too much thrust of private data in hands of strangers.
Your mail account can get hacked too and a lot of people leave their mail on the account too.
So what you’re trying to say is that you don’t really know how e-mail works… 😉
Why would you have to do that? It’s not like Thunderbird will blip out of existence. I’m going to guess that the features it has now is pretty much all your mom will need for quite some time when it comes to reading and sending email.
An email client also has a more fixed feature set than a browser. The problems with Thunderbird is less about features and more about implementing different backends for these features. Unlike browsers which need to be cumbersome reimplementations of wholesale operating systems – preferably with flash and silverlight in use everywhere :p
I’ve seen this argument in almost any discussion about desktop vs web mail.
But it doesn’t hold any water. I have ALL my emails (three gmail accounts, two Namecheap domains, two GoDaddy domains and my university mail) all hooked up to my gmail account. I can select in a simple drop down which account I want to send as.
So why do people keep mentioning this? Is it because they are not aware of this functionality in web based email (at least Gmail, not sure if other such as Yahoo! or Hotmail can do this, maybe someone could fill me in on that) or is it because desktop clients do it some other, more magical, way?
Gmail, while nice, is not the end all solution to the problem. Many folks don’t use Gmail and as far as I know no other free email provider offers that functionality. Further more, most businesses aren’t going to be keen on company related email being pushed through peoples personal Gmail (or any other free mail provider) accounts. In addition, many people still use their ISP provided email accounts. Not everyone has a Yahoo/Hotmail/Gmail/etc account. That’s just the way of the world.
I personally hate web based email for anything other than checking my email on a foreign device. I also don’t really like thunderbird for anything other than its awesome IMAP support so I guess in the end I don’t care as long as there is a decent desktop client around to use.
My point was that the “connect several accounts” works equally well on at least Gmail as it does in desktop clients (ISP provided ones included). I just checked and both Hotmail and Yahoo provide the same functionality.
I’m just focusing on this particular argument. Letting a third party read your emails or having access to your account on a foreign device is another thing, and there I couldn’t agree with you more.
Most business I have been use Exchange as email server, so they use Outlook as the email client.
The only exception I have found personally are ISP, because given the amount of account they must serve, usually prefer open source alternatives, and have their own web GUI for them.
At my work they also use Exchange Server and our IT team has switched off pop3 and imap support in an attempt to try to force people to use Outlook exclusively.
Luckily there is a very nice application called DavMail which allows you to use Thunderbird (with Lightning) together with Exchange anyway.
Best regards,
John Bijnens
Edited 2012-07-08 10:14 UTC
You nailed it :p
I will reply to you as your mother (no pun intended):
Will I be able to access an attached file if the router is for whatever reason “dead”?
I mean, if someone phone me asking for information I have in a PDF in a e-mail, will I be able to give that information tough my Internet connection is down?
So it seems who commented before me is implying that being able to read your email and/or view your attachments when offline is of no interest to anyone.
I disagree.
I like having all my mail in one, easily accessible “place” that is not dependent on the availability of my Internet connection, thanks. It seems crazy to me to be forced to use ugly web interfaces to manage my messages. Moreover, I like to keep my accounts separate – ie no redirection to my main gmail address, please.
Am I the only one?
nope
i us thunderbird since ~3 years and don’t plan to switch to some stupid webmail-crap
sorry, but with 4 mail-accounts and over 50 aliases thats no option for me
and don’t get me started on privacy-issues
Edited 2012-07-06 23:35 UTC
Unless every email you send and receive is encrypted, the privacy of your email is a moot point.
Edited 2012-07-07 02:07 UTC
Are you comparing security of an email sent from a desktop, to security of emails stored in a webmail controlled from a private entity ???
You are joking right?
Niether one is really secure. Arguing about which one is worse is semantics. Obviously the web based one is mined for ad related material, but unless you control the mail server, you don’t know what’s going on. I’d actually trust gmail more than my local isp.
Do you think your ISP (or other email provider) does not have the ability to read all your emails stored on their servers?
If you don’t run your own mail server you are trusting a third party with your emails.
Are you encrypting every email you send? If not, every server your message passes through can read it, so what’s the difference between that and email stored on GMail?
Google does not control all SMTPs. Well, yet anyway.
