Thunderbird Mail Client Now Being Pushed Along By "MZLA Technologies Corporation"

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Thunderbird Mail Client Now Being Pushed Along By "MZLA Technologies Corporation"

Mozilla's Thunderbird mail client has been rather neglected the past several years with all the focus on the Firefox web browser, but as the next step forward for this mail/RSS client is now placing it under the newly-formed MZLA Technologies Corporation...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Thunderbird-MZLA-Technologies

[jacob]

This is good news. Thunderbird remains one of the very few email clients for Linux that are actually useable.

[torsionbar28]

This is good news. Thunderbird remains one of the very few email clients for Linux that are actually useable.

Agree on your latter point, not so much on the former one. I've used Tbird myself for many years now. But what leads you to believe this is a "good" turn of events? I'd like to know what specifically they are targeting with this reorg. Thunderbird *is* very usable and that's why any promise of major change seems foreboding. After all, Gnome 3 was a well hyped "change" from the highly usable Gnome 2... but far from a positive one; A highly usable product became a highly UNusable product in one fell swoop. I sure hope this MZLA team doesn't pull a "Gnome 3" on Thunderbird.

[jacob]

Agree on your latter point, not so much on the former one. I've used Tbird myself for many years now. But what leads you to believe this is a "good" turn of events? I'd like to know what specifically they are targeting with this reorg. Thunderbird *is* very usable and that's why any promise of major change seems foreboding. After all, Gnome 3 was a well hyped "change" from the highly usable Gnome 2... but far from a positive one; A highly usable product became a highly UNusable product in one fell swoop. I sure hope this MZLA team doesn't pull a "Gnome 3" on Thunderbird.

IMO it is a positive turn of events because Thunderbird has been stagnating. Many standing issues have been unaddressed for too long (bugs with folder compacting, Wayland) and since it is such an irreplaceable piece of software, having a new team on board opens a possibility that things could get better. I certainly hope that they will know their priorities, i.e. making a best of breed email client with robust features and GPG support front and centre, not retarget it as a twitter / instagram client for kids.

[rgloor]

I have deployed TB to many friends systems and within some companies.

I hope, that with this new "setup", they (MZLA) can now really complete the functional foundation of the client. Before any cosmetic updates.
Most important:

1.) MUST: CardDAV AddressBook
Include a CardDAV compatible AddressBook. Like CardBook, but not as an add-on, but fully integrated with a proper sync. (If you want to write an email, you need email-addresses, hence a address book, and you don't want to maintain, several of those.

2.) IMPORTANT: Tasks & Memos/Notes
In order to have a full PIM client, improved features for Tasks as well as Memos/Notes.
Adding tags to both of them, eventually folders and tags, and much better sort and filter capabilities. (Similar to the sort and filter functions in the email section.)

=> It would be nice to have a fully functional "Outlook" (PIM) replacement, running on several platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac).

There is still a large user base, that does want a local client, capable of managing several email inboxes / accounts from several providers, as well as tasks and memos/notes, all in one location.

[Mez']

After all, Gnome 3 was a well hyped "change" from the highly usable Gnome 2... but far from a positive one; A highly usable product became a highly UNusable product in one fell swoop.

I'm just going to add the most important part of your message, which is probably implicit but I don't want others to miss it.

"For me".
It could be "subjectively" though.
Or maybe "this is only my opinion".
And if we want to be more casual "just my two cents".

Just saying because it seems so enforced and we wouldn't want people to believe you extrapolated your single opinion to a widespread truth.

[xpander]

Just when my thunderbird broke completely all those years i have been using it. like 5 days ago after system update thunderbird just segfaults for me. It was pain to get a tray area icon for thunderbird for quite some time, since they moved to new extension system or whatever. Had to use the slow birdtray that pulled the CPU quite a bit every rescan. Anyway yeah, lets see what the future will look like for it. Currently i switched to Mailspring cause of thunderbird segfaults.

[treba]

... Many standing issues have been unaddressed for too long (... Wayland) ...

The Wayland support is completely shared with Firefox and well on the way, fedora even offers a Wayland enabled launcher (when installing the thunderbird-wayland package). If everything goes right we have Wayland enabled by default for the next FF esr / TB stable version.
Fedora 31 alreadry ships FF with Wayland enabled by default and the last rough edges are currently being tackled to let it ride the trains.

[Mez']

Anyway, I've been using it for for the last 15 years. It's fantastic with the lightning extension.
Also, it looks arguably better with the monterail theme. But this will be a matter of opinion.

The main points I'm not fully satisfied with:

• In general the reply window looks very austere and I just don't feel fully comfortable using Tb because of it. As of late, I've been to the specific webmails because it's much cleaner and warmer. Hence, it needs a cleaner and warmer message structure.
  • Replies with "On 29/01/2020 11:05, John DOE wrote:" is a big no. Structure that on a couple of clean lines with From, to, etc... It gives space, it is easier to find between several lines of text and thus you spot the beginning of a message more easily.
  • In the same vein, please add a line between replied messages for distinction's sake
  • it is sometimes difficult to find an attachment within a message containing several replies. Give it a specific fixed section independent from each message. Whether it is on top, on the side or on the bottom, I really don't care.
• The left menu/tree (Inbox, etc...) is not aligned horizontally with the first message line but with the column titles, it hurts the eye.

If these are given proper attention, I see many more years ahead.

[Saverios]

I was a happy KMail user for years; visually it was much more appealing than anything available for Linux / KDE. But the bugs and instability drove me to Thunderbird.

I never enjoyed it as much as KMail, but it got the job done and there were very few problems. Tried others (claws, etc), nothing was as feature-complete as Thunderbird.

Except the damn tray icon. It's 2020 and still no damn tray icon. And every time there is an update they *have* to break the extensions that provide this basic functionality (and probably most other extensions, as well). There have been so many users complaining about this in bug reports / feature requests that the devs now simply close the threads with a "yes, we know".

I really love OSS, but sometimes it lacks maturity in terms of product management. Maybe this change will help guide Thunderbird development towards a more mature offering.