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Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by ronjouch on Friday February 09, 2018 @10:27AM (#16340825)
> "2. I would like to see a mobile app."

Opposite stance: please, Mozilla, do not build mobile Thunderbird apps. That's tremendous effort, and IMHO too much for what you can do with the priority on Firefox, even with these new Thunderbird hires.

Focus on polishing and maintaining the existing Thunderbird the best you can with the limited resources you have for the project. You have a large existing userbase that will be extremely thankful for that.

Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by jerrac on Friday February 09, 2018 @06:57PM (#16344887)
I'm going to chime in and say I want Thunderbird on Android. Preferably with the ability to sync settings and data from and to my desktop and laptop.

Also, frankly, there are so many email clients out there for Android, that it's a pain trying to finding something trustworthy. Thunderbird would be something I can trust.

Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by Sylos on Saturday February 10, 2018 @01:48AM (#16346214)
Don't think you can go more than two scrolls in these comments without having it smacked into your face repeatedly, but K-9 Mail is that. It's open-source and by a long shot the most popular open-source client (except maybe the AOSP client, but that one's not exactly good).

https://f-droid.org/app/com.fsck.k9

Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by jerrac on Monday February 12, 2018 @03:20PM (#16361688)
A little late in replying, but the fact I had never heard of K-9 until this HN post kinda proves my point about name recognition. Last year I actually tried 5 or more different Android clients. I didn't try K-9, if it I even saw it. I must have judged it as untrustworthy or not worth trying for some reason.
Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by ekianjo on Friday February 09, 2018 @11:01AM (#16341177)
and K9 on Android is not a bad client. It seems like people are not aware of it much.
Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by CaptSpify on Friday February 09, 2018 @11:12AM (#16341327)
It's the best mobile client I've used, but thats not saying much.

It doesn't make me sad, which is the best I can say about it

Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by Sylos on Saturday February 10, 2018 @01:56AM (#16346238)
I mean, I don't know about you, but that seems to be the fate of any mail client. "Doesn't make me sad" is the highest rating that any mail client, web-based or not, has ever gotten from me.
Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by mondoshawan on Friday February 09, 2018 @11:15AM (#16341362)
It's not a /good/ client, either. It's adequate, but has a long way to go to clean up it's UX and normal reading flow.
Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by cvwright on Friday February 09, 2018 @12:12PM (#16341920)
No argument here. But is it any worse than Thunderbird?
Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by Arkanosis on Friday February 09, 2018 @01:09PM (#16342441)
My own take on this point: for my neither trivial nor very advanced needs, K9 at least lacks: - hierarchical display of email threads; - search that actually works.

That being said, I'm rather happy with K9, and I'd certainly prefer to see energy spent in making it even better than in making a “Mobile Thunderbird” from scratch.

Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by ntnn on Friday February 09, 2018 @08:38PM (#16345323)
You should try AquaMail. The search works. Threads aren't shows as a tree, sadly, but they are grouped into a folder - not ideal but you can at least follow simple conversations. Still not something for mailing lists.

Additionally, AquaMail can handle nested folders, which K9 doesn't and never will, according to its developers.

Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by Arkanosis on Monday February 12, 2018 @06:10AM (#16357920)
It's not free software, unfortunately, so that is a showstopper for me. Thanks for suggestion, though.
Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by PuffinBlue on Saturday February 10, 2018 @02:14PM (#16348956)
Does it allow plain text composing/viewing yet?
Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by Arkanosis on Monday February 12, 2018 @06:11AM (#16357924)
Good question, this is also mandatory for me.
Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by javitury on Friday February 09, 2018 @02:08PM (#16342982)
> search that actually works

If search works fast on Thunderbird is because it keeps all emails in your local hdd. To be fair you should also set the option account settings > fetching mail > local folder size to 'all' in K9.

Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by Nux on Friday February 09, 2018 @04:27PM (#16343969)
That's a bit overkill for a phone. I recommend enabling server side search in Account Settings, much easier on resources.
Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by Arkanosis on Monday February 12, 2018 @06:24AM (#16357957)
It doesn't work well either in my experience. Not sure if K9 is really the one to blame, or the IMAP server (Gmail, in my case). As Thunderbird indeed does search locally, it isn't impacted by poor server side search anyway. Thanks for the suggestion, though.
Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by Arkanosis on Monday February 12, 2018 @06:15AM (#16357934)
Thanks a lot for the suggestion! It was set to 100… that's a terrible default for a phone with 64 GiB onboard storage…
Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by drc0 on Friday February 09, 2018 @01:26PM (#16342593)
with a polished UI it could be better, the protocol and options support are fine.
Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by fencepost on Friday February 09, 2018 @09:39PM (#16345538)
> please, Mozilla, do not build mobile Thunderbird apps

100% agreed. Thunderbird for many years was (or was perceived as) moribund and now that it's showing more signs of life people are pushing to add mobile clients as well as desktop? Are those people trying to kill it off?

Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by Vinnl on Friday February 09, 2018 @01:39PM (#16342728)
Thunderbird is not maintained by Mozilla, and those new hires are not by Mozilla, so it should not affect Firefox. It might affect desktop Thunderbird, of course.
Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by rocky1138 on Friday February 09, 2018 @02:17PM (#16343049)
It's confusing that people keep saying Thunderbird is separate from Mozilla but here we have a blog post posted on Mozilla's blog.
Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by Faark on Friday February 09, 2018 @04:26PM (#16343954)
And their job posting was on mozilla.org. As is their bug tracking. And their conference team was stationed at the Mozilla booth. According to Wikipedia, even what they intent to be is hard to call independent from an outside perspective:

> On May 9, 2017, Philipp Kewisch announced that the Mozilla Foundation will continue to serve as the legal and fiscal home for the Thunderbird project, but that Thunderbird will migrate off Mozilla Corporation infrastructure, separating the operational aspects of the project.

Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by rocky1138 on Friday February 09, 2018 @11:17PM (#16345845)
I don't mean to be a weenie about it. I really truly appreciate what the Thunderbird team and Mozilla team are up to and have donated in the past. I also understand that the Thunderbird team is super small, as well. As an outsider, I guess I just don't understand how they are separate :)
Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by digi_owl on Friday February 09, 2018 @06:03PM (#16344594)
Welcome to present day FOSS.

Just watch the number of supposed independent projects that are created and/or maintained by a small handful of corporations.

And they maintain control what may well be a variant of embrace extend extinguish. Meaning that they churn the code so much with changes that a would be fork has to have the backing of a similarly resourceful organization.

Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by j45 on Friday February 09, 2018 @11:12PM (#16345833)
I'll add to the mix - there needs to be an equivalent of Thunderbird on Android.

Aquamail is the most feature complete service there was, and now it's been acquired.

A major Thunderbird and Firefox distraction was their shared codebase.

If the new Firefox can do what it can, maybe there could be another codebase that compiles well to multiple platforms, maybe even the first mainstream webassembly app.

Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by hendersoon on Friday February 09, 2018 @02:26PM (#16343108)
Splitting focus to create a mobile client while the desktop client all their remaining loyal users actually care about lies moribund is a great idea!

But it just isn't thinking far enough outside the box. What they really should do is create an entire Thunderbird OS based on web technologies and XUL, and sell it to mobile phone manufacturers! It could be huge!

I'm full of great ideas. Have they considered that email client interfaces are hard to understand for your grandparents? Maybe they could make it look like your living room, with each piece of email a book on a shelf. And they could have a cute little animatronic talking bluebird that you could ask for help-- call it, I dunno, want something non-threatening... Thunderbird Bob!

One more? Short but sweet-- Thunderbird Vista!

Really, the possibilities are endless.

Re:What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM by dorp on Friday February 09, 2018 @03:57PM (#16343762)
Thunderbird would look really bad if it was for mobile. It would just be a generic mail app due to the limited screen real estate.