You’re almost certainly not the only one, but you’re also most likely in the minority WRT to email priorities…
It seems you in turn are implying that being able to read/search your inbox and/or view your attachments when outside is of no interest to anyone.
Meanwhile, people do like that option, access on any computer (whether or not that’s always wise is another issue; but they do like it), and/or on more than one of their personal devices.
They like having all their mail in one, easily accessible “place” that is not dependent on them constantly carrying their laptop around. It probably seemed crazy to them to be forced to use ugly local clients to manage their messages… (judging from how email usage apparently exploded with availability of decent webmails, how that’s the mode of choice for most users)
You seem to have the impression that using a desktop client somehow forbids having the email on your webserver and easy accessible trhough other computers. It doesn’t. if you use IMAP, the desktop client and server just behave like a mirror of each other. I have most of my email on my webserver, sent email, trash, INbox, other sub folders. And have exactly the same folders with the same email on my destkop client… (a lot of selected email i store at my mac only, for safety. But until i use my laptop to check it, then it’s still there on the web )
I just prefer to use the client because i can do more, get easy warning of new email, offline acces and other accounts which i can’t or i’m not supposed to forward or store on other server/company.
i agree with you but most people are morons… (sorry to say that). Webmail is good if you use it for facebook and cat pics sends. If you use it for any resemblance of a profession, webmail is definitely not the way to go. Not that it can’t be done, just that it shouldn’t.
Consulting your email on random computers is a security risk waiting to happen. If some one gets to your cat pics , no problem. If they get to your bank reset password email or other financial security info, then big problem. But as you said, the wisdom of such option is not relevant to this discussion. (it should, but then we would be back at “most people are morons..)
Sure (and I do prefer having it like that, with local IMAP copy of my email account at least on my main PC – a copy which for me includes also IM BTW), I was just pointing out how the priorities taken here by some posters for granted …aren’t actually very universal.
People at large are generally happy just with webmail (and not because they are “morons”… it’s just perfectly sufficient and convenient to the way they use it; but I did point out myself security risks of one usage variant), don’t seem to care to bother with local clients.
The same could be said about people who think that using a thick desktop client makes you more professional.
Using a desktop client does not make it any less of a security risk though. In fact, it makes it more of a security risk in some ways since all your emails are stored unencrypted on your disk.
Hum, so it is simple to steal a desktop computer, than your webmail password and acess all your mails??
You live in a very dangerous country….
Of course not, don’t be silly. I said that when using random computers using a desktop client is not more secure.
As for webmail passwords, considering that any serious provider is going to use SSL I dont see how you’d go about stealing that very easily. It’s certainly not easier (or harder) than stealing your IMAP or POP3 password.
It doesn’t make *you* more professional, but it is better for the exercise of your profession. I can give you several advantages of having a desktop client as a professional:
+ It allows you having every budget, project file and workplan while offline (on trips, off site, while the company internet is down)
+ it allows you to keep doing your work while offline (you need to send a mail/work to your colleagues you can keep writing it and adding stuff, whith no change to the workflow whatsoever and the desktop client will send it when there’s connectivity, no problem whatsoever.
+ it allows you a local addressbook & local calendar, that other applications can use.
+ it allows easy “new mail” notifications without me frequently checking my browser or losing some time sensitive information
+ it allows simple adding of mail info to other programs such as calendar. most desktop clients recognize specific info and allow you to act on it with other program (outlook on that kind of stuff is pretty amazing)
+ it allows for easy writing or consultation of different emails (you can do that with browser tabs obviously, but i find more practical to have a tiny window of text that an full sized browser window with all the extra “cruft” a browser has)
+ it allows for easy and time stamped backup of your email as part of the normal and scheduled desktop backup. No dependency of other company security policy
+ it allows you a “handmade” easy backup by just copying the mail folders/archives to a dvd or cd.
+ this is highly personal but i find myself much less “distracted” if i don’t have the browser running. For many no “normal” internet is a productivity enhancer
+ You can easily store each emails as single files (on most programs you just drag the message to the desktop and .eml file is created there. Great for creating a comprehensive “single issue” folders.
maybe there are more, i don’t know or remember all, but apart of having your email accessible from every browser, which you can still do if you’re using a desktop client, can you give me any advantage of using a web based email interface for use in a “professional environment” ?
