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.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:46AM (13 children)
They're going to GNOMEify it. The backwash from mobile/touch design has covered the desktop in festering garbage.
We need Chinese walls between mobile and desktop designers, and having touched an iphone EVER disqualifies you from doing desktop UI design.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by frojack on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:05AM (4 children)
It took 10 years to get most of the bugs out and the interface stabilized to the point where it is usable, even if not fully intuitive.
Just leave it the fuck alone for godsake.
I doubt these guys are smart enough to add something make client side encryption automatic and easy without plugins.
They can't even handle 2FA properly.
So send those guys some beer tickets and a truck full dog food and 20 Rottweilers to guard the code.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bob_super on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:37AM (1 child)
> It took 10 years to get most of the bugs out and the interface stabilized
Therefore running out of interesting bugs to fix, and not using $Fashionable_platform and $Marketable_new_language.
If it ain't broken, and it ain't changing, it's great for users, not for programmers.
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday January 18 2018, @06:31PM
Well, with how few programmers that are working on Thunderbird, minimal change seems best.
From lurking on various mailing lists and newsgroups, it seems that it is going to take all their programmers to just keep legacy add-ons working and/or migrate to the new add-on paradigm.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Friday January 19 2018, @04:48AM (1 child)
It's FOSS. No need to guard the code, just download a copy of the version you like and it will never change.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 20 2018, @02:10PM
Bitrot is a thing, and old versions are known to disappear.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:01AM (2 children)
I'm out of mod points, but damn, why isn't this modded up to +500?
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @08:20AM (1 child)
'Cause the UI goes only up to 5. Wanna rewrite it?
(Score: 3, Funny) by fyngyrz on Thursday January 18 2018, @10:27AM
You have no idea, lol
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TheRaven on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:00PM (1 child)
I've touched an iPhone and can honestly say that the iOS mail client is the worst that I have ever used. The desktop Apple mail client is a lot better and all of the recent UI regressions have been a result of trying to make it more like the iOS one. This redesign seems to be trying to make Thunderbird look more like the iOS mail client.
The survey is also pretty annoying. It asks if you think the existing Thunderbird UI is boring, with an implicit assumption that this is a bad thing. It is not. A good UI is boring. It is invisible. If I notice the UI in normal operation of the program, then you are doing something wrong. The purpose of a good UI is to get out of my way and make the things that I want to do easier. Every time I press a button, you should be thinking 'did we really need that to be a button?' If I need to interact with three UI elements to accomplish a task, you should be thinking 'could that be a single UI element?'
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @07:44PM
Does it at least ask whether it needs a hamburger menu?
And why doesn't this site have a hamburger menu?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by crafoo on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:58PM
Backwash, I like that. Very descriptive and accurate. Forcing desktop users to drink the spit and mucus of mouth-breathing mobile users. 2018 is going to be a great year.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by digitalaudiorock on Thursday January 18 2018, @04:20PM (1 child)
Have any of you checked out the actual "survey"? I mean for the love of all that is Holy! I'm not seeing any options for "leave it the fuck alone", but instead questions asking if the current interface looks "professional" and better yet, whether or not it's "inspiring"?? OMFG...I'm already 99% sure that a palemoon-like fork will be needed at some point. What a bunch of self important ass-hats.
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday January 18 2018, @06:41PM
There already is a PaleMoon style fork of Thunderbird. Hmm, seems to have been discontinued due to lack of time, funds and users. I'd guess it could be brought back to life.
https://www.fossamail.org/ [fossamail.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by drussell on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:46AM
Please don't try to do whatever you tried to do to Firefox...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:46AM (3 children)
Outlooks flow works decently. Apple, gmail, outlook.com. Now THOSE are a pain in the ass to use.
They basically have eudoras. Which is alright. But kinda of meh and seems lacking. I knew that was true when QCOM basically told everyone to stop using it. It is fine to use if you know how. But it has a early 90s application learning curve.
(Score: 2) by drussell on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:51AM (2 children)
I liked Eudora
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:58AM (1 child)
Yes but it suffers from high information density.
I prefer low information density, acres of whitespace, and I love scrolling. Ideally there should be nothing but a picture of a businessman on the phone above-the-fold.
