There was a time when Thunderbird’s future was uncertain, and it was unclear what was going to happen to the project after it was decided Mozilla Corporation would no longer support it. But in recent years donations from Thunderbird users have allowed the project to grow and flourish organically within the Mozilla Foundation. Now, to ensure future operational success, following months of planning, we are forging a new path forward. Moving to MZLA Technologies Corporation will not only allow the Thunderbird project more flexibility and agility, but will also allow us to explore offering our users products and services that were not possible under the Mozilla Foundation. The move will allow the project to collect revenue through partnerships and non-charitable donations, which in turn can be used to cover the costs of new products and services.
Thunderbird’s focus isn’t going to change. We remain committed to creating amazing, open source technology focused on open standards, user privacy, and productive communication. The Thunderbird Council continues to steward the project, and the team guiding Thunderbird’s development remains the same.
I’m glad Thunderbird and its users found a way forward for the application, but I’ve never been a fan of these complex, overloaded e-mail/groupware applications like Thunderbird, Evolution, and Kmail. I use Geary because it focuses on one thing and does it well – e-mail – and it doesn’t try to also do all sorts of stuff I don’t want an e-mail client to do.
As a side note, KDE could really use a Geary-like simple e-mail client – because Kmail is not in a great state.
I’ll have to disagree with you there.
As I see it, the problem isn’t that things like Thunderbird, Evolution, or Outlook do too much… it’s that they’re not integrated enough.
E-Mail and RSS and Twitter and so on should be in the same program… because it’s counter-productive to silo incoming messages based on the underlying technology.
If I want messages from two RSS feeds and an e-mail filter that matches e-mails from various fanfiction sites to wind up in the same “new chapters to read” folder, I should be able to do that.
Likewise for calendaring and TODOs. The most useful form of a TODO is often an e-mail (complete with intact context) with a checkbox, deadline, and one-line synopsis tacked onto it.
We never really recovered the versatility that physical desks imparted. To be able to take incoming mail, annotate it, stick it in a heterogeneous bundle with arbitrary other objects, etc.
ssokolow,
I agree, I like calendar integration and more integration could further simplify my workflow. The first priority for me though would be to fix some of thunderbird’s longstanding bugs. But I suspect they’re actually going to focus on whatever their new corporate partners have in mind. I really do hope for the best and that they manage to stay afloat financially without mozilla.
I used to agree on integrated to-dos, but at one stage in frustration took my to-do process to handwriting on a white board. It has some structure to it. I take photograph when I leave the office. Best self management tool I ever made. Forces me to prioritize and aggregate. It is basically a form of visual control board. You want to to-do system that reduces not increases entropy. Nothing like big writing on a small board to do that. My wife and I have one each at home now. She has read-only on my board and that is enough to keep the domestic entropy low. I do deletes, no cross-outs or checks.
For me, that sort of thing just results in losing TODOs because, when the list gets too unwieldly, I sometimes lose a high-importance TODO when transferring to a fresh list.
Integrated TODOing’s problem is the workflow for prioritizing and aggregating and the UX for filtering, not something inherent.
You can’t loose a white board To-do unless you erase it deliberately. However, your white board has limited capacity so you are forced to either do something or decide its not important. I run a company for a living, which may be inherently less micro task oriented, but maybe not. When I had digital and notebook To-dos they used to proliferate like crazy and important stuff got missed. That does not happen now. I am forced to decide what is important or just do things regularly. My ratio of To-do doing vs To-do management is now much higher. Not for everyone I am sure.
I have solutions for stuff like that (eg. a little USB-attached LCD display that can fit five lines and can’t get covered up by desktop windows, a second browser window full of tabs sorted by how soon the associated deadline is coming up, etc.)
The problem is keeping track of the rest of the stuff and keeping context readily available for everything that *is* pinned like that.
It also doesn’t deal well with having a flood of things that need to be done within a week and will take at least three days, *plus* a batch of long-term things that need to be done over the next few months, for example.
The advantage of a well-designed program is that virtual writing space can flex to accomodate changing amounts of data when you really can’t just clear out a few things promptly.
I really disagree with the integration of everything. Do emails really well, and connect in some way (AFAIK this is done through MIME types) to a calendaring app…
For instance, I really love how the KDE Kontact suite is made. KMail does email, with a few options integrating into the completely separate, feature complete calendaring KOrganizer. KOrganizer can send invites using ANY email program you set as default.
Integration through interoperation, that I can go along with, not with “do everything under one roof”
My problem with that approach is that there are no standards which would allow the kind of UX I want to be split across multiple applications. The closest you get is KParts, and those are very much KDE-specific.
What I’m imagining is designed and factored rather differently from a traditional PIM suite.
I actually plan on writing an experimental PIM application once I’ve finished clearing out projects that need maintenance more urgently. In fact, my degree project was the beginnings of such a thing.
(I just put out an RC for the GTK 3 port of QuickTile in the
gtk3_portbranch (including a redesign of its site), I have a few other things that need TLC, and then I want to write an alternative take on tools like Scrivener before I get to the PIM tool, since it’ll be a bigger job.)Standards exist! Maybe what you want is your own standard. But that’s the problem with standards, right? Everybody wants their own.
iCalendar and vCard comes to mind for the tasks described in this thread.
