SoylentNews

The Thunderbird Redesign Survey

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:35AM   
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

• "under the hood and invisible" "under the hood and invisible" (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:27PM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:27PM (#624104)

  Maybe a option to "export" long conversation where
  each conversation partner just clicks "reply" and it gets
  nested 10 levels deep, to a real conversation, like you see
  in all those chat application, on the left the sender and on the right
  the receiver. right-click and "export as conversation" preferably
  to something that can be copy-pasted into a regular text-editor...

  also a ENDSOLUTION to the freaking glob-of-heap file format of all emails.
  as it is now, ALL emails sit in one monster file that only the generating
  program can understand?

  with UTF-8 and some control characters (html like?) i am sure it could be
  turned into a monster text file that can be read by a mere human in a text editor?

• Re:"under the hood and invisible" (Score: 3, Informative) by termigator on Thursday January 18 2018, @05:22PM

  by termigator (4271) on Thursday January 18 2018, @05:22PM (#624223)

  also a ENDSOLUTION to the freaking glob-of-heap file format of all emails.
  as it is now, ALL emails sit in one monster file that only the generating
  program can understand?

  IIRC, Thunderbird basically uses the old UUCP mbox format for each folder: Emails are stored in single file, seperated by separator line (usually starting with "From "). To provide faster access to mail data, Thunderbird has a separate index to access messages in the file by offset.

  The mbox format is very old and textual in nature, so it is easy to process.

  For those less inclined to look under the hood, there is an extension for Thunderbird that provides nice import/export facilities.

  Most MUAs either use a mbox-style storage format or a single-file-per-message format to store raw mail data. Microsoft Outhouse^H^H^H^H^Hlook is an exception and a PITA for those that need to examine raw email data. In the past, when some asks me help for an email-related problem, I typically like to see the raw email data. Fairly straight-forward to do in MUAs not called Outlook.

  Parent