This would be a terrible blow. I know many real world business that use thunderbird as an alternative to outlook.
Thunderbird is GO: Mozilla prepares to jettison mail client
The Mozilla Foundation, which last year flagged its intention to push Thunderbird out of its nest, reckons it's identified possible new homes – including itself. In a report provided to Mozilla by Simon Phipps, the Software Freedom Conservancy and The Document Foundation are named as possible hosts for the project. Phipps …
COMMENTS
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 07:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Still around?
Beside that, there's still people who like to access mails even when offline (because you're in places where you can't or don't want to connect to a network...), use multiple accounts (without funneling everything into a single mailbox), and like more comfortable editors and tools, especially to organize mails, handle attachments and perform end-to-end encryption.
After all, do people use webmails on their phones? Or any other web messaging app, And if not, why? <G>
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 08:43 GMT Terry 6
Re: Still around?
AC "Beside that, there's still people who like to access mails......etc "
That's me ( and my family) to a T. All of those things.
Why would I want to check each of my email accounts individually?
Why would I want to log in to a (selection of) web page(s) every time I want to see if there's any new mail?
Why would I want to access a web page every time I want to check an old email?
And why would I want to be tied to Outlook? I use it on one computer, because I need it to manage my diary. Even then, if I didn't have a WinPhone as well I'd probably dump it.
Meanwhile, I used to manage my diary cross platform through Google to Outlook. But they removed that functionality. What else might they take out if it suited them?
And also, yes I use it in 'nux when I boot to Mint.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 09:25 GMT m0rt
Re: Still around?
Thunderbird is *the* goto email client. I use it on every OS, including OS X to replace the abomination that is Apple mail.
Thunderbird is a good email client. That said, there are a few issues that need addressing, namely search performance and memory usage, but there is nothing else out there that comes close. As long as they don't 'improve the ui' like they did on Firefox.
Put it this way, I would pay for Thunderbird.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 09:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Still around?
Right. but for this you not only need your own mail client, you need your own mail server as well (or at least one that doesn't "crawls" your mails and address books). Using TB or whatever else to access your gmail (or whatever else) account doesn't help unless your mails are fully encrypted.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 12:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Still around?
Downvoters really need a "mail 101" course. If you use an "untrusted" mail server, even if you download your emails using POP3 and delete them from the server ASAP, still your emails goes through the external server, and unless you use full end-to-end encryption, the mail server can still access (and extract data from...) all your emails. The fact you don't keep them stored there is irrelevant. The fact that you use SSL/TLS (and not S/MIME or PGP) to read or send them is irrelevant, the server still sees mails in plain text. And even if you encrypt a message, the server still can read the headers... so it does know the subject, recipients, and other info.
Moreover, now that people access mails from more than one device, it's a bit difficult to keep them in sync without storing them on the server and accessing them with a protocol designed for easy syncing like IMAP4. You need a mail server you fully trust... if you trust Google & C. is up to you...
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 14:52 GMT Barry Rueger
Re: Still around?
Moreover, now that people access mails from more than one device,
This is the single biggest barrier to escaping Gmail etc.
I'd much prefer a local desktop client (although not TB, which feels about a decade behind everybody else), but shudder to think how difficult it might be keeping an Android version in sync.
I've had calendars and contact lists totally mangled by competing systems in the past, and for now will stick with a single vendor, even if I dislike them.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 16:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Still around?
I don't usually use a webmail and I keep easily in sync my three devices (PC, tablet and phone), across multiple accounts (private and public ones).
IMAP is a standard protocol (there are proprietary ones also) designed to easily keep clients in sync across devices. It doesn't really matter if the device is a fat client, a phone app or a web mail. Actually, most webmail applications does connect to the mail server through IMAP.
Just, of course, the mailbox needs to be stored on a server, so each client can sync. That's why "trusting" the server becomes important. Most free mail servers allows also IMAP connections, you just need to configure your client - of course your mail are stored on their servers.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 13:37 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Still around?
"you need your own mail server as well"
Yes, but you don't need to run it yourself. In addition to the usual suspect there are paid for service providers. Your ISP may include an email service although using it makes it harder to jump ship if they have problems such as, let's say, three security breaches in less than a year.
