While its been a long time since Ive used Thunderbird, I just wanted to take the time to publicly say thank you.
Many HNers probably wont (or cant) remember the world of desktop mail clients but basically during the height of MSFT dominance there was only one real mail client: Outlook. Which Microsoft was starting to monetize heavily, ignore UX, and keep it windows only (cant blame them for that).
Then Thunderbird arrived on the scene, an OSS mail client that beat the pants off of Outlook in features, spam detection, IMAP support and a bunch of other things.
And it was free.
And you could use it on any machine.
This was a huge moment for OSS.
We owe a lot of credit to Mozilla and Thunderbird for rescuing us from a closed source world.
Before Thunderbird, Eudora was fantastic. We ran it at a college I worked at for most of the staff and faculty, and it was a very sad day when Qualcomm shut it down.
The last 'mainline' (pre-OSE) versions of Eudora for Mac and Windows were open-sourced and preserved as an artefact by the Computer History Museum[2] in 2018; as part of the preservation, the CHM assumed ownership of the Eudora trademark.
The only actively maintained fork of the software, known as Eudoramail as of June 2024, originates from 'mainline' Eudora for Windows as preserved by the CHM. Hermes, its current maintainers, describe Eudoramail 8.0 as currently being in alpha; Wellington publisher Jack Yan, meanwhile, points out its stability, a number of well-characterised and reproducible display bugs notwithstanding.
On May 22, 2018, after five years of discussion with Qualcomm, the Computer History Museum acquired full ownership of the source code, the Eudora trademarks, copyrights, and domain names. The transfer agreement from Qualcomm also allowed the Computer History Museum to publish the source code under the BSD open source license. The Eudora source code distributed by the Computer History Museum is the same except for the addition of the new license, code sanitization of profanity within its comments, and the removal of third-party software whose distribution rights had long expired.
The time period under discussion ("before Thunderbird", and the heyday of Outlook lock-in, and I would also add before gmail) is well before 2018.
I used mutt at the time too, but I don't think it's in the same category as the graphical clients. For a while Gnome's evolution was also big in free OS circles.
Eventually, and I was glad to see it!, but way too late for it to matter much. I would've used Eudora when it was originally offered. Since I couldn't, I got comfortable with Thunderbird. And when my friends who used Eudora had to migrate off of it, I set them up with Thunderbird, too.
Eudora was practically a CULT. I worked for one of their users who straight refused to use anything else, and one of my ongoing jobs as an admin was trying to get Exchange to play nice with it. It was maddening.
I fired it up several times for testing purposes, I don't get the hype, but man, for some people it was just the best damn software ever made.
It did its thing—internet email—really well. It was aimed squarely at the user with like a POP account, and it had a clean UI and plenty of features. For the time and use case, it was a fantastic client.
Outhouse tried to be too many things at once. Email client with HTML/rich text features that made it leave Microsoft crufties including mso: tags and the infamous J smiley all over your emails, contact manager, calendar. It was heavyweight, slow, and not quite there in terms of UI. But if you're an MBA type and you're committed to MSFT, or you're looking for a turnkey solution and it's this or Lotus Notes, Outhouse and Exchange sound like a win.
The Bat! was absolutely the best email client. ever. way ahead of eudora.
it was a massive step back when i switched to my first macbook in 2006 (the black one!) and started to use Thunderbird.
That said Thunderbird is fantastic now and great to see it get native Exchange support!
Eudora had its own very distinct take on mail client UI. Many loved it. I never really got on with it, although I could use it.
While the native codebase is probably too old to salvage now, there was a project to write a Eudora-style UI for Thunderbird as an add-on. That might be easier to revive for 21st century email.
I know people that used it because it was self contained for Windows if I remember correctly. I remember one person running the installation off of a Zip drive back in the 90's. I warned them that Zip disks like to randomly self destruct and he'd better be making backups.
Used to rely heavily on this, until an upgrade on one of my systems blew up the entire profile and I just stuck with webmail mostly. On my phone I have gmail, Outlook and Thunderbird (forked from K-9).
> but basically during the height of MSFT dominance there was only one real mail client: Outlook.
On Windows, you had:
* Netscape Suite (later Seamonkey)
* Eudora
* Pegasus
and (edit:) two of those still exist. Plus, Outlook cost money (unless you used Outlook Express), while Netscape was gratis, and on Linux and most Unix variants, Outlook has never even existed. On Linux specifically there's Evolution and there's KMail.
And I'm sure I'm forgeting a few others.
> Then Thunderbird arrived on the scene
It was a development of the MailNews component of Netscape, to use the same XUL-based platform as Firefox. So, an evolution, not a revolution.
I loved Pegasus. Specifically because to move it to another machine you just had to copy the PMAIL folder and make a shortcut. No registry awareness, no dependencies.
> Many HNers probably wont (or cant) remember the world of desktop mail clients...
If there are people who have never used a desktop mail client, I will say you owe it to yourself to try one. Web clients suck compared to desktop clients, it's not even close between the two. Sticking with just the Gmail interface (or whatever) is so limiting; definitely give alternatives a shot if you haven't.