I don’t know about you but my home folder is encrypted as are my passwords storage. Most medium to large size companies also buy full disk encryption software to use in all their portable computers. And i would probably guess that the probability of having one of several random computer that i could use infected with a keylogger is probably much bigger than the probability of someone having physical access to my desktop/laptop that probably sits most of the time at corporate locations.
Why are you storing this in your email?
Sure but here you equate “work” with “writing emails”. I’d like to think that work is a little more varied.
Many email clients can sync contacts and calendars with online services thus making those available offline and to other apps.
Google mail has desktop notifications, providing the browser is running. If that’s not the case you can often use a dedicated email checker to check for new emails.
Some webmail clients (for example Zimbra) can do the same without needing to open each message in a new tab.
Zimbra, for example, can export mail folders as archives.
Or you can put them in a dedicated mail folder. I really see no advantage with saving them as files for this purpose.
No but I never said it was better. It can, however, be just as good as a desktop client.
Right and a desktop client does not defeat keyloggers so you’re equally screwed as with webmail.
because you usually get this kind of stuff by email, and either you download it all “by hand” using the webbased interface, or you let a program do it for you… Also,because if by hand, it would be certain that i would forget to donwload something that would be indispensable at the most inconvenient time.
well, some times work involve writing emails or replying to stuff you get asked for. Most work these computer based days involve email communication one way or the other. Waiting for the internet connection to come back or doing your work in some other program and then pasting stuff is sloppy and accident prone.
you do realize that what you suggested are by definition parts of a “desktop client” right?
i’ve tried to use zimbra a long time ago but never sticked to it. But how can it show 3 or 4 or 5 emails at a time and you having a couple of drafts flying around without tabs?
what i meant was a full desktop folder with other software files (excel, cad, what ever) and the emails relating the discussion you had with whom was involved.
this is the part where we fundamentally disagree. I agree with you that you can do it with a webbased interface, i said that since the beginning, i just disagree that it’s as good or as “professional”* as local, full-fledged desktop client.
[/q]
i never said that, what i said was that checking your mail on your laptop through a desktop client only is a hell of a lot safer than using several computers by webinterface, which is the general advantage web-based interface provide you. Giving my “paranoid” side, i think that that advantage is really not an advantage. Many people think otherwise. For a personal mail, yeah, sure, maybe they are right. For money-making activity that feeds you and your family? hell no, i’ll take laptop carrying everytime.
* And by “professional” i don’t mean “official looking” or “tie wearing”, i mean that as a professional you shouldn’t leave stuff dependent on others or behave in a way that doesn’t minimize the accident or error probability of your work.
* And confidential. i was going to put on the advantages the local client encryption/PGP capabilities but unfortunately is so unused that it really doesn’t count. (you can use it by remotely by uploading the keys to the webserver, but i assume you’re not going to disagree with me when i say that completely moots the point of using it right!? )
i just went to the gmail web interface (i mostly don’t use gmail any more) and, using chrome, i couldn’t even find a way of right clicking on a email and opening in a new tab!? wtf? i remember that i used to be able to do that, but not any more?!
All my emails are stored encrypted on disk and backed up. Way more secure than webmail.
Good for you but that is a) not the default behavior of most (any?) desktop client and b) that’s not the point. The point is that when using random computers a desktop client is not more secure than webmail and can in fact be less so.
Well, hacking into web based e-mail accounts is easy if you’re good at data mining / getting dox online or you crack another site where the person does have an account (many people use same password for multiple accounts on multiple servers
)
But hacking into people computers can be easy, too. I’m talking about average Joe’s computer or average’s company mail server. If you use high security environments/proper secured servers that’s another story.
I think that to protect very sensitive data, having highly secured servers are a must but might not be enough because 0days can always exist in the wild or someone can find an exploit & not publish it. I I’d have to protect some highly sensitive data I would use encryption, too. If I would be paranoic and think Google or The Man (NSA, KGB, Mossad, Men in Black) can crack regular algorithms such as DES, Rjindael, RC5, AES (might be true) I would waste 1 year or 2 or hire someone and write my own encryption algorithm.
Definitely not the only one, though I’m actually partial to Claws-mail on *nix boxen.
