Thunderbird is go: 139 follows closely on Firefox's heels Mozilla subsidiary MZLA has released the latest version of its messaging client, with some handy extras. Thunderbird 139 is out, following the new monthly release cycle that we covered a month ago. Thunderbird now has short-term releases that track the upstream Firefox releases, but if you don't want your email client to …
I find the free version of Proton a bit limited but OK. If you don't mind paying, the full version is better and has an included desktop version. I've set mine up to deal with a very old Gmail account, which is less hassle than Google's stuff. I used to host my own Linux server, but now I'm too old to bother with the faff.
> Don't think I've used a Desktop/Laptop email client since my days using Eudora.
So, mainly webmail, then?
Do you host and run it yourself? If not, you may want to consider using T'bird to maintain a local archive, just in case.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/26/new_betas_of_firefox_and_tbird/
I largely stopped using them for a decade or more, I must admit. I am slowly shifting back to doing more and more work in them.
1. It brings all of half a dozen different email accounts into the same place.
2. I get up to dozens of story pitches a day, and I find that asking people to reply in plain text with bottom-posting very quickly sorts marketroids from techies. If they can do it, they can tell me interesting things. If they can't do plain text and bottom-posting, they probably have nothing useful to say to me.
3. I get my laptop to sync before I travel, and I can work on my eternal email backlog when I'm offline.
4. I occasionally use Usenet. T'bird is still good for that.
5. I occasionally use Matrix. It's my default client for that.
6. It's a handy new mail notifier which also maintains a local archive should any of my accounts get closed down or disappear. I've been on email since 1985. It's happened several times.
Reversing top posting gets you bottom posting (all previous posts in full, followed by the reply) which is just as bad.
What we actually want is interleaved posting, where you quote only the points you are replying to, and put your contribution below each point.
Doing that automatically would be very difficult, although I'm sure AI could hallucinate up something.
> However, I don't like bottom-posting.
The opposite of top posting (or retard quoting, as I prefer to describe it) is not bottom posting: it's (trimmed and) interleaved quoting. ;-)
> Luckily, I don't think I will ever be sending you a story pitch.
I probably won't be either, but I do like Liam's strategy for separating the wheat from the chaff. :-D
Have ran Evolution for more than a decade now. And with very little (Evolution!) complaints I must admit. Since I have to make my money by getting my email/ calendars from other peoples MS Exchange servers, and because it was a PITA to get (and keep!) it setup (OAuth2) and running (But why do you not buy a Windows computer then?), I'm kind of hesitant to fix it if it is not broken.
Having said that though, (the GUI of) Evolution is also not safe from the people with the Gnome kiddie crayons and too much phone screen time on their hands, and upon sync between my different systems I already have to
gsettings set org.gnome.evolution.shell use-header-bar false;sed -i "'s/Enabled=true/Enabled=false/g'" $HOME/.config/evolution/sources/rss.source
so it becomes a tool again that you can make your money with efficiently.
The threat out of the Gnome camp however is that "Gnome can taketh away" this little GUI tweak. And since we are on the topic of TBird anyway...
Many mention using it with webmail. But what are your experiences with plugging it into EWS, OAuth2 and stuff? All the stuff like email, calendar, contacts and tasks still working? Both local and remote?
@Liam: Coming your way again on 2 wheels tomorrow...
I like the 'use-header-bar false' setting too; but what does the change to rss.source do?
In my copy of rss.source it looks like the sed will change [Refresh] but I'm not familiar with that.
At the moment I'm only using evolution for webmail account(s) but I've also briefly experimented with using it for a self-hosted local mail spool, e.g. for those rare times I want GUI mail instead of Mutt, and it seemed to work well enough, such that I could switch back and forth between mail clients without much peril.
I didn't see a way to do that switching with Thunderbird, as I understand it TB moves (not copies) everything into its own mailbox repository, so Mutt et al wouldn't find your mail afterwards.
...but what does the change to rss.source do?