Those are data interchange formats, not standards for allowing two different applications to be different views into a common data store.
It becomes awkward at best to achieve the kinds of UIs and workflows I’m planning when you have to coordinate two completely independent applications and the best you can do for keeping them in sync is to fire up a server exposing the data in IMAP, CalDAV, and CardDAV when those protocols impose certain inherent assumptions that already get a little creaky just from GMail’s more tag-oriented approach to message organization and its “archive everything in one big All Mail folder by default and let search sort it out” approach to message history.
That said, if for no other reason than to allow integration of multiple devices, I do plan to investigate those as well as things like JMAP once I’ve got a minimum viable product I can use locally for my own needs.
As a long time user of thunderbird… *Cringe*
I hope my gut reaction is unjustified though. It’s just that this announcement doesn’t do anything to quell my fears that “corporate partnerships” is a code word for introducing ads & unwanted bundling or even replacing features with sponsored ones.
They already have/had a partnership with Gandi to get people to sign up for email accounts with them.
Who knows though. It can’t be worse then when it was the stepchild to Firefox though. Maybe a partnership with ProtoMail or Keybase where it automatically sets up keys and signs email.
I’m hoping this will really open the door to pushing the envelope. They could stand to switch to not being based on the old Firefox code base, and maybe offer a Roundcube/AtMail competitor called Thunderbird Web which they could be hosted, for a fee, or it could be self-hosted.
I don’t see this being better or worse then their attempt to join the Document Foundation and LibreOffice.
KMail used to be great in the KDE 3.x days. Then they serious messed it up with KDE 4. That’s when I stopped using it.
Even after all these years e-mail clients are in a very sorry state on Linux. Evolution has always been junk and KMail has seemed confused for direction. People demand Outlook equivalents, but those on Linux are still lacking.
> People demand Outlook equivalents
Who?
Outlook is trash and should die. But it looks ‘pretty’ for some.
I will take the nice and clean Evolution, thank you very much.
Outlook’s interface is all over the place. Also, it freezes on me whenever I try to compose an email…. and that is with 32gb of RAM…
said1,
Those of us who use linux for one. But even on windows I preferred thunderbird.
Although I’ve stuck with thunderbird through the years, I encounter bugs with it. These are added to the backlog only to never be addressed. This led me to try some alternatives last year, but none were really as full featured and well rounded as I wanted. For the moment I am sticking with thunderbird, but I’m keeping an open mind.
https://alternativeto.net/software/microsoft-office-outlook/?platform=linux
It’s really amazing how poorly an email client can be implemented. Thunderbird has it’s problems, but it’s works better then others. Apple Mail is my favorite alternative, but it’s not on Linux
People who like Outlook. They are out there.
People who need Exchange support, which Outlook is the best option.
People who like fat apps.
Business users. Many businesses use their AD and Exchange calendars as the primary source of truth for scheduling things, and emails with Outlook invites are common. Is this sub optimal? Probably. Are these businesses going to switch off of Windows if they can’t keep their email/calendar/meetings workflow? Not a chance in hell.
Not worked in a company before? Bless.
People have no doubt been asking the same question for well over a decade as to why people don’t really want to use Linux e-mail clients.
> Not worked in a company before?
Sure, but no one ever forced me to use Outlook (nor Windows).
This is true, and it’s amazing it hasn’t gotten better. That’s a testament to something.
My favorite Evolution problem was when it would just quit checking for email, and it would just hang there when I tried to quit. The best option was to restart my desktop.
Flatland_Spider,
You know, I think building an email/collaboration client would be something I could enjoy tackling. We could put together a team with different skills and really make something that shines without legacy issues. Something that works across platforms so there’s no need to use different software solutions everywhere (this is so annoying!). Alas, every time I get pumped up about ideas like this reality hits me…there’s no good business model and I’d be financially constrained from the start. With inadequate resources it would get stuck on the back burner and would end up as broken as anything else.
And as for the reason so many business models don’t work these days, I’m going to quote kurkosdr from a different topic:
He’s not wrong, but the consequences of this can be devastating for independent projects.
I run into this too. Everything I get excited about has already been done before, and it would be a kind of quixotic to make a run at the incumbents.
Of course, the incumbents get fat and old, and you can grab marketshare when they decide they don’t want to serve a market anymore.
Anyway, your idea has merit. I could see it as a central aggregation point for cloud services. An alternative to the services Apple and Google provide for their mobile platforms, and extend that to desktop as well.
He’s not wrong at all. MS ripped the bottom out of the browser market by giving IE away, and Google is never going to charge for Chrome because it provides valuable info to their ad empire. MS and Google have other revenue streams which can subsidize their browsers.
He does miss the point that devs don’t really care about FOSS anymore. It’s just a means to an end these days. The dev gets noticed, or advances their career, to land a job at BigSVTech Corp these days, and if anyone is interested in the product it gets close sourced.
