from Hacker News

Thunderbird 102

by moojacob on 6/28/22, 11:09 PM with 452 comments

• by roomey on 6/29/22, 12:31 AM

  There is of course a flood of negative comments...

  So in the interest of balance I have to say thunderbird is a excellent program. I use it as my daily driver in work and for personal use.

  It has so many features that puts me, the user, in control that I totally take them for granted until I have to use outlook for something.

  I use it in a multinational, I used it with exchange and now with office 365. People can complain away but there are many like me who rely on it every single day and it has a real, positive impact on our work lives every single day.

  Some days are just email client and Web browser, and without thunderbird and Firefox working for me as the user...... I dunno, work would be a lot more frustrating I guess. MASSIVE thanks to all the contributors to thunderbird!

• by sudobash1 on 6/28/22, 11:15 PM

  > One of the core philosophies behind the development of Thunderbird 102 was doing more with less.

  > ...you’ll find out-of-box support for the popular, decentralized chat protocol Matrix in Thunderbird 102

  Personally, I see these two statements as being directly contradictory. I'm glad to see Thunderbird's maintenance continuing well, but I want it to be a focused app. On the other hand, I have been glad to have out of the box Lightning integration, so perhaps I will come to enjoy the Matrix addition as well.

• by drewzero1 on 6/29/22, 2:38 AM

  A few months ago I was tasked with switching our office from Gmail's web interface to Thunderbird and it's gone surprisingly well. Usually new software meets a lot of resistance and complaints from the staff, but I've heard mostly praise.

  I've been playing around with a testing version (beta? nightly? can't remember) and am very excited about the chat integration. I'm not sure if it will be useful in the office, which is small enough for people to just talk to one another, but it could come in handy in some circumstances where we'd normally use an email chain.

• by seraphine on 6/29/22, 4:02 AM

  Thunderbird is finally paying attention to the UI side of things. Hopefully they finally implement the standard multiline email list view which has been on the back burner for 19 years XD

  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213945

• by teekert on 6/29/22, 8:38 AM

  I love the new look, and Matrix, as far as I'm concerned is the only true alternative to Email with its fully open protocol, open source server and multitude of clients! Absolutely great move, and it looks great too!

  Now I can just tell family to use Thunderbird and they already have their first Matrix client, which they can install on mobile in a jiffy. It would be nice if it could make another dent in Whatsapp's monopoly (in my country). I just hope account creation is easy... Will check it out!

  Thanx TB team!

• by Zhyl on 6/28/22, 11:25 PM

  Matrix integration is big. Maybe not for Thunderbird, but this is probably the most venerable application to support it.

  Probably not surprising as Mozilla moved from IRC to matrix.

• by Diti on 6/29/22, 12:59 AM

  Kudos to Thunderbird for being the only reliable Windows email client to get S/MIME certificates right. A feature that no current webmail implemented.

• by linker3000 on 6/29/22, 7:36 AM

  Trying to use Thunderbird in the corporate world was frustrating - but just for two reasons:

  1) Accepted recurring calendar events that started in the past would pop up reminders that could not be dismissed (they would just pop up again immediately).

  2) Thunderbird had problems embedding meeting links in the calendar event (especially, if the meeting was rescheduled), so you'd have to go find the original meeting invite email.

  For those two reasons, I ended up installing Outlook to handle corporate stuff while TB took care of everything else.

  I see from the release notes that these two issues have been worked on so I'll have to see what happens when I re-add my corporate account again; it will be great if the calendar is fixed.

• by mmaunder on 6/29/22, 12:37 AM

  It’s projects like these that continue to make it feasible to run an entirely open source productivity stack. And that is very important, or a proprietary internet will become the only Internet.

• by miles on 6/29/22, 1:36 AM

  Glad to see Maildir support hasn't fallen off the map:

  https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap#maildir

  > Maildir is a message storage format that should improve data safety, allow for incremental (delta) backups of messages and allow for antivirus to interact better with messages. Maildir will be vastly improved for 102, but may not be pref'd on by default.

  > https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=845952

• by black_puppydog on 6/29/22, 9:34 AM

  I took this as a reminder to finally set up Thunderbird for my work email.

  After figuring out that gmail login will only work with cookies being enabled in the setting I am super happy to finally have a sane folder & filtering interface. I'll probably stick with google's UI for the agendas for now, but overall this is being really smooth.

