Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
[...] When the Mozilla Foundation decided to turn the email client loose in May 2017, its future looked doubtful, but it's still here and, according to this post by community manager Ryan Sipes, donations are flowing freely enough for Thunderbird to expand its development team.
The current eight personnel are to be expanded to 14, and one of the roles to be resourced is an engineer who will focus on security and privacy.
"The UX/UI around encryption and settings will get an overhaul in the coming year," Sipes wrote.
While he couldn't guarantee that effort making it into the next release, "It is our hope to make encrypting Email and ensuring your private communication easier in upcoming releases."
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 5, Informative) by Subsentient on Friday January 04 2019, @08:17PM (5 children)
I use Thunderbird myself. It's a damn good email client, and one of the only good ones left alive.
Claws Mail won't render HTML, Eudora is ancient dog shit that only runs on Windows and old Macs, and Seamonkey's alright I guess, but it's not my cup of tea.
Long live Thunderbird.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 3, Informative) by richtopia on Friday January 04 2019, @08:55PM (2 children)
Same here. Thunderbird is not perfect, but I have yet to find an email client that I find intuitive. Even considering commercial clients, there is very little happening in the email client space, excluding web apps.
I'm still waiting on Vivaldi to include a client and see how they fare, but I doubt the client will be a high priority for them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04 2019, @09:42PM
why would you be waiting on enslaveware from vivaldi? give me a break.
(Score: 5, Touché) by driverless on Saturday January 05 2019, @03:54AM
And this is the thing that always makes me smile:
It's too small for Mozilla to notice and fuck up. As long as the team stays small and dedicated and below the radar of the great Mozilla fuck-things-up machine, it'll be fine.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04 2019, @10:51PM
That's a definite plus in my book.
(Score: 1) by Veyrdite on Friday January 04 2019, @11:31PM
When moving from Seamonkey to Thunderbird I had a look at several alternatives, including Claws and Trojita:
https://halestrom.net/darksleep/blog/031_browser_loss/#emailclients [halestrom.net]
Opinion: Claws would be an amazing option if it had even a little bit of HTML's features. Full HTML is wild and uncontrollable; but partial HTML composition (inline images, headings, *B*, _U_ and /i/) could make the software a lot more attractive for the masses without without compromising on security. A full XML/HTML parser wouldn't be needed either, simple features like this need no understanding of nesting or trees.
I write really long emails with lots of technical pictures and examples strewn throughout. Telling people to "see attached xyz.jpeg" every few paragraphs would be completely game-breaking. As fast and amazing as Claws is it's not an option for me unless I compose the email in an attached document.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04 2019, @08:41PM (3 children)
Why don't you use all that coin you're raking in to figure out why an email client consumes 3gb of memory with no windows open.
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Friday January 04 2019, @09:30PM (2 children)
Jesus Christ, I'd have drop kicked Thunderbird if it did that to me. Thankfully it uses only a little over 200MB for me.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Saturday January 05 2019, @01:29AM (1 child)
Similar.
I have it using 350mb right now on linux. With 6 different email accounts and up to 10 years of old email in some of those accounts.
Honestly, I hate the UI/UX now and it seems to get worse every new version. I would drop Thunderbird in a second, if something could handle my email accounts so well.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday January 05 2019, @04:06AM
My mail app is using 3MB, and that's to hold my entire mailbox in memory.
That's /bin/mail. If it was good enough for Ken, Dennis, and Brian, it's good enough for me. And, as others have pointed out, the lack of support for HTML is a bonus.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday January 04 2019, @08:49PM (5 children)
Until the recipient gives up the goods [nytimes.com]
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday January 04 2019, @09:03PM (4 children)
It's not a perfect security measure for those with good reasons to be paranoid, that's for sure. But some agencies would hate to see millions of people start using "easy" end-to-end encryption.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Friday January 04 2019, @10:47PM (1 child)
That's how you get fun laws [abc.net.au] like down-under...
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday January 05 2019, @12:31AM
Tech industry needs to go underground. If they're "angry and confused", it's only because they have to cough up a new and completely different PR campaign. At least the open source people can release stuff anonymously. Let's hope the voters in the *five eyes* countries reverse themselves and put a lid on it some day.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday January 04 2019, @11:54PM (1 child)
But some agencies would hate to see millions of people start using "easy" end-to-end encryption.