It disables and removes an annoying and useless News and Blogs entry in the tree view on the left (scroll down and you see it) where you can have all your accounts and their subfolders listed. And since, contrary to the Gnome people, I do not think that having the "Better Apple Pie" and "More Lego Adverntures" between my business email accounts is useful, I disable it like that, killing it at birth.
And to add to my own moaning: it seems "there are more of us", so after about 2 years @Gnome are contemplating making the GUI customisable in Evolution ("It's for 3.55.1+") direct, sparked by the issue we were discussing originally. Have a look here. Not sure about the buttons in the topbar though...
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution/-/issues/2294
(My apologies to the TBird people for this subject highjacking...)
Divorced from windows and outlook in 2008 and married linux and evolution. At that time only evolution could import Posts. Since then all old pst files work great in evolution . Own hosted emails access , on line hotmail, Gmail etc in one cliënt. Many email accounts and an move all email to local storage. It has been a great tool. Only deleting and moving to trash for Gmail mails is a bit funky.
Sorry, but I will refuse to do that. 99% of people stick with the default: top-posting and HTML/rich text.
>2. I get up to dozens of story pitches a day, and I find that asking people to reply in plain text with bottom-posting very quickly sorts marketroids from techies. If they can do it, they can tell me interesting things. If they can't do plain text and bottom-posting, they probably have nothing useful to say to me.
I'm still on 102.15.1 (I know it's insecure) because I don't like the fact the TB user interface has gone "full outlook" on us, mimicking the "master shit" of email clients. I know that there will come a time when I'll have to eat the shit myself, I cannot stay on 102 forever.
Take a look at Seamonkey, if only for the email part. It's basically a slower-moving T'bird under the covers but still mostly sane interface-wise although wrapping the calendar into it instead of having a separate window has buggered it up a bit, nothing like the main T'bird release, through.
> I don't like the fact the TB user interface has gone "full outlook" on us
The article specifically addresses how to turn that off.
Does the screenshot look like what you're thinking of?
Basically all the recent changes can be turned off again, and that is what I do.
> Don't change the ui on a whim, and add new functionality only when required.
I don't think it's on a whim.
A lot of people actively like the way that things like Outlook and Gmail work, and to tempt those folks to a local client, giving them the tools they've grown to like helps. That makes sense to me.
Things like menu bars missing are because we didn't teach the children how to use computers properly and so they don't know.
With a moving target like a FOSS email client, I think "release it on a fixed cadence" makes sense. It is a very big, old, complicated codebase, and there will always be some bugs. There is no way to say "it's ready", so it's better to have a fixed cycle of snapshots.
Also, personally, I like dual-cadence release cycles.
Ubuntu: we release the stable version every 2 years, but you can get a fresh tested working version every 6 months if you need the latest code.
Mozilla: we release a stable version annually, but you can get a fresh version every month.
I prefer this to:
Debian: we release every two years. Deal with the old stuff.
Red Hat: every _three_ years and we will fix it for a decade... if you pay us a thousand per seat per month.
Maybe it's just me?
For the people who actively like Outlook and Gmail there's already Outlook and Gmail. They're catered for.
A lot of other people actively dislike how Outlook and Gmail work. Shouldn't the purpose of other clients be to put them first?
As to the release cadence, I find just a few things break over a couple of years. They're easier to deal with than having stuff broken every 6 months.
> For the people who actively like Outlook and Gmail there's already Outlook and Gmail. They're catered for.
You seem especially determined to miss the points here, so permit me to belabour you about the head with them.
Outlook is widely used but it's also proprietary, works best with a proprietary server over a proprietary protocol, and is native to a single platform and doesn't work well on anything else.
A FOSS alternative that's entirely open, talks umpteen open protocols, runs on all major desktop OSes, and which can talk to Exchange Server if the admin ticks a couple of boxes -- that is a GOOD THING.
If the bar to using it is that it lacks a couple of views, then add those views, yes.
Gmail is closed source and it's a web app that only works with one vendor's proprietary (albeit free) service.
If that service shuts down, you lose everything.
It has innovated in UI.
