I love thunderbird because it's the only email client that does everything I want. I tried CLI clients, they are great and customizable, but CLI is a bit bare for email (images, html, fonts...)
Things I'd like to see improved:
- Native CardDAV and CalDAV support (there is caldav, but no discoverability of calendars).
- Native PGP.
- Better search, the UI is horrible and the search string is hard to get right (need fuzzy search and partial contact completion).
- A bit of UX work, some preferences are just a nightmare to find.
- Automation (auto tags, auto threading (for example, I get an order confirmation from webshop X, and a while after a shipping confirmation from webshop X, I want those to be grouped)).
- Improved storage engine, thunderbird is often freezing to compress folders.
- Critical bugd being fixed, like "imap"->"local folder" messages vanishing.
Native PGP is something I'd be very happy to see. Enigmail is needlessly complex with long setup wizards that frequently fail and a lot of legacy code supported for old distros. Services such as ProtonMail show that focusing on modern conventions and picking the right defaults can really bring encryption to normal users.
Agreed. I used Mailpile for a while, a lot of interesting ideas there.
As for PGP Thunderbird could use one nice idea that the browser extension Mailvelope uses: have bundled OpenPGP implementation in JavaScript (OpenPGP.js) for most users (guarantees easy setup) and a bridge to call GnuPG for experts.
Yeah, it makes a real mess. It generates random numbers of key pairs for each user, breaks subject line encryption randomly, and just generally sucks. I hope it gets better, but it’s definitely not something you want to enable at this time, I regret doing it. At this point it’s easier to have one person help 50 people manually generate and exchange keys in an office setting.
I really, really want it to work. I'm hopeful it will get better. I don't like PGP keyservers, they aren't very reliable, I wish I could remove all the old keys I've lost. And I don't like publishing my email address like that. Plus, the most of my GPG email use is with keys from people I know that we've sent each other directly. Overall I'm pretty satisfied with Enigmail running in the old PEP-free mode.
I'm also running PeP-free mode and I'm satisfied with it. I'm thinking that maybe after initial configuration it just works so the problem is largely setup.
As for keyservers even GnuPG is diminishing their role. Web Key Directory is promoted as a replacement for discovery and updates of keys. Coincidentally Enigmail will automatically fetch recipients keys using WKD when composing an email. For example kernel is using it (https://www.kernel.org/category/signatures.html#using-the-we...) so does ProtonMail.
Actually Enigmail couldn't generate user's key (I wanted to do a clean install and see the provisioning process for normal users) and later got stuck on some silly, completely unnecessary step (generating revocation certificate).
As for PeP I don't quite understand how it works and what is it for (and I'm quite proficient with OpenPGP in general). I don't mind Autocrypt, it's good for people on commodity mail providers, but I rather prefer Web Key Directory where possible.
A small note: beside CLI MUAs there is another text-based but graphic-capable MUAs, those inside of Emacs, Notmuch in my case, and this one can really beat not only TB but also GMail, earlier not-so-crappy versions included.
Native CardDAV integration can come via KHard or other sources, CalDAV can be integrated with org-agenda, GNUPG while not native is really quick to add, search is at another level + tags & saved searches, automation is via external tools like afew and it can be (with a not so small works, unfortunately) really efficient, for instance I auto-archive pdf attachments of my monthly bills in a proper tree, with proper filenames and a note in the org-agenda.
The real problem is only that no one still do not package anything in a sole comprehensive software with a simple config. You have to make it yourself perhaps with the help of org-mode and a bit of extra scripting. A price not anyone is willing to pay but a real opportunity for ThunderBird IMO.
Everything is there, needs only integration for casual users.
> Native CardDAV and CalDAV support (there is caldav, but no discoverability of calendars).
This would have been great about 5 years ago, and still would be useful, but I think we're going in the direction of unified protocols, like ActiveSync, JMAP, MAPI/EWS etc.
IMHO x-DAV should have been there from day one. I'm using SOGo for my family's groupware and although SOGo provide plugins for Thunderbird, I've been missing an integrated, seamless approach.
> I'm using SOGo for my family's groupware and although SOGo provide plugins for Thunderbird
I used to use SOGo but found it used way too much resources. None of us really even used 'webmail' so I ditched SOGO.
I went with https://radicale.org most of my family either uses mail clients, Thunderbird, (with Lightning), Canary Mail (the mac user), DAVx⁵ (formerly Davdroid). Radicale allows for ldap authentication which was a must for us.
On a side note the SOGO Integrator plugin took AGES to be updated for Thunderbird 60. I found https://gitlab.com/CardBook/CardBook/ to be WAY better, particularly as it replaces the crufty-old Thunderbird addressbook.
ActiveSync is the best email protocol but as far as I know is very costly. JMAP is comparable to ActiveSync but will see will gain enough adoption when RFC is finished.
