SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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, Interesting) by Covalent on Wednesday December 02 2015, @10:57AM
I've been a gmail user since the early days, but for my wife's business she likes a dedicated email program. Thunderbird is easily the nicest one around imho. Even 3+ years out of date it's still terrific. It'd be a shame to see it go, so I hope they at least continue to support the security aspect of it.
I think email has become what snail mail was a generation ago: that old dog, long in the tooth, that everyone is familiar with but whose bad habits are so engrained that he's kind of annoying. Oh and we all think he'll die any day but he's got years (which in this case will be decades...email years?) before he's gone.
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Wednesday December 02 2015, @11:22AM
> I think email has become what snail mail was a generation ago
Why? SMS, facebook and twitter don't replace email. Email has excellent compatibility across many clients and servers. Email is private/targetted to recipients only, essential for almost any workplace. Email supports data attachments. What replaces that?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday December 02 2015, @12:40PM
My guess might be the death of push due to hyperspam.
There's just too much spam in the world to use a service where any jerk can push garbage at you.
Outside work I use email for some legacy email lists and occasionally corporations send me valuable non-spam. Oh look Digikey shipped my order. I got a new electric bill. How nice. But all of that is realistically better done by pull.
Even at work most "email" is better done with other tools. Ticketing systems always devolve at big corporations into metric generation systems and all the ticketing functions move off into email. The metrics are more important than actually doing the job so don't mess up the ticketing system by using it, use email instead, keep the ticketing system for manipulated metric generation. I've only seen that anti-pattern a couple dozen times across many employers. But in theory a decent ticketing system combined with management that doesn't suck would result in using the ticketing system as a ticketing system not using email as a bugtracker. The spam emails from HR about having diversity carrot cake in the lunch room at 11 that nobody really reads anyway belong on an internal blog or twitter-like feed. Idiots trying to send DVD ISO images via email show most morons are better off with file servers than trying to use email attachments. Plenty of business that used to be transacted in email is now text message and IRC-clones. I'm not really seeing email as business-critical anymore. Its nice, sure, but ... Its kind of like desk phones, which are nearly dead where I work. Everyone has a smart phone as their electronic leash / ankle bracelet so nobody uses desk phones. I believe mine is being taken away at the end of the year; I'm cool with that, I haven't used it in maybe 3 or 4 years. Email will be the same way.
My guess is Apple will let Siri poll RSS feeds and then we'll be permitted (because we can't do things until Apple lets us) and I'll just have a dedicated customer RSS feed from digikey and from the local electric company and WTF else and I'll subscribe to those rss feeds (In newsblur not siri obviously) then bye bye email.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday December 02 2015, @11:35AM
I've been a gmail user since the early days, but for my wife's business she likes a dedicated email program. Thunderbird is easily the nicest one around imho. Even 3+ years out of date it's still terrific. It'd be a shame to see it go, so I hope they at least continue to support the security aspect of it.
Your experience seems to be different from mine. I perceive Thunderbird as a terrible program. Slow, cumbersome UI (menus especially, but many other examples), bad mail format (mailbox). To me it is embarrassing that Linux does not have a decent email client. I do use Thunderbird but was always dissatisfied. Kmail used to be a total disaster in the 4.X days (X 10). I will probably give it another try. My solution for now is to have an IMAP server running locally (dovecot) and rely on the client only for fetching and displaying email.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday December 02 2015, @12:23PM
To me it is embarrassing that Linux does not have a decent email client.
There's no lack of email reading on Linux... Going back to the early 90s I used elm, pine, mutt for well over a decade, then gmail. Those are just the popular and reasonably usable UI clients. Emacs has (or had) a couple ways to read email, none very good. There was a phase, just before the explosion of "every noob writes a mp3 player" where "every noob writes an email client" almost all of which sucked.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2015, @02:38PM
What's wrong with menus?
Care to elaborate?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2015, @01:04PM
Gmail is not just the webmail you know. Gmail can be used with thunderbird also.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2015, @02:06PM
Even 3+ years out of date it's still terrific.
Just because it hasn't needed to do anything more than it already can doesn't mean that it is "out of date".
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Wednesday December 02 2015, @06:46PM
Even 3+ years out of date it's still terrific.
That's because it did what an e-mail client needs to do at that point. Thank god Mozilla hasn't been crapifying, er, I mean developing it further like they have with Firefox. Too bad they did not stop even sooner.