On GNU/Linux Thunderbird ist my favourite GUI mail client, offering support for a variety of standards, including e.g. CalDAV (CardDAV in Beta), OpenPGP and S/MIME.
Not sure whether Chat should be part of it, currently offering Google Talk, IRC, Odnoklassniki, and XMPP (Twitter finally gone). Support for Usenet News is appreciated, though I enjoy Pan.
On GNU/Linux I thus consider GNOME Evolution as best alternative. (Haven't looked at the KDE suite for some time with Akonadi being too heavy last time I tried it on my simple machine.) Neither Claws, Geary, Sylpheed, or others offer such broad support, although those are very nice GUI clients.
I tried a lot of alternatives to thunderbird on linux for mail/calendar/contacts. Every single one had a severe issue at some point with something (timeline problems, losing events, can’t sync contacts, privacy issue for one paid app). Thunderbird is just wonderful though and deserves support
I want to like Kmail, but it's a bit too opinionated (e.g. having a setting letting you set to reply-to-all by default was removed because it is 'wrong', as well as having the button show up on messages without a roll-down) and just too crashy (akonadi...) and impossible to backup configuration (I spend a full day tracking all the various files/dirs down, no luck).
I think there's an A-rate tool hiding in Kmail and Kontact, but development is glacial and not very responsive feature requests. (I even asked for some help setting up a dev env to develop something myself but no replies.)
KMail used to be wonderful, but Akonadi has been a train wreck since day one. I had to switch to Thunderbird for work eventually because it just wasn't acceptable to not respond to urgent things because "sorry, my mail client decided to silently stop checking for mail again!".
> Neither Claws, Geary, Sylpheed, or others offer such broad support
But Geary works nicely on mobile phones, like the PinePhone. For me it serves a different niche than Thunderbird (which is my default desktop email-client).
If your company uses Office 365, these guys have a plugin that I think parses the HTML website to get your mail (and calendar!) into Thunderbird:
https://www.beonex.com/owl/
Just this week I gave them 10 Euros for the addon because my company refuses to enable IMAP for Office 365. I'm not affiliated with them, but I've been using the Tbird addon for a few weeks and it works perfectly. The license is per-year, though I guess that makes sense because I expect that it needs to be updated whenever the Office 365 site is updated.
Did you get this extension audited by your security team? It sounds insane to me that you’re bypassing IMAP restrictions, with a plug-in that monitors and parses the entire O365 website…
To be fair, it’s the security team’s idiotic position on IMAP that prompted the parent commenter to find a workaround.
It’s like how having super draconian password reset and complexity requirements ends up being less secure because users will start writing their impossible-to-remember passwords on post-it notes.
There’s a big difference between password reset rules, and giving third-parties access to emails and calendar.
There is nothing draconian about restricting IMAP - any app could exfiltrate confidential emails once granted access. It’s a very sane rule to disallow everything except webmail or first party apps.
Of course it does matter! Webmail is quite restricted and optimized for viewing and replying to emails. IMAP is great for that, while also facilitating exporting (exfiltrating) the entire mailbox.
"modern Auth" means OAUTH, so, you aren't giving passwords to the email application.
If you have IMAP on GMail you get two choices, you can admit you're sacrificing security, and they'll mint a random password just for that IMAP application, or you can use OAUTHBEARER. As I understand it if enabled IMAP for Office365 can do OAUTHBEARER.
The nice thing about OAUTH is that it's a natural integration for your multi-factor authentication, which as I understand it doesn't fit well into Kerberos. But to be sure Kerberos is much better than yet another human memorable secret password exchange.
It's the complete opposite, Office365 only supports OAuth with IMAP and is phasing out/has phased out Basic Auth for IMAP. Additionally more often than not organizations are actually running Microsoft Exchange under the hood -- the majority of MS Exchange servers have Basic Auth disabled for IMAP (I believe since 2017 it's been off by default).
That addon got the exact same stringent audit by my security team as did the Firefox web browser that I installed to browse the entire O365 website to begin with.
