Thunderbird 142 lands with modest upgrades – plus talk of Pro service ahead Mozilla-owned subsidiary MZLA has released a new version of the Thunderbird messaging client and shared details on the forthcoming paid Thunderbird Pro service. Thunderbird 142 touched down at the same time as Firefox 142. The release notes list 25 bug fixes, and there's an additional list of fixed security vulnerabilities. …
I'm still hanging on with Thunderbird even though they did hideous things to the UI a while back, which broke my long standing workflow in a single update.
I tried Betterbird but IIRC it didn't work properly for me, nor did it fix the UI issues that were bugging me, so for a while i pinned TB to the version before the "upgrade". But alas I eventually (I think initially by accident) relented and installed the current version with a few tweaks to help my sanity.
It still irks me that TB decided to force a major change to the UI onto established users without any choice in the matter. They should take a leaf out of Libre Office's book here, which tends to leave established layouts alone whilst offering the latest whizzy UI to new users.
I still miss the old UI but for now I'm coping with the new one. Meanwhile they're developing stuff in the background and thankfully, day to day, it rarely affects me... I wish they'd fix the HTML email editor as it's really clunky and buggy... For starters, when i begin an email in plain text (my default) and happen to add an element such as emboldened text which triggers it to convert the message to HTML, the text size instantly (and irreversibly) shrinks to a tiny font meaning I have to select all and enlarge it again.
And if you've ever tried inserting a table.... That's excruciating!
Still I'll take TB over Outlook or Gmail any day - Outlook is so shockingly bad I don't think TB could even deliberately become worse. But then again I'm often faced with businesses and users who are ditching thunderbird for Outlook (or worse, Apple Mail; or worse still, Windows Mail!) and I honestly can't get any coherent answers from them as to why.. I've been told that Thunderbird "looks too old fashioned" or that "I just prefer Outlook" even through there's never any compelling reason. Sad but true, unfortunately.
For me, nothing has ever come close to the lightning fast search in Thunderbird. Let's just say that I'm not the best at organising my email, yet the quick search in the inbox, easily expanding to a full search across folders and mailboxes means that I can always find what I need within moments. Meanwhile I can never find anything in Outlook, including recently the search bar itself which they've permanently moved into the goddamn title bar (seriously everybody, stop doing that!)..
They just care about the UI, and they only work towards making TB look like Outlook, so it's enshittification full steam ahead!
And why? Because, as you stated, people use Outlook because it looks better (ugh!) than TB. Because TB is "so old" (by "old" do you mean "useful", maybe?)
Anyway, we "oldies" are screwed, there is no place in this new world of cloud services with dumbed-down three-big-buttons interfaces with flat grey on grey colours.
And TB will fade into oblivion because they can't get it right. They don't get the idea that TB is not Outlook. Come on, even Outlook is not Outlook anymore. The "NEW" outlook is a webmail. MS is ditching Outlook, and TB is trying to become Outlook? A little too late, they are trying to come to the party when the police has already come and shut the party down for good.
Oh, and what about the old fashioned email? Like supporting IMAP and SIEVE for people who DO NOT use Copilot365? No way, they must support Exchange!
What a surprise they will have once MS will officially ditch Outlook (old) and the whole Exchange protocol to support only Outlook(new) which is a wrapper around a webmail session in Edge.
> I wish they'd fix the HTML email editor as it's really clunky and buggy.
I'll probably get downvoted. Tough.
Please do not do this. Ever. No HTML in emails.
https://useplaintext.email/
I saw the bit where you mentioned starting in text and then adding it... All I am saying is that in 40 years on email now (aaaargh) I have never *EVER* needed to do this.
HTML is not designed for live editing, anyway. I occasionally fire up Seamonkey when I need to edit an article that's already in HTML and the Composer editor is about the best there is these days. They probably can't fix bad editing of something that was never meant to be edited on-the-fly or in WSYIWYG.
Have my upvote.
HTML email is, at its best, a waste of time and resources. At its worst it's the tool of spammers and scammers. Honest people send email in plain text.
Apropos Thunderbird, it's a mail client I would really want to like, as it's free and open and multi platform. About a year ago I switched to Thunderbird for my private use, to drag myself into the modern world. I seriously gave it a try, but last month I went back to Mutt. To me, as an old dog, It felt like coming home.
Thunderbird is just unwieldy, compared to Mutt. Some people may think that Mutt is hard to configure, but typing up a muttrc is actually a lot more straightforward than writing the user.js that Thunderbird relies on for a number of, what are to me, vital settings. Thunderbird hasn't got a comprehensive manual to guide you in these matters, but Mutt has: http://mutt.org/doc/manual/
> I have found myself in need of sending an email with bold text or highlighted parts
Thunderbird understands and displays the old pre-Mardown conventions. So do the Meta tools Whatsapp and FB Messenger.
As an example, this word is in *bold* while this is /italic/ and this is _underlined_.
When that's not enough, I use CAPS LOCK. :-)
I would like to completely agree with this but I can't because HTML in emails has been completely normalised in all forms of marketing and for any messages using even basic formatting.
If I simply want to include some bold text in an email then thunderbird immediately converts the entire message to HTML and in turn causes all the text to shrink to an unacceptably tiny font - this conversion is also irreversible so far as I can tell. The same applies when replying to an html email and quoting back the original message.
I'd be all for using markdown instead but the fact of the matter is that all the mainstream webmail providers and Outlook make HTML the default format and my clients expect to be able to send messages with their logo embedded in the message and use the message editor like a word processor..