My own solution is my own domain with both the registration and email server handled by a single hosting company. Several years advance payment didn't amount to much and I can set up multiple email addresses within the domain.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 13:41 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Still around?
"So Thunderbird's a fully-fledged mail server now, is it?"
Read this carefully. Thunderbird allows you to download your mail from the server and keep, i.e. store, it anywhere you want, even with multiple copies in multiple locations. Was that too difficult to understand?
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 16:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Still around?
Yes, and from where it downloads them from, before storing them locally? Do you believe it captures your mails as they travel on the wire? And when you send a message, what delivers your message to the final destination? Or do you believe TB contacts directly the destination server?
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 17:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
@AMBxx - Re: Still around?
Two reasons for you:
1. Ability to force displaying of emails in plain text (i.e. no script execution and no remote content)
2. Ability to display a message in its source form without opening it so you can see all the nasties in it without actually running them.
No other email client standalone or (especially) web based offer these abilities which in my opinion are an invaluable security tool.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 06:16 GMT Voland's right hand
Er... beg to differ
Thunderbird is a red-headed stepchild in Mozilla.
Mozilla has wasted money on anything and everything - Mobile OS, etc in the last 5 years. At the same time they provided only the bare minimum (if not less) to something which has a loyal user base and is an essential part of most Linux desktops.
With such a loving parent, it is better for it to be taken by social services and adopted.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 10:05 GMT Dazed and Confused
Re: Er... beg to differ
> With such a loving parent, it is better for it to be taken by social services and adopted.
If the latest update to Thunderbird is anything to go by then it needs to be taken into protective custody PDQ.
It's driving me nuts!
Oh yes, and I do run a real business using Thunderbird. It happily copes with the 70K odd messages in my in-tray and instantly finds things for me so I've given up filing everything away into different folders. It runs cross platform, so I can use the same config files on my Linux and Windows PCs. The death of Thunderbird would be a huge blow.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 06:37 GMT batfastad
> This would be a terrible blow. I know many real world business that use thunderbird as an alternative to outlook.
Not so sure about that. Look at what Mozilla has done to Firefox - I'm thankful they haven't dedicated as much UI tinkering resources to Thunderbird over the years. Though the carnage already happened when they introduced a tab bar, which IIRC could only ever have a single tab!
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 08:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
This is the reason Mozilla became actually very, very consumer oriented. It really doesn't care about business users - but of course you don't pay for its software so you can hardly blame them.
Within Mozilla business model, it's hard to make money from a mail client - and thereby no reason to invest in its development.
LibreOffice could try to add it to its office suite in an attempt to counteract Outlook somehow in the business space - today is especially the business user needing a fat mail client - yet if enough resources are available is to be discovered...
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 21:18 GMT John Brown (no body)
"LibreOffice could try to add it to its office suite in an attempt to counteract Outlook "
Yes, I think in the long run, giving it to The Open Document Foundation might well be the better option so they can help it interoperate more fully with Libre Office but, hopefully not actually integrating it.
Full interoperability with LO and a good calendaring system would make it a good alternative for many business users.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 06:12 GMT bombastic bob
I use thunderbird, and don't want to see it go
I use thunderbird, and don't want to see it go.
But I don't want it to turn into a "hamburger menu" version, either. If the wrong group maintains it, we could end up with another "the METRO" looking interface, like what seems to be happening to Firefox lately...
and don't call it "modern", that's actually a pejorative term, implying NOT wanting "that change" means you're a neanderthal or something... [like the way the "the METRO"-tards for windows "ape" and win-10-nic go off and do all the time]
maybe we could just host it on git. why does it need to "change" or "develop" anyway? works fine for me, and I'm using a 2 year old version even... (with gnome 2, on FreeBSD, and I'm happy with it). Just fix the bugs, and make it nice and solid.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 08:58 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: I use thunderbird, and don't want to see it go
"Seamonkey is still going strong for the truly nostalgic."
