Honestly this doesn't seem like the main issue with Thunderbird; the main issue is that the UI is very slow, it tends to use a lot of CPU and memory just sitting there and a lot of operations block the UI. This got a lot worse with 102. 102 unfortunately is so low in responsiveness that it's literally quicker for me to open a new tab, load Google Mail (the slowest webmail I'm using) find and(!) read the mail there than switching to the already running Thunderbird and waiting for it to load the new message. It also tends to take pretty long to "boot", so most days I just avoid using it entirely now, as leaving it running in the background substantially decreases battery life.

For me it runs lightning fast, especially compared to other tools like Outlook. Clicking any message loads it instantly, searching through my 30000 emails in 10 different accounts is also instant, etc. Why is my experience so different? Mostly everything is on default settings.

Pretty much the only complaint I have about this tool is that parts of the window sometimes flash for seemingly no reason when it is left open for a while.

I can't complain about performance. My profile folder is ~90 GB. I have multiple email accounts connected and a large local folder which contains email from Google Takeout since I had to delete some (larger) emails from my Google mail to make space. That being said, it would be nice to not see application not responding messages on Fedora (Gnome) as much.

But.. it seems like a solveable problem..

The mailboxes are very inefficient, being regular mboxes with an index. I'd rather have the e-mails in a sqlite database. A Maildir on disk is a waste of inodes and a liability when one does a search or archives the thing. Old mail is rarely touched and sqlite has a full text search function.

The interface is okay. Quirky, dated but okay. I just need a snooze option like Gmail's but one that doesn't hide the e-mail. Now I have to convert the e-mail to a task and add an alarm to the task which requires a lot of clicks and setting options that are unergonomic.

I do, around 100k mails in various dirs with order of magnitude higher volume than you. Just need to set it up

> The mailboxes are very inefficient, being regular mboxes with an index. I'd rather have the e-mails in a sqlite database. A Maildir on disk is a waste of inodes and a liability when one does a search or archives the thing. Old mail is rarely touched and sqlite has a full text search function.

You can set it to maildir style, sadly impossible after account creation and requires unbelievably much effort for such simple change.

Like, this piece of shit asked me to restart client to change IMAP server name, who wrote that garbage?

How do you cope with that? Given a work day has 8 hours, you'll have at best 30 seconds to process an email (480 working minutes for 1000 mails) and that includes reading, answering and doing the actual work required to have an answer. That seems like not manageable?

Many are just notifications from GitHub from 7-year-ago employers since leaving an org does not (did not?) unsubscribe you.

Others are build logs which are useful to keep around for searching and so forth.

Typically I just let my mail provider sort them for me.

For some reason on Linux it was fine in Windows it was literally unusable. Particularly when composing a message of all things.

There’s definitely some quirks somewhere.

Same here, been running it for years, it even runs and looks great on my oldest (10 years old) machine.

Unfortunately, it has some serious performance bugs. It often sits there idle on a brand new laptop eating 50% or 70% of a core. Doing who knows what, without giving any indication or any sort of pause button to the user.

I almost have to keep Thunderbird closed to save my battery. Sometimes I think if I wrote a shell script that suspended the main process four of every five minutes, it'd make for better background task scheduling than whatever must be going on.

The software is burning hundred of billions of CPU cycles running in circles for hours and hours, when it's supposed to be sitting idle.

If they want to grow the user base (or even maintain it against attrition) then relying on just the current folks isn't enough: you have to get new people to use it. (And hopefully support/donate to it.)

Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is 'current'.

Unless you make the interface skinnable, or provide a 'core' which folks can build their own variant on with whatever interface they desire.

Reminds me of the arguments for Firefox getting rid of the "Old School" interface and copying Chrome to bring in new users. Didn't exactly work out very well...

That wouldn't have gained them appreciable new users, but it would have slowed losses. Almost all my browsing is done in Chrome and Brave now. There's not really any reason to use Firefox besides habit now, and I don't, except on my desktop.

Mozilla somehow failed to recognize their entire core userbase was power users and Firefox fans, which relentlessly evangelized the product to other people, going around installing it on grandma's computer.

Then they failed to recognize that while Chrome was a comparable technical product, maybe even slightly better in some ways, the reason for its success it because it was relentlessly shilled by a huge megacorporation that pushed it in advertising, on the world's biggest web properties, and even had it packaged in installers for other products.

Mozilla was never going to be able to compete with Chrome by assuming that "if we were just more like Chrome, people would use us", or "we need to make a browser for grandma." Grandma doesn't download browsers. That is, unless a big banner comes up on YouTube telling her she needs to download Chrome for the best experience. By alienating its core "fanbase" or whatever you want to call it, by alienating its power users, Firefox alienated the only demographic it ever had an actual shot with. Unless you count the even-smaller real-open-source-only-we-need-web-freedom demographic.

So why would anyone use Firefox over chrome?

Because it is open source? Sure, but so is Chromium. But both seem to have mostly cathedral-style development and someone outside of Mozilla is unlikely to be able to influence the direction of the project in any meaningful way. It's open source software but not an open source project. User feedback is continuously ignored, often with the only argument being developer convenience.