I'm sure they would, but they have nothing to worry about as long as we are tethered to an ISP that will eventually only permit government approved protocols and content over their networks if serviceable encryption ever becomes widely popular. Ad hoc networking over the WAN is our only hope for secure accessible communications. Encryption is moot when you get cut off.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 05 2019, @02:52PM
And that's when you get creative with tunneling and encapsulation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04 2019, @09:48PM (1 child)
a proper native gtk3 theme would be nice. modernizing the ui would be nice. right now it's too much config over convention for my tastes.
making it leaner, faster and more secure. and yes, make everything, including security easier to use.
also, what is tbird's problem with a changing internet connection? if i switch between vpn and no vpn many times i have to restart tbird. it's ridiculous.
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Saturday January 05 2019, @10:39PM
I think that's inherited from the Mozilla codebase, Firefox does the same thing. This has been a problem for years, [mozilla.org] and keeps cropping up [mozilla.org] even after they say it's fixed. I'm not seeing an open bug report for it now, but can confirm that it's been a thing for me on recent versions.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 4, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Friday January 04 2019, @09:55PM (6 children)
Or at least those who use Thunderbird is a great idea. As a user of Thunderbird for nearly 15 years, I find it one of the best email clients out there.
However, Enigmail [enigmail.net] integrates nicely with Thunderbird already.
Presumably, PGP support is what Thunderbird will bake in. Which is fine, and may encourage non-technical users to use PGP. Unfortunately, managing PGP keys is beyond the experience of many users.
As such, those who are using Thunderbird (given the mass rush to "web-based," -- read: giving your email to the folks who most want to spy on you -- email clients) are likely more technical and more security conscious anyway.
I welcome integration of encryption into Thunderbird, but I suspect the target pool of users are already running Enigmail -- like me.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04 2019, @10:41PM (1 child)
The best things to do here are to not require passwords on keys and to silently default to full trust on them. Sure, this makes the security people howl, but if you want people to use encryption, it needs to not require any additional steps. Then, automatically send out the user's public key with every message and encrypt such key is received. For most users, this is the only way they'll do it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 06 2019, @07:16PM
If you look at many of the most widely-used encryption systems, they all use Trust On First Use. That always makes me nervous, but absent a trusted third party signing everything, it is the good-enough for most people. All you need is some "advanced mode," where they show you the key (like SSH), and it is as good as you can probably get for everyone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04 2019, @10:53PM (3 children)
I am guessing you mean they will be putting in GPG (Gnu Privacy Guard) rather than PGP (Pretty Good Privacy).
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday January 04 2019, @11:34PM (2 children)
Actually, I mean OpenPGP [wikipedia.org]. Especially since these folks are talking about integrating encryption into Thunderbird.
Given that they don't need to glom GPG onto Thunderbird (given that Enigmail already does that pretty well), I assume they will implement (as the GNU folks did) OpenPGP in their code.
Oh, and by the way, GPG is an implementation of OpenPGP [wikipedia.org].
So no. That's emphatically *not* what I mean.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 05 2019, @02:09AM
On r/linux, Ryan Lee Sipes:
And he also implied that since Thunderbird is now independent of Mozilla, you can donate to Thunderbird, and not have to worry about Moz://a getting their hands on it and diverting it somewhere else, as happened in the past to donations for Thunderbird.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 05 2019, @09:19PM
Ugh PGP... the whole "web of trust" thing is a pain. How about Thunderbird just spins up a CA that only signs S/MIME certs (since Letsencrypt refuses to do it) and include the root cert in Thunderbird. No identity verification, just that the cert requester has control of the email address. Make getting a cert part of the new account configuration wizard process and done.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Saturday January 05 2019, @10:34AM (1 child)
Are they making the world's first VR, AI, HD, multi touch, enterprise, web scale, green, mobile, cloud, LSS, ISS, LGBT, ASMR, AARP email client or what? Are 13 of the people wardrobe consultants, nutrition advisors, and makeup artists?
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Saturday January 05 2019, @03:36PM
Well, Thunderbird is actually a huge codebase, and takes a lot of stuff straight out of Firefox. So it makes some sense.
I'm glad to have more people working on it, actually.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti