It’ll be interesting to see if this pans out. Personally, of the many things that’ve kept me away from Thunderbird, one of them is how it tries to do several things and is medicore at most of them...
It’ll be interesting to see if this pans out.
Personally, of the many things that’ve kept me away from Thunderbird, one of them is how it tries to do several things and is medicore at most of them instead of squarely focusing on the mail aspect. I’d like to see an approach that’s more similar to that of Apple Mail/Contacts/Calendar, where the three are separate but work together and make it easy to swap out any of those individual apps for something else without throwing out the others too. The more Outlook-like design Thunderbird had since its inception has always felt cumbersome.
I’m not really sold on webmail, either. It just doesn’t work well unless you’re a single-address-for-everything sort of person. A local client is a must for anybody with multiple regularly used addresses.
All that said, I’m happy to see that they’re looking to embrace FastMail’s JMAP. From a developer perspective, IMAP is a rather cantakerous and tedious beast to work with which I believe is acting as a massive damper on local client projects. JMAP should be much easier to work with and would enable local client projects to flourish.
While I get that, I understand why they have to do this. If you want to take even a small bite of the marketshare you NEED your calendar/contacts/mail to integrate at minimum. Barely anyone wants...
While I get that, I understand why they have to do this. If you want to take even a small bite of the marketshare you NEED your calendar/contacts/mail to integrate at minimum.
Barely anyone wants a mail app that's not going to sync/work with their calendar, and I can't imagine one that doesn't play nice with some form of contacts.
It'd be nice to start abstracting these things with standardized formats so it doesn't matter if your contacts are in outlook/gmail/iphone/whatever...buuuuuuuuut that's not really the way things are right now and I doubt they'd change.
I mean, all the Apple apps do is use standardized protocols (IMAP, CalDAV, and CardDAV). Even iCloud itself is built around those. The only thing that prevents that elsewhere is primarily Google...
I mean, all the Apple apps do is use standardized protocols (IMAP, CalDAV, and CardDAV). Even iCloud itself is built around those. The only thing that prevents that elsewhere is primarily Google and Microsoft either doing their own proprietary thing or favoring their own proprietary thing (Gmail’s IMAP implementation for example is among the worst in popular usage).
That’s true, but I’m not sure how that factors in here? Lots of macOS/iOS users use e.g. Apple Mail but Fantastical or something else for calendar and it works because those third party apps use...
That’s true, but I’m not sure how that factors in here? Lots of macOS/iOS users use e.g. Apple Mail but Fantastical or something else for calendar and it works because those third party apps use the same standards. That’s what I’d like to see Mozilla to mirror.
This might be because I'm 22 but in my whole life, I've never had the need for either of these things and I struggle to imagine them as being essential to most people... We're getting less reliant...
Barely anyone wants a mail app that's not going to sync/work with their calendar, and I can't imagine one that doesn't play nice with some form of contacts.
This might be because I'm 22 but in my whole life, I've never had the need for either of these things and I struggle to imagine them as being essential to most people... We're getting less reliant on e-mail by the minute, wouldn't most people prefer simpler clients that just handle what they need it to handle?
Not in 90% of the professional world we're not. Sure slack has become a major tool for companies, but especially for any sort of inter company communication, the world still runs on email. Being...
We're getting less reliant on e-mail by the minute
Not in 90% of the professional world we're not. Sure slack has become a major tool for companies, but especially for any sort of inter company communication, the world still runs on email. Being able to sync email's/calendars/contact lists easily to keep everything together when managing large projects and teams is a fairly critical aspect for most operations.
You CAN work without it, or without it being as heavily integrated, but that's in techier industries with lower body counts usually. The average everyday "i click here, then there, and it does the thing" tech skill person is still very much using all 3.
My entire division, and likely based on my interactions, the entire "staff" side of the faculty/staff divide at my university lives by their calendars. I can't speak to faculty, and our counseling...
My entire division, and likely based on my interactions, the entire "staff" side of the faculty/staff divide at my university lives by their calendars. I can't speak to faculty, and our counseling and health services have specialized and more confidential scheduling software on top of just Outlook but they're definitely using email.
New software for most people isn't simpler. Even if it should be
I am a semi-happy user of Thunderbird, but I do not trust Mozilla to sustainably keep a service running as they do not have a track record in that area. The reason people choose Gmail or Office...
I am a semi-happy user of Thunderbird, but I do not trust Mozilla to sustainably keep a service running as they do not have a track record in that area. The reason people choose Gmail or Office 365 mail addresses is convenience and the fact that at this point they have decades of proven reliability.
