[kwlug-disc] Does anyone want to take over Thunderbird?

[B.S.]

As said, the death of tb in the breeze for some long time now.)

claws-mail (or Sylpheed) touted as tb replacement - tried it. Never again. (Hostile community.) Or Zimbra. Or Evolution.

kmail has never seemed to have the rich (addon) environment of tb, so never done more than peek at it. kontact / kde pim suffers the same outdated / 'old school' problems as tb.

I also keep coming back to tb, and continued rumours of death leave me anxious as to what to do when that happens. Even now with so 'little' development I'm not entirely convinced that it is being kept secure or that bugs are being fixed. 'Bugs' seems to be a moving target in the sense of the original intent of tb, and where it seems to be going, seem like two different things. e.g. Although 'classic' themes are present, the idiotic pace and depth of underlying mozilla changes keeps breaking things. I've even given up on the k/ubuntu repo versions (change/break addons frequently) and got down the direct tb package. Which means I don't get security updates. Ack!

Part of the moving specs is the whole integration of e-mail within a larger context. Thus, for example, lightning for calendar, or tasks. Or, more usually, pims, such as evolution or zimbra. Never mind instant messaging / chat connectors, or gmail (not adhering to standards causing conniption fits in everything, including tb.)

ESR releases bring yet another annoying wrinkle in all of this, in the sense of not being mainstream, so 'new' things that attract the eye may not be present - thus another decision / confusion point. java / things moving to the web, such as pims, means that the offline pop/imap email client have a steadily decreasing user base (and developers to maintain them). Since the idea of tb is so outdated / people think it needs to be refactored for today's environment, and thus web presentment to reduce build complexity (for different distros / desktops / window managers).

Add people and connectivity, together even, and the desire for collaboration / coordination, and tb gets further and further from where people are trying to go. Whether it be shoehorning disparate technology into tb (lightning, or shared contacts) and breaking things along the way, or people using it less. Leading to less attention and development, and a viciously spinning down circle. Easy example - the need for cross provider corralling, as mentioned.

Wither icedove in this? (I'm still getting confused by the various 'ice' things, be they GNU, or Debian. e.g. icecat and iceweasel.)

Firefox, and canonical for that matter, for some years seem to be moving to a phone / touch / gnome type interface - dropping desktops, and the inherent assumption of the presence of a keyboard and mouse. Pry my desktop out of my ...

E-mail is NOT instant messaging, nor intended to be instant. Thus I don't do e-mail on a tablet or phone. If things need to be instant, people can use actual instant messaging - or ... call voice!

(tb is a [mostly] solved problem - mozilla, STOP messing with it!]



----- Original Message -----
> From: Hubert Chathi <hubert at uhoreg.ca>
> To: kwlug-disc at kwlug.org
> Sent: Tuesday, December 1, 2015 8:38 PM
> Subject: Re: [kwlug-disc] Does anyone want to take over Thunderbird?
> 
> On Tue, 1 Dec 2015 17:34:44 -0500, "Andrew Kohlsmith (mailing lists 
> account)" <aklists at mixdown.ca> said:
> 
>>  Sylpheed is one I was thinking of. Back then it seemed to have a lot
>>  of effort on non-ASCII charsets which didn’t matter to me. From the
>>  screenshots it looks like it’s still in KDE 3.x land (which isn’t
>>  necessarily a bad thing).
> 
> Sylpheed uses GTK+2, so it's more GNOME 2 than KDE 3.  But I think
> that's around the same time frame anyways.
> 
>>  Haven’t heard of Claws before.
> 
> Claws started as a fork of Sylpheed.  In fact, it used to be called
> Sylpheed Claws.  I haven't tried Sylpheed, but Claws is a nice
> lightweight MUA, though it may be less featureful than some people might
> expect.  It was my preferred MUA, for a while, but I think that what
> made me move off of it was the poor calendaring support, which I needed
> at the time.
> 
> There's also a newer program, Geary, which got some good press when it
> was first launched.  Last I checked, though, it didn't seem to support
> multiple accounts, which is a deal breaker for me.
> 
> Right now, I'm using Gnus (Emacs) as my MUA, and even though it works
> very well for me, I wouldn't recommend it for most people.