Thunderbird in Crisis? 422
Elektroschock writes "The two core developers of Thunderbird have left Mozilla. Scott McGregor made a brief statement: 'I wanted to let the Thunderbird community know that Friday October 12th will be my last day as an employee of the Mozilla Corporation.' Meanwhile, David Bienvenu blogged: 'Just wanted to let everyone know that my last day at The Mozilla Corporation will be Oct. 12. I intend to stay involved with Thunderbird... I've enjoyed working at Mozilla a lot, and I wish Mozilla Co and the new Mail Co all the best.' A few month ago Mozilla management considered abandoning their second product and setting up a special corporation just for the mail client. Scott was more or less supportive. David joined in. While Sunbird just released a new version no appropriate resources were dedicated to the missing component. And while Thunderbird became the most used Linux mail client it has been abandoned by Mozilla for 'popularity reasons'. Both messages from David and Scott do not sound as if the founders will play any role in the Thunderbird Mail Corporation. What happened to Mozilla? Is it a case of pauperization through donations?"
Re:Thunderbird is awesome on Windows (Score:5, Informative)
Thunderbird's renderer works, Evolution's is crap.
Also, while there is a tiny handful of plugins for Evolution, there is a HUGE selection of extensions for Tunderbird which are extremely useful, including one extension which can be used to automatically purge duplicate messages from one's inbox.
With that said, I do use Evolution as my primary email program both at home and at work, but only because the scalix connector is available for Evolution. Thunderbird can access via IMAP only, and cannot use Scalix's calendaring features.
Re:Well, it kind of shows in the code... (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure if you're aware but there is a Thunderbird project called Penelope [mozilla.org] for those Eudora users stuck by Qualcomm's decision to discontinue the product. I haven't tried the Eudora importers, though...
Re:Thunderbird is awesome on Windows (Score:5, Informative)
Outlook has been pretty safe since the XP release (Outlook 2002), and even the 2000 release with a patch. That's when they stopped allowing you to open executable attachments. There was still a minor risk of javascript nastiness, but they fixed that as well. The 2003 (11) and 2007 (12) releases of Outlook have been stable and safe. (Outlook 2007 doesn't use the controversial Ribbon toolbar like the rest of the Office 12 suite)
Outlook Express is dead, though if you're still using XP you have it. Outlook Express has also been the Microsoft mail client with the most issues, mostly because it's free and more or less neglected. The problem is that "Outlook Express" and "Outlook" actually share nothing in common except for the name and the fact that they both do email. Beyond that they're two separate codebases, managed by two separate teams. It's unfortunate that they're named similarly, since Outlook Express' issues have tarnished the fact that Outlook proper is actually a very good, secure, and competent email client.
If you're running Vista, Outlook Express is gone. It was replaced by Windows Mail, a more bare-bones mail and news reader that finally divorces the "Outlook" name from the free mail client. Alternatively, you can use the Windows Live Mail Beta [live.com] software (different from Hotmail/Windows Live Mail web interface, as it's client software that can be used for other mail accounts besides just Hotmail). Windows Live Mail integrates with Live services (Messenger, Spaces), where Outlook Express and Windows Mail don't.
Re:Well, it kind of shows in the code... (Score:5, Informative)
Don't forget KMail (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Thunderbird is awesome on Windows (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Thunderbird in Crisis? Yes. (Score:4, Informative)
You should give credit to the right people. Two of those three are Opera innovations, that Firefox copied. Not that Firefox is not a good browser. I'm just saying who actually did this first.
Re:The elephant in the room. (Score:4, Informative)
Still it doesn't do exchange intigration all that well, but I think they're on the right track.
They wrote about it on the dot [kde.org] a few days ago.
Try Claws Mail (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Still good... (Score:3, Informative)
I thought it was released under the MPL like all the other Mozilla software?
Re:Still good... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Still good... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird/ [mozilla.org]
Re:Thunderbird is awesome on Windows (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Natural Selection (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Natural Selection (Score:2, Informative)
Kmail for KDE (Score:4, Informative)
From the blog of David Ascher (Score:5, Informative)
Open Letter to the Thunderbird Community [ascher.ca]
Also note that both Scott and David say they'll still be working on TB. Scott's post:
David's:
Given the timing and very similar wording of their posts, I'm guessing that Ascher's right - they're going off to work on something together.
It does suck; those two know more about TB than anyone, and even when they were full-time employees, TB development was fairly glacial - it's just too big and monolithic for that size development team. But I don't know that this necessarily means the end of TB. I certainly hope not.
OH, PLEASE NO! (Score:3, Informative)
But I load OpenOffice and the world stops.
I fear that Thunderbird, under the direction of OO will become bloated and laggy as well! I had a friend who didn't know any better; her P2/300 was on loan to show her how to use Linux. She waited over 2H for it to load. It was insane. These guys really need to profile their code.
Maildir is cool if you run Reiser4 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:is webmail to blame (Score:3, Informative)
http://marklyon.org/gmail/instruction.htm [marklyon.org]
Been there, done that, have the scars to prove it. (Score:2, Informative)
As I said, there may have been other steps in this process that I've forgotten.
My point isn't that these solutions, in my case, were that hard. But figuring out what was wrong, and implementing them, took huge amounts of time and patience. An ordinary user would never have these means (knowledge of command-line Unix utilities, and insight into what might be failing) at his/her disposal. And they surely wouldn't have gone to these lengths to diagnose and correct the problems. (Although, to be honest, an ordinary user wouldn't have 10-15 years of email saved up that they wanted to convert to a new platform).
And - more importantly, and some of the reason for this rant - I think that import/conversion function, especially in FOSS software, have a greater need to be as friendly and bulletproof as possible, because the user's still quite possibly in the "I'm going to try it out and see if I want to use it instead of my old [proprietary] application if it doesn't work'. But in Tbird, seemingly, Import's it's at most an afterthought, and extremely fragile even AFTER you've used third-party apps like Eudora Rescue or Eudora Mailbox Cleaner to try and get around the known issues, limitations, and deficiencies in the code. That isn't the way it should be in an app that's trying to compete for mind and market share with some pretty damn good commercial or closed-source apps.
Thunderbird has been ignored for too long! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Natural Selection (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Try Claws Mail (Score:3, Informative)
Dude, because it bites.
No, seriously. It says so right on the website. Thanks, I'll be here all day.
I kid. But seriously for real this time, GTK+? WTF+? That does bite. I know it's a great toolkit that's been in use since ancient times, etc., but it's pretty ugly no matter what theme you slap on it and it's a serious pain to install on any platform besides *nix. The Windows version of Claws is apparently part of a confusing (to non-geeks) package of a bunch of GPG software. The Mac version is one of those ports maintained by one guy on his own domain, which is nice of him but doesn't give me much confidence that it will always be available. I'm downloading it because I've heard good things about it over the years, but I would never recommend it to anyone who didn't know how to build their own computer.
In short, like so much of the software that has originated on the *nix side, Claws is entirely too *nix oriented to appeal to the masses. The Mac and Windows versions are mere afterthoughts on a page filled with links to versions of the software for a dozen different Linux distros, the BSDs, and even Solaris. If the developers cared about the general computing population using Claws, the Windows and Mac links would be the most prominent links at the top of the page, and they wouldn't send you off to some other website, there would be official Windows and Mac packages right there. You know, like with Firefox and Thunderbird.
And you wonder why it doesn't get more attention. The developers don't care about attention. They've made powerful software that does what they want, and that's as far as it goes for them. Unfortunately in my experience this is a fairly common mindset in the FOSS software world, which is why few non-geeks have ever heard of any free software other than Firefox.