Because of a focus on privacy? While they do like to push that angle in their marketing and in some ways do more to prevent websites from tracking you they show little concern for making the browser itself respect your privacy with opt out telemetry, eperiments, in-browser advertising and more. Again, any user pushback is summarily dismissed.

The only remaining advantage are some niche features here and there. And those are often provided by extension whose API Mozilla limits more and more.

So I still use Firefox but its only because it is the lesser evil, and the differrence is shrinking. I certainly don't trust Mozilla's autoupdates and won't use upstream builds. Thankfully Linux distros still provide a last defense layer - but that we need that layer at all for something that is supposed to be an open browser is ridiculous. I don't fault anyone who says fuck it and just uses Chrome so that ALL sites work out of the box.

People moved to Chrome coz it was plainly faster and those who stayed did it for the various plugins they got used to. When new version of FF blows up your workflow might as well go try Chrome. Hell, I'd be using Chrome already if it had sensible vertical tabs implementation... the FF ones after the apocalypse are worse than XUL ones but still better than I've seen on Chrome.

This is an easy thing to say. Sometimes it is even true, but i think its overstated.

To survive you need to lean into whatever makes you unique or interesting, and convince new users that you're worth it. Chase whatever is trendy too far, and you simply become the off-brand version of whoever is the market leader. That annoys your base wothout actually growing new users since you aren't going to be better than whoever you are copying.

Moreover, detering active users in the hopes of catching new users is a risky move. If you do it you need to be sure that there will be more new users faster than old users leaving. If it doesn't work out, chances are that they ain't coming back.

I can't say anything about keeping TB open and having it steal CPU time. I usually close it after checking for mail. Having it open appears to be a valid use case taht shouldn't create problems, however.

I believe there are settings you can run that might create more problems with performance but I haven't touched anything the last 5 years so can't say what it was any more.

And that risks doing absolute horseshit. Outlook's new UI for example hides the cc/bcc behind an additional click, extremely annoying for anyone but personal mail usage. How MS still haven't managed to discover and fix that with their billions of corporate users is astonishing.

It doesn't look like the interface is a big problem to anyone. Projects with a tech debt problem could always do with a touch up. But emails haven't changed that much in the last few decades.

I haven't used it in a while, but if it's true, it's a pity that once so useful and fast piece of software deteriorate so hard. One would expect that a stale project can only benefit from the newer hardware to become crazy fast ...

I remember Thunderbird as being both fast, and uniquely able to run on pretty much any hardware.

I used it on an eeePC 701 with no problems, even though the machine had only a 900 MHz processor, 512MB of RAM, and a 4GB disk.

Sad to hear it's gone all bloatware since those days.

I also ran it on a netbook (some variant of a 901?) for a couple years, and it was great. I'm also pretty sure it would be less great now, even if I were running the same version.

People delete email?

I started using the gmail's "archive" button in ~2009 and now I see 112,315 conversations in the "all mail" section. That's probably 200k emails in total. The fact that web mail always runs at the same speed regardless of how much mail you have is seriously underappreciated.

(Some operations like creating a filter and applying it to all past conversations does take 5 seconds, but this doesn't block the UI so it's not a deal breaker)

What is the advantage of the archive, if you have to rely on search to find stuff anyway?

This lets you turn the inbox into a sort of TODO list that only shows you stuff that's still pending. Of course you also have to use filters aggressively if you wanna maintain inbox-zero without having to manually archive every "your bank statement is ready" email.

If they're basically stacked on top of 90% of firefox (which is how I understand it to work), then it's not necessarily TB's fault. It's like writing a tiny app on top of a framework that gets bloated.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ORqed8SW_7fPnPdjfz42RoGf... https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1446335 https://arewexblstill.com/

It does have a quirk with IMAP, in that it only checks your main folder until you visit a sub-folder. Then it'll check those, but even then, any time I go in and click a folder, it tends to react by "really checking."

But quirks aside, performance doesn't seem like an issue for me.

Discord, Teams, Firefox, and Slack all seem to use 0-0.1% without much interaction (though I am typing into Firefox right now!) - Thunderbird seems to be 0% more often than not.

Uses %1.5 of my 32G of RAM and 0.2% CPU. I'm running on Linux, but I do not see the performance issues others are having.

You can enable checking all folders by setting "mail.server.default.check_all_folders_for_new" config option. Quite weird it's not on by default, though.

Maybe it's because I only use POP/SMTP accounts?

I originally switched from Apple mail because I thought Apple mail could not handle my gmail.

https://support.google.com/a/answer/1071518?hl=en

My issues were:

   - no support for O365, unless you pay for a 3rd party plugin
   - bizarrely high CPU usage, even when seemingly not doing anything
   - *sometimes* memory usage grows really high
   - a bunch of small niggling issues over missing features - for example, I can't paste in a formatted signature from Outlook

It seems that Thunderbird supports O365 oauth natively now, including access to calendars.

I know I had to use some plugins in the past, but now, it just works.

* https://office365.mcmaster.ca/reconfigure-mozilla-thunderbir...

If you've constantly upgraded over the years, try creating a new account or even reseting your profile. Perhaps there are/were some 'stale' settings that are messing things up.

