Mozilla shoots down Thunderbird, hatches new release model Mozilla has announced a new plan for the ongoing development of its Thunderbird email client that it says will provide for a stable product and continued opportunity for innovation That's all well and good, but the contents of a leaked internal Mozilla memo suggest that the full picture may be less rosy than it seems. The …
Decent email clients have become a commodity. I don’t buy the argument that the email client is dead. Ask an iPhone or iPad user. Even Windows 8 has a pretty nice metro client (a lot nicer than Windows Live Mail, which I think still had code from Outlook Express 4 inside it somewhere). The bar has been raised too high, so why compete. Concentrate on the browser instead.
One thing I will miss is the fact it was a decent Newsreader.
As has been said before...
They can have my hard drive when they pull it from my cold dead fingers.
Use Linux... Icedove the secure version of Thunderbird ( or something else ) will be around for some time... so will Thunderbird, hopefully.
Yes, Mobile is here, now... it will not go away, that’s fine.
The desktop may fade into the hands of those who can use it, those who understand that the web is fragile and ephemeral. However, those who may wish to Kill desktop computing and put it into the cloud completely can literally call up these words... Give me liberty or give me death, just expect a fight.
Its not that I am riled up about a single project but the trend to abandon desktop computing is getting more traction than is justly deserved. have you actually tried to use a mobile device... as a computer, without the frustration of no "keyboard" or "mouse" a touchscreen is a waste of time when it gets serious.
Thunderbird does everything I need it to do.
1) automatically setups gmail, hotmail, yahoo, aol accounts via a simple wizzard.
2) works correctly with both pop and IMAP
3) optional unification of inboxes and other folders
4) addons to reorder account listings
5) addons to find and delete duplicate messages
6) addon to sync with google contacts
I can't think of any new and exciting features I would want added, if they keep what hey have working smoothly I'm a happy camper.
Been using it for over 5 years with multiple IMAP accounts and my old hotmail account, the integrated inbox makes sure I see email I need to and the filtering options means the mail lists I am on and the turgid crap work send me are put in their own nice little folders.
Search could be improved and the plain/html issue already discussed needs refining. I'm happy with lightning, it integrates well with my google calendar, tasks would be nice but I can cope with using wunderlist for those. Maybe if lightning was built into the core application we might get some better usability but I'm not sure what.
I would hate to see it go the way of many other pieces of software and dwindle away, we need a good thunderbird to provide an alternative to outlook and the microsoftification of email, outlook isn't the only fruit.
Mail clients aren't exciting. They aren't very web 2.0 but they are very useful. Having a local store of your emails especially in business is vital. Web mail is useful for short stints but if you are in an environment where you write more than 5 emails a day of more than a few paragraphs then a dedicated mail client is the way to go.
The fact is that the all of the Linux email clients have been inferior to Outlook. Outlook is one of the few products that MS nailed. It is very difficult to give up the integrated messaging, calender, contacts and collaboration once you get used to it. It does cost a lot but your paying for the productivity boast. Large enterprises need this kind of capability and are willing to pay for it.
I use Thunderbird on my Linux Mint and Ubuntu set ups , I even installed it for my Mother. She loves it because it works and it makes email simple she has all of her email contacts in once place and the interface is pretty easy to understand. I would be sad to see it loose the little support Thunderbird gets from Mozilla but its their product and they are entitled to do this if they feel their resources would be better spent elsewhere. I wonder if the the libre office team might take up the baton. The office productivity suites on Linux really do need a lot of love and a polished functional email client is a must.
As a Thunderbird user I have to meeting this news with... indifference. Thunderbird is an email client that does exactly what it should. What else does it have to do? Sure, everybody is using gmail now, but what is so innovative about it? Once you get past the fancy UI gewgaws the only "innovation" I see is that whenever I send or receive an email that contains the word underpants the UI displays an ad for underpants. Some innovation!
Email clients are more or less the same as they have been for years and don't need to do more, I'll take Thunderbird as it is and wake me when a real change is afoot.
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