I interpreted his comment as saying he did not ask permission. Probably he'll be fine as long as nothing he did was explicitly against any rules, even if it is clearly against the spirit of the rules. More likely still, no one will ever find out.
What happened to vetting sources? Beonex is Ben Bucksch, a Mozilla true believer who's been around since before Firefox even existed. The chances that it will suddenly turn into malware is about as likely a distro's coreutils package maintainer going rogue—and far less likely than the revolving door at Mozilla Corp leading to the Firefox product team deciding to do something untoward themselves.
Vetting sources is only basic due diligence. Auditing source code, infrastructure, and data storage is crucial regardless of how “prolific” the author is.
The plugin works, but barely. I have to use it on the job. It does not for example deal with JS on the login page. If there is a JS "button" that has an event handler for clicks, you are screwed. Do not expect support from them. I once wrote them about this problem and their response was basically "Oh, that's unfortunate!" and that for a paid product. They are basically living off of people having few other choices, not, because their stuff was so high quality.
I use this software every day on multiple machines (rss for work, rss & email personal). It's not without wrinkles, but at least it never feels exploitative.
Donated, and will consider setting up something recurring.
I’d venture it is because Firefox is developed by a for-profit corporation with hundreds of millions in revenue.
So the split is: you can donate to the non-profit organization, while the for-profit corporation only handles taxable income.
The reason why it is split is due to taxes. Mozilla created the corporation after getting in trouble with the IRS.
Edit: I haven’t kept up with Thunderbird for a very long time, but it looks like they’ve also moved to be developed by a for profit corporation, but a different one then the one that develops Firefox, so different people making different decisions. Also, donations to thunderbird are no longer tax deductible.
> I’d venture it is because Firefox is developed by a for-profit corporation with hundreds of millions in revenue.
I think a lot of people are confused about this, myself included. A lot of people want to donate directly to Firefox for development.
But there are vast sums of money to the tune of $400M+ already involved here. I assume the $20 donations people give to Mozilla go towards the broader initiatives of the Foundation.
Exactly. I'd really pay for Firefox. But I don't want to sponsor their foundation even though I have a few times in the past. I'd just like to help with Firefox development.
I understand about the corporate/foundation split, but they could just sell 'subscriptions' that don't really give anything so they're basically donations. If the pencil pushers really insist something is given in return, they can make a cool subscriber badge in the app or something.
Right now they're focusing too much on their VPN stuff which isn't available here and I have no need for anyway.
Even if you could donate to Firefox specifically, that's still no guarantee because Mozilla could decide to just channel less money from other sources of funding towards Firefox and you'd end up where you started.
I pay for the Owl extension [0] which allows me to use my university's MS Exchange account with Thunderbird. I don't understand why Mozilla don't offer this themselves though, is it too complicated to put the effort in given the size of the userbase? Or is there some reason it has to be proprietary and they're against releasing proprietary software? I really appreciate Owl, but I'd much rather just pay Mozilla directly for it.
I get the impression that this kind of thing depends rather on what specific locked-down settings choices the Exchange admins have made. I use work's Office-365 mail setup (which is I assume basically "exchange in the cloud") with stock thunderbird plus the free "TbSync" and "Provider for Exchange ActiveSync" addons, for instance (and I only need those for calendar and contacts stuff). This relies on the Exchange server not having disabled IMAP and SMTP. So the userbase for this kind of connector feature is not just "people whose organisation uses Exchange" but "people whose organisation uses Exchange and whose mail admins are sufficiently anti non-Outlook clients to have turned off IMAP but not so anti non-Outlook clients as to just say that it's policy that you must use Outlook". (There was a period where stock Thunderbird couldn't handle a "Modern Authentication" Exchange setup, but as of Thunderbird 78 or so it now can.)