Signatures are a pain.

Since its deprecation and Thunderbird's integration of GPG, there were a few hiccups (mostly UI differences between Enigmail and native TB support), but none with key management.

I can generate, store and use keys without issue.

Condolences on having to use O365, BTW.

https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/owl-f...

which is paid.

Can achieve feature parity with plain IMAP + TbSync but that's another 3rd party addon.

So "doesn't work out of the box with o365" isn't that big of a stretch, plain TB will only get you IMAP working.

That's honestly more of MS being cancer and not using standards than anything else.

They also introduced required OAUTH2 authentication last year and in a way that you need essentially org admin rights to give any other client than TB access... because you need to create fucking app in MS panels that then gets used by mail client to authorize you. It is entirely aisine platform

But... pasting in a table from anywhere (libreoffice,...) would break everything (still does in 102).

Could be some quirk with a local gentoo install, but if i copy a random 2x2 (or more) table from libreoffice into an empty email (or the very last line of a non-empty one), and want to type anything below the table, there's no way to actually move the typing "cursor" outside of the table itself or type a newline at the end of the table and for the newline to be outside of the table (and not just stretch the last cell). This basically means I have to type some random newlines, paste in the middle of those newlines, so i can then move my cursor out of the tables itself.

I am now considering dumping the Bird after almost twenty years of continuous and happy use. The main reason I am still sticking around is because I hope it turns out to be a simple bug that some kind soul will fix.

If Thunderbird was easy to develop and modify then all the performance issues you're talking about would be resolved.

The problem is that Thunderbird's legacy code base makes making changes extremely difficult, slow and risky.

And that's Thunderbird's fundamental problem as the article describes well.

I switched off of it because the new index builder was slow on whatever spinning disk single machine I had back then. Also, the UI was trying too hard to look new, and it made it difficult to use.

Oh well. I haven’t looked back. Plenty of functional old school mail UIs exist (Fastmail and Apple Mail for macOS come to mind.). I’d prefer an open source one though.

Might have to do with us having allowed to infest mail, like so many other things, with the piece of shit that is CSS. As it's formulated, it would indeed appear gross, but coming to think about it, it's no wonder that loading a document into an already running browser is faster than starting a web browser albatross afresh.

Maybe embedding (and keeping up to date with security band aids) an old Moz browser is the problem, but I don't remember performance to be as much as a problem when I was still using Thunderbird. I was glad it existed and hope their rewrite goes well.

Wouldn't that only make sense if your Gmail tab wasn't also loading up the same CSS?

It doesn't fix the age old default search output, but it works comparably well for my taste. It also doesn't fix the idle CPU usage unfortunately.

[1] https://www.betterbird.eu/#featuretable

On the much needed feature side of things, other email clients have the very useful feature of showing the complete conversation history (across all accounts) in a sidebar. This alone has been a compelling reason to switch email clients, though, the real reason I switched was the extremely slow interface.

I sincerely hope these changes will make Thunderbird usable for me again.

Have you tried changing local storage format from default mbox (one big linear file per folder) to maildir (each message in its own file)?

It may be they don't want to break those external tools.

FYI, iTunes.app (or whatever it's called now) for a long time had a legacy XML-file representation of the music library "for interoperability", that you could enable to be persisted to disk alongside its newer, binary DB file; when enabled, it worked exactly like this.

Making the sqlite db the primary would mean that unless there was constant synchronisation I would be missing emails in the other clients.

I feel like just switching to maildir across the board is a pretty good solution performance wise. Although, I do understand that folders with large numbers of files is a problem under Windows (many projects had to rework their design for this). So perhaps a sqlite solution for Windows would be a good idea.. or just a maildir with more nested folders to reduce size, linked to the thunderbird indexing.

This is a perfect example of complicating what should be a simple thing to support a very, very niche use case. Thunderbird should just use sqlite so all normal operations including search are fast across all platforms, and if you have a use case like wanting to synchronize with other mail clients using maildir, then write a plugin that will duplicate the sqlite db to a user-specified maildir.

The bigger issue with the Maildir standard on Windows is that the Maildir standard uses colons in filenames which is not allowed on Windows.

(ETA: The obvious idea here to me would be to do something like a bare git repo as a Maildir-like with content-addressed storage.)

Packing individual resources into archives is the norm for Games for a reason.

I feel these weren't the only cases. And none of those had anything to do with Explorer.

But, it might have improved, and might be "good enough" for email.

I'm not suggesting that architecting with lots of small files in a single folder is yet the best architecture on Windows, just that for Maildir specifically on Windows it is among the least of the problems.

But... just, FWIW, this particular subject has come up a lot on HN over the years with various explanations. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18783525 and many many others easily searchable on hn.algolia.com

My fav comment was by an MS dev: "NTFS code is a purple opium-fueled Victorian horror novel that uses global recursive locks and SEH for flow control."

