Yes, precisely. I rely on Thunderbird every single day, which is why I froze it at version 60-something (rolling back about four years) after the upgrades kept breaking it and mangling the appearance for me and the other people in my company.
It was a lovely mail client. It seems they're repeating all the mistakes that firefox made. Firefox added pocket, everyone disabled it and eventually the feature was removed. Firefox added chat, everybody disabled it and eventually the feature was removed.
Now Thunderbird has added chat, that's great. What does it support, Slack? no. Discord? no. Oh. That's not great, then, that's useless. They're intending to jumpstart a chat protocol with a client that's used by like 0.8% of users? Sure.
The last update made the context-menus and dropdown-menus white backgrounded menus with literally no border, so you had no way to determine where the menu background ended and the email background started. That was the update that pushed me over the edge and prompted the rollback and push of whatever 60-ish version I chose. My staff need imap and calendaring and consistency. That version delivers.
I have absolutely zero interest in playing the 'what spurious UI change will throw my staff into confusion today' game with a basic productivity tool.
>Now Thunderbird has added chat, that's great. What does it support, Slack? no. Discord? no. Oh. That's not great, then, that's useless. They're intending to jumpstart a chat protocol with a client that's used by like 0.8% of users? Sure.
Thunderbird has had XMPP and other chat for many, many years now.
Like I said, 0.8% of users. Slack and discord and maybe the MS product are what matter in the chat space. If you're not offering that then the dev resources would probably be better funnelled into bug chasing and UI consistency.
'It supports XMPP' that's great. ICQ support would arguably be more useful.
I don’t know about Slack, but discord’s terms of service explicitly forbid external chat clients. It’s also proprietary, like Slack I believe. Maybe we should try and encourage more use of open protocols over things like Discord or Slack.
I've seen multiple people be banned from using this client. It does everything in its power to remain unnoticed but you only need to come across the wrong server-side detection update once to get the hammer.
Good to know and unfortunate although not terribly surprising. I guess this is the recommended user experience that the commenter up the thread is suggesting be integrated into thunderbird?
There were some automated bans that happened after an outage (years ago), but those bans got lifted. After that, I haven't seen anyone get banned for using Ripcord. But like all things, YMMV. The benefits of Ripcord outweigh the negatives for me.
Yes. It is. It's been confirmed multiple times that even using browser plugins that interact with the Discord client code in any way counts, in their opinion, as a "third party client".
And what percent of users use iCal, carddav and imap? Matrix is the most popular open chat protocol. Seems like your angling for Exchange and Slack support. Yeah, no thanks.
>And what percent of users use iCal, carddav and imap?
Thunderbird users? I'd say ~100% of them use imap, probably ~75% of them use calendaring. I don't know whether Thunderbird uses ical or imap-type calendars behind the scenes but it works with gmail, zimbra and apple type shared/hosted calendars which account for basically ~100% of the non-exchange type calendars in common use. It probably supports exchange-type calendars too though I've never tried that.
I'd wager less than ~2% of TB users use a non-slack non-discord non-irc chat.
I use only SMTP and POP3, no calendar. Chat: Slack (work) and WhatsApp plus Telegram.
I think that TLS is the only new protocol level feature I'm using compared to 30 years ago. Anything else is in the UI and keeping the software compatible with new versions of the OS.
What was I using back then? Some emacs mail client with filters I wrote in elisp. I got my current folder structure started in emacs (roughly one folder per person and customer) and kept it through all the moves to Eudora, Netscape's mail client and Exchange Express until I landed to Thunderbird (desktop) and K9 (phone, much later on.) Work email was on Exchange when I was an employee, always separated from personal email.
Which works so well across multiple devices, which is a very very common use-case for email. Either you have some homebrew sync going on or you have a very simple email use-case.
I check mail on my phone with K9 (configured to leave messages on server,) possibly answer BCCing myself and eventually download mail forever on my laptop and remove from server.
My 35 years experience with email: I don't need to read old messages when I'm not at my computer. I never did before 2011 (first Android phone) and nothing changed after then. I can easily figure jobs that need constant access to the complete email archive. Not my one.
And I don't need mail on tablets and my old phone. I've got my main phone always with me, but the setup would be the same.
One reason it works for me could be that communication moved increasingly from email to messaging platforms and those are on my phone, except Slack which is confined to work boundaries. However I feel like I can lose all of WhatsApp and Telegram messages with no harm. I already lost a few years of WhatsApp and nothing happened. Who cares about conversations of 3 years or 3 days ago. It's mostly nearly unsearchable trash. And everybody else and I never had a verbatim trace of any IRL conversations for million of years, so they could be nice to have feature but not an important one.
But I'm doing my best not to lose mail. The long term important messages are in there.
Can you show me where to opt in, and where this is documented? The only stats I can find that are close to the number provided are for total registered users.
I wouldn't be so sure. If you create a Matrix account and join an IRC channel, your username[m] will never leave the channel, even if you never use Matrix again. I made a few test accounts and it was rather difficult to figure out how leave IRC channels properly if you decide not to use Matrix anymore.
Why do we even need chat in an email app? It just adds bloat and slowness for not discernible reason. This is why I WONT be using apps like Thunderbird any time soon.
It was a lovely mail client. It seems they're repeating all the mistakes that firefox made. Firefox added pocket, everyone disabled it and eventually the feature was removed. Firefox added chat, everybody disabled it and eventually the feature was removed.
Now Thunderbird has added chat, that's great. What does it support, Slack? no. Discord? no. Oh. That's not great, then, that's useless. They're intending to jumpstart a chat protocol with a client that's used by like 0.8% of users? Sure.
The last update made the context-menus and dropdown-menus white backgrounded menus with literally no border, so you had no way to determine where the menu background ended and the email background started. That was the update that pushed me over the edge and prompted the rollback and push of whatever 60-ish version I chose. My staff need imap and calendaring and consistency. That version delivers.
I have absolutely zero interest in playing the 'what spurious UI change will throw my staff into confusion today' game with a basic productivity tool.