> Sticking with just the Gmail interface (or whatever) is so limiting
Perhaps it's the fact that I grew up with Gmail throughout my education (and now my career), but most local clients lack one key feature - quick move!
My entire workflow around emails is based around opening & reading them, and then using the "Quick Move" button in Gmail to move it into a specific folder by typing the first few letters of the folder and hitting enter.
I know there are extensions for Thunderbird like Quick Folder Move [0], but I find these can be buggy, slow, etc. I presume these are just the realities of dealing with email providers who'd prefer you use their webmail clients rather than Thunderbird et al.
Gnome evolution has shift-ctrl-v to move to a folder with typeahead search. I don't use the gmail webclient so I can't say how it compares.
I should note that I mostly use the emacs notmuch mail client, which requires having the mail mirrored locally (which I do with e.g. isync/mbsync), but gives really responsive and rich search and tagging capabilities
I tried a couple of them, and they both started downloading my entire backlog of email to my hard drive, which I didn't want.
I couldn't think of a reason why this would be necessary, but I haven't really kept up with how the technology has evolved in recent years. Is this behavior intrinsic to desktop clients?
Intrinsic, no. Common, yes. Many people who use desktop clients want a local copy of a substantial fraction of their email so that they can review or compose messages while off-line. Desktop clients also operate faster and can provide robust search services only if they have a cached copy of the messages on disk.
I can think of reasons why I might want a local copy, but they didn't apply in my case.
Do I have control over my data? I'm not sure I understand the question, but in this case the answer seems like a clear no, as my employer manages the email server.
Definitely make sure to adjust your defaults if you decide to dip your toes into nntp... I hate some of the defaults there... namely the reply/respond button defaults. Usually you want to respond to the group, not send an email to the poster.
That said, NNTP is so dead at this point, outside some active BBSes that offer NNTP access. Usenet definitely feels like a wasteland when I've looked around the past couple years.
Opera had an amazing built-in NNTP and email client. I think it was my first experience with views instead of folders, so my emails could appear in multiple "folders" (I think now we call them "smart folders").
It is double weird because unix has always supported this.
I think was an accident of how the unix filesystem was implemented but basically, every file has at least one name but can have as many as you want, if a file ever has zero names it gets deleted. note that every open file is considered an additional name for that file.
By accident, I don't think it was designed this way but as they were putting together the filesystem "hey, what happens if two directories entries point to the same data?" anyone else "We will make a complicated locking system to prevent that from happening" the unix madlads "ship it and call it a feature, hell, work it into how files are opened as well then you can do tricksy stuff like open a file then delete it so it does not exists anywhere in the filesystem but it is still on disk"
The funny, in an ironic sense, thing is that while this this sort of naturally fell out of the first design of the unix filesystem it is not natural at all to modern copy-on-write filesystems, they have to do contortions to support it, but they do because it is now what people expect.
Personally I do not use thunderbird, but one elderly relative requires thunderbird. So I am all in favour of thunderbird getting better. Not everyone is able to use emails in a much simpler way. I actually, back when I was using gmail still, had some +4000 unread messages. I simply can not keep up with regular mail.
What, you don't think people were flocking over to Mutt?
When I was first getting into Linux, I liked Evolution a lot, though admittedly I haven't used it in awhile. Honestly I haven't really used Mutt in awhile either; webmail is just easier.
Evolution is great; it's also had outlook EWS (including Oauth2) support for several years now. I am still mystified as to why Thunderbird is so much more popular (though nice to see that thunderbird is getting some much needed TLC more recently).
Thunderbird is the only MOZ product that I still use daily - almost at par with Mail.app if not more, and I hope to keep using it unless they eventually release the iOS Thunderbird after making it unrecognisable to me and ensuring that some of the differentiating Thunderbird features are missing – like the ability to send email from any address on a domain by just editing the "From" field - of course, it will work only if you own that domain. But it's a feature I can't do without (and utilise it a lot on desktop). Then there are forever pending things like maildir support :)
I used, and even paid for, The Bat! at around this time, but as it was the emailer of choice for spammers, when spamming was a newish thing, I kept getting perfectly legitimate mail bounced and the developers had to constantly update the client to traverse the anti Bat internet! Which was a pain. I also used Opera email client for a while. Which was dross.
It also had a password dialog that showed fun hieroglyphs as you typed, instead of dots or asterisks. But, oops, those would change deterministically depending on what you typed.
I still use Thunderbird and I love it. Even though I absolutely hate email and it is a chaotic clusterfuck we act like is bulletproof.
I'm incredibly impressed at how feature deficit email is, but Thunderbird gives a lot of power back. It's just a lot of little things that add up. Like why is tagging and sorting so hard? But Thunderbird makes it easy, giving you as many as you want and let you label as you please. In Gmail, Outlook, or Apple Mail you can't implement filtering, but in Thunderbird you can. There's just so many junk emails being sent from accounts I can't outright block and my inbox is a nightmare of chaos without these. Sure, I wish I could do regex and it was more feature rich, but it is strong enough that I can already catch a lot of emails that Gmail's spam detection misses. Like what the fuck is with this spam detection, it is missing things where my email is not even in the To or {B,}CC fields![0]
> And you could use it on any machine.
