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In this Ars Technica article, Mozilla Corporation Chair Mitchell Baker discloses the desire to drop the Thunderbird email client altogether.
"Many inside of Mozilla, including an overwhelming majority of our leadership, feel the need to be laser-focused on activities like Firefox that can have an industry-wide impact." Baker writes. "With all due respect to Thunderbird and the Thunderbird community, we have been clear for years that we do not view Thunderbird as having this sort of potential."
Thunderbird has already been demoted to second-tier status, receiving only security updates since the summer of 2012. Baker's plan would turn Thunderbird over to a community product, similar to what happened with the Mozilla Suite a decade ago.
Is Mozilla's decision to laser-focus on improving Firefox going to stop their dwindling market share? Who else, besides the submitter, is still using Thunderbird? And where will you go once Thunderbird is no longer supported?
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2015, @10:00AM
May this be is good for Thunderbird. So that Mozilla can keep its focus just on crapping all over Firefox with more and more unwanted bloat.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2015, @10:03AM
May this be is good for Thunderbird. So that Mozilla can keep its focus just on crapping all over Firefox with more and more unwanted bloat.
And social justice. Never forget social justice.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2015, @10:09AM
Thunderbird being on security updates only is good. I don't want them to mess with the interface as they did with Firefox.
Thunderbird being abandoned completely is bad. It would mean that there won't be further security updates.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2015, @11:59AM
There are still bad, open bugs for thunderbird. Those need to be fixed.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Wednesday December 02 2015, @10:35AM
I don't understand why thunderbird is not seen as a place where they can have "industry-wide" impact. At the moment I think they are the number 2 email client I think after outlook? Everyone uses email, it is as ubiquitous as the intrawebs. I spend probably as much time on email as I do on a browser at work (I do some actual work as well, promise). I don't think I am alone in this? It is an area that has been lost and is crying out for improvements.
I like thunderbird, it has a nice search functionality and it is nice to cache locally for the days when the network is down or I am on a train. Webmail is generally crappy and slow (outlook webmail at least, I don't really use gmail for much). Webmail doesn't aggregate well from several accounts (again I don't know much about gmail here).
For example:
* A better calendar would be nice - e.g. better compatibility with google, mac, outlook calendar formats. At the moment I have to use gmail for calendar. This would be a "killer app" that would put them ahead of outlook. At my workplace, everyone has a different calendar app and none of them are compatible.
* A better security model would be nice - e.g. if thunderbird took over number 1 spot from outlook and then started implementing gpg or whatever it is nowadays by default. Maybe have a chat with gmail et al about this (gmail still get to scan emails for the marketers before they are sent, so google might still be happy, and they get to look like they are supporting privacy vs nsa/whoever).
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Wednesday December 02 2015, @11:45AM
It also has great encryption support through EnigMail, and at a time when people really should be using it. I've actually switched over to KMail though as Thunderbird has this weird bug where it seems to lose its will to check for new mail after running for about a week. (KMail also has good encryption support and even better profile support, but Thunderbird's search is much better).
(Score: 2) by stormreaver on Wednesday December 02 2015, @12:12PM
I've actually switched over to KMail though as Thunderbird has this weird bug....
As a KMail user since KDE 1.44, my advice is to stay as far away from it as possible. While it used to be a great email program, its current incarnation is best described as a steaming pile of useless crap. It is horribly unstable; frequently corrupts its mailboxes; frequently fails to run due to the Akonadi/MySQL brain damaged, idiotic approach to email; and now refuses to acknowledge that I have any email at all in my 16-year email archives.
I use Thunderbird at work (where I formerly used KMail), and am in the process of migrating over to Thunderbird from KMail at home as well. Whatever bugs Thunderbird has, it is still heads and shoulders above KMail.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by zafiro17 on Wednesday December 02 2015, @12:55PM
That's sadly my opinion too - I've been using Kmail for about as long as you have, and though I try every new release thinking "this is the one!" it is getting worse, not better. Akonadi needs to die in a fire - great concept, piss-poor execution and rather than admit it sucks, they just keep digging in their heels.
Kmail has so much potential. But it sucks harder than your mom.
I need Thunderbird to work and work well. I'm generally happy with it. EMClient on Windows is better, but since they don't have anything available for Linux, Thunderbird is kind of the winner. (I also like Claws/Sylpheed but Thunderbird has better search). I feel like, email is such a basic part of the internet (feels like a right, actually), we desperately need at least one app that works.
There's Trujio (or something like that), an IMAP-only client. I wrote some documentation for it a couple of years ago. Not sure what happened to it - it wasn't as full featured as kmail, but it worked pretty damned well, and it was fast.