Even if we consider that people might want to not be beholden to Microsoft or Google, I am also not sure if they actually have anything to offer there either. There are a plethora of other providers with a focus on security and a proven track record. Not to mention that this count increases by a lot once you factor in those services where you can attach your own domain.
The latter is something I recommend to anyone who is somewhat familiar with DNS settings for a domain. Simply because it gives you actual ownership of your mail, no matter the service where it is hosted you can always switch over to a new one as long as you own the domain.
One other issue I see here is public opinion. While Mozilla seems to go all in on thunderbird, until recently it was completely dropped by them with no Mozilla programmers working on it. The only work done was by volunteers.
I honestly do hope they manage to come up with a solid offering and enough paying customers to keep the service running. But, they are facing an uphill battle in an already fairly competitive market.
I sure help this manifests as a viable offering. Separate of the need for an alternative to Gmail/Gooogle docs and MS office 365, i tend to hope that Thunderbird rises to more prominence because i...
I sure help this manifests as a viable offering. Separate of the need for an alternative to Gmail/Gooogle docs and MS office 365, i tend to hope that Thunderbird rises to more prominence because i often consider thunderbird as an underdog, and i like supporting an nice underdog...I don't necessarily need them and their offering to be the top dog/best in class in all of this...simply a viable, worthwhile alternative.
Between Europe wanting to establish their own digital and cloud offerings and platforms, and more folks spinning up their own web presence (a la indieweb resurgence), to self-hosting getting more popular (at least more than i ever felt that it might have been), and plus a general vibe to move away at least partly away from some of the big platform/silos...maybe this effort will be met with some positive support from potential customers? I sure hope so! I pay for my email and have done so via my own domain names for probably more than 2 decades, and i sure hope this offering helps others do the same - both for techies or people wanting digital sovereignty, as well as, the "normies" who aren't technical but who purchase with their ethics. Fingers crossed for their success!
Not sure about Mozilla services. Unfortunately Thunderbird is easily the best email client on Linux, betterbird looks really sketchy and is just a soft fork anyway and would likely die with t-bird...
Not sure about Mozilla services.
Unfortunately Thunderbird is easily the best email client on Linux, betterbird looks really sketchy and is just a soft fork anyway and would likely die with t-bird if it went away.
Wish I could find an alternate email client that was as good or better. Geary is terrible, enlightenment and kmail too, and I'm not going to go all stone age and use elm or pine.
Have you tried Evolution? It's been quite a long time since I've used it last, and since it's a Gnome application I wouldn't doubt it's been ruined like every other Gnome app has been, but I...
Have you tried Evolution? It's been quite a long time since I've used it last, and since it's a Gnome application I wouldn't doubt it's been ruined like every other Gnome app has been, but I remember having a very positive opinion of it.
Not for years, and it would be entirely jarring on a KDE Plasma desktop. Must admit I haven't looked recently though Edit: I tried Evolution on KDE Plasma via flatpak and it's not great. The...
Not for years, and it would be entirely jarring on a KDE Plasma desktop. Must admit I haven't looked recently though
Edit:
I tried Evolution on KDE Plasma via flatpak and it's not great. The dialogues look all wrong and the scaling is terrible. It ain't gonna work
It’ll be interesting to see if this pans out.
Personally, of the many things that’ve kept me away from Thunderbird, one of them is how it tries to do several things and is medicore at most of them instead of squarely focusing on the mail aspect. I’d like to see an approach that’s more similar to that of Apple Mail/Contacts/Calendar, where the three are separate but work together and make it easy to swap out any of those individual apps for something else without throwing out the others too. The more Outlook-like design Thunderbird had since its inception has always felt cumbersome.
I’m not really sold on webmail, either. It just doesn’t work well unless you’re a single-address-for-everything sort of person. A local client is a must for anybody with multiple regularly used addresses.
All that said, I’m happy to see that they’re looking to embrace FastMail’s JMAP. From a developer perspective, IMAP is a rather cantakerous and tedious beast to work with which I believe is acting as a massive damper on local client projects. JMAP should be much easier to work with and would enable local client projects to flourish.
While I get that, I understand why they have to do this. If you want to take even a small bite of the marketshare you NEED your calendar/contacts/mail to integrate at minimum.
Barely anyone wants a mail app that's not going to sync/work with their calendar, and I can't imagine one that doesn't play nice with some form of contacts.
It'd be nice to start abstracting these things with standardized formats so it doesn't matter if your contacts are in outlook/gmail/iphone/whatever...buuuuuuuuut that's not really the way things are right now and I doubt they'd change.