When re-homing Thunderbird with the Document Foundation was looked at some months ago one of the issues raised was the need to re-skin it to fit in with LibreOffice. In its Seamonkey guise the mail client wouldn't be a problem. Ironically it seems that LibreOffice (and OpenOffice?) had a good deal of Seamonkey code buried in it until fairly recently in order to have access to the address-book.
As a user of both Seamonkey and LibreOffice my preferred choice would be to see the Document Foundation look after the whole shooting match giving the option of anything between a free-standing email client and a complete package.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 11:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I use thunderbird, and don't want to see it go
Well said brah.
It's easy to look beyond this era of "hamburger menu" flat design, and see that it's as faddy as web 2.0 was last decade.
Once you're older than say 28, you'll have probably observed first hand the cyclical nature of design, and that "modern" is just "everything old is new again".
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 07:05 GMT Mage
Thunderbird needed resources better spent on Firefox,
Well... in the past 8 years they seem to have been squandering their resources, what little they did do to Thunderbird wasn't what was needed.
Most of what has been done on Firefox has been stupid (GUI) or ill advised.
Can someone else look after Firefox too?
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 11:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Thunderbird needed resources better spent on Firefox,
That's not a bad idea. Mozilla spend over $200 million per year on software development (plus another $100 million on other stuff) and other than messing around the edges of Firefox there is bugger all to show for it. Just imagine what any other open source project could have done with that much cash...
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 11:30 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Thunderbird needed resources better spent on Firefox,
I agree with your sentiment, but for Firefox you're only seeing the (stupid) GUI changes from an end-user perspective.
Under the hood, Firefox is racing flat out to keep up with Chrome implementing the standard. If Firefox so much as pulls in for a pit stop, it will fall behind catastrophically and be lost.
Unfortunately this means Google (and Google affiliated people) are effectively writing the "open" web spec now.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 13:53 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Thunderbird needed resources better spent on Firefox,
"Under the hood, Firefox is racing flat out to keep up with Chrome implementing the standard. If Firefox so much as pulls in for a pit stop, it will fall behind catastrophically and be lost."
And the corollary seems to be that Thunderbird, by using the underpinnings of Firefox has exactly the same problem in relation to Firefox that Firefox has in relation to Chrome. As far as I'm aware Seamonkey also has the same problem and so does Palemoon.
I recall reading that Palemoon were considering writing their own rendering engine. Maybe there's scope for all the Mozilla spin-offs and splinter groups to get together and provide themselves with their own common core, either as a fork or from ground up.
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Wednesday 27th April 2016 16:36 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: Thunderbird needed resources better spent on Firefox,
I recall reading that Palemoon were considering writing their own rendering engine. Maybe there's scope for all the Mozilla spin-offs and splinter groups to get together and provide themselves with their own common core, either as a fork or from ground up.
Ever since WHAT-WG gained de facto control of HTML this hasn't really been realistic. The cost of keeping track with the "living standard" puts a standards-compliant, up-to-date rendering engine out of reach of anything but well-funded, well-staffed development groups.
True, many people don't care about having an engine that supports all the latest bells and whistles of HTML 5, many of which are either unproductive eye candy or for rather specific use cases. But a rendering engine which isn't current necessarily has a somewhat smaller audience, which makes it harder to compete against the free ones from Mozilla and Google.
(The same could be said, to a lesser extent, of the modularization of the CSS standard, the growth in standard browser host-object script APIs, etc.)
WHAT-WG's mission, more or less, is to promote much faster change in web languages. Ostensibly that's because its stakeholders wanted "richer" web-based UIs, but it necessarily has the effect of reducing the number of independent implementations. And that suits WHAT-WG's stakeholders just fine.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 07:10 GMT Novex
My biggest concern is that whoever takes this on doesn't change the basic layout and usability of the application. I don't want to see a completely made over interface, changed for the sake of change. Keep it looking and working as per its current appearance, and only add features that are useful into the existing design, and fix any bugs.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 07:41 GMT wolfetone
Best Thing For Thunderbird
To say that Thunderbird uses resources that should be spent on Firefox is laughable. With all the money Mozilla get from various sources they should already have plenty of resources to make Firefox better than it already is! But no! They're hell bent on taking a browser which was effectively Elvis in the 1950's, giving it hamburgers and pills and squeeze it's bloated body in to a tight white jump suit.
