Re:Thunderbird’s New Home (2020)
by donatj on Sunday February 27, 2022 @05:05AM
(#30486866)
I was looking for a very particular old email, and had some backed-up Thunderbird mailboxes from the mid aughts. I was surprised and dismayed to find the “modern redesigned” newest release completely incapable of opening them at all.
I don’t recall the exact version I had to download to get them to work. I suspect 67, 68 is the non-XUL redesign.
In my mind, being able to read old mailboxes should be one of the core competencies of a mail app, particularly one that speaks POP, where the download itself is a destructive act server-side. The current Thunderbird fails.
You need to know your market, most people are happy with webmail these days, and the people using mail apps often have particular needs. There’s no amount of modernizing your going to do to Thunderbird to pull in average Joe’s. The day of the stand-alone mail client, particularly one without a weird edge, has long passed.
I don’t recall the exact version I had to download to get them to work. I suspect 67, 68 is the non-XUL redesign.
In my mind, being able to read old mailboxes should be one of the core competencies of a mail app, particularly one that speaks POP, where the download itself is a destructive act server-side. The current Thunderbird fails.
You need to know your market, most people are happy with webmail these days, and the people using mail apps often have particular needs. There’s no amount of modernizing your going to do to Thunderbird to pull in average Joe’s. The day of the stand-alone mail client, particularly one without a weird edge, has long passed.