I set up two of our workstations at the part time job with Thunderbird so we can get around Google’s annoying limitations regarding mailing lists. We have a ton of customers signed up to receive weekly specials, and Thunderbird makes it easy to send out mass mailings with embedded HTML. With the Gmail web interface the HTML is stripped out and the account is suspended if you send more than a few BCCs at once.
Another one here, I can’t stand web browser email interfaces. Love the power and flexability of a real email client.
Haven’t used Thunderbird for a few years, I use Claws Mail but most of the members of my family use T-Bird. Shame to see it go not to mention a mistake IMO.
It depends on your personal situation. For some profession, business, hobby or occupation having the ability to read offline e-mail might be of importance. However I am many hrs / day online.
Even if I’m not I can get online very fast (mobile phone, laptop, 3G data, etc) and if I go visit some remote place like Kalahari Desert or countryside India or China or Jordan or Peru or Brazilian Rainforrest I am during my vacation and I couldn’t care less about such things as e-mails. (in fact I have different ‘work’ or ‘business’ and ‘personal’ mobile numbers and during my vacation my ‘work’ phone is shut down
:D:D)
Even if I were visiting the Brazilian Rainforrest and I were in a big need to read my e-mails, I would probably use a satellite connection. (satellite connections suck and are expensive but for emails are ok and if I were in a big need of reading/sending e-mails anywhere the cost might not be such a big issue)
So having offline e-mails might be a must for some people but I guess this is a rare case.
And nobody is killing offline e-mails, Mozilla is just saying that they don’t want to use too many resources for a client just a few people use. There are many e-mail solutions beside Thunderbird and people who need can use those.
I started using thunderbird less than a month ago, simply in order to move all of my mail from google’s servers onto my own computer.
This timing is so deliciously awkward.
Thunderbird won’t cease to exist and will shall still be maintained. If not will very certainly be forked. So there is no need to worry.
Oh, I understand that entirely.
It will be interesting to see how long their maintenance and security fixes will last for, and whether there will be any updates on the feature-set again in the future.
As each day passes, Stallman seems more and more justified in his worries regarding things like cloud computing.
There are other proper mail clients outthere
One might even argue some were and are more proper
(but then, that’s ultimately a matter of personal tastes)
Certainly. Evolution is not one of them, but GNUmail.app or Balsa or mutt come to mind. KMail too. Most of Thunderbirds shortcomings can be circumvented through extensions.
Well, I was a long time Claws-Mail user, but recently switched to Thunderbird because of better IMAP support and a calender addon that looked interesting.
It does some things better and some things worse. I’ve also been using console clients, but it can be annoying, especially when you receive lots of pictures from people that are not into computers.
So what alternative is there?
I actually hope that there will be a really good web application some day. Something I can install on my web server, but maybe over some nice interface and HTML5 (as in the related technologies not just the ML) magic acts more like a local app and handles certificates and stuff well. Sadly most web interfaces are still using very old approaches and/or don’t really support most of IMAP. This actually makes me sad. Be it a web app or not there are few that for example support everything that would be supported. A reason might be that they don’t use a common library, but usually develop their own stuff. I am not too much into that and I know IMAP isn’t really loved by developers, but I guess emailing could be much better if there was some consolidation.
Maybe someone here knows why many things just seem unfinished, while a lot of people, lots of them developers are annoyed by this fact.
(Sorry, if there is much nonsense in here and please correct me. I am really not much into these things.)
mutt user, and loving it
sad news though..
Mozilla did that with Mozilla Application Suite before.
Fork away, fellow people, fork away…
The major issue here is that people want to access their mail anytime on any computer, and that`s where the client loses and webmail wins. Unless you carry your notebook wherever you go, what`s the point of an email client?
The point is having your data on your computer.
If you want ubiquitous access, it is simple to set thunderbird up to delete messages on the server after a set period following retreival.
This way, one can respond to emails on the go, but keep the archive on their computer.
As said by many in this thread, you can very well have both worlds, access your emails from everywhere and, at same time, have copies of them on your notebook and/or desktop and/or server. That is what I like to do. If you use your emails professionally, BACKUPS are a MUST.
Also, there are very useful extensions for Thunderbird that are hard to be matched by other emails clients, even Outlook falls short behind on some use cases.