  Ironically, the search in thunderbird, while not perfect, is so much better than on gmail, where I often have trouble finding emails from half an hour ago, searching for the exact subject line.

  EDIT: and spam filtering! It's amazing how many really important emails gmail flagged as spam for me. Like, mails coming from colleagues on the same custom domain, as replies to emails I sent them. I really don't get why people use google's products, honestly. At this point it's just pure monopoly I guess, and increasingly network effects since the big providers don't play well with smaller ones.

• by Klonoar on 6/29/22, 2:24 AM

  Any reason that the Matrix blurb is the only one without a graphic attached? I'm curious to see how it looks.

  Edit: ah, there's an image here at least https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/thunderbird

• by krono on 6/28/22, 11:40 PM

  Glad this is still being actively developed!

  A little bit odd, perhaps, for an email client to feature Matrix chat functionality but no support for Exchange accounts. Hope it's on their roadmap though.

• by bprasanna on 6/29/22, 4:25 AM

  I really appreciate the Thunderbird development team for proactively going through the list of add-ons and reaching out to the add-on developers if there is any concern to be addressed before moving the add-ons to 102. I can feel the commitment to keep Thunderbird a great email client.

• by waynesonfire on 6/29/22, 12:14 AM

  But does it have support for smartkeys? You know, like it use to prior to thunderbird 78. Huge regression dropping support for enigmail plugin and gnugpg for some built in solution that's half complete and as far as I'm aware doesn't support smartcards like yubikey. So crummy.

• by Tainnor on 6/29/22, 12:43 AM

  I had to switch to evolution for my work computer because the company uses Exchange accounts and at least with the setup we have, it's not supported in Thunderbird on Linux. Supposedly there's a paid add-on that does this, but even if I was willing to pay for it, I wouldn't know beforehand if it actually works.

  Evolution supports exchange properly, by contrast (well, I did have to ask my boss to whitelist an app id somewhere in the server settings, but that was no problem).

  After some initial adjustment, I find evolution equally as capable as thunderbird. Both don't necessarily win design prizes (well maybe this new version of thunderbird does, but certainly not the old one), but if that was important to me, I wouldn't use Linux. :) I would even say that I prefer the calendar integration in evolution.

• by jazzyjackson on 6/28/22, 11:30 PM

  Really nice to see a new matrix client. I was never able to get the hang of the discord UX, I think treating chat “channels” as email threads might be easier for me to grok, now I just need to find some matrix communities to join…

• by defrost on 6/29/22, 2:04 AM

  My only current grief with Thunderbird is minor.

  I recently circled about RSS feeds again and looked into "not Browser Addon" RSS clients - Feedbro as an extension is pretty good, has some shortcomings, and requires the browser to be left active 24/7 to catch ALL of a few of the feeds I follow.

  Thunderbird accepts RSS feeds but, for better or worse, is extremely strict about only accepting fully compliant RSS | ATOM spec verified feeds.

  There are a number of older "RSS feeds" that are compliant XML but missing a few recent feature fields - these work in Feedbro and other more accepting clients but fail in Thunderbird.

  It's a minor quibble, I should write a note to the devs I guess, but it did dash my idea of having the one email+RSS feed hub active 24|7.

• by cutler on 6/29/22, 12:24 PM

  Unusable Address Book. For me horizontal view is essential and now it's borked, ie. all email addresses lumped together as Email Addresses and the same for Phone Numbers and Addresses. How can this possibly be touted as an improvement? For me it's exactly the opposite. Columns are no longer resizable and the Notes section, which I rely on heavily, has been reduced in size YET AGAIN. Mozilla, there's an old adage - If It Ain't Broke Don't Fix It. Switching back to 91 immediately and looking to disable updates.

• by wufocaculura on 6/29/22, 2:48 PM

  So happy that thunderbird is still alive :)

  I like the new UI - seems a bit more compact than previous one - a nice chnage comparing to useless space wasted in most of the apps we have today.

  Hope they will focus on editor in the upcoming versions - if only they could make html tables as good as they are in Outlook...

• by MikusR on 6/28/22, 11:25 PM

  Have they added the ability to increase font size of the email list?