Part of what certainly doesn't help is that most of the "lots of files in a single folder" applications make other POSIX-based assumptions (such as locks and consistency with respect to concurrency are generally much more opt-in and eventually consistent by default in POSIX rather than opt-out and aggressively consistent by default in Windows). If you are trying to use POSIX-based assumptions on Windows it doesn't matter what you are doing, including "lots of files in a single folder", you are going to have a bad time. I can easily presume that is what happened in most of your anecdotal counter-examples (Java Minecraft, Firefox, Hedgewars, will all have different, plausible POSIX biases), though I can't know for certain without benchmarks and performance data in front of me, and none of those are currently my job. "Lots of files in a single folder" at that point, under that presumption, is a symptom, rather than the root cause. It's very easy to blame the symptom sometimes, especially when that sort of performance debugging/fixing is getting in the way of your real goals and that symptom is sometimes such an easy fix (use more folders, bundle more zips, what have you).

Again, I can't say that with too much certainty without specific performance data, it's just I do think people need to question the "Orthodoxy" of "well, Windows is just bad at that" more than they do sometimes.

"We've long since gotten all the low-hanging fruit and are left with what is essentially "death by a thousand cuts," with no single component responsible for our (lack of) performance, but with lots of different things contributing"

* Linux has a top-level directory entry cache that means that certain queries (most notably stat calls) can be serviced without calling into the file system at all once an item is in the cache. Windows has no such cache, and leaves much more up to the file systems... [snip]

* Windows's IO stack is extensible, allowing filter drivers to attach to volumes and intercept IO requests before the file system sees them. ... [snip] .. Even a clean install of Windows will have a number of filters present, particularly on the system volume (so if you have a D: drive or partition, I recommend using that instead, since it likely has fewer filters attached). Filters are involved in many IO operations, most notably creating/opening files.

* The NT file system API is designed around handles, not paths. Almost any operation requires opening the file first, which can be expensive. ... [snip]

"Whether we like it or not (and we don't), file operations in Windows are more expensive than in Linux, even more so for those operations that only touch file metadata (such as stat)."

I can say my personal experience under Windows has been that compiling the same project was twice as fast in a linux virtualbox inside windows, than in the host. :)

EDITED TO ADD: Using gmail and fastmail.

'nother edit: should deal gracefully with emailing files to myself. C.f the threading in fastmail's webmail, which is ... weird?

It's still in beta, but I've been using it for the better part of a year without issue. Fast, simple, clean.

[1] https://mimestream.com/

... is Mail not OK?

It ain’t outlook if you need that level of Corp crap but it does well with my massive mess of email from 2002 onwards over various hosting and forwards and works well with gmail.

The price has gone up a fair bit since I had to move away from Mac, so I don't know if the value proposition is still there, but I know it saved me hours of time...

Thunderbird is the closest to productive I've gotten on Windows since, but I want those hotkeys!

Kinda like getting used to drag-n-drop usually doing something sensible, rather than its fucking everything up, doing nothing, or causing a crash/state-corruption in the target program. I'd been trained by other platforms to just about never try to use it for anything except dragging files from directory to directory, and had to un-learn that.

The UI uses Electron, but the actual sync engine is in C++, so it's pretty fast.

I'm curious what gripes you have here. Compared to GMail linear threading based on subject I find the correct threading based on headers fantastic.

The fact that I'm dealing with this in three different interfaces (Thunderbird, Gmail, Fastmail) is probably not helping my sanity.

After these news, I'm searching for an alternative right away. I won't touch a "rewriting from scratch" piece of software with a ten feet pole. Very disappointing.

Suggestions very welcome.

They know they have a huge user base, including enterprise users. They can do it right and modernize the UI without breaking your workflow. Maybe they will propose compact views and everything. They already have such options.

I've been using Thunderbird for 2005 and like it as is, but I wouldn't mind some fresh air. I'd also love being able to convince my younger relatives to adopt Thunderbird but that somewhat cannot happen in its current state.

Thunderbird is also not Firefox and I would expect them not handle UI/UX changes differently. Worst case, it will remain customizable. I'm not quite happy with the current Firefox UI, but luckily, someone built the Lepton theme [1] which is perfect for me. Thunderbird will still be based on Gecko for the UI, and I'm sure it'll remain at least as customizable as Firefox, even if it involves some hackery.

If Thunderbird works well for you, just wait. Maybe you'll like the changes after all?

As for the suggestions I could suggest KMail, it seems good, and would integrate perfectly with my KDE Plasma desktop environment, though I have been trapped in Thunderbird for more than a decade now.

[1] https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/

This is what I'm going with. We use Thunderbird for work and as long they don't kill of functionality and disrupt what we're doing I don't really care what Thunderbird looks like.

I'm a little worried about a bunch of new bugs, especially ones that result in data loss though. As things change I may be pushing back on updates for a while just to make sure things are stable.

If things go bad, I'll have to look for forks or set up something else that can reasonably handle IMAP and supports MBOX

Not sure changes will be good or bad, but rewriting implies some things stop working. My workflow is mostly fetch mail, read mail, done. Nothing fancy. If they want to write a new client, just do it and replace the old one only when they're on par functionally. But they never do that :(

You can bet the "rewrite" aka "make it look modern" jazz won't make this better.

Probably worse.

Kmail's UI can be fast, but its IMAP support is so horribly slow and buggy at least for me.

Better yet, they could do a better job handling it automatically so I don't need it to ask me.

