Thunderbird Developer

I've been running thunderbird for what, ~20 years now? Its a love/hate relationship. I curse it almost daily, but have issues with most of the alternatives as well.

So, I was excited about the fact that thunderbird was going to get some attention, and was even going to throw some $ at them.

Then I read their planning/backlog

https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap-1

and things I simply could not agree with poped out at me, particularly the plan (now partially done?) to reimplement the IMAP support in javascript.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1707547

The IMAP support is one of the weakest things about thunderbird, because its horribly slow, buggy, doesn't scale, etc, etc, etc. And frankly I cannot see how rewritting in it JS will solve any of that. What it needs is IMAP support that can sync lots of folders and doesn't peg CPUs (which is already a problem) while doing it. My own biases seeing what others have accomplished with their JS rewrites (usually electron, so maybe that is part of the problem) give me a very low opinion of them.

So, I will give it a chance, but I predict it won't work with my mailflow out of the box, and generally will make everything even worse, and the developers will ignore those of us that get more than 1k worth of emails in a day.

(I mean look where firefox has gone, I can't even get it to draw pages consistently, and its not the platform/computer because I see it doing the same buggy behaviors on my linux and…

> Alternatively, and not so good, the other answer is to maintain shims or back-ported APIs for some duration

If I understand correctly, this is what they're actually doing. From https://developer.thunderbird.net/add-ons/updating/tb78:

> Knowing that following the proper migration strategy is not easy, we created two wrapper APIs which do not require all of these changes. Using these APIs, you can quickly get your add-on running in Thunderbird 78 again, but you will not get the benefits of a MailExtension. The idea behind this is to make add-ons compatible with the current ESR as quickly and easily as possible, so users can continue to work with their beloved add-ons.

Per se, this would be a sensible move. However, in the bigger picture, the plan starts to show its pointy-hairedness:

> While the Thunderbird team plans to add more APIs with upcoming releases, the current set of APIs will not be sufficient to port most add-ons. To work around this limitation, add-ons can introduce their own, additional APIs as so-called Experiments [...] [which] are expected to require updates for each new version of Thunderbird.

In other words, the TB team, for unspecified reasons (it's not clear if they were really forced to move to MailExtensions), has broken compatibility with the previous versions of the addons, and provided half-baked APIs which are expected to break again in the future.

Other mind-numbing pointy-hairedness:

> [...] If you follow this strategy, you will end up…

So much negativity in this thread, jeez.

I love current Thunderbird but it undeniably has its issues. Firstly, of course this is subjective, but its UI is starting to look dated. Lots of you are complaining about modern UIs, but I think the designs [0][1] look great and are much more readable than the current design, which looks straight out of Ubuntu 8.04.

Then there are some major UX issues, the most obvious one being the lack of conversation view, which is how pretty much everybody expects an email client to work in 2023. Supernova implementing that is reason enough to be excited about the release.

I can't wait to try it out - keep up the awesome work, team!

[0] https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap

[1] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/11/thunderbird-supernova-preview-the-new-calendar-design/

Literally here's a doc explaining how XUL has changed as of Thunderbird 68, the most recent version, released about a month and a half ago. Yes, some elements have been removed, but others have been modified and still exist.

https://developer.thunderbird.net/add-ons/updating/tb68/changes

And that's in the add-on documentation, not even just internal development docs.

Also, describing information changed in the most recent stable release, a month and a half ago, hardly qualifies any older as "ridiculously outdated ".

Its all nice and dandy and I really appreciate that development of Thunderbird has awoken from its hiatus, but I really really wish they would fix the Maildir storage and make it standards compatible, so that one can use other mail tools like offlineimap (aka nbsync) or mu on the same Maildir store.

Please let form follow function...

Edit: some other user pointed out that Maildir support is on the roadmap:
https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap#maildir

Great news!!

Glad to see Maildir support hasn't fallen off the map:

https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap#maildir

> Maildir is a message storage format that should improve data safety, allow for incremental (delta) backups of messages and allow for antivirus to interact better with messages. Maildir will be vastly improved for 102, but may not be pref'd on by default.

> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=845952