• by bigpeopleareold on 6/29/22, 6:46 AM

  I tried TB once a year or two ago - it was slow and the GUI was hard to read (maybe the same design worked on lower resolutions?) I completely forgot what I used in the 2000s, it could have been TB. A month ago, I gave it another shot. Not slow, GUI still hard to read, but at least there is a nice theme I found that now makes it usable ("Monterail Full Dark" is what I use). With that, I decided to stick with TB; it feels very comfortable and feels better than jumping into all the different webmail clients for various email addresses I have. I am curious to see what 102's UI re-design will bring.

• by VWWHFSfQ on 6/29/22, 12:01 AM

  I'm on an Ubuntu 22.04 Desktop computer. I click on the big green Free Download button. It downloads a .tar.bz2 file. I double-click on that in the Firefox download manager. It opens the Gnome archive extractor. I'm looking at... .gif files? .so files? I see something called "thunderbird" and another thing called "thunderbird-bin". I double-click on those and some other dialog pops up that says "No applications found for 'thunderbird'".

  Will desktop Linux ever solve these basic usability problems?

  Or will this always just be user error! you're doing it wrong!

• by hammyhavoc on 6/29/22, 11:45 PM

  Surprisingly impressive. Matrix integration is excellent, and loving the configurable UI modernizations, especially being able to simplify it in some areas. The least worst of current email clients, but there's always room for improvement, though email is never going to be glam to develop a client for.

  Now, if only I could sync accounts and configs between devices without a bodge of a workaround. That would be fantastic, especially with the new Android client.

• by m-ueberall on 6/29/22, 7:07 AM

  If you're already using an older version of Thunderbird, be sure to first check https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-us/thunderbird/addon/addon... (Addon Compatibility Check for TB 102) ...

• by mtmail on 6/28/22, 11:54 PM

  Are they following Firefox version numbers for theeir stable releases? Thunderbird jumps from v91 to v102 (Firefox is currently at v102).

• by rambambram on 6/29/22, 6:19 AM

  Nice, I like Thunderbird! Can't wait to use the import/export wizard. I always thought it a little strange to install add-ons for this functionality.

  I'm also very curious to their Matrix support. I've heard about it, and maybe this move from Thunderbird makes it more accessible.

  Also, a reminder to self: donate some money to the Thunderbird development team.

• by cycomanic on 6/29/22, 11:51 AM

  I really wish muttator was still working. It was an extension which turned thunderbird into mutt with a GUI, in other words a keyboard driven email client without the hassle of dealing with calendars, HTML, images... of cli clients. Also unfortunately firenvim (an extension to use Neovim for textfields) is currently broken.

• by digisign on 6/28/22, 11:29 PM

  Looks nice, but I'm worried they broke more things. It has been a number of releases that the mail pane no longer respects my dark system theme. It looks horrible.

  Also I have a portrait monitor so not interested in getting rid of title-bars... better be able to keep them and not be forcing a widescreen layout.

• by jsilence on 6/29/22, 3:55 PM

  Its all nice and dandy and I really appreciate that development of Thunderbird has awoken from its hiatus, but I really really wish they would fix the Maildir storage and make it standards compatible, so that one can use other mail tools like offlineimap (aka nbsync) or mu on the same Maildir store.

  Please let form follow function...

  Edit: some other user pointed out that Maildir support is on the roadmap: https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap#maildir

  Great news!!

• by nsxwolf on 6/29/22, 3:14 PM

  I haven't looked at Thunderbird in over 10 years so I decided to download it. It was very easy to set up my Gmail account.

  My initial impression is that it is delightfully old-fashioned. It reminds me of the mail clients we used to use in the good old days - The list view has tiny fonts and is packed with all kinds of information. It isn't at all "slick" like Apple Mail or even Outlook.

  It feels clunky, like it's an ancient codebase that's been redesigned a million times. But it's charming.

• by anony999 on 6/29/22, 9:18 AM

  This looks great! The only reason I didn't fully migrate to Thunderbird yet is the search feature which seems to be lacking in some areas compared with the mail.app

• by siraben on 6/29/22, 2:12 AM

  I've been using Thunderbird on and off for several years now, but I'm repeatedly confused by the search feature. Has anyone else found it inadequate?