More generally, I've found in the past that "open source connectors etc to Exchange" support tends to be or become abandonware, because generally the kind of person who writes that sort of addon/integration doesn't really like working in the sort of environment which mandates Exchange and locks it down, and so after a few years when they move on to a new job that doesn't require them to use Exchange the addon becomes abandonware because the original author no longer needs it. So it probably does need to be either Mozilla taking it on as a "we must support this" feature or somebody like Beonex making it a paid product.
> I don't understand why Mozilla don't offer this themselves though, is it too complicated to put the effort in given the size of the userbase?
That's the short answer to the question.
A longer answer: the underlying Exchange protocol is another IMAP-level of complexity of protocol, and the IMAP protocol implementation in Thunderbird is itself running somewhere in the 50KLOC region. On top of that, the protocol itself (I believe) largely works in Outlook's not-a-regular-RFC 822-email-message representation, which means you need to build in a translation layer to make it work well. Finally, a lot of the logic in Thunderbird isn't really designed for pluggable account types, and that it's even possible to a degree is up to work that rkent and I did to make it barely possible for extensions to do so; incorporating the code in core would require properly fixing several of the places rather than continuing the various levels of hacks in place.
Now what's the benefit of adding it core? If you're using TB for your small/medium enterprise, then the better answer is to just switch on IMAP access on the server, which is much better supported in TB (and other clients). So the value-add is comparatively minimal, especially compared to doing something like supporting JMAP (which is somewhat closer to a sane modernization of IMAP than EWS is). It's going to rank lower priority than other fixes, then, especially given the technical debt TB suffers from.
Thanks so much for your response, as well as your work on Thunderbird/MailNews! I’m pretty sure I must be using your code every day, it’s really appreciated.
That all makes sense, I think the reason my uni refuse to allow normal IMAP is because they’re trying to enforce 2FA-only access to their systems, which could become more common down the line.
Does Owl allow you to proprly respond (accept/reject) to meeting invites? I am using TBSync and Provider for Exchange ActiveSync and that cannot do so.
It uses about half a GB of ram when actively running on my system. CPU usage is fine except when I sync an IMAP folder that has over 10k or so messages, at which point it does pin one CPU.
[edit]
I noticed I'm running it with "java -Xmx512M" which probably explains the half-GB of ram usage. It's possible that if I increased that value it would perform better with large folders, but I keep my inbox fairly reasonable and I don't care if the other folders take a bit of time to sync.
You can certainly try running it with a smaller heap, some of the modern java GCs can run at very close to 100% heap utilization.
Also, FWIW, it's the 10th largest item in my top listing, with even Thunderbird using more RAM (850MB). I suspect mutt, offlineimap and davmail would combine to be smaller than TB alone.
[edit]
Also consider getting your employer to buy you more RAM? A 32GB SO-DIMM kit from corsair is under $200, so nobody should have to worry about half a gig on their work machine...
accept/reject meeting invites seems to depend on your CalDAV client. It doesn't work well with TB, but works great with Evolution. I haven't dug into what's actually happening because when it didn't work with TB, it was spamming peoples inboxes (e.g. one time it decided to reject every single instance of a recurring meeting that had been going on for years), so I just set the calendar to read-only in TB.
> Contributions go to MZLA Technologies Corporation, a California corporation wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation. Funds will be reserved for use in the Thunderbird project. Contributions are not tax-deductible as charitable contributions.
I thought that too, I was a bit confused by the fact Mozilla are still operating the donations in the OP, which is why I mention Mozilla specifically. Definitely s/Mozilla/Thunderbird devs/ if that's wrong though.
We received a lot of donations from the community, so we're going to shift to a for-profit footing? That does not make a lot of sense to me.
One of the things I really like about Thunderbird is that it's from a not-for-profit entity. It makes it easier to trust them with so much of my most personal data.
It's still wholly owned by a non-profit, which means I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt for now. But especially given the vagueness of that statement, I'm definitely concerned.
> it's from a not-for-profit entity. It makes it easier to trust them with so much of my most personal data.