At least now Thunderbird has the chance to fly. Look at what happened to OpenOffice when it was split and LibreOffice was born. The same can and will happen with Thunderbird, and maybe one day when Firefox is on the toilet on the verge of a heart attack the Thunderbird developers can swoop in and save it.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 08:14 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: Best Thing For Thunderbird
At least now Thunderbird has the chance to fly. Look at what happened to OpenOffice when it was split and LibreOffice was born.
What an explosion of new features and bugs?
I understand why LibreOffice was started but, to be honest, I am not impressed by the work so far. On OS X I find OpenOffice far more reliable.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 07:41 GMT fnj
A chance to do some long-overdue good, actually
In general all it needs, and all that it should be touched for, are security fixes for vulnerabilities that emerge, a very few bug fixes, and one or two config rationalizations.
Beyond that, the only change that is REALLY needed, and this is in common with Firefox, is some semblance of sane memory management. This is in reality a bug fix for a colossal and deeply embarrassing super-bug. I am sick and tired of watching my Thunderbird process in ps grow in RAM use past 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, even yes, 6 GB, instrumental in driving my 16 GB RAM super powerful desktop into memory exhaustion swapping so bad that it cannot be recovered without hitting the power switch.
It gobbles RAM with every message you read, every search you run, every time you switch between accounts. I've repeatedly verified that it hogs down RAM, more and more over time and without any limit whatsoever, even just sitting statically on the desktop collecting new mail.
Firefox with plenty of tabs open shares the same inexcusable RAM hogging.
There is no excuse for this infantile, incompetent level of code design. It is only possible to read one message at a time. Having collected the other messages, the collection code's job is DONE until a new one is opened to be read. All RAM used to collect them should be freed. This is NOT rocket science. Same with Firefox tabs. Only one tab is active and live (or one SHOULD BE so) at a time. Having rendered other tabs, all RAM used to do so should be FREED.
In the case of Firefox, I completely abandoned it for Chrome. The same problem is still there, but not quite as bad, and the entire browser does not get bogged down as horribly just because a bunch of tabs are open.
For Thunderbird, I mostly had to abandon it in favor of Claws because T-bird's behavior got so pathological. I had to give up significant features to do so, but I can leave Claws running for many days at a time, collecting many accounts, and RAM use does not climb at all.
$ ps -C claws-mail,thunderbird -o vsz,rss,comm,etime
VSZ RSS COMMAND ELAPSED
1802716 790736 thunderbird 10:00
1337436 187896 claws-mail 15-10:52:31
(sorry, code and pre tags do not work properly)
Yeah, Claws has been running for 15 days, while I just started Thunderbird 10 minutes ago for the illustration. That Thunderbird RSS will climb to 6,000,000+ (6 GB) if I leave it sitting open a few days.
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Wednesday 27th April 2016 14:17 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: A chance to do some long-overdue good, actually
I tried claws. Truly awful handling of html mail. Abysmal performance. Really wanted to like it but in the end switched back to thunderbird. All the other alternatives (I've tried them all) are significantly worse than most Android clients. Only t-bird comes close to the best on mobile. Even then it lags behind Outlook, which it once beat hands down (coming from a former Outlook SDK slinger who grew to hate it with a passion).
Thunderbird is a worthwhile project that deserves support. Although SFC would make a fine home for it, I think TDF would probably be a better fit, so long as they recognize t-bird's special place in the Internet ecosystem and make a commitment to do everything they can to avoid mangling it.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 07:48 GMT DrXym
LibreOffice sounds like a good idea
LibreOffice is competing with Microsoft Office which includes Outlook in some configurations. It'd be pretty handy to provide Thunderbird as an option particularly if it included a scheduling plugin. Better yet if it grew sync backends so data could be synced with Exchange / Domino servers.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 09:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
it if it grew sync backends
Unluckily using the ActiveSync protocol to sync with Exchange requires a license from Microsoft (see https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/intellectualproperty/mtl/technologylicensing.aspx), which I'm quite sure the Document Foundation will never ask because of its ideology - but I may be wrong.