Sad day. Will keep using it. Hopefully the community will help maintain it.
Have you ever tried to use a webmail interface on a mobile device? They’re terrible. Slow, laggy, buggy and lacking in features. PGP? Fail. Push notifications? Forget it.
I suppose you’ve never heard of IMAP, have you? That’s how most reasonable people do it – server side mailbox, client-side app, IMAP+SMTP to tie it together. Simple, secure, universal and *I* get to decide what app to use to access my e-mail, not my e-mail service provider.
You´ve ever heard of imap?
an mail client doesn´t always mean that the mail is not on the server anymore.
Point taken. So it doesn’t make any sense Mozilla ceasing development of Thunderbird, right?
It makes perfect sense, if you realize that they’re a small organization with limited resources – they can’t fund everything. And while they’ve produced decent email clients over the years (Communicator, Thunderbird), it’s not something that the Mozilla organization as a whole is particularly interested in – it’s always been very peripheral.
I arrived here via Thunderbird. I use Thunderbird as my RSS reader and email client. Sad to hear this news. First The Suite and now Thunderbird.
Well, at least we still have KMail… lol.
eheh, only if you are talking about kmail1.
Kmail2 is a piece of garbage
Kmail simply sucks big time! I wish the KDE team would spend a development cycle giving the Kontact suite some TLC!
I use it, it is indeed great.
(I don’t know whether or not you were being sarcastic but I am not.)
I better stick to GNUmail.app for mails and Grr.app for RSS.
But really odd with all the cloud-stuff. Distributing the common sense out of people.
Well, I am using it for many years now, as do a lot of people I know, for pop and imap as well.
Back in the days I started to use it at home since I could make the Linux-Win dualboot machine use the same tbird folders in a shared partition.
Then, I saw how easy it is to migrate to other machines and new installs. That enabled me to have easily accessible multi- (and I mean multi-) year e-mail folders always at hand. I do not trust online/cloud e-mail providers to have a permanent archive of my mails.
Also, thanks to portableapps, I always have on me a full copy of my full e-mail archive with a portable Thunderbird on a mobile hdd.
All in all, Thunderbird has been – for me at least – the best possible e-mail client (and more) for many years now, and I’ll be sad to see it go.
I’ve been using Thunderbird a lot over the past year or so. It’s been great and some of my friends and family have also been happy moving to it (and ditching Outlook).
Personally I maintain six (soon to be seven) e-mail accounts for various things and web-based mail is just not a reasonable option for that sort of situation. Thunderbird makes it easy to set up accounts, manage folders and keep backups of messages.
I think it’s probably good that Mozilla is ramping back developers (not ceasing development) as it will hopefully lead to Thunderbird being kept as is without any major changes as we’ve seen with Firefox.
Actually, although a bit sad for this “much dear friend”, this is a good news!
I’ve been realizing that the most proclaimed and loved “quality” of opensource is simultaneously it’s worst enemy and the single major reason why, unfortunately, opensource software is usually not an option. I mean this referring solely at “end-user software”, not open-source libraries or small UNIX-style programs/packages.
The driving feature of opensource is it’s community passion and desire to program something new and exciting. Something that “scratches their itch”. So, as result opensource “new programs and projects” spring everywhere and for all things.
But a mature robust software, is not that very exciting. Simple bug correcting and security updates (the kind that Mozilla says that are the only ones they will be doing for thunderbird) is probably a PITA and dull as hell. I know i would probably hate it.
So, to keep developer momentum and joy, as soon as the program is mainly stable and stuff is just chugging along the way, some need comes along so that we just have to rewrite the entire stuff, or add a revolutionary new interface or just go in another completely f***ing direction.
I’ve first experienced this when i changed to linux back in 2007/2008. Switched a lot, try a dozen distros and finally decided i was really comfortable with KDE. Highly polished, highly usable Graphic environment. I assume there was some fundamental need for something different/security/touch/sound/fireworks in the sky or diamonds on strawberry hills and “they” had to change do KDE4. which was f****ing unusable back those days, and a complete departure from everything i liked about KDE3.