Why? Non-profit status has nothing to do with privacy policy. It just means that money goes to employees and vendors instead of owners (who could be the same people for all practical purposes).
Thanks, yes, it turns out I'm familiar with basic definitions. But not-for-profit culture is much more mission-oriented than for-profit culture, at least in the US. I've worked and consulted for both for-profit and not-for-profit entities, and know which I would rather trust.
> by moving the project away from its foundation into a corporate entity they will be able to monetize the product and pay for its development easier than before.
Non profits also are able to monetize products and pay out employees.
If you love the product, why do you care how they spend the money for they value they already gave you? Do you ask for a refund from for-profit businesses after you use their product if you don't trust where the money will go?
Late versions of Thunderbird have integrated GPG functionality. I have tested and used this extensively and I think it's a required feature that enables most users to have excellent security in their communications.
For me, only this would be more than enough enough to switch to Thunderbird as my main mail client!
Just a nitpick, but FYI: Thunderbird now has an integrated PGP implementation, but it does not use GnuPG (GPG). Rather they integrated another PGP implementation called RNP. The standard is called OpenPGP, PGP is the original (proprietary) implementation and GnuPG was originally created as a compatible free software alternative to PGP. In previous Thunderbird versions (before 78), the quasi-standard Enigmail extension provided OpenPGP support via GPG.
A side effect of this is that Thunderbird does not interact with your GPG keyring anymore. So if you locally trusted a certain key using GPG for example, Thunderbird won't know about it and will ask you to verify it again.
Yes that's the case. Thunderbird does not use gnupg anymore and the enigmail extension is not needed.
However I think that Thunderbird having everything integrated in its UI, without the need to use or even install a third party program line gnupg makes the experience much better for inexperienced users.
I recently switched off Thunderbird because the company I work for dropped PGP and switched to Microsoft's OME which is (surprise!) best supported by Outlook.
I don't have the feeling that PGP/GPG is growing in popularity and if that's Thunderbird's big feature, it might not help them.
It ain't Thunderbird's big feature but it's an important one at least for me.
The fact that pgp is not growing in popularity is not related to its security but its difficulty of using it properly (and the fact that it is an open and non monetizable solution). Having been integrated in the Thunderbird as a first class feature makes it very easy to use so it may lead to increase in its popularity!
I have no experience with OME but I presume it's a proprietary solution.
I donate semi-regularly. Been using Thunderbird as my primary email client (almost) since its release. The installation has hundreds of thousands of mails across many folders, and yet, it is super fast and rock solid.
I used Thunderbird for a very long time but recently stopped. Every update has made it slower, breaks a host of extensions, and the Google Calendar integration is consistently broken no matter which solution I use. I really, really want to use Thunderbird but email and calendar need to Just Work. I can't keep fixing it every time they push out an update
This 13 year old bug in the calendar has been pretty frustrating. Would love to donate specifically towards a fix for that. But I guess that's not an option.
Thunderbird is significant tool in my daily workflows. I created multiple profiles for RSS, email, calendar, contacts and usually have multiple instances opened at once. Everything operates smoothly. I would gladly setup monthly fee but also want to have the possiblity to cancel it at any time by the end of the month. This worries me:
The link just says they can’t help with technical issues, not donation issues. You can also use a virtual card https://privacy.com/ that you can cancel when you want.
I use Thunderbird, and have for a very long time. Unfortunately, the new development and progress is gradually breaking more and more extensions, making it less useful to me as time goes on.
Bizarrely, the donation page thinks I'm in the UK, when I'm almost as far as possible away from there.
> Unfortunately, the new development and progress is gradually breaking more and more extensions, making it less useful to me as time goes on.
I have very strong suspicions about the engineering quality of their work (but can't confirm).
With the recent version, v78, they did broke extensions again, however, something very smell is the policy that they've adopted - the new replacement APIs are incomplete and experimental (see https://developer.thunderbird.net/add-ons/updating/tb78):
> While the Thunderbird team plans to add more APIs with upcoming releases, the current set of APIs will not be sufficient to port most add-ons. To work around this limitation, add-ons can introduce their own, additional APIs as so-called Experiments.