Isn't this the same as the unified inbox feature in Thunderbird? All your accounts can be displayed sorted and threaded together.

> …Since Thunderbird was being contributed to by many volunteer contributors with varying tastes, it resulted in an Inconsistent user interface without a coherent user experience.

Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month" really never stops giving.

You don't actually get more efficient by moving to a giant decentralized volunteer engineering workforce -- someone has to coordinate all that, or else what you're going to get is a mess, both under the hood and in what is visible. And coordinating all that is hard and resource-intensive, the more so the _more_ developers involved.

Some open source projects manage to do that coordination with a decentralized volunteer coordinating staff (although in many cases, it's not truly "volunteer", it's people being paid by various employers collaborating across organizations/employers -- this was in fact most of original open source success stories). But it's not easy. And requires stability and tenure in that decentralized coordinating staff, to hold the vision, and to have the relationships to work together in a unified way. (A "benevolent dictator" is another way to do it).

The hardest part of developing software that is too much for one person to do by themselves (and that one person never leaves), is always the inter-personal communication, coordination, and shared-mental-model-making-and-sharing, not the coding.

So anyway, without being involved in Thunderbird at all, I totally believe this story, and that bringing it back into an organization of paid employees as a core was necessary to prevent complete disintegration (I mean, other organizational solutions are possible too, but they are all even more challenging, this is the simplest), because... that's how it works.

i don't think that vision can be developed and maintained succesfully only by people who never get their hands dirty, it needs to be iteratively developed with constant feedback from the work itself and it's reception, if it is to be successful.

There's a danger here too in that you can iterate on a design in a "monolithic" way where you iterate over a brittle design that's still hard to work with years later because you need to reload the entire system into your brain to make sense of it again.

Looking at Unix as an open source design success story, it was designed in relatively well-defined "layers". So for example it can get away with making literally everything a "file" with a common file interface, even if you're actually working with a physical peripheral or a "black hole" like /dev/null. And on these layers you can build all kinds of different implementations.

I try to push for a similar approach even on proprietary projects because if we can compartmentalize what we need to know to work with the pieces of our systems, they'll be easier to understand with less effort than if we need to understand everything about them before iterating on them.

And this can be passively "encouraged" by how the work is divided across teams/workgroups to leverage Conway's Law (which can also just as easily lead to software components that don't make any engineering sense if people aren't conscious of the effect their organization has on their software's organization).

Over time, Thunderbird has become slower and less reliable, most notably in the area of search. While the advanced search tools are excellent, the results are lousy. Email that I know exists is often unfindable until I force Thunderbird to re-index my whole mailbox.

Seeing F/OSS devs of (what I consider to be) a critical app like Thunderbird talk about "modernizing the interface" is the worst. The interface is fine and there are far bigger problems -- problems related to actual functionality as opposed to prettiness -- that desperately need work.

And to echo others' comments: courting the "average user" is worse than a waste of resources, it's an active turning away from the core users and supporters.

You may want to read the blog post again. This isn't just about a new UI, it's about overhauling the codebase in general, so that they can improve all aspects.

"Rebuild the interface from scratch..."

as a separate bullet point from codebase issues, and later talked about

"A UI that looks and feels modern is getting initially implemented...aiming at offering a simple and clean interface for “new” users..."

Have you tried Claws Mail? It's a plain native traditional email client, and I find it really snappy.

There is even a Windows port. Not sure how "native" people might consider that as it's still based on GTK for Windows, and I don't have personal experience with it, but might be worth giving a try?

https://www.claws-mail.org/downloads.php

That said, I need to scan through a lot of mails for some specific things, thunderbird is barely getting a long with that anymore (the day I have to setup notmuch for real seems to be around the corner), so for most people Claws search may be easily good enough.

I had already lost hope of finding a civilized email client. This is what all software should look like.

Thank you.

Nice to have confirmation of this very irritating bug! When something isn't found in Thunderbird I now resort to searching in Fastmail's web interface.

Why change the UI? I mean, I like Thunderbird exactly since it's the only email client that didn't go into the direction of emulating GMail or Apple Mail or other mail interfaces that shows you the messages in a conversational manner.

I like Thunderbird because it has more or less the same user experience of the old "Outlook" Windows application. Why change something that works???

At least I hope they will give users the possibility to remain with the classical interface, otherwise I think I will still remain on older versions (after all IMAP is relatively stable so I shouldn't have that much issues).

The only thing I would like on Thunderbird is sync of the settings with a Mozilla account like Firefox does. Not that it's a big deal, I just copy around the profile directory (because reconfiguring 10 email accounts each time I change/format the PC takes almost 1 hour).

> Using a solid base architecture like Firefox is the perfect starting point.

No, but why? Why does an email client need a web browser to function, and why is that the "perfect starting point"?

The only reason an email client might use a web _view_ for, is for reading HTML emails, and even then that web view should be a far more restricted and barebones version of a traditional browser tab.

This approach simply inherits all the security issues from the insane complexity of modern browsers, just to reuse some common components that should've been extracted and separated from all the browser baggage.

Hey, Mozilla, remember XUL? Before you decided to deprecate and remove it from Firefox, it was the unified UI framework that both a browser and an email client could use, without sharing any of their core dependencies. What a concept!

