Thunderbird 78 Rolls Out With UI Updates, New Features

[M@yeulC]

Nice improvements, I whish search gets some love soon, though: I don't really see a way of searching mails received from a specific sender, for instance, which is something I need almost everyday.

[PluMGMK]

All I want to know is can I use Muttator (or a WebExtensions equivalent) with it? :P

[hajj_3]

The best thing about v78 is that there is an option in the settings to minimise to tray icon at least on windows, not sure whether this option has been added to linux. Maybe someone will try?

[Mez']

The Outlook Windows client sucks, but the Web client is really, really nice, albeit a bit laggy (that's probably my only complaint). The Android client is also really nice, esp. in landscape mode, but it needs more features.

At work, I use both Gmail and Outlook webmails. Outlook is terrible comparatively. You can't add a "Mark as read" icon at a convenient place (instead of extending the 3 dots every time), for your spams you have to delete them twice (spam then deleted) with as many confirmation required. Why so many clicks necessary and no option to bypass those inadvertent error prevention mechanisms?
It's also slow and there's something with that interface, it's just not working (for me).

[Mez']

Nice to see Thunderbird is still being developed. I thought it had been abandoned. Used it a lot back in the day but it had dated really badly by 2014 - although it did the core task of email perfectly fine. I still pine for the days I used pine, back when everything was plain text and you rarely did attachments.

Still, it's not as horrific as Outlook :-)

Nothing some tinkering with css can't fix .
And if you don't want to lose time doing it yourself, I believe the Monterail theme can bring a more modern look & feel.

Anyway, I have been using Thunderbird since my last few years on Windows, probably 2003-2004. So I'm with you on that one, pretty happy it hasn't been abandoned as it was anounced it would be at some point.

[Vistaus]

At work, I use both Gmail and Outlook webmails. Outlook is terrible comparatively. You can't add a "Mark as read" icon at a convenient place (instead of extending the 3 dots every time), for your spams you have to delete them twice (spam then deleted) with as many confirmation required. Why so many clicks necessary and no option to bypass those inadvertent error prevention mechanisms?
It's also slow and there's something with that interface, it's just not working (for me).

I find the interface much more clear than Gmail's horrid one where everything is all over the place.

Also, you can add the Mark as read icon to the message list so that each message contains a Mark as read option.
I also don't see the issue with the Spam folder. If I report the message to Microsoft, it's permanently deleted.

Also, since you mentioned work: are you sure you're talking about the Outlook webmail interface and not Office 365's Outlook webmail interface? 'Cause there's a difference between both webmails.

[schmidtbag]

Apple's Mail is a complete disaster if you have thousands of mails in your InBox.

In my experience, Outlook is just as bad. But frankly, I find any of these mail clients to be more of a hassle than they're worth. They're only good if you either have crappy internet, the webmail is crappy and unusable, or if you depend on certain plugins.

[Sonadow]

The Outlook Windows client sucks, but the Web client is really, really nice, albeit a bit laggy (that's probably my only complaint). The Android client is also really nice, esp. in landscape mode, but it needs more features.

The Outlook 365 web client's lagginess is legendary. When I type in an email address in the To, CC or BCC fields, the characters appear in the field one-by-one even after I have finished entering the full address on the keyboard. But the message box for actually composing the mail never seems to lag at all...

Other than that, the Outlook 365 web client does indeed have the best user interface and design ever. Way superior to any other email client I have ever used.

[Mez']

I find the interface much more clear than Gmail's horrid one where everything is all over the place.

I don't have anything over the place in gmail. Everything's tight and neat, without too much padding between messages.

Also, you can add the Mark as read icon to the message list so that each message contains a Mark as read option.
I also don't see the issue with the Spam folder. If I report the message to Microsoft, it's permanently deleted.

That's not the intuitive place for me. In Thunderbird, in (the pro client) Outlook, in gmail webmail, I can add a Mark as Read on the icon bar on top. Which mean I can do it for per message or per a group of selected messages. Not in Outlook webmail.

In gmail, I select spams and in one click I can "Delete forever".
In Outlook webmail, I need 4 clicks for that (delete spams then confirm, then in the delete folder delete them AGAIN and confirm).
I don't want to report anything, just delete entirely.

Also, since you mentioned work: are you sure you're talking about the Outlook webmail interface and not Office 365's Outlook webmail interface? 'Cause there's a difference between both webmails.

I'm talking about outlook.live.com. The normal webmail.
I also sometimes use outlook.office.com (Office 365) for work but then I prefer to use the Office client, as I don't like webmails in general and the ones from MS are just even more irritating to use.

But it's obviously all subjective. It's my workflow that is not very compatible. Yours might be.

[ElectricPrism]

I've watched users of Thunderbird click on Mailbox [email protected] and expect to be in their INBOX completely dumbfounded and shown instead of a overview screen with buttons and no INBOX or even Mini Inbox -- I think that's a oversight.

I've used Evoltion, Thunderbird, and Geary for years now and each has its pros and cons

Geary is simple but lacks the ability to sort by table column header like Sender, Date, Subject or even change the layout view to be more compact or less in various ways.

Evolution really fits in nicely with Gnome under GTK but pulls huge dependencies that are somewhat annoying outside of Gnome and has occasional issues syncing like crazy and with a notification that doesn't fit in on the dark theme.

Thunderbird's UI was ANCIENT, I'm glad to see this step in the right direction -- but the sheer complexity of the app is a "Spruce Goose" -- there are so many oddities like not having compose new message as a tab in a tabbed UI it feels very much "evolved" and "evolved too slow to keep users happy" like it's always playing catchup with the times.

Then there's the weird chat, rss and other features of Thunderbird that seem really cool at first but then you realize that it doesn't do Chat, IRC or RSS as well as a independent app for each of those.

I get that they were trying to make a "All-in-one" like Firefox reads PDFs in the browser, has a Download Manager, Bookmark Manager, does FTP, and more, but I am not a fan of this Monolithic "All-in-one" design -- I think they should lean towards simplicity and cutting out the fat with major redesign.

Each component should have been independent severable apps that communicate and work together -- eg: "Mozilla Download Manager", "Mozilla Office [For PDFs]", "Mozilla Bookmarks [Oldschool Bookmarking and New Snippets]", "Mozilla Email", "Mozilla Chat [IRC, Hangouts, XMMP, etc...]", "Mozilla Contacts", etc...

Do one thing and do it well. Google Chrome has lead the "Operating System as a Web Browser" idea and it just doesn't make sense -- and if it did it should at the very least be compartmentalized into Apps that work together using Protocols or APIs not just one big fat-ass program.

/rant

Edit: Every time Nightly installs a new version it would be nice if I didn't need to manually migrate my profile in ~/.thunderbird (which doesn't follow XDG spec btw)

Also, on every boot it does a new version check which spawns a annoying window that is pinned to all workspaces on Tiling Window Managers -- so annoying.

Also, the IMAP mail copy feature doesn't always work or complete without failing -- it can't restart a "move" or "sync" where it left off so you have to use a CLI utility -- imapsync to do large operations -- another usability pitfall that hopefully one day will get fixed.

My hope is they cut off all the fat and try to make the core features go from "Good" to "Damn Good".