Not sure if other ways to interact with Exchange still needs a license, but they are far more complex and harder to use outside a LAN, and less supported (especially if they are a reverse engineering effort).
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 10:13 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: it if it grew sync backends
AFAIK Z-push is more a server side implementation of ActiveSync than a client one. And being ActiveSync a MS IP, the license should apply as well - it's the protocol to be patented, not the implementation.
MAPI AFAIK doesn't require a license (but of course the Exchange CALs...) but it's more difficult to use, and while with recent versions of Exchange it can also be accessed over HTTP(S), in older ones it is still a RPC based protocol, and requires a lot of plumbing to work.
While on Windows there could be some support, on other platforms that becomes more complex. Projects like OpenMAPI looks to be dragging their feet a lot.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 08:03 GMT psyvenrix
Sad but glad
Thunderbird user for a while now. I use the features present, from multiple profiles to even the chat function and twitter integration from time to time.
Whilst stable, it could use some more love. And the idea of the Document Foundation buffing it up to compete against outlook (one day) strikes me as a good long term goal.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 15:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
@amethyst_igor
Not sure about bundling with LO. I've found LO to be a bloated turd with developers that fail to fix known issues even decades after they were identified. In terms of compatibility with MS Office, it's also far behind the likes of Kingsoft Office. Plus it wants you to install Java which is just stupid.
No, if the Document Foundation are to be the ones taking over I hope they keep Thunderbird as a separate entity and generally leave the code well alone.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 14:24 GMT Doctor Syntax
'Last time I complained on a Thunderbird forum I got told "It's free, how can you complain about something you don't pay for"'
This is a common problem with FOSS forums. There's always a smattering of religious zealots who assume that because it's free in the Stallman sense that it must be beyond criticism - and will be even more beyond criticism in the next release. Alternatively you'll be told that there's the source, fix it up yourself. In reality the actual devs may well be aware of the problems but are too busy chasing something more demanding - such as chasing a changes in the libraries on which they depend.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 12:11 GMT Marvin O'Gravel Balloon Face
Not being a big fan of cloudy services, I've found the combined address book, enhanced calendar and mail functionality of Thunderbird to be all I need to organise my life. One central profile gets synchronised across 2 android phones, 3 house phones and another PC. Works very well (although I wish they'd fix the vcard formatting/integration).
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 14:50 GMT Dan 55
The only thing Mozilla has offered Thunderbird since 2012 is webspace, blogspace, use of the addons site, use of Bugzilla, and so on. All fairly automatic as it was previously set up that way anyway. No code contributions, no staff.
Apparently in 2016 this is now too much. Perhaps it interrupts their navel gazing.
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Tuesday 26th April 2016 19:37 GMT Fonant
Vivaldi and M3, please!
Opera's M2 was the best email client for me (my terrible memory, mitigated by M2's top-notch ways to find messages) until Opera ditched it. M2 made Thunderbird's search look painfully slow: and I still can't find a way to list all messages to or from a specific contact in Thunderbird - something I did all the time in M2.
Can't wait for M3 to be released in Vivaldi. Until then I'm reluctantly a Thunderbird user.
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Wednesday 27th April 2016 02:33 GMT Tannin
Good thinking that tool
Yer, right. Good thinking Mr Tool. Take resources away from your useful, practical product in order to waste them on your slowly dying flagship.Yes, that one, the one you have been doing your best to wreck one brick at a time with one daft, unwanted UI change after another. yes, that's right, the one that more and more users are turning away from every month because you keep making it worse.
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Thursday 28th April 2016 00:16 GMT John Sanders
Re: Good thinking that tool
Amen brother!
I think this is for the best of Thunderbird, at some point Firefox will completely sink and finally rest at the bottom of the Mariana trench, so for Thunderbird is better to get of the Firetanic now that's still okay-sh.
I hope the Document Foundation is who ends maintain it, I'm willing to make a considerable money donation towards fixing the font issues that have plagued the HTML editor for the last 10 years, or the lack of official tray icon in Linux, or the enormous memory consumption, or the archive function breaking if you try to archive more than 200 messages, or the filters breaking when a message is both moved and mark as read... etc.
And have no doubt besides its defects I love Thunderbird.
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