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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: 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.