Thanks for not letting Thunderbird die. In my opinion it's still the best and most customizable opensource email client and there is just not a viable replacement.
Most of the open source email clients I have tested require you to run a local webserver and access the mail using a web browser with very limited features. All I want/need is a desktop app that can be customized to work similar to Gmail, pulls and deletes emails from remote SMTP/IMAP servers and allows me to create backups locally.
It's been quite a while since I used it, but I recall Kmail being quite customizable. Indeed I actually remember it as being more customizable and had kind of been meaning to switch back to it from Thunderbird (but haven't actually done so because switching mail clients is a pain).
kmail is in terrible state and has been for while (can't even send text email by default for several weeks (months?). IINM a replacement is being developed and kmail is on life support until then.
Everything I've seen in the software industry suggests that these two qualities are at odds. The more config parameters there are, the more bugs and crap there will be. Unless by "best" you mean "most configurable" in which case, sure.
These days I run away from customizability. I'm actively choosing the least customizable software I can find.
I've been looking for ways to prevent it from opening tabs all around as this change to tabbed UX was forced upon users and confuses most of the people I maintain TB for, even to this day years later.
Is it customizable? That seems like a pretty strange question from someone that maintains it for a user base. Apart from "disabling" tabs what are you looking to customize? Having used TB since inception I might think a more apt question is "What can't you customize?".
I also don't think I understand your tab stance. You don't have to base your usage on tabs, do you? Personally, given the volume and types of mail I deal with, I was waiting for tabs for years. I just want the context menu option to "view message in conversation" to always exist. It dropped off a couple of builds ago and I can't seem to get it back. Usability of mail without this is decreased exponentially.
Oh my god. Thank you for this great news. I was almost resigned to see Thunderbird being sunset. It's an amazing client and will only become better by utilising the progress made by Firefox.
I'm pretty thrilled as well. I upgraded Thunderbird to 58beta and it is pretty nice. The visual refresh is welcome and it feels like TB maybe has benefited from some of Firefox's under-the-hood improvements since 52.
Is the new Thunderbird compatible with Microsoft's Exchange email service? If memory serves, I think that was what forced me to switch to the Evolution Mail client (which uses "Exchange Web Services") since my workplace uses Exchange.
With regard to the Photon UI, I'm weary of the calendar button being in the application header like that. It's just not where I would look for it, and I don't see what's different between it and the other buttons that would merit some of them being in the header and some of them not.
Either way, I'm happy that Thunderbird isn't dead. Even version 52 has some nice features that I couldn't find in other clients.
>Is the new Thunderbird compatible with Microsoft's Exchange email service? If memory serves, I think that was what forced me to switch to the Evolution Mail client
I see this very much as a Microsoft problem rather than a Thunderbird problem, although I appreciate that doesn't make your situation better.
I use davmail[1] to solve this problem at work. Davmail sits in your tray, connects to exchange and turns the exchange traffic into standards-compliant mail traffic for your email client.
Of course, you lose some features in the process. About once a month I have to remind HR that the "vote" buttons in exchange are not part of any email client except outlook. Still, it works well for sending/receiving mail and tolerably for handling calendar invites.
>>I see this very much as a Microsoft problem rather than a Thunderbird problem,
In a away yes, but is also a Standards Problem. the Email Standards are shit and have needed to be updated for atleast 2 decades now but no one can agree on what should replace them.
For all of Microsoft failings, EWS and even ActiveSync is superior for syncing a users Mailbox, Calendar and other communication data between a central mail server and many clients...
I've had good success with using davmail[1] with the exchange server at work. It's still hosted on sourceforge, but some extended/community repositories have it as well (like Arch's AUR). It's Java, so relatively portable and easy to get working.
This is my story as well. It's especially the case in a corporate environment when you're the love Linux insurgent holding ground in a sea of Macs and Windows
Just adding my voice to the cacophony of enterprise users, hoping Mozilla takes note.