I’ve noticed the FOSS stuff, the real commuity driven stuff, isn’t actually better then the proprietary stuff, and all the good ideas get copied by proprietary software. I think part of this is that people gravitate towards brand name things, but unless something is backed by a corp no one cares. Maybe I’m just getting old, or the pendelum is swinging back to proprietary software, or I’ve spent too much time with people/corps who have no vision and would rather buy solutions then obtain the technical knowledge.
Anyone know if kmail or thunderbird work with massively threaded and replied emails? I stopped using both because they would start mangling email chains after a certain length. Other than that either was pretty darn good, better than any web mail I’ve used. But the basic task of displaying a really long email was too much for either. Thunderbird’s codebase at that time wasn’t great. Kmail I got lost in trying to figure out where it was. I think the root issue was in akonadi, which made debugging too time consuming.
I tried asking for help from the devs, but my reproduction case was pretty vauge ” have 30 + emails in a chain with an average length of 30 kb each and it happens sometimes. No I can’t forward you the email chain that creates it. Oh it works find for you? Well….
“As a side note, KDE could really use a Geary-like simple e-mail client – because Kmail is not in a great state.”
https://github.com/KDE/trojita
Thunderbird isn’t that complicated. It’s pretty simple in the grand scheme of things.
Multiple account handling could be better, like how Apple Mail does it, but overall, it’s not a bad email client.
My biggest problem is it’s inability to easily handle Exchange servers out of the box. It can be done, but via IMAP and other hoops.
This is how I have mine setup to work with my Office365 account via IMAP. It works well for me and allows me to not have to have a browser tab open for just one of my several email accounts. Frankly, I’m just happy that we’ve come to a place where we can easily use Microsoft email with these types of clients.
It’s nice that we’re not totally cut off like it was. 🙂
However, using Thunderbird and Exchange in a business setting it tough. It’s when you get into all of the other things that Exchange does that Thunderbird doesn’t really work that well, and you have to do some obscure stuff, calendars in particular. I’ve gotten it to work, but the experience and functionality could be better.
Evolution handles Exchange much better, but then you have to use Evolution. Picking between two devils is tough place to be. 🙂
Geary is nice and as a Gnome user it fits well with the desktop, but it lacks feaures that are important enough that I used Thunderbird with a few extensions. Primarily, my extensions pull in m contacts and sync them with my personal Gmail and my work Office365 email (total garbage). That’s important, especially at work when I may have to look up someone’s email that I don’t correspond with often and it’s a big help over Geary’s work flow. That said, I know Geary isn’t really shooting for the same userbase as Thunderbird is.
I have always been a webmail guy. I understand it might not be the most privacy-concerned choice, but I just click on Gmail & get things done. No heavy software, no complication.
Bless them for actually dedicating resources to an email client. These days, email is *not* cool. I’m totally shocked by the way that proprietary networks, especially WhatsApp, are utterly dominating over email and traditional ephimeral instant messaging protocols.
I’m one of the rare breed that refuses to use WhatsApp, but it’s extremely difficult now, because almost nobody checks or responds to their email. I usually have to resort to asking my closest friends, who use email exclusively to communicate with me, to please send a WhatsApp message to somebody requesting them to check their email. Even large organizations I work with or work for can’t function without WhatsApp. Despite officially using email, usually via Exchange, many official business emails simply go unread and/or ignored, and without being prodded via WhatsApp nothing gets done.
So despite all of Thunderbird’s flaws, I am quite happy and flattered by the fact that Mozilla has created a company specifically for me, the last surviving email user on Earth. 😛
You’re so right about WhatsApp!!!! In my country (Dominican Republic), most folks don’t even know how to deal with an email. It is absolutely IMPOSSIBLE not to be on WhatsApp. I also use Telegram, but this seems to be an underground thing here, and when I tried Signal, there was just no one there… So WhatsApp rules like a king. I understand it is a mistake, as emails are way superior, but it’s the way it goes here.
rahim123,
Whatsapp is very rare here, in fact I was absolutely shocked when I had to deal with an indian contractor who wouldn’t even use voice calls, only whatsapp. I *tried* to accommodate them, but whatsapp doesn’t even let you create an account without an android or IOS phone. My business uses a landline, and I don’t intend to give them my personal cell number. The business number is the correct legitimate number to use, I’m not going to put myself through a discriminatory process just to create a whatsapp account. So I made it their problem, rather than mine; the onus was on them to communicate with me.
I admit I took advantage of a power dynamic in this case, which theoretically could have been the other way around, but truthfully I have yet to encounter any local business/client that doesn’t do voice calls and email…these remain the status quo by far, with many conferencing services sprinkled in. Obviously whatsapp hurts business uptake by not accepting business phone lines.
@Alfman, yep, I would handle that situation the same way, especially when I’m the client. Phones still exist for a reason. But you confirm what I’ve also discovered, that the WhatsApp dominance is specific to certain regions. I strongly suspect that this is related to the issue of net neutrality, since the same regions that depend on WhatsApp are also usually the ones that have the most expensive mobile data rates, but they usually offer cheap/free/unlimited WhatsApp data.