I love thunderbird because it's the only email client that does everything I want. I tried CLI clients, they are great and customizable, but CLI is a bit bare for email (images, html, fonts...)<p>Things I'd like to see improved:<p>- Native CardDAV and CalDAV support (there is caldav, but no discoverability of calendars).<p>- Native PGP.<p>- Better search, the UI is horrible and the search string is hard to get right (need fuzzy search and partial contact completion).<p>- A bit of UX work, some preferences are just a nightmare to find.<p>- Automation (auto tags, auto threading (for example, I get an order confirmation from webshop X, and a while after a shipping confirmation from webshop X, I want those to be grouped)).<p>- Improved storage engine, thunderbird is often freezing to compress folders.<p>- Critical bugd being fixed, like "imap"->"local folder" messages vanishing.
The last I heard from Thunderbird in 2018, the story was Mozilla making preparations to divest themselves from the project and spin it off to "the community" (a.k.a. Apache graveyard).<p>This post makes it sound like the Thunderbird team has been growing within Mozilla during 2018, and is targeting another 75% headcount increase in 2019.<p>I mean, that's awesome, as someone who wants there to be a viable desktop email client option out there. But geeze... what a muddled mess of messaging and pivots from this organization.
Thunderbird still has a critical bug open that literally deletes your email. I have been bitten by it once and lost hundreds of email permanently. Not fun. I am subscribed to the ticket and every month or so someone posts an outraged "me too".<p><a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156" rel="nofollow">https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156</a>
I recently discovered this add-on:<p>* <a href="https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/tbsync/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/tbsyn...</a><p>* <a href="https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/eas-4-tbsync/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/eas-4...</a><p>An actual working atcivesync support for calendar and contacts.<p>With Exchange being still very pervasive in corporate environments, it's quite useful.
Glad to see UX on that list. Under the hood Thunderbird is incredibly powerfull, but actually using it beyond the most basic workflows is mildly painful. With competition from highly polished webmail clients with autolabeling features I find it hard to actually recommend Thunderbird to anyone unless they <i>need</i> PGP (which is even more painful in Thunderbird, but PGP in the cloud is a different threat model).
Thanks for this great news for people hungry for good desktop alternatives for the abundant webmails. Please spend part of the effort on Lightning (the calendar add-on).
As a daily user my personal preference almost align with their goals. I look forward very much to the day that I can stop using mail-notification in Gnome. The Thunderbird built-in system has seemingly broken polling feature (not sure if it does anything when running minimized), and has no option to specify folders that you want fast notification when a new mail arrives. I always miss Gnome mail-notification when I am using Windows, and sometimes have my laptop running Gnome next to the Windows computer just for this purpose.<p>The second feature I would very much like them to work on is search. It is horrifically slow, seems to miss some mail (html only maybe?) and the result window has terrible UI. You can't preview why the search found something so either you run a more narrow search or manually go through each email it found. There is also no threading in the result window so you lose a lot of context.
IMO the <i>real</i> revolution might be a decision to integrate notmuch so to move from a '90s-like UI/workflow to a modern era one so powerful that can easily outshine webmails.<p>Also, with a proper maildir cloning support (mbsync like for instance) it may give to the casual users the opportunity to have locally their messages.<p>Otherwise anything Mozilla can do can at maximum keep a zombie alive simply because of lack of less ugly widespread and generic alternatives.
It's good to hear that Thunderbird is getting more resources. One UI bug that I didn't see mentioned in the post though, and that shouldn't exist in 2019, is that Thunderbird loses the scroll position of a tab when changing tabs. I hope this will get fixed soon.
It's good to hear that people are interested in actually getting something set up to track performance metrics, but I won't believe it until I actually see it.<p>One thing I would add to performance metrics is that tests for very large folders (of about 1M) should be added. I was talking with someone last night who was complaining about how long it took to delete 200K messages from his inbox, so it's not a wholly implausible metric. I just worry that people are going to focus on metrics that go "oh, there's no issue with a 1K message folder since it's all within the 16ms budget" without looking to see their impact on 10K or 100K folders, which is where people really complain about performance.