I'd love to be able to ditch Evolution for Thunderbird but without Exchange it won't happen. I can manage without built-in calendar since Gnome calendar works well and I have my tablet too.
You can do EWS very well through a plugin called ExQuilla. You have to pay some small fee for a license, but you can try it for free. Otherwise, you can go through DavMail, but it's more of a hassle.
I recently paid for Hiri[1], which very smoothly connected with my corporate Exchange server. I haven't used it extensively yet, but the interface is interesting and they seem to be trying to do something different with email.
Unfortunately, this means you can use email, but not the calendar.
(In a slight twist of dramatic irony, we have had the same problem with Outlook 2016 trying to talk to an Exchange 2007 server... ;-) Upgrading the server is on our TODO list for 2018, but for the moment, we have to live with it.)
I'm so glad for some news about Thunderbird's future. A conglomeration of little annoyances made me go hunting for an alternative client earlier in the year, and I just couldn't find one that would really replace it for me.
If any of the team are reading, I hope the search interface is on the radar for when the project is on stable footing again. That's Thunderbird's main area of weakness in my opinion.
I find recent emails with Thunderbird's search pretty reliably, but for indexing a large archive of emails I can definitely recommend Recoll. I have it run a scan daily as a cronjob and it finds absolutely everything.
Search would be fine (for my needs at least) if they'd just (add an option to) do one thing: Skip that stupid search tab and go straight to "open email as list". I don't want full email text sorted by "relevance" (whatever that means for a search on a couple of keywords). I want a list of email threads that match.
This is pretty much the only fly in my Thunderbird ointment. Otherwise it's been a great client for years and I look forward to using it for years more.
I thought thunderbird was in pure maintenance mode and practically abandoned. Has something changed? Is this a maintenance release or is thunderbird starting to be a viable client again?
Basically, they're still under the Mozilla umbrella for legal and fiscal reasons, but all development and operations are completely separate from Mozilla and Firefox.
Thunderbird has always been and continues to be a viable email client-- it just hasn't seen any meaningful development for a heck of a long time. It still _works_. Anyway, hopefully this means development will pick up. It's kinda amazing that it doesn't have multirow views yet.
Why would Thunderbird need to change beyond maintenance in order to be "viable" in the first place? Email hasn't changed. It's still solving the same problem. It should be as good as ever.
Tell Google that. :/ Most of my email woes doing support over the years have been Gmail related. Google changes something, suddenly happy email clients cease working as users expect.
Indeed. While I'm interested to see where this goes, current Thunderbird already does its job pretty well if you want an offline mail client. Security updates and bug fixes are always welcome of course, but I don't see why it's not a viable mail client.
Still the option for basic security such as protecting the access to your mail with a password. 15 years that this feature has been removed with no explanation and that it's not been put back despite feature requests.
This make thunderbird unfit for deployment in places.
How about, once all the maintenance is done,
- Exchange support
- Native Calendar with Exchange and CalDAV support
- Native Contacts with Exchange and CardDAV support
(I'm currently using Evolution, and it mostly works. But elegant or polished it is not.)
While I'm happy they are keeping development up, I'm sad about the 'move to web technologies'. I really like the idea of purpose-built applications in fast languages that compile to efficient native code. I don't really want a webapp, wrapped in a single-app browser, we already have so many of those.
More relevant to Firefox than Thunderbird, perhaps, but the advantage to using web technologies for their own front end is that it forces them to eat their own dogfood at least. Given that Mozilla wants the web to win, making sure their platform is well-rounded enough to performantly build their own products on top of seems like a wise strategy. Kind of a vote of no-confidence otherwise.
Readit News
Most of the open source email clients I have tested require you to run a local webserver and access the mail using a web browser with very limited features. All I want/need is a desktop app that can be customized to work similar to Gmail, pulls and deletes emails from remote SMTP/IMAP servers and allows me to create backups locally.