• by yubiox on 7/1/22, 7:03 AM

  I don't really care about icons and I don't use contacts. What would be nice though is to be able to customize things like putting those stars on all unread email instead of just "new" email, whatever that is. The read/unread tiny dot is hard to see especially for the current highlighted message. I've used tbird forever and it is otherwise awesome. Thanks.

• by yyyk on 6/29/22, 1:27 AM

  Cool, a UI upgrade. Yet they still omit proper tray support on Linux, barring hacks (birdtray, systray-x, etc.). Oh, well. At least it's maintained.

• by encryptluks2 on 6/28/22, 11:20 PM

  Last I checked Thunderbird still doesn't support Maildir by default and is hidden behind an experimental flag with the following warning:

  > We suggest you leave Maildir disabled unless you are an advanced user, willing to risk your data, and know how to back up your email before turning on Maildir and how to restore it if you run into problems.

  Have they fixed that or has other things like Matrix integration taken priority over email?

• by Animats on 6/29/22, 12:24 AM

  Oh, gawd, the mobile people got into Thunderbird.

• by reagle on 6/29/22, 1:20 AM

  I’m still stuck pre78 because I like to use an external editor. https://github.com/exteditor/exteditor/issues/74

• by throwaway81523 on 6/28/22, 11:58 PM

  I wonder if they could fix basic things like letting the user control the font size, before messing with "serious upgrades" which almost always turn out to be downgrades.

• by mdrzn on 6/29/22, 8:20 AM

  I really can't stand how SLOW Thunderbird is, from starting the app to doing searches, to any action at all. Even with 32gb ram, i9-9900, SSDs.. sooooo slow.

• by lobocinza on 6/29/22, 2:53 AM

  I've tried Thunderbird and Evolution a few times in the past and I'll will not be fooled again. The experience is always the same: clunky interface, sync issues and a lot of time wasted. With Thunderbird I had to install a few extensions just to have some that barely was a proper Mail/Contacts/Calendar integration.

  Nowadays I just run the default web app in Ferdium and use vdirsyncer to backup my mail and calendars to disk. And I use Evolution only because Gnome uses it for showing my events on the shell calendar. Like it or not Gmail (and Fastmail) interfaces are great and native PIM is dead.

• by clircle on 6/29/22, 2:06 AM

  Long Live Thunderbird

• by spacechild1 on 6/29/22, 6:59 AM

  Happy Thunderbird user here. Just wanted to say thanks!

• by aceazzameen on 6/29/22, 12:26 AM

  Funny! I just installed Thunderbird two weeks ago and my biggest gripe was importing my contacts from Gmail. It was a bit of a hassle until I used vcards. VCards ended up working but didn't have birthdays? It may have been missing more data too. I haven't verified it all. I might have to try again.

• by pers0n on 6/29/22, 1:09 PM

  I've been using Thunderbird for decades, nice to see color is back!

• by awinter-py on 6/29/22, 2:27 PM

  recently tried to switch to desktop from web gmail -- logging into gmail with a client is terrifying and painful

  typing my google password into a random popup isn't exactly confidence inspiring -- neither is the 'less secure apps' flow they invented

  hard to set up threading, sync took forever before newest part of inbox was ready, unclear impact on how replies look

  IMO it's 2022 and the open niche for email clients is 'offramp from gmail' -- how can I get a temporary gmail-like experience on desktop w/out an overnight sync, without a giant security hole, and with minimal changed experience. Solve this and you can eventually migrate people to other email hosting.

• by nswest23 on 6/29/22, 11:17 AM

  Serious question: what is the point of an email client?

• by dusted on 6/29/22, 8:31 AM

  my knee jerk reaction is "oh god no why!?" but I guess I'll just keep using it because it's what I've always used..

• by mgaunard on 6/29/22, 10:46 AM

  I stopped using Thunderbird with version 3 when all the new database indexing features made it very slow and unusable.

  Haven't tried it again since then.

• by newsarchive88 on 6/29/22, 5:54 AM

  The beast is back...

• by anujkumars on 6/29/22, 6:58 AM

  its bike or company.. please suggest

• by ruph123 on 6/29/22, 1:25 PM

  I really wish they would do away with tabs. Somehow this has always bothered me about TB. I don't know why. Maybe because it adds more layers in ehat should be a clean interface. Or maybe it is just tab-anxiety I have from using browsers. I just don't want to micro-manage tabs in my email client.