I'm surprised Mozilla still has interest in maintaining Thunderbird. I'm curious to know what the userbase for it is, but I can't imagine desktop email clients have a mainstream audience anymore.

> Why does an email client need a web browser to function, and why is that the "perfect starting point"?

I'm not saying using Firefox is the best thing, but there are arguments to be made: first, Firefox is multiplatform, and good at it, and that's something Thunderbird needs as well. Then, like you said, an email client needs to display web pages, so no matter what, a web engine is needed (and it's absolutely possible to re-use Firefox core without building and including all the HTML features regular Firefox comes with). And finally, the whole TB code base is already in JS/XPCom, which would make the transition much easier.

> Hey, Mozilla, remember XUL? Before you decided to deprecate and remove it from Firefox, it was the unified UI framework that both a browser and an email client could use

That's an unnecessary snarky. There are millions of reasons why it made sense to remove XUL. Yes, on paper XUL is great, but it was based on old UI ideas, we had to make tons of hacks to work around those old ideas, and performance was not on par with what overly-optimised HTML could achieve. XBL was way to limited, and tons of features were just useless (remember RDF and templates?).

I would love to see XUL come back, but we need a modern version of it, and to be honest, this could just be an extension of HTML.

> without sharing any of their core dependencies

That's not true.

> I'm surprised Mozilla still has interest in maintaining Thunderbird

It's not Mozilla-Mozilla who's maintaining Thunderbird, but another entity.

Criticizing the quality of something by saying it’s from “old ideas” is a total non sequitir. Old is not the same as bad (there are plenty of great ideas that are old) and modern is not the same as good.

The pointlessness of just saying XUL is old is underlined when you suggest replacing it with HTML. HTML is even older than XUL and a pretty good idea.

And by the way whatever you replace(d) XUL with will be an old idea soon too.

> Firefox is multiplatform, and good at it, and that's something Thunderbird needs as well

I get that, but why isn't the UI toolkit and whatever multiplatform support that Thunderbird needs, not abstracted away from the web browser dependencies? Maybe it is so, but from this article, it sounds like actual Firefox components are reused by Thunderbird, for better or worse.

> an email client needs to display web pages, so no matter what, a web engine is needed

Again, I'm not familiar with the internals, but surely the engine needed to render just HTML and CSS for purposes of HTML emails, is not the same engine needed to render modern web sites with JavaScript and all the overhead of related technologies. You do say that it's possible to re-use Firefox core without all Firefox features, so I would assume that this purpose-built engine for Thunderbird is a very, very minor subset of Firefox, that could be isolated in a way to not pull in all other Firefox dependencies.

And keep in mind, that all this is to render HTML emails, a minor part of the feature set of an email client, which many users--particularly those that still choose to use a desktop email client--prefer to disable altogether.

> the whole TB code base is already in JS/XPCom, which would make the transition much easier.

I see, but this is a benefit for Mozilla developers, not users. Often technical decisions are made because it benefits the developer, rather than user experience. This is the reason we see the proliferation of so many Electron apps, and so many failed attempts at cross-platform mobile toolkits. The direction Mozilla seems to be headed in is to reinvent Electron for Firefox, which is again prioritizing the QoL of internal developers over users. No user _wants_ to run a separate web browser process that wraps a single web site just because it was convenient for developers to build it.

> There are millions of reasons why it made sense to remove XUL.

I can imagine that was certainly the case, but all reasons you've listed were problems for developers.

> performance was not on par with what overly-optimised HTML could achieve

You mean actual UI performance, or performance in some synthetic benchmark? I've used a few of the Firefox forks that still use XUL (Pale Moon, Basilisk, etc.), and while I chose to abandon them for other reasons, UI performance was never an issue.[1]

> I would love to see XUL come back, but we need a modern version of it, and to be honest, this could just be an extension of HTML.

As a user, my frustration wasn't with XUL going away. It was because it was removed without an equivalent replacement, while breaking and severely limiting many extensions. So I'd also like to see a modern XUL alternative, since a crossplatform and generic UI toolkit is exactly what's needed to build applications as diverse as a web browser and email client (or audio player[2], or chat client[3]).

> > without sharing any of their core dependencies > That's not true.

That's a sign of my technical ignorance then, but there's no reason why a sane UI toolkit _couldn't_ be built without a cross-contamination of dependencies between projects that use it.

[1]: After reading this article[4], which I highly recommend for anyone interested in the topic, it makes it clear that there were several issues with XUL/XPCOM that limited performance. IMHO, that's not a reason to remove XUL altogether, but to address these performance bottlenecks in a way that avoids throwing the baby out with the bath water. Indeed, a lot of effort seemed to go in this direction, but ultimately it was decided to scrap it entirely. It seems like Mozilla was chasing the performance of Chrome by becoming more like Chrome, rather than fixing the issues with XUL.

This comment[5] from a Pale Moon maintainer is enlightening. To summarize, there are warts and security issues with XUL (extensions, in this case), but such a framework can continue to exist if the maintainers prioritize keeping their existing user base of power users, instead of chasing the development model of Chrome. Yet Mozilla decided to do the latter, alienating their user base in the process, while still failing to attract new users. In retrospect, how was this a good decision?

