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The Thunderbird Redesign Survey

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the now-with-ponies dept.

canopic jug writes:

Mozilla is asking for feedback about Thunderbird and threatening a redesign. Thunderbird is the most feature-rich of the GUI mail clients, but as a result also has a lot of cruft. The goal of the survey is to learn what Thunderbird users think about the current design, what are the biggest drawbacks, what potential changes should there be, and so on. The claim is that the information will be considered before any actual changes are made to the program itself.

See also Bryan Lunduke's interview with newly fledged Thunderbird developer Ryan Sypes about future directions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BQugHIccTI

So if you rely on Thunderbird for any part of your work flow, speak up now before it ends up unusable trash like M$ Outlook or Apple Mail.

Original Submission

 
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The Thunderbird Redesign Survey | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 81 comments | Search Discussion
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  • (Score: 2) by Lester on Thursday January 18 2018, @09:53AM (9 children)

    by Lester (6231) on Thursday January 18 2018, @09:53AM (#624078) Journal

    Does anybody knows why SMTP is separated from IMAP/POP3 configuration? I know they are different services, but they are logically linked and should be in the same UI.

    Why in the earth the whole SMTP accounts configuration are packed all together in the list of accounts? SMTP configuration of each account should be added to server configuration tab of each account. In fact, when you create a new account it is in the same window, Why in the earth do they split it latter.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:05PM (8 children)

    by TheRaven (270) on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:05PM (#624101) Journal
    Because they're not always unified. Having them combined was actually one of my biggest UI annoyances with mail clients 15 years ago. In a number of cases, I have more outgoing mail servers than incoming, because some email addresses forward their incoming mail to an existing account, but need outgoing mail to go through the authorised server (now for SPF / DKIM, previously for things like mailing lists on the same domain not to reject them).
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    • (Score: 2) by Lester on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:07PM (7 children)

      by Lester (6231) on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:07PM (#624115) Journal

      Because they're not always unified.

      But they are in 99% of cases.

      Make and "Advanced" option for 1% of remaining cases. Don't make 99% waste time because a particular case.

      • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:31PM (6 children)

        by TheRaven (270) on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:31PM (#624121) Journal
        That's precisely what Thunderbird does. When you set up an account, you give it a username and password and it defaults to assuming that the config for each is the same and then tries a few variations, and finally asks you to enter more details if it doesn't work.
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        • (Score: 2) by Lester on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:10PM (5 children)

          by Lester (6231) on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:10PM (#624130) Journal

          It shoudn't be just in the set up, but when you modify or delete it.

          • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:33PM (4 children)

            by TheRaven (270) on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:33PM (#624140) Journal
            How would you design a UI that handles all of the cases well. The common cases are:
            • Same credentials, but different server name for IMAP / SMTP (most ISP-provided email).
            • Same credentials for IMAP and SMTP, same server, but more outgoing accounts than incoming.
            • Completely different IMAP and SMTP accounts.

            Make sure that, in your design, you allow other common use cases for the settings, such as someone who initially set up a POP3 account to move it to an IMAP4 account without redoing the entire config process.

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            • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Lester on Thursday January 18 2018, @03:34PM (3 children)

              by Lester (6231) on Thursday January 18 2018, @03:34PM (#624166) Journal

              Create email account
              advanced -> create only outgoing account

              Create email account
                  ingoing data
                      Button (copy ingoing data from other account)
                  SMTP
                      checkbox (Use same credendials as IMAP)
                      button (copy SMTP data from other account)

              And when you create a new account, the proposed data should a guess check other the configured accounts.

              • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday January 18 2018, @05:01PM (2 children)

                by TheRaven (270) on Thursday January 18 2018, @05:01PM (#624208) Journal
                Please read the rest of the thread (including your last post in this thread!). Thunderbird already does almost exactly what you describe for creating accounts. We are now talking about the UI for modifying accounts.
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                • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Thursday January 18 2018, @06:31PM (1 child)

                  by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 18 2018, @06:31PM (#624273) Journal

                  Why can't it use a similar UI and methodology for modifying accounts?

                  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday January 22 2018, @12:05PM

                    by TheRaven (270) on Monday January 22 2018, @12:05PM (#626039) Journal
                    So tell me how it would work. At the moment, I have a config for SMTP accounts and a config for POP3/IMAP4 accounts. What use case would I want to modify both together and how would you make that work without breaking the (common, though less common) case where an account of one type doesn't have a directly linked account of the other type?
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