Switched to gnome after a lot of teeth grinding and adjusting, and when i was getting comfortable using and thought that a good “enterprise class” (stable, robust, simple and clean) product could probably be built on it, “they” had to build something different for security/usability/diamonds or the fireworks or whatever, and then came Gnome3 and/or Unity. And guess what, they’re still pretty much a mess…
I’ve been realizing that of all the opensource software that i use, eventually they all either die in “abandonment” when they are in the “good-enough”/robust phase and all that’s left is some boring maintenance and some loooooong development cycles; or they all got sent back to square one for a complete, utterly unusable, refit/redraw of the whole thing. There’s some exceptions off course but on the whole that ‘s been my general experience.
So unfortunately, i’ve been unconsciously changing (i’ve realized later) to paid software (or backed by some big corporation/foundation) because it allows me my “found something that does what i want, how i want, then i don’t ever change it and just keep using it as i want” behaviour. Which is also the behaviour of most people out there.
I don’t see how this can be fixed in a voluntary driven environment, so i’m kind of pleased that mozilla decided to took this step. The truth is that Thunderbird is already good enough for most, so instead of killing it by abandonment or just dropping the whole thing and starting over, they are just slowly keeping it updated and working for us folks that just want use it and never thinking about it.
I would love that it had some new features though (as a more Mac OS integration or a slightly simpler and slightly cleaner interface) but on the whole the entire thing is pretty mush everything you could expect from a multiplatform, free mail client and it’s hard to find a reason to complain strongly about it.
So thanks Mozilla! And may Thundebird keep working along, silently and efficiently for a long, long time!
PS: i started this as a comment but after reading it again, i think that it would make a good post, so i’m posting it on my website.
Edited 2012-07-07 01:33 UTC
That’s a real problem.
I’m unconvinced the ‘proprietary world’ does this better than the ‘opensource world’. Vendors of proprietary software drop support, go out of business or force you into an ‘upgrade path’ just as well…
If anything, this should be a reason to choose open-source software over proprietary: as long as there’s users, maintenance will be possible.
So, uh, they behave pretty much the same?
Well no, with Organization backed software (i’ll just use this general category to define something that is backed by comercial ventures or very big foundations* as Mozilla or Linux Found.) they keep updating it with security fixes and OS compliance, so if change OS (in my case from one Mac OS X to another) i know that my program will work either at OS launch or a couple of weeks after.
You do pay for this kind of things/support but i’ve come to understand the “value” of not having to disrupt your workflow by struggling to find a replacement that doesn’t fit exactly with what you used to do.
With the small voluntary team of developers typical of opensource this is not the case (in “general”, not a full 100% blanket statement here). You can use a great piece of software for a couple of years but then happens the abandonment issue and you need to change OS/program or worse the “let’s rewrite everything from the ground” and although it is “theoretically there” it’s just not the same program any more and you either wait a lot for the wrinkles to be ironed out or just look for a substitute.
This is not an “attack” on open-source, more of a “critique”. i love the concept, like the “movement” and i love some great pieces of software that came out of it, but the truth is that this, to me, seems a really flaw in the practical implementation of the concept.
And this is why i realized that, unlike my times at “Linux”, i’m using mostly paid-software with very few exceptions. You can get almost as much open-source software for the mac as for windows (you can’t get as much as for linux of course) but i like having the long term “just works” reliability.
I don’t have an answer to this question, although i feel that using that small differential of “convenience” of app stores (download,updates, management in several computers) you could charge a couple of dollars/euros for it, and maintain the long-term viability of the software. and you could still allow the availability of the source in the project website. If you want to download, compile it, play around with it, go for it. If you want to contribute to it, come along. If you just want a piece of software that does it’s thing, pay a euro and half every three years or so, and be merry.
* i realize that most “big projects” as KDE or Gnome, have foundations of itself, but i’m not sure if they have the scale or funding that Mozilla haves (linux i’m sure they don’t.)
Every single opensource software that has good funding has some corporation or corporations behind it. And corporations will fund only projects that they intend to use and are useful to them. So KDE or Gnome is way less funded than linux kernel, some RDBMS, some file systems etc.
This OSNews summary and many commenters here seem to be overreacting a bit to the Mozilla announcement. Read this: http://mikeconley.ca/blog/2012/07/06/no-thats-not-it-for-thunderbir…
Edited 2012-07-07 04:40 UTC
Yeah, a lot of people are reacting as if the project were being completely shut down, end of story.