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_(software)

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instantbird

[4]: https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addo...

[5]: https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addo...

I dread the day that Google manages to grab enough of Outlook's marketshare so that they can dictate the direction of email just like they have been doing to the web - we're almost there already.

UI isn't a fashion show. I'd much rather have a UI that looks older but is comfortable to use than something trendy.

> A UI that looks and feels modern is getting initially implemented with version 115 in July, aiming at offering a simple and clean interface for “new” users, as well as the implementation of more customizable options with a flexible and adaptable interface to allow “old” users to maintain that familiarity they love.

I don't understand why today's new users shouldn't be able to cope with an interface any old new user didn't have any problem using. However as long as they keep the promise not to take away the current convenient interface, they can do whatever they feel like to remove functionality for a dumb modern mode.

So they could keep the good old HN alive for PCs.

*I send emails in plaintext, don't tell me about S/MIME.

Old reddit + RES is entirely better in every regard. New reddit is utter garbage tho.

If there's no theming support, then yeah, at minimum a dark mode is a totally reasonable request.

edit: or were you talking about HN?

I quickly found a new client, but not one I love. If thunderbird does get a UI overhaul I'd give them another chance, and it sounds like they're moving towards a UI that I at the very least would prefer.

Yes, it is. At least, it is for UI designers.

Very few changes I see these days actually improve anything; they are merely change for the sake of providing evidence to justify the UI designers' salaries.

If something already works, and we know how to use it, there had better be a damn good reason for changing it, because you are burdening thousands, millions, or even billions of people with yet another entirely unnecessary learning task in our already over-stressed lives.

We are far past the time when the new version of X will be seen by orders of magnitude more users than the previous version, so it'll be only the minority that have to relearn, and the majority will enjoy the improved UI (assuming that the new stuff is actually an improvement; BIG assumption). Today, most of it will burden existing users.

You want to make the colors prettier, add a dark/night mode, round the corners, highlight things a bit better? Wonderful. Just don't mess with the organization.

And don't mess with discoverability and ergonomics. I hate buttons that don't look like buttons, controls littering the title bar so that I can't use it to move the window, etc etc

There is a degree of modern style needed because Thunderbird does not exist in a vacuum. Windows evolved, macOS evolved, iPhone/Android look different than 1997 Windows .. which Thunderbird looked like the last years.

I'm skeptical that normal, non-technical users actually benefit from or even prefer all this crap. Someone does, but I'm not convinced it's them.

By the time it was renamed Thunderbird, Netcraft had already confirmed /. was dead. Now get off my lawn!

The new CEO of a tech company shows up for day one. He meets his recently-fired predecessor as he enters his office. They shake hands and the outgoing guy says "I left three letters for you in the bottom drawer, use them as needed".

First quarter for the new CEO, he hasn't much to put in the win column, having barely familiarized himself with staff and projects. But he has to provide a report to the Directors. Desperate, he pulls the first envelope, which reads "Blame your predecessor".

Next quarter isn't much better. Again desperate to prepare for the Board Meeting, pulls the second letter which reads "Blame the economy".

Third quarter he's just about to get some traction but still doesn't have anything earth shattering to report, he goes for the last letter, which reads "Write three letters".

After I finished one contract I told my team there (all permies) to remember to blame me after I'm gone.

I use Thunderbird for personal stuff and Outlook for work. I know it's probably not a fair comparison as my work laptop is slowed down by all the security stuff and general corporate spyware, but damn I only wish my work email could be half as snappy as my personal email.

A tip for those complaining about search, particularly about its performance: if you can, try filtering instead. It's more limited (I think it only searches sender and subject line) but it is blazingly fast for me, filtering out several GB of emails in less than a second, always.

Finally, for those wondering why an email client needs to be built on top of a web browser - this is because in 2023, most "normies" receive a lot of email that is heavy on HTML, so in order to be in any way useful to the majority of users, an email client needs to be really good at parsing HTML, which browsers are. Of course it seems like overkill if you only receive plaintext email.

And I was pleasantly surprised to find that it's better than I remember, and worked great for the 20,000 messages or so in each of their AOL In boxes. Sadly, I'm not kidding about those In boxes.

For my accounts I rely on Apple Mail and SpamSieve, which works well. The dealbreaker for me when I tried Thunderbird years ago is that it lacked any way to export the filters you'd set up, so you could copy them to your other computers. Has this been addressed?

It’s been a while since I used Thunderbird and looked at its internal files. But I remember some .dat file inside the profile that stored the filters and could be copied across.

Edit: Found it. The filter rules are in a file called msgFilterRules.dat. This answer and others on super user (from more than 10 years ago) have the details. [1] I’m sure the Thunderbird forums would also have this information.

[1]: http://superuser.com/questions/439451/ddg#439458

Leaving it here in case that’s useful to anyone.

No. You can't even copy them to other accounts on the same computer. I had to recreate dozens of rules last year for just that reason. If TB wasn't head and shoulders above other MUAs, I'd have dumped it.