If adding those UI innovations to a FOSS client makes it easier for _me_ to switch then I will have some of that, thank you very much, and you can take your failed attempt at snobbish superiority and use your imagination for what I'd like you to do with it.
Secondly, if Google _does_ nuke someone's account, or Hotmail or Outlook.com or any webmail, then if they run Thunderbird, they get to keep all their mails and all their contacts and a local copy of their calendar... that is a huge win.
> A lot of other people actively dislike how Outlook and Gmail work. Shouldn't the purpose of other clients be to put them first?
NO it should not.
So long as it accommodates the old farts who have lost the neuroplasticity to adapt to a change, then if it only requires TWO CLICKS to change back that is 100% fine.
> Upgrade to a new changed version, and turn off the changes? Hardly seems worth it.
It's an internet-facing client app. I want all the latest security updates, please, and I also want any tweaks to make Javascript faster, any new chat or authentication protocols it supports, and if I have problems, I want to be able to ask and not be told "You're not running the current release. That was fixed last year."
I am happy to run a word processor that was released 28 years ago, but I'd rather not risk an email client that old, ta.
I want to like Thunderbird, I really do. But I just like Apple Mail better. The TB UI is a bit of a mess, and has been for a long time. And I don't want my calendar and contacts to be in the same program as my email, Apple's approach with separate apps is just better. I despise Outsuck with every fiber of my being, it's NOT a model to mimic.
> But I just like Apple Mail better.
OK, fair enough. _De gustibus non est disputandum._
I ran Mail.app for years. I used apps like CageFighter to undo OS X "modernisations" like making all the buttons monochrome and the same shape.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050429044057/http://otierney.net/cagefighter/
I switched when I realised I had to futz around with a menu to mark a message as unread in Mail.app whereas in T'bird I can just click the little blue status button directly.
And, of course, the same mail UI whether I'm on a desktop Mac or a Linux laptop.
> Card View is for Stupid People.
No... I see and sympathise with those who want a line or two of body-text content preview in the message list.
Gmail is a superb web app, one of the best around. The solutions the Gmail team came up with for mail in a web browser are often inspired.
Compare with Hotmail. I've had an account for 29 years, I think, gods help us -- man and boy less wrinkly less embittered man.
It was a dog-walking-on-its-hind-legs proposition when it was new, and it got worse when MS bought it. It's a horrible clumsy interface. The various Oath services are worse.
At least in Gmail I can bottom-post in plain text like a functional adult professional. Not on those others.
But I only have Gmail at Google's whim. Once they turned it off, for a few hours, and I panicked when I realised how much I was at their mercy. OK, sure, I had 4 other accounts to fall back on, but still.
Since then: keep a local backup. But gradually I am shifting back to T'bird first.
But I had calls yesterday from desperate people for whom this update ruined their day. I'm all for options, particularly when installing from scratch, but when someone has a working application they are used to the layout of it's at the very least extremely bad manners to randomly muck that about without any warning or their consent.
Personally I hope never to have to live without notmuch again so until TB can handle notmuch as a backend I'll stick with neomutt and aerc
> But I had calls yesterday from desperate people for whom this update ruined their day.
Yeah, the Mozilla bug about the update changing layouts is seeing some activity:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1968963
But it doesn't break the app. It still works. It just may not have the view they're expecting, but it is 100% functional. This is a purely cosmetic bug. It's still a bug, but not a bad one.
I think that is was around 2003 that I moved to it on Windows. Lookout was for work and was always a PITA with those pesky .PST files.
Since then I have moved the email tree from Windows to Linux and since 2009, OS/X, MacOS.
I've never bothered with Apple Mail. Didn't need to. I had all my accounts in one place (and of five different hosts on three continents).
I have contributed a bit towards their development and if ERNIE says 'Yes' next month, they will get some more.
The switch to card view for existing table view users when they upgrade to version 139 is actually a bug:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1968963
I suspect the vast majority of existing Thunderbird users have never used card view - it seems to be a much less efficient use of space than table view to me - I like having one line per e-mail in my message list - any other format doesn't make logical sense to me or to most people I suspect.
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