> As Experiments usually run in the main process and have unrestricted access to any aspect of Thunderbird, they are expected to require updates for each new version of Thunderbird. To reduce the maintenance burden in the future, it is in your own interest to use Experiment APIs only to the extent necessary for the add-on.
Essentially, they've broken compatibility by introducing a half-baked framework, and guaranteed that compatibility will be broken again and again.
I don't have the technical insight to know if this is really necessary (I know that in the past, breaking compatibility was a necessity in some cases), but on the outside, this looks like terrible, careless, engineering.
In practice I've found it works pretty well. Every geolocation service I've tried (just did 6-7 now) gets my country right, and more than half get the city/region. I've always had it get online students' locations right too.
Thunderbird is such a great program. Ever since I gave up Mutt as my default email program, I've been using all the time.
One of the richest guys on the planet (Zuckerberg) was using Thinderbird in a photo some time ago I think. Perhaps if he reads HN; they can get an infinite lifeline.
HOLD the phone. Can we confirm this? If so, this 100% furthers my idea of "Stop thinking of tech billionaires of being helpfully creative to the world and having imaginations, they are the exact opposite."
If a normal person were also a billionaire, they'd stop for half a second and call someone and say "hey, make sure Thunderbird is good for forever."
These people can't think that way, they're hampered by the mental defect of "Hmm, what's the angle, how can I make money off this? I can't right now, okay so I'll do nothing."
Me too. I wouldn't even want any extra features behind this paywall. The only perk I would like is some sort of weighted/priority feedback.
I do feel like Firefox needs to do its best to hold on to the existing power users, in addition to growing its casual user base. I feel like Firefox really disregards feedback from its biggest fans (i.e. the scheduled removal of compact view), and is overly focused on converting chrome users.
I set up a recurring monthly contribution of $10. I've used Thunderbird for years, its my go-to client. Unfortunately these days, day job forces windows 10 and lookout. But I use it everywhere else.
FWIW, lookout is itself dangerous software to install/use. There are many hacks of it, including new and exciting zero-days where you don't even need to interact with the mail in any way, to have a compromise occur. It is simply not worth the risk, on any platform.
I've used (and paid for) both Owl and ExQuilla for office365 integration when needed. Owl was iffy ... had lots of problems. ExQuilla just worked.
Not stable enough for production. Every time I've tried to use them (3-5 times since they got started) they've lost emails and calendar events in inexplicable ways, possibly by not taking a careful enough approach when dealing with unreliable connections or full storage. The suggested solution when reporting bugs has several times been to try the latest version with no justification other than "it might be fixed now, who knows" or reset completely and spend several hours reconfiguring and re-downloading everything.
The least terrible solution I've found so far is GNOME Evolution, which I don't think has lost anything outright yet, although the UX is meh (no option for separate event start/end time zones, slow search even when all emails are cached locally, randomly requires re-signing in to Google, defaults time zone to Antarctica/McMurdo when travelling(?!?), does not seem to give any indication whether spam filtering is working or not, groups all accounts under my Google account in the Edit → Accounts view, and many more I can't remember off the top of my head).
Sorry to be so negative, but so far every single email client (Evolution, K-9, Mutt, Outlook, Thunderbird) has been a chore, for different reasons. Gmail/Google Calendar is the only client(s) I rate, but I'm shutting down that account slowly for obvious reasons.
After using TB for 10 years I uninstalled it half a year ago. Because of bad UI decisions and constant extension and PGP breakage. Got to a point where I froze the installation at version 68 just to be left alone. A security nightmare of course. In the end I trusted it less and less to not one day kill my e-mail archive going back 25 years. Also I still have PGP 2.6 encrypted e-mails that require IDEA/MD5 support. I know this scheme is insecure, but you can't disconnect me from my archive by no longer supporting those ancient formats.