Then again, I have emails in TB accounts going back to 1996, so perhaps I'm biased in that regard.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34735788

The biggest issue (from what I read) is technical debt. It's a huge, time consuming and possibly an explosive mess. They have about a dozen developers providing for the needs of millions of users worldwide. They are working on 20 years of (legacy) code.

Even Mozilla had to scrap off the old DNA in favor of new.

I am glad this core group remains excited about the project. Ecstatic that they are looking toward the future. Happy that they are taking the time to make their jobs (much) easier in the long run.

I use https://hub.docker.com/r/ich777/thunderbird, which exposes the UI as a website with a javascript version of vnc. I log into it every once in a while to verify that it's still fetching updates.

I used to use imapbackup but I wouldn't say they are better tools:

- They rarely support OAUTH directly so it can be a pain to set up with gmail

- You still need a viewer to navigate the backup when you need it (usually a full mail client though there are some lighter maildir frontends)

Given how a targeted email can reach someone wherever they are (and spam can conceal mass exploits), frequent security updates are the wrong mindset.

The mindset of one necessary security update should be, OMG, we messed up badly, we need to fix and mitigate, and immediately figure out how never to need another security update, ever again.

Web browsers, OTOH, are hopeless for security right now, due to monstrously big-moat standards. But email MUAs (with addressbook, calendar, and maybe chat) are a much-much simpler problem, also high-value, and maybe the place to set a good example.

If someone objects "but we will always have constant stream of security vulns, because we need these 1,000 libraries, many of which are hopeless"... maybe that's not true. Implementing email is conceptually very easy, and you don't need all that much more than conceptual to get all the benefit that users actually want from email.

(Even incoming HTML multipart content-types, which are often a nightmare of BS generated by some MS program, can be transformed to a vastly simpler and cleaned-up form, enabling a very simple and secure rendering/editing engine, with zero baggage from hopeless browser engines.)

It literally could be a simple ASN lookup, and you would prevent 99% of targeted phishing emails.

Nobody in the world uses some random domain.trade to send emails as company.com ffs.

Microsoft is kind of not giving a damn about security and I dont understand why they do not invest in Outlook security that much. To me this is straight up offensive how they behave.

How can it be that a VBA exploit from 2003 can still compromise an updated system in 2023?

Lots of emails come via mail delivery services.. random domains (sendgrid, amazonses, mailchimp)

Many phishing attempts can be defeated by SPF[0] (the servers that are allowed to send email for this domain), DKIM[1] (proof that it was sent from a domain, and not tampered with), and DMARC[2] (what to do if the email fails SPF/DKIM). Many virus scanners, spam filters pay attention to these, but your mail service can filter mail by it too.

The other piece is seeing `FROM` (just a mail header, spammers will set this to what they're pretending to be) vs `Reply-To` (if you reply this is the address the message will be sent to, for spam this is often unrelated to the content eg random1222@example.com) vs `Return-Path` (who sent the email). This is sort of like the `raw domain` vs `internationalized domain` (allowing UTF8 similar characters to spoof a domain) vs `hiding the URL` problem in the browser.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys_Identified_Mail [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMARC

There's no such thing as applications. There's just us, and browsers. That's it!

The whole calendaring system is written in javascript.

The chat clients (irc, matrix, etc) are also written in javascript.

Instead, Tbird stores one folder in one gigantic file. One threading error, and poof! It's gone. Happened to me several times. Yes, I filed bug reports. No, it was never fixed (at least the Tbird developers denied this was a problem).

Another minor thing I'd like to see is don't hide everything in multiple places.

There's still no way to backup my account settings.

Thunderbird supports one-file-per-email (Maildir) accounts, see settings. It's still marked as "experimental" because of some edge cases, but I have not encountered issues in many years, and it makes for a snappier experience.

- https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/maildir-thunderbird

> There's still no way to backup my account settings.

Import / Export settings has ben around for a few versions:

- https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-export

In all the years I've used Thunderbird, it's never happened to me, several machine types.

I like the way the file/folder structure is and do not want to see it changed.

Here are my two cents in hashtags and slogans for the future of thunderbird: embrace activitypub/fediverse, expand rss functionality, reinvent bookmarks, think about audio/podcasts, improve filtering and smart search. Leverage open source ecosystems and tools for next generation content management. In sum, become the local app where people spend quality time to organize their online life and experience the digital ocean.

Yeah, you could improve on the looks. But keep in mind: "In architecture, functionalism is the principle that software[/buildings] should be designed based solely on their purpose and function". If the purpose and function are beautiful, people will think thunderbird is beautiful. On the other hand no amount of eye-candy can hide the lack of purpose.

And i thought i just wanted a fast, snappy, powerful email client. Silly me.

I've switched to having it do full downloads of messages from IMAP, and run MailBackupX separately to ingest everything. Every month or so, I delete everything older than a month from Thunderbird, and rely on MailBackupX for my historical mail reference, searches, etc.

Now Thunderbird is fast and responsive.

My partner keeps hundreds of thousands of emails in Thunderbird from tens of email accounts, some active, some dead. Last time I looked, it was well over a terabyte of old email. The computer, a reasonably recent and fast Mac, can take several hours to start Thunderbird. That being said, I'm impressed it can handle that much cruft at all.