I mean, all the Apple apps do is use standardized protocols (IMAP, CalDAV, and CardDAV). Even iCloud itself is built around those. The only thing that prevents that elsewhere is primarily Google and Microsoft either doing their own proprietary thing or favoring their own proprietary thing (Gmail’s IMAP implementation for example is among the worst in popular usage).
Right, but apple is known to be prickly in other areas (their entire environment according to some).
That’s true, but I’m not sure how that factors in here? Lots of macOS/iOS users use e.g. Apple Mail but Fantastical or something else for calendar and it works because those third party apps use the same standards. That’s what I’d like to see Mozilla to mirror.
This might be because I'm 22 but in my whole life, I've never had the need for either of these things and I struggle to imagine them as being essential to most people... We're getting less reliant on e-mail by the minute, wouldn't most people prefer simpler clients that just handle what they need it to handle?
Not in 90% of the professional world we're not. Sure slack has become a major tool for companies, but especially for any sort of inter company communication, the world still runs on email. Being able to sync email's/calendars/contact lists easily to keep everything together when managing large projects and teams is a fairly critical aspect for most operations.
You CAN work without it, or without it being as heavily integrated, but that's in techier industries with lower body counts usually. The average everyday "i click here, then there, and it does the thing" tech skill person is still very much using all 3.
My entire division, and likely based on my interactions, the entire "staff" side of the faculty/staff divide at my university lives by their calendars. I can't speak to faculty, and our counseling and health services have specialized and more confidential scheduling software on top of just Outlook but they're definitely using email.
New software for most people isn't simpler. Even if it should be
I am a semi-happy user of Thunderbird, but I do not trust Mozilla to sustainably keep a service running as they do not have a track record in that area. The reason people choose Gmail or Office 365 mail addresses is convenience and the fact that at this point they have decades of proven reliability.
Even if we consider that people might want to not be beholden to Microsoft or Google, I am also not sure if they actually have anything to offer there either. There are a plethora of other providers with a focus on security and a proven track record. Not to mention that this count increases by a lot once you factor in those services where you can attach your own domain.
The latter is something I recommend to anyone who is somewhat familiar with DNS settings for a domain. Simply because it gives you actual ownership of your mail, no matter the service where it is hosted you can always switch over to a new one as long as you own the domain.
One other issue I see here is public opinion. While Mozilla seems to go all in on thunderbird, until recently it was completely dropped by them with no Mozilla programmers working on it. The only work done was by volunteers.
I honestly do hope they manage to come up with a solid offering and enough paying customers to keep the service running. But, they are facing an uphill battle in an already fairly competitive market.
I sure help this manifests as a viable offering. Separate of the need for an alternative to Gmail/Gooogle docs and MS office 365, i tend to hope that Thunderbird rises to more prominence because i often consider thunderbird as an underdog, and i like supporting an nice underdog...I don't necessarily need them and their offering to be the top dog/best in class in all of this...simply a viable, worthwhile alternative.
Between Europe wanting to establish their own digital and cloud offerings and platforms, and more folks spinning up their own web presence (a la indieweb resurgence), to self-hosting getting more popular (at least more than i ever felt that it might have been), and plus a general vibe to move away at least partly away from some of the big platform/silos...maybe this effort will be met with some positive support from potential customers? I sure hope so! I pay for my email and have done so via my own domain names for probably more than 2 decades, and i sure hope this offering helps others do the same - both for techies or people wanting digital sovereignty, as well as, the "normies" who aren't technical but who purchase with their ethics. Fingers crossed for their success!
Not sure about Mozilla services.
Unfortunately Thunderbird is easily the best email client on Linux, betterbird looks really sketchy and is just a soft fork anyway and would likely die with t-bird if it went away.
Wish I could find an alternate email client that was as good or better. Geary is terrible, enlightenment and kmail too, and I'm not going to go all stone age and use elm or pine.
I was really hopeful for Geary because it was looking good early on, but lost steam and so we’re now back to square one.
Have you tried Evolution? It's been quite a long time since I've used it last, and since it's a Gnome application I wouldn't doubt it's been ruined like every other Gnome app has been, but I remember having a very positive opinion of it.
Not for years, and it would be entirely jarring on a KDE Plasma desktop. Must admit I haven't looked recently though
Edit:
I tried Evolution on KDE Plasma via flatpak and it's not great. The dialogues look all wrong and the scaling is terrible. It ain't gonna work
Please, no.