Since I self-host e-mail anyway, I switched to a well-greased Roundcube web UI for desktop and FairEmail on the phone. Searching through 20 GB of mail, including text in PDF and Office formats, is more or less "Google-instant" thanks to dovecot-fts-xapian. Having everything in Maildirs for me is very pleasant.
For calendaring I now use Radicale and either Infcloud web UI on desktop or CalDAV-Sync on phone. Could be tighter integrated with e-mail but the old Unix ways of one tool for one job have merits, like all calendar entries are now file system objects and under Git control. Impossible now to fat-finger half the calender and having to jump through hoops to restore entries.
I dislike Mozilla's politics and don't use Firefox, but I have been using Thunderbird since at least 15 years. So yes, donated money for this project, hoping that they don't come up with some "revolutionary" UI ideas.
I am not sure what you call "revolutionary" UI ideas, perhaps more in-depth changes, but as far as surface is concerned, they have already abolished a lot visual cues, by flattening almost everything and turning icons into B&W :-(
A better way to use email is through the browser, isn't it? I wonder what's use of an email client; especially now since the storage cost in the "cloud" have plummeted. I can't imagine backing up my 10 years worth of email locally when Fastmail on the web works well.
Doing your email locally on a device you control means you can do effective end to end encryption. Otherwise you end up having to trust that your webmail provider does not become interested in the content of your emails.
I've long since deleted the email updates. It was in regards to them removing semicolons as separators for lists of email addresses. You can only use commas now.
Use thunderbird everyday on both my machines - but they've been changing things for no good reason and breaking the UI/UX because of it. thanks but no thanks.
> but they've been changing things for no good reason and breaking the UI/UX because of it.
The reason is the underlying Gecko engine being constantly yanked from under them — they rely on parts of Firefox's codebase and when that changes, they have to keep up, risk having security vulnerabilities or manually backport relevant security patches, in effect maintaining their own forked browser engine.
understandable shifting sands; but that's NO excuse for the sort of shoddy work they've done to address it. At best interpretation, there was not enough rudimentary QA done, because some of their changes (at least, in previous releases i worked with) outright broke the ability to compose messages. This was the result of finally hitting the "upgrade" button: black text on a black background. So I rolled back.
This, in addition to some of their other UX changes (like moving to SVG icons) - just makes it feel like after 10 years I am no longer their user base, and from what I've read the team is unwilling to be flexible with these changes. Thanks for the middle finger. They're breaking things and I'm supposed to just be happy about it.
Regretfully I've fallen out of love with thunderbird, and i am exploring other clients. My needs are not complex, outside of perhaps the google auth song & dance.
I want thunderbird to be the FF of email clients.... I guess in a way they are. Open source disappointment that pushes people to non-open solutions.
I understand your frustration — I've similarly been bitten by some changes to Firefox; however please do remember that Thunderbird is developed by a small team with limited funds and adding or even maintaining configurability is expensive.
That isn't to say that you should give to thunderbird, since they are currently disappointing you, but it is a bit of a vicious cycle.
> That isn't to say that you should give to thunderbird, since they are currently disappointing you, but it is a bit of a vicious cycle.
Well, not exactly, because while it was on low-effort maintenance mode, there was no such changes; it was just doing the same job in the same way since forever. Problems arose when a new team with a new mission, new funding, and worst of all, "new" ideas ("new" being the same fate other pieces of software underwent in the last decade: inserting more web tech, changing the look into something more modern, i.e. more web-like), became active.
Not sure whether Chat should be part of it, currently offering Google Talk, IRC, Odnoklassniki, and XMPP (Twitter finally gone). Support for Usenet News is appreciated, though I enjoy Pan.
On GNU/Linux I thus consider GNOME Evolution as best alternative. (Haven't looked at the KDE suite for some time with Akonadi being too heavy last time I tried it on my simple machine.) Neither Claws, Geary, Sylpheed, or others offer such broad support, although those are very nice GUI clients.
Further alternatives are listed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_email_client