Mozilla is a sinking ship these days.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 2) by stormreaver on Wednesday December 02 2015, @08:35PM
I found a wonderful Python script that successfully transferred all of my KMail mail to Thunderbird. There are a few variations of this script, and I'm not 100% certain that this is *the one* I used, but the code and comments at the end look the same at first glance.
https://gist.github.com/scrinzi/3274493 [github.com]
It took just a few seconds to transfer all 16 years of email out of KMail and into Thunderbird.
As for losing Thunderbird, there are several forks to consider, including the one that seems the most appealing to me: FossaMail (http://www.fossamail.org/).
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Wednesday December 02 2015, @02:45PM
I ran into the instability for a while but it seems to have been completely stable for the last month or so. It was quite annoying for a while there (yes, corrupted database problems). Thunderbird's problem where it quietly stop retrieving mail is more serious for me unfortunately, as it quiet ... and it stops retrieving mail. I should probably dig a little more into it and see if I can find some more information for the developers, but of course there aren't any now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2015, @05:50PM
pine FTW.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by art guerrilla on Wednesday December 02 2015, @12:18PM
noooooooo... don't fuck up the last email client i can barely stand ! !!
hate, Hate, HATE how many/most email clients put ALL your email into little piles IT THINKS they should go in, instead of simply giving me a chronological listing of my email as it comes in...
is that too much to ask ? ? ?
i don't want you to combine all my emails from this or that person/company into their own blobs of unreadable piles of junk...
JUST.
DELIVER.
THE.
EMAIL.
AND.
GO.
AWAY.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Wednesday December 02 2015, @01:35PM
Because Mozilla is "moztly" funded by Google (pun intended). And Google wants you on their platform.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday December 02 2015, @02:22PM
Uhh you must have missed it because Mozilla is Mozilla is funded by Yahoo [techcrunch.com] and has been for nearly a year. And before somebody chimes in with "Because Yahoo uses Bing that means they are funded by MSFT!" nope, sorry, the CEO of Yahoo has already announced the second the current MSFT search deal is done which IIRC is next year? They are going back to their own search engine which is why they wanted Firefox search to default to yahoo, it gives them a preinstalled userbase for their new search.
of course this is assuming that Moz doesn't commit suicide before then and with all the dumbshit they have pulled lately, from shitting on the UI to announcing they are killing XUL (and thus making extensions, the reason anybody uses FF anymore, as weak and gimped as they are on Chrome) to TFA? that is a pretty damned big if. They have gone from nearly half the browser share to less than 10% and are falling fast and stupid shit like this? Is just gonna alienate more formerly loyal users.
I'd personally advise folks to switch to either PaleMoon or IceDragon, both are damned nice and support Firefox extensions.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Wednesday December 02 2015, @03:01PM
Everyone uses email, it is as ubiquitous as the intrawebs
What percentage of people who use email use webmail? I was recently surprised to talk to people who had never even considered the idea that you might use a stand-alone application for email, rather than a web browser. I think that's part of Mozilla's problem with Thunderbird. The main place where a fat client for email is still a big win is on mobile devices (does anyone know of an Android mail client that sucks less than K9? I found a lot that were even worse, but none that were actually good), and Thunderbird doesn't run on mobile devices.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 3, Touché) by Refugee from beyond on Wednesday December 02 2015, @04:33PM
There is no point then. Effectively you do not have encryption.
Instantly better soylentnews: replace background on article and comment titles with #973131.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday December 04 2015, @09:42AM
I think you miss the point - you need to have encryption and decryption for the thing to work. So you need to get a majority of folks using encryption/decryption. So you want to get a few of the major email providers (gmail is the biggest nowadays I think) to make encryption the default.
Obviously, this means that google et al can read your email; but when encryption becomes standardised, everyone then implements encryption as standard, and all email is encrypted. So then, when you are sending email to not gmail et al, the email is encrypted. I am making a path for standardisation of email encryption, so that users can choose to use gmail and let google read their emails, or choose to use some other email provider (or set up their own mail server), and encryption is a standard.
(Score: 2) by Nollij on Thursday December 03 2015, @03:23AM
I'd put money on there being more GMail users alone than Thunderbird users.
Webmail is certainly the popular approach to mail these days. Local clients are a thing of the past.
Look at how rarely you see anyone advertise their mail client, or how few you can even name. Most of them have ceased to be, or at least stagnated just like Thunderbird.
I found This article [labnol.org] from July 2012. Not a reliable source, but it does show how popular the webmails are.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday December 04 2015, @09:44AM
It is an interesting feature. When the rest of the universe is moving away from in-browser things to "Apps", why is email moving to webmail? Is it lack of local storage on mobile platforms? Is it just that there is no decent email client out there?
(Score: 2) by Nollij on Friday December 04 2015, @10:40PM
The big draw is that webmail is easy to setup (no server settings for users to worry about, almost never firewall blocks, etc), and it replicates all e-mail (and everything related) to all devices, effectively in real-time.
As for mobile apps, most of the ones that can be done as a website aren't much more than a customized browser UI. This includes most shopping apps.