I personally found z-push very buggy. Also you need your own DAV servers for calendar and contacts AFAIK. I found Horde and SOGo much more reliable, I went eventually with SOGo as I thought it was weird using PHP for a long running server. With php stuff (horde and z-push) I had to edit too many timeouts etc.
I mean, people use it, it's not terrible, I just found it unreliable since at the end of the day it's a PHP app. Though Horde (which is also PHP) was miles better. I think z-push uses the php imap library, which is quite ineffecient. See https://wiki.horde.org/activesync#toc29
SOGo being written in obj-c means it's fundamentally much better suited to this task.
Speaking of CalDAV, the only thing I care about is the actual support of the calendar. Every time Thunderbird updates the Calendar “addon” loses compatibility and I'm without a calendar for a couple of weeks. Come to think about it, I don't even remeber for how long I've been without the calendar after the last update.
I always thought the search was excellent when I used it. At one point I had a 100k of emails. But I could find what ever I needed. Meanwhile Outlook failed with a certain local file size limit and caused endless problems. They were apparently okay with that and resisted change to something that actually worked.
The quick search bar is the one thing I find exasperating about Thunderbird. The advanced search works as you would expect, but I have no idea what the quick search is supposed to do. It does not do the one thing I'd expect it to do - a substring match on the email addresses and subject.
I'm not saying it was perfect, but it was far better than Outlook. And I have never once had to purchase recovery utils for Thunderbird, but to fix the fragile pst Outlook uses. I cant even count the number of times I had to do recovery for someone because IT was busy. Thunderbird never failed. At one point I just outright installed Thunderbird, changed the icon to Outlook and no one complained. I think I told them it was just the new interface.
I have been wanting to switch from i3 to Sway for some time now and not have blurry fonts in Mozilla products. (That's what happens if you use them through XWayland).
I wish thunderbird supports native reply reminders like in gmail/outlook. I always have to remind myself to follow up with people who haven't replied to my emails. I've been using threaded messages to combat this, but it gets kind of messy when email chains get lengthy.
Also, I wish there were more tutorials online for workflow processes on thunderbird. With more funding by mozilla and dev support, I hope people make higher quality tutorials online, many of them are highly dated.
More robust addons. I've tried dozens but I currently only use 2 now, one for attaching images with website URLs and another for image-previewing multiple attachments.
I haven't really bothered compressing anything because it freezes my PC everytime. I set everything to IMAP, my localstorage on thunderbird is about 100 GB since I send out and receive a lot of large files. It's not a great way of handling things, but it works since my server has a 3 million file limitation. Storage is cheap, but security is nonexistent in this regard.
Automation with autothreading would definitely be a nice feature. I personally don't use any autotagging in any email system, I normally just rewrite subject headers instead / use filters alot / get better at searching.
Fuzzy searching really needs some work. Usually, I will know exactly what email to search for (be it an automated subject header with a unique identifier, or a person I deal with), but I cannot find it on my first try.
Second, from a UX design prospective, I wish thunderbird would have an accordion-like collapsible method for threaded messages, indicated by a "..." in the UX. For instance, I might have a 10+ chain response email, I only need to see the first 2 emails sent, and the last 2 in the chain, not the 6 in the middle (collapse by default). This is mostly for items that need a lot of clarifications.
UX needs improvement for handling multiple emails. As of now , I just forward every email to my main email and filter out appropiately. I don't see a better way of doing things in thunderbird.
Thunderbird doesn't support threaded messages outside main inbox, AFAIK.
Baynesian junk filter could use some improvements as well. Some vendors will mix spam and important mail from the same email address. Thunderbird doesn't do a great job filtering these out, even after training junk filter consistently.
I'd like to add the account settings section to the list. Whenever I want to change or review the server settings (IMAP/SMTP/POP), I always have to look for it like 30 seconds, since they are not in the same location (which is technically okay, since they are different services).
While valid and interesting (good to know, and to share) for most people GNUPG-signed+encrypted emails are nice as a privacy protection tools against mass data mining. Even in today's society I't a bit hard to imaging Alphabet, Yandex, Microsoft etc do such kind of attacks...
Yes, but i believe tools/features like these advertise a sense of a level of security to the user which is, evidently and also to the protocols involved inherently, not what they might be led to believe. Given it's usually sensitive context, this can be quite dangerous.
Things I'd like to see improved:
- Native CardDAV and CalDAV support (there is caldav, but no discoverability of calendars).
- Native PGP.
- Better search, the UI is horrible and the search string is hard to get right (need fuzzy search and partial contact completion).
- A bit of UX work, some preferences are just a nightmare to find.
- Automation (auto tags, auto threading (for example, I get an order confirmation from webshop X, and a while after a shipping confirmation from webshop X, I want those to be grouped)).
- Improved storage engine, thunderbird is often freezing to compress folders.
- Critical bugd being fixed, like "imap"->"local folder" messages vanishing.