In case you can't tell I am being sarcastic. No more apples in the vending machine please!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @08:07AM
I love whitespace and large, I mean LARGE icons with tiny skeletal graphics inside that all look like rectangles. Spread them around the screen - cancel in the top right, save in the bottom left, make me scroll baby! Use an arrow for save and undo and back and return to previous list. Four buttons max. Anything else is a key combination - I'll get it eventually.
It's modern, sleek, abstract and challenges my preconceptions. It's art but functional, a new kind of art for the 21st century. Makes me happy and makes me sad. Can't be captured by my primitive notions.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Justin Case on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:15AM (14 children)
It must be time to crap all over the user interface!
C'mon. Just leave it be. Thunderbird is about the only thing that hasn't been ruined in the last decade.
About a year ago I nearly switched to alpine. Got it working, used it a while, wanted to make some minor tweaks but put it on the back burner. This may be the shove that pushes me back to where I really want to be, no goddamn GUI!
And of course the survey page is a vomitorium of CSS and scripts and horrendously bloated inscrutable code. Yeah, these are the people I want tinkering with Thunderbird.
Fucking idiots! Please, really, just stop. Stop it already.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Justin Case on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:25AM (11 children)
Fuck the fucking fuckers to fucking hell!
I just took the survey (in my radiation-shielded browser that runs fucking scripts) and it is clear the way they've stacked the questions that they've already decided.
"Is this interface boring or exciting?"
IT IS NOT YOUR JOB TO EXCITE ME
Just deliver the goddamn mail!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by coolgopher on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:31AM
No no no, you're being over excited now. The question was whether the UI was inspiring.
Other than that I'm with you 100% on this. The current UI is full-featured and works well. I don't want it prettified, spaceified or dumbed down further.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:38AM (1 child)
If you look at the pictures, one thing I immediately noticed is that the screenshots were taken on screens with different resolutions. This makes the old version (on the smaller screen) appear to be more cluttered and with more dead space, as the padding is physically larger on the smaller screen.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by http on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:33AM
In addition, one version shows active events and the other doesn't.
Some fucker is trying to put their thumb on the scale.
I browse at -1 when I have mod points. It's unsettling.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Arik on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:25AM (1 child)
Boring is good, exciting is bad, when it comes to UIs.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @08:13AM
WRONG. The Principle of Least Astonishment is outdated. Click in the whitespace.... BOOM! Deleted. CTRL-C... BOOM! Shutdown.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:43AM (1 child)
I think you may be correct that, as usual, the Gnomists* already have their unusable build with the flat look and silly defaults in the wings. As a formailty, before clicking 'commit' to CVS / GiT / whatever, they "run a user survey."
At this moment, Thunderbird is working fine for me. They should please not try to 'modernize' it by screwing it up.
* Gnomists, n.: a cult of early 21st century software developers whose mission was to introduce maximum unusability in applications they worked on. The cult seems to have originated from the Gnome 3 desktop developers. Fortunately for mankind, the cult were totally wiped out worldwide in the revolutions of the mid 2020's.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday January 18 2018, @05:55AM
If they do this I'm going to use Sylpheed, Claws, or even learn Mutt/Pine instead.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @03:05AM (3 children)
Pick the rightmost option, the 7, for everything about the old UI. Pick the leftmost option, the 1, for everything about the new UI.
Oh yeah, the old one is so simple and modern and exciting! The new one is boring, obsolete, and confusing!
There are open-ended questions. We should all demand these features:
1. Restore the original threading algorithm: https://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html [jwz.org]
2. Allow full traditional control of the Debian bug system, including easy insertion of the non-standard email header.
3. Allow reliable and easy sending of patches to the linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org mailing list. This means not fucking with whitespace at all. Don't word-wrap. Don't do HTML. Don't convert between tabs and spaces. Don't remove spaces from the ends of the lines. Don't remove empty lines from the end of the email. Don't MIME encode anything.
4. Allow forcing UTF-8, latin-1, or ASCII. Allow forcing just-send-8bit behavior.
5. Fully support both types of X11 copy-and-paste operations. Old-style is highlight to copy, then middle click to paste. New-style is Control-C to copy a selection and Control-V to paste.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:12PM
That's too obvious, and too easy to filter out. The important thing is to be consistently more on the right for the old design than for the new design.