Really good to see Thunderbird getting some attention and a dedicated development team. I have to use Microsoft Exchange at work and Thunderbird (i'm on version 60) with a couple of plugins, has been the client that has worked best for me on linux.
I use Thunderbird pretty much just for FiltaQuilla extension, which runs shell commands when email matching some filter arrives. It would be nice to have this functionality built-in and extended (e.g. email data could be passed to stdin).<p>The biggest drawbacks is overall slowness (especially when syncing with server) and search UI (which really needs to be condensed). BTW it would be nice to have option to search for all mails involving some address by just right-clicking the address, like in Mailspring.
First of all I’m very happy to see a community-driven Thunderbird that’s still alive and kicking. I used Thunderbird before and I can see myself returning to it.<p>Now I'm on MacOS and I use MailMate, see: <a href="https://freron.com/" rel="nofollow">https://freron.com/</a><p>I wish Thunderbird would be more like it. It's simple, fast, uses Markdown in its editor, has nice keyboard shortcuts, plays well with Gmail's labels, has smart filters and works well with multiple accounts and aliases.<p>Seeing some of the comments, I’m surprised to see people putting emphasis on Thunderbird’s calendar or missing CardDav support. Well, MailMate provides no such support.<p>I.e. for calendars I simply use Apple’s Calendar, for contacts I use Apple’s Contacts. I don’t need my email client to handle these.<p>That Thunderbird can do it, that’s cool, but I think Thunderbird has problems in handling email that should be fixed first. And I’m glad to see them invest in better Gmail support. I don’t even use Gmail as my personal account, but in this day and age it’s a must and the features (like labels) will prove handy for other email providers too.
I just switched away from Thunderbird after I found out about a long standing bug where the search index may not be updated sometimes, resulting in some emails not being discoverable with search.<p>Not able to find emails in my email client is a 100% deal breaker.<p>Back to Outlook I go. It's search isn't perfect, but at least emails show up eventually.
I wonder if Mozilla evaluates hiring teams in areas with lower avg income but still reasonable quality of CS education like Eastern Europe, Russia, etc. to get faster product development for the same donations.
I actually like Thunderbird since when I discovered MRC Compose extension[0] which provides a UI similar to Outlook in the To, CC and BCC fields. Having to input one by one the email addresses is troublesome in my use case (lots of addresses to manipulate when replying). It's a pity it isn't a default behaviour.<p>[0] <a href="https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/mrc-compose/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/mrc-c...</a>
Every time I am excited to try Thunderbird I am sent packing because of all the features that are barely implemented or don't work well.<p>The practice of having plugins do core functionality is just not a good idea. Things that 90% of the users use should ship in the product.<p>For instance, cloud Exchange support is lacking. I couldn't even login to my work account, while other clients (Windows Mail, iOS, Outlook, etc...) have no issues whatsoever.<p>The calendar is just awful. The contacts is completely bare bones.<p>Here is hoping the new folks breathe some life into it.
Is anyone successfully using Thunderbird with Google calendar? I gave up on it a couple years ago and just use the website, but I'd love to use it again if possible. I honestly can't remember what issues I had, but I do remember near the end I was using it as a view only feature, but for actually stating hangouts or creating new meetings I still had to use the website anyway.
An email client that doesn't have a mobile companion app is an immediate thumbs down for me. I want a consistent experience for something as important as email, whether I'm on a laptop or on my phone.<p>Sigh. That probably means Thunderbird mobile is going to take till... 2021? 2022?
I'm still on Thunderbird 52 because the upgrade to 60 ruined my calendar. I hope the next ESR version works better. :-/<p>I don't even use Thunderbird for email anymore, so I guess what I really want is a standalone calendaring application that I can migrate to.
I have a couple family members that were heavy Thunderbird users. They recently switched off it because it was chewing up CPU when in the backgound, and the spam filtering doesn't really work. Glad to hear they are getting some more engineers.
one thing I'm really hoping for is more support for calendars. I see no way to view / change the color of events. while I can add them to categories, it is much easier for me to color code them.