The only thing I'm missing is on iOS. Email on my phone is a literal joke. Apple Mail[0.1] is the only one (compared to Gmail, Outlook, and Thunderbird) that previews a PDF. It seems like they're just helping scammers. I routinely get PayPal crypto scams and they look reasonably legitimate on Apple Mail but nowhere else. I could see how someone could be fooled, but I don't even have a PayPal account lol.
But on this note, we really do need to do something about email. We treat it so poorly. I use a lot of relay and proxy addresses now[1]. I'm also sending out a lot of resumes lately and it is surprising how we treat email. Like Microsoft only gives you SSO and then forces your email through that, not allowing you to add another email address. Not everything is "godelski@gmail.com", I use "linkedin@godelski.mozmail.com"[2] and "resume@godelski.com" (ditto [2]). In a world where we keep IDs for decades, where emails are constantly scraped and leaked, and where logins are tied to emails, these proxies are more important than ever. When I dump my gmail address I can also just redirect my two entry points (the mozmail and website domains) towards my new one. It is still not a great solution but at least it is easier to dump linkedin@godelski.com and move to new_linkedin@godelski.com than it is to go from godelski@gmail.com to godelski123@gmail.com.
If anyone has a better solution to this too, please let me know. I really fucking hate email and it seems like there's a ton of low hanging fruit
[0] The source of the email is a bit complicated and is clearly a LLM bypass by looking like generic emails like password resets or login alerts, but if my email was godelski@gmail.com it looks like it is sent to `godelski@gmail.com <bnchrch123@utahit.net>` CC `bnchrch1a2b@somehash.namprd04.prod.outlook.com`. It feels like we've gone backwards in spam detection. These are trivial to detect!
[0.1] And dear god, the least Apple Intelligence could do is run a god damn Naive Bayes filter on my text messages. You can surely do that on device! No Angela, I don't want to learn more about how I can make $500/wk and at no point in time have I ever wanted to accept a text message from a +63 country code... nor do I ever accept a call from my original area code as I haven't lived in the area for decades and it is a great filter to know who's spam.
[1] I use both Firefox relay and my personal website as Cloudflare gives you free email forwarding. Firefox relay integrates into Bitwarden (most of the time...) and it makes it really convenient for giving websites unique emails and unique passwords. Also helpful when you are given a piece of paper as you can create an email on the spot, block them as needed, and track how they're traded.
[2] I don't actually have the "godelski.mozmail.com" domain, so don't send me mail there. Though I wish relay would allow you to buy a second domain (and Signal would allow you at least 2 usernames!) At least give me one "clear" and one "handle".
> I'm incredibly impressed at how feature deficit email is . . . It's just a lot of little things that add up. Like why is tagging and sorting so hard?
If you read the specifications for the various email protocols, you'll soon discover that email, at the protocol level, is at its most feature-rich akin to flat files stored in a hierarchy of folders.
Tags, sorting, etc. are all the responsibility of clients. (Which is as it should be, since sorting is part of viewing data, not storing or sending it. Regarding tags, I suppose you could roll out a new email protocol, but SMTP is nothing more than a few text commands to send and receive bytes, and any tagging would be done by the client alone or the server alone as a value-add. The feature itself could not be implemented via, for example, the SMTP spec.
When you send an email via SMTP, you send the server "MAIL FROM" plus sender's address, RCPT TO plus destination, DATA and the contents of the email, and then a dot to represent the end of the email.
The email is then immutable. The receiver would be the one who wants to tag an email, and since the email is immutable, there's nothing you can do. And even if the sender wants to tag it, there's no command. I suppose in theory you could just add the tags to the email body, but every recipient not using your "improved" email format would just see that in the body of the email
In this context, the relevant protocol is IMAP, not SMTP. And IMAP very much has tagging and filtering, which is what Thunderbird exposes here. Heck, IMAP even has notes, you can attach to mails, so you could discuss mail drafts using plain IMAP, but no client I know exposes this.
Fair, but I think you missed the forest for the trees. You're right that I could be more clear but you also seem to understand that in context I'm discussing clients.
Nothing I've discussed has to do with protocol and everything has to do with clients, which is also in the context of what Thunderbird is. So I'm not sure why you're bringing up protocols as no one was discussing it until you brought it up.
Many HNers probably wont (or cant) remember the world of desktop mail clients but basically during the height of MSFT dominance there was only one real mail client: Outlook. Which Microsoft was starting to monetize heavily, ignore UX, and keep it windows only (cant blame them for that).
Then Thunderbird arrived on the scene, an OSS mail client that beat the pants off of Outlook in features, spam detection, IMAP support and a bunch of other things.
And it was free.
And you could use it on any machine.
This was a huge moment for OSS.
We owe a lot of credit to Mozilla and Thunderbird for rescuing us from a closed source world.