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday January 18 2018, @06:47PM
Most of what you list can be accomplished with old style add-ons. And Thunderbird correctly supports copy and paste with the correct ctrl-insert and shift-insert, no need to copy Apple.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @06:49PM
Should be "Swipe right if you think it is exciting" and "Swipe left if you think it is boring"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Arik on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:27AM
1360 lines of junk to render a blank page. Utter incompetence. What do you expect from the people that ruined Firefox?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:05PM
Goodness yes! Alpine and Claws-Mail are what I use, except when I'm at work. HTML mail is an abomination. Perhaps we should have markdown or something if we need formatting. At least I can tell Seamonkey to ignore font and color styles--idiots don't realize I don't even see their cute purple 24pt Comic Sans text with their name in the cursive font like it's their handwritten signature or something. I'm otherwise stuck with Seamonkey at work because I need something to parse out the HTML and pages of x-mso-ermahgerd and x-mso-you-do-not-know-de-wae styles.
For that matter, why is it impossible for HTML mail composers like Outlook to use only a few tags like <em> or <strong>, maybe a <ol> here or <ul> there?
Agh, I already know the answer. Fucking sales and marketing idiots who don't even have the mental faculties to pass a middle school introductory algebra class! And they're proud of the fact that they're too intellectually deficient to handle middle school maths!
(Score: 5, Informative) by looorg on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:16AM (8 children)
Oh great. So what is a proper replacement for Thunderbird since this is probably the prelude to the eventual massive design fuckup.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:28AM
Mutt
(Score: 5, Touché) by black6host on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:29AM (2 children)
You may be right regarding the massive fuckup. Here's what I'd be concerned about: Does the cruft they speak of include functionality of any sort? The reason I ask this is because, as a developer for many years and a user of other's work, I discovered that the functionality I thought I was providing was not necessarily how it was actually used. Users will figure out all kinds of ways to abuse your program to make it conform to their will :) So, as a developer, you might think that a feature should be deprecated and then removed but that really fucks up one, or more, of your users who are using your software in ways you couldn't think of.
I may have relegated a feature to an obscure menu but I made sure it remained for those few who used it and built their workflow around it.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:35AM
We need a "Good Citzen" mod, I think.
In lieu of that, I modded you Touche' for this:
OMG is this ever a stone truth. I made parts of the UI of my SDR app configurable. Users send me screenshots for various reasons. Some of them make me want to drink. Heavily. And I really don't drink. Much.
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:34PM
This is why Exchange still hasn't properly gotten rid of public folders. Try as they might, it keeps turning out users have all kinds of crazy uses for them that weren't anticipated, and the replacements still aren't quite adequate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:30AM
Emacs
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:19AM (2 children)
Unfortunately there isn't much of one which is multi-platform. Linux has good email clients available, but Windows is really lacking these days.
Aside from Thunderbird, running your own webmail client like Rainloop might be the only other multi-platform, open source solution. I am genuinely interested in email client alternatives if anyone does know of one.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @04:26AM
Claws Mail for Windows: http://www.claws-mail.org/win32/ [claws-mail.org]
I've been using it for over 15 years on various Linux distros.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dry on Thursday January 18 2018, @06:52PM
For now there is always SeaMonkey, which shares most of its mail code with Thunderbird. Unluckily SeaMonkey has the same problem as Thunderbird, how to proceed with Mozilla fucking up the back end. It's currently on the 52ESR backend channel and there are rumours it may stay there with some Linux dists backporting security fixes.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:43AM (1 child)
there's some way to do that that I long ago forgot.
For TB to get the junk filtering right, you need to declare Not Junk a whole bunch of your legitimate mail.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @04:27AM
At least on my box currently you click a small icon of flame to mark a post spam and click it again to mark it not spam.
I get very few spams to my obscure email addy and mostly they haven't been marked so.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:58AM (1 child)
... For God's sake, LEAVE IT ALONE. It's not broken. When you attempt to fix what's not broken, you usually wind up screwing it up.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by canopic jug on Thursday January 18 2018, @08:30AM
During his interview, Bryan Lunduke was able to get Ryan Sipes to say the e-mail address you can send feedback to, if you want to give a more free-form response. It's mentioned several times throughout the interview but first mentioned just after 13:25.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Whoever on Thursday January 18 2018, @04:35AM (2 children)
Why did I have to click through 3 pages in order to arrive at the actual survey?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @07:25AM
You could've at least provided the link! https://thunderbird-design.typeform.com/to/f7wiiq?hsCta [typeform.com]
A perfectly nice blank page btw. These guys seem to value minimalism in their designs...