Thunderbird gives me that.
-edit- found it, it's kube: https://kube.kde.org/
Everything I've seen in the software industry suggests that these two qualities are at odds. The more config parameters there are, the more bugs and crap there will be. Unless by "best" you mean "most configurable" in which case, sure.
These days I run away from customizability. I'm actively choosing the least customizable software I can find.
Do you have examples?
[1] https://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/
[1]: http://www.claws-mail.org/
I've been looking for ways to prevent it from opening tabs all around as this change to tabbed UX was forced upon users and confuses most of the people I maintain TB for, even to this day years later.
I also don't think I understand your tab stance. You don't have to base your usage on tabs, do you? Personally, given the volume and types of mail I deal with, I was waiting for tabs for years. I just want the context menu option to "view message in conversation" to always exist. It dropped off a couple of builds ago and I can't seem to get it back. Usability of mail without this is decreased exponentially.
With regard to the Photon UI, I'm weary of the calendar button being in the application header like that. It's just not where I would look for it, and I don't see what's different between it and the other buttons that would merit some of them being in the header and some of them not.
Either way, I'm happy that Thunderbird isn't dead. Even version 52 has some nice features that I couldn't find in other clients.
I see this very much as a Microsoft problem rather than a Thunderbird problem, although I appreciate that doesn't make your situation better.
I use davmail[1] to solve this problem at work. Davmail sits in your tray, connects to exchange and turns the exchange traffic into standards-compliant mail traffic for your email client.
Of course, you lose some features in the process. About once a month I have to remind HR that the "vote" buttons in exchange are not part of any email client except outlook. Still, it works well for sending/receiving mail and tolerably for handling calendar invites.
[1] http://davmail.sourceforge.net/
In a away yes, but is also a Standards Problem. the Email Standards are shit and have needed to be updated for atleast 2 decades now but no one can agree on what should replace them.
For all of Microsoft failings, EWS and even ActiveSync is superior for syncing a users Mailbox, Calendar and other communication data between a central mail server and many clients...
The calendar stuff is a bit rockier, but there is project to keep it alive here: https://github.com/ExchangeCalendar/exchangecalendar/
Many organizations do not enable IMAP on Exchange (I know at least one that disabled it). So supporting the native Exchange API would be a big win.
For many people "lack of calendar" means "can't use it".
Deleted Comment
It even works with the calendar!
[1] http://davmail.sourceforge.net
I'd love to be able to ditch Evolution for Thunderbird but without Exchange it won't happen. I can manage without built-in calendar since Gnome calendar works well and I have my tablet too.
[1] https://www.hiri.com
(In a slight twist of dramatic irony, we have had the same problem with Outlook 2016 trying to talk to an Exchange 2007 server... ;-) Upgrading the server is on our TODO list for 2018, but for the moment, we have to live with it.)
If any of the team are reading, I hope the search interface is on the radar for when the project is on stable footing again. That's Thunderbird's main area of weakness in my opinion.
http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/
This is pretty much the only fly in my Thunderbird ointment. Otherwise it's been a great client for years and I look forward to using it for years more.
Basically, they're still under the Mozilla umbrella for legal and fiscal reasons, but all development and operations are completely separate from Mozilla and Firefox.
Thunderbird has always been and continues to be a viable email client-- it just hasn't seen any meaningful development for a heck of a long time. It still _works_. Anyway, hopefully this means development will pick up. It's kinda amazing that it doesn't have multirow views yet.
Tell Google that. :/ Most of my email woes doing support over the years have been Gmail related. Google changes something, suddenly happy email clients cease working as users expect.
This make thunderbird unfit for deployment in places.
https://twitter.com/symbolicsoft/status/943106337617084417
How about, once all the maintenance is done, - Exchange support - Native Calendar with Exchange and CalDAV support - Native Contacts with Exchange and CardDAV support
(I'm currently using Evolution, and it mostly works. But elegant or polished it is not.)