Does HTML email suck!? Yes! Massively, but it's what we've got. And whilst thunderbird mainly does a good job of rendering incoming HTML emails, the message editor really sucks at editing them and it needs to improve because everybody else's editor is better.
> I'm still hanging on with Thunderbird even though they did hideous things to the UI a while back, which broke my long standing workflow in a single update.
You're not alone, I really hate Thunderbird, that update was disastrous: it silently upgraded my ancient profile (which has 6 e-mail accounts) so I couldn't go back to a previous version, infuriating. And what can I say about the UI? OMG!!! awful, inconvenient, unusable, all is too big or too small; who was in charge of its design? He/she must be jailed for a long time.
> sort the contents of the folder list. .....it has a choice of views:
That's been true for years. In fact the link you give is at least 7 years ago. I seem to remember finding and doing this myself longer ago than that. (I did user support and some of the messes users got into.....) The headline should be "T-Bird obfuscates simple operations".
> That's been true for years.
Yes, I know it has.
Note the first few comments to this story, above yours: "OMG they broke the UI".
Almost all the new stuff can be turned off or put back to how it was. My Thunderbird today looks very much the same as it did a decade ago.
I am trying to point out to people that all this stuff is _optional._
I've just written an application to strip all the c**p out of MBOX archives.......and load the stripped data into a SQLITE3 database.
The basic idea is to get rid of all the stuff the email user never sees: the headers, the HTML, the ASCII encoding of UNICODE, etc., etc.
I've also stripped out the BASE64 stuff representing attachments. All that is left is From: To: Cc: Bcc: and body text.
It's an eye opener. One 700MB Inbox compresses to 7MB of SQL. A more recent Inbox compresses 2GB to 20MB of SQL.
....and I get a normalised representation of the mail which is EASILY searchable.
What's going on here? Well one of the main "features" which gets stripped out is the HUGE amount of header data
which is inserted into email by service providers (yup....inserted by service providers) with header labels like:
x-antiabuse:
x-antispamcloud-domain:
x-antispamcloud-outgoing-class:
x-antispamcloud-outgoing-evidence:
x-antispamcloud-username:
x-antivirus:
x-antivirus-status:
Now....I use Thunderbird a lot, and it's very useful......but just look at those compression numbers!!
This is a different problem. It's not a Thunderbird problem. The problem with the waste of space comes from.... suspense... MICROSOFT! (As usual)
Only MS could cause an email containing no images, no signature, no nothing, only the word "Ok" to be 16Kb in size.
Then there are the signatures, with hundreds of Kbytes of useless images and hundreds of useless words about saving the planet, about how these emails are confidential, etc etc.
In the end that "Ok" mail is 300Kb, and MS is happy about it because they can sell you more and more space on Copilot365.
@Kurgan
Thanks for the M$ insight............but I never said it was a Thunderbird problem.
I implied that it was a "service provider" problem.....with consequences caused by "service providers inserting c**p" into emails............
...............as indeed your reply confirms!
That said......it also shows that searching MBOX archives can be very difficult...............except, of course, if you have a nice compressed SQL version of your MBOX archive!!
> the waste of space comes from....
Maybe my users and I are strange (OK, we ARE), but easily 80%-90% of a mailbox's bulk is, and always was, PICTURES. Simple cropping and compression helps, but nobody does that.
I found myself trimming and squeezing cellphone pics yesterday and thought "Why bother!?"
> strip all the c**p out of MBOX
That is not "c**p", it's metadata, and it's very valuable and worth having.
Instead of wasting your time with reinventing wheels to see if you can make them even rounder, switch to storing on Maildir instead, and keep it on a filesystem with compression and ideally dedup.
Then you keep the metadata which you are going to find you miss, and you get the space savings too.
What irks me most about Thunderbird is the fact that it’s fiddly (end users would say “hard”) to set up HTML based signatures. It may not be a necessity, and it may sometimes look ugly, but the requirement to make signatures with pictures and bold and underline and that sort of thing is almost ubiquitous in business use. So why the hell doesn’t Thunderbirds make this easier? The current process of starting an email with your desired sig and then saving it somewhere and then pointing the signature to to it is cumbersome to say the least.
Thunderbird could have been developed into a combined e-mail client and distributed social media network, with posts being moved between users as encrypted e-mail attachments. The social media feed is just a different way of displaying content from e-mail. Users who wanted discounts and vouchers could have signed up for customised advertising based on their own stated interests, offering an income for the project.
Changing how a menu or pane is displayed is not really innovation, is it?
I was quite impressed with TrustedBird when I set it up for a few users well over a decade ago - I think as a replacement for Eudora.
I don't think it has been updated much since and likely unable to handle modern authentication oauth2 so probably not too useful today.
When I recall the massive jump from no email to being able send and receive plain text email from other users connected to the growing internet often with a turnaround time of mere minutes, I am saddened by subsequent degradation of the medium from many causes but not the least from straying from plain text.
There is very little that cannot be effectively communicated in text (utf8.)
Almost all markup and non textual content is unnecessary and rarely called for (by the recipient.) Attachments should be reserved for clarification or elaboration of the core text communication.
I don't have any real gripes with TB - moved to it from Outlook some years ago when MS started to remove all the useful features from that program.
My only criticism is the search.
If you type a search phrase and get it wrong, when you go back to the search box the phrase you typed is not available for editing and you have to re-type the whole thing. Given that old age makes my typing about as accurate as a shotgun on a rifle-range this is more annoying than it should be.
If someone pops up to tell me there is a setting that I haven't found that gets around this I will be just as pleased as if TB fixes it!
8)