(Score: 2) by termigator on Thursday January 18 2018, @05:06PM
To minimize the amount of feedback.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @04:58AM
Dude! ARE YOU FUCKING THIS UP?!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @05:55AM (3 children)
Well, at least we'll still have Sogo https://sogo.nu/ [sogo.nu]. They managed to mimic the current Thunderbird interface quite well.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday January 18 2018, @07:57AM (2 children)
Looking at the linked page, I get that SOGo is a server, not a client like Thunderbird.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:03PM (1 child)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday January 18 2018, @07:33PM
Seems overly complicated compared to just installing Thunderbird and pointing it at your POP3 or IMAP account.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Thursday January 18 2018, @07:54AM
What they should do is:
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @07:56AM (1 child)
I would expect an Open Source company to use Open Source tools to run surveys, like using LimeSurvey ( https://www.limesurvey.org) [www.limesurvey.org)] , for example.
Thunderbird and the Mozilla corporation as whole stands for Opens Source so I wonder why they always neglect that when they choose tools to do their work.
(Score: 2) by http on Thursday January 18 2018, @08:25AM
LimeSurvey doesn't focus on put a lot of money in marketeer's pockets.
I browse at -1 when I have mod points. It's unsettling.
(Score: 1) by engblom on Thursday January 18 2018, @08:18AM
This is is not good. I like Thunderbird and I do not want it to change. Sadly it looks like there are no real alternatives, at least not for me yet.
Today I tested quickly Claws mail, and I found it not to be a good alternative. Claws is terrible with high resolution screen. Also, the quick filter is less good as you can search only one field (for example only subject) rather than several fields. I am using a tiling window manager, and I found it frustrating how Claws do not automatically adjust the field widths in the main panel, according to how wide the window is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @09:40AM (1 child)
Looks like they finished destroying Firefox. Now it's Thunderbirds turn.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:38PM
They want Thunderbird to share the same codebase as Firefox. At this point, it should be forked, and put into maintenance mode. If they want to make a shiny new Thunderbird, that's fine, but Thunderbird doesn't need an update.
(Score: 2) by Lester on Thursday January 18 2018, @09:53AM (9 children)
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.
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:05PM (8 children)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Lester on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:07PM (7 children)
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)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Lester on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:10PM (5 children)
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)
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.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Lester on Thursday January 18 2018, @03:34PM (3 children)
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)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Thursday January 18 2018, @06:31PM (1 child)
Why can't it use a similar UI and methodology for modifying accounts?
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday January 22 2018, @12:05PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 3, Interesting) by inertnet on Thursday January 18 2018, @10:26AM
I hope someone has the will and time to fork it before it gets destroyed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @10:27AM
I replied to the survey. Most questions were meaningless (i.e., how inspiring I find the UI), clearly designed to "prove" that the current interface is bad, and their proposed interface is great. For all those meanigless questions, I graded Thunderbird with 7 (top mark) and the proposed new interface with 1. In the additional comments section, I explained that I did this because they should not fall victim to the current trend, which is to make UIs ugly, with reduced usability, and that they should focus on maintaining the code, instead.
Just as the first question, that a prospective lion tamer is asked, is not whether he has a hat saying "lion tamer", my first concern about the future of Thunderbird is not whether its UI will be changed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:27PM (1 child)
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?
(Score: 3, Informative) by termigator on Thursday January 18 2018, @05:22PM
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.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @01:08PM (2 children)
After destroying firefox, now they will move on to destroying Thunderbird? Just keep it secure and stable. Please do not start "improving" the UI. These UI experts are an illness.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @03:52PM (1 child)
Boy you ain't kidding. Where I work GUI "experts" are called "human factors" and man are they idiots.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @06:20PM
Of course "human factors" is the wrong term, because two negative factors give a positive result, something that is not observed with GUI "experts".
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Thursday January 18 2018, @07:32PM (1 child)
I think we missed the point of the survey.
The survey was so obviously stacked against the old UI, that of course we would kick back and say that the old UI is modern and exciting, while the new UI is obsolete and exciting. The result of the survey will be that thunderbird users want to keep the old UI, and we all know what Mozilla think of what their users want...
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday January 18 2018, @07:39PM
Mozilla has never been about the users. It's all about the Architecture, and fuck the users.
(Score: 2) by snufu on Friday January 19 2018, @11:08PM
and you sent it to the wrong department!"
"Sorry, Boss, the user interface was SO exciting I couldn't concentrate."