Whereas what’s actually happened is that Mozilla have decided to maintain it, but to stop investing their own resources in adding new functionality. The project will continue, and people are still free to add new features – all that’s changed is that Mozilla are providing less support.
We happily use Tbird … not everyone wants webmail solutions. But as long as Mozilla continue to offer it for download and offer security updates, I’m cool with this move.
I have often used TB to simultanuously access multiple Gmail accounts using IMAP. It is easy to move / copy individual messages or even whole folders.
Also, you can make an offline backup of a Gmail folder using TB. Or move it to your own mail server storage, of whatever…
For those that love encrypted mail: Gmail still has no PGP support.
Many unique features in the add-ons are not to be found somewhere else.
In short, I use TB on a daily basis, I love it, and I welcome the “stability, not more features” approach.
How could it? Would you trust google to keep your private keys safe?
(Disclaimer: heavy Enigmail user)
True, that *is* the biggest problem with webmail – it’s impossible to support encryption or signing without some kind of desktop integration, since that’s where the actual keys are.
I don’t care much for encryption – that just makes it hard to search for contents – but the ability to sign and verify messages is certainly nice to have…
I use Mozilla Thunderbird a long time.
From the first incarnations in the Netscape Suite ’till now.
I have an email archive of about 6 GB.
I love all the features of it aspecially the search function <ctrl><k>.
I don’t like webmail. I have had very bad experiences with webmail providers where they suddenly out of the blue ceased to offer the account.
I don’t like Outlook. Not from an ideological point of view but because it just doesn’t work for me.
I hope Mozilla will reconsider this.
Not all users are as previous posters have mentioned morons. There are still professional users who like Thunderbird and the way it works a lot.
I know my opinion is worth nothing to Mozilla, but I always wondered why Thunderbird wasn’t just an elaborate extension for Firefox. It seemed as if they spent so much engineering just trying to chase the Firefox code base.
Wild guess: Thunderbird blows on Metro and has snowball’s chance in hell ever getting on WinRT.
Well at least they won’t screw up the UI by mindlessly copying whatever google does to dumb down email.
Using an e-mail client gives away less usage information to Google/Hotmail/whatever than using their web client.
Maybe the problem is that it is a product trying to find a problem to be a solution to? Mac OS X has Mail, *NIX/*BSD has Evolution or KMail (and friends) and Windows has Windows Live Mail/Metro Mail which leaves one to ask where does Thunderbird fit into the equation? Maybe the question that needs to reflected upon is given the limited resources Mozilla has (just like any other organisation) does it make sense dedicating those limited resources on a product that pretty much served its purpose but now no longer ‘essential’ for many users?
Wow, this is strange. I would never say they can kill one of the two flagship products they have.
Who uses TB? Well, me, many corporate users, individuals who are willing to store their mail locally [for both availability and security reasons] and people who don’t like to go through that “type in your password yet again” mumbo-jumbo.
But well, I guess it was comming anyway. I was actually about to change my e-mail client anyway, because TB was not doing great job with IMAP servers.
And BTW: I think IMAP is the key for those who wish to use app for their remote mail management [not storage]
Well, most of the people I know who use a desktop email client at home uses Thunderbird. I doubt that it represents the world in large, but at least it makes me believe that it’s not dying.
I’ve personally settled on Apple Mail because it’s simple and macisch. But I’ve tried Postbox for a month and liked it but it didn’t feel as elegant as Mail.app. Going to try out the latest version soon though to see if it’s better UI-wise.
I really haven’t found any webmail to be more convenient. But I do have roundcube installed on my webserver in case I need to access my email on the go.
I decided to google the email client usage and was very surprised. I was not surprised to see Outlook at the top, but other than that it sure does not represent what I see around me here in Sweden.
I guess such things does very a lot in different countries.
As said before they aren’t killing TBird off.
I have used TBird for so long it’s not funny. I tried Kmail a few times but we just don’t get along.
I don’t care that they have stopped “innovating” on TBird. I just hope that the add-on community don’t drop it and run for something else and I also hope that Mozilla actually fix the silly bugs in TBird. If it actually did what it’s advertised to do properly (no bugs) it will be great for all.