A very interesting video about the Thunderbird Project successful donation process and how KDE can improve them by following their step.
ELI5 please, why would I use thunderbird over a web client? I have used a local email client in years but it seems everyone uses and loves thunderbird.
May I ask the opposite? Why use JavaScript client from the web instead of desktop ones?
Most operating systems, excluding Windows, are shipping with decent native and fast email client. They are automatically updated with the system, again excluding Windows, integrate with other apps (for ex. right-click and share with mail), can store messages offline just in case and are overall nicer to use.
The only use case I think of is when using someone’s else computer and you don’t want to remember to log out, because browsers have “incognito” mode.
The best email client ♥️
i love it but it’s not very stable, crashes pretty often
Have never had this happen on my 4 computers
Client like thunderbird is good if you always use the same desktop/laptop machine to do your email. If you are using multiple devices like school, friend, work, library or even mobile it totally breaks down. To say nothing of system failures, breaking or losing the machine etc.
Most people who love TB have a setup that has been stable for 20 years. Good for them, it suits their needs. But the contempt with which they seem to hold the majority of the population for whom TB would be a totally unsuitable choice is rather unpleasent.
Ever notice how rarely you see someone saying “I switched to TB from webmail 2 years ago and its great”?
Too bad, as i would absolutely love to switch the floss desktop/mobile clients and have tried to do so on a few occasions. They are simply not compatible with modern communications habits.
I switched to TB from webmail 1 year ago and it’s great.
There you go.
I’m a heavy Thunderbird user and to be honest, I don’t understand what you’re saying at all? I have multiple private mail accounts and a work mail account and I use all of them on multiple machines with Thunderbird but also with different clients (e.g. FairEmail on Android) as well as webmail (at least for my work mail I use it sometimes) and I never experienced any problems. What exactly do you mean? I mean, I do have an export of my thunderbird profiles (maybe not up to date, though, tbh), but more so out of comfort than necessity. Without this export, and in the unlikely case of a system failure, I would have to go through the process of adding my mail accounts (server, password, username) by hand and that’s basically it
I’m not really sure I understand this post.
I use Thunderbird on several machines, and I use broadly the default config (no fancy business). I also have the same email accounts set up on my Android phone (Gmail ones on the native Gmail client app, an Outlook one on the Outlook app). When accessing my email on a machine which doesn’t have Thunderbird set up for me (such as my corporate laptop), I just use the webmail interfaces.
And it all works…fine. why wouldn’t it? Thunderbird and the Android apps just send their service calls off via IMAP and it all sorts itself out without any fuss from me. All the data lives off in the cloud anyway; it’s just a different way to interact with it other than the web interface.
I just happen to like having all my email accounts in one combined place, running in the background and throwing system notifications.
I think they’re expecting thunderbird users to use POP instead of imap, Gmail integration, OWA, or other protocol that expects the mail to stay on the server.
Leaving the mail on the server has been great in Thunderbird since the Mozilla days. I did jump to Gmail web app a long time ago though. I’m assuming Gmail support has improved in the last 15 years?
Does anyone still use POP?
Hopefully they’ll build in support for disroot, fastmail, posteo, protonmail, tutanota, and other opensource encrypted mail agends that don’t provide a bridge.
Edit: so the summary of the video is “marketing”. Linux, KDE, and opensource projects in general need way better marketing. If Linux could rebrand itself as anything but “the geek thing”, I bet it would be much more successful.
