As a Thunderbird user and Rust fan, I approve this integration. However I want to mention that Thunderbird is good as it is and actually don’t think new features are needed. Only compatibility with other software or protocols could be better (which the Rust integration aims to improve). And to be honest, a way to disable some of the feature bloat would be preferable too, as I don’t use lot of the additional stuff (but I make use of the RSS Feed reader).
JMAP support would make a huge difference to expand the only open/free (as in speech) competition Exchange has.
What’s JMAP?
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t this allow one to represent virtually any resource as a mail inbox/outbox with access through a generic mail app?
I’m working with a specialized healthcare company right now, and this looks like a way to represent patient treatments data as an intuitive timeline of messages. With a local offline cache in case of outages. Security of local workstations is a weak point of course, but when is it not…
Yes, but that is always possible with most protocols, including imap.
Take a look a FUSE and you will see all the creative things people have done with filesystems. Or DNS, lots of fun things have been done with that also.
I was reading that page and was just getting more and more confused and then eventually I realised it’s an alternative to IMAP. Pretty cool.
I didn’t know JMAP either. Apparently the authors found the complexity and stagnation of IMAP as well as inability to integrate with basic groupware such as CalDAV caused free e-mail clients to be dropped in favor of proprietary systems. Seems like a fair assessment and if JMAP solves that I’d be very pleased.
How many people still use an email client? Genuine question.
I use either my phone or a web interface.
I only recently start using it after also being a browser email user all my life.
Kinda wondering what took me so long Thunderbird is great! don’t have to relearn questionable Ui between different email providers or re-login to check two mailboxes on the same provider.
Only annoying thing is not supporting ProtonMail out of the box.
Only annoying thing is not supporting ProtonMail out of the box.
That’s Protons fault, they’re the ones that decided to ignore all the open and standard e-mail, contacts and calendar protocols out there and built their custom-everything stack to keep you vendor-locked into their interfaces.
And your Phone is not using a Client?
I’m getting fed up about all those articles “rust x something: the future?”, “I rewrote <cli tool> in rust it’s now memory safe”. I get the rust safeties and all, but that doesn’t automatically make everything great, right ? You can still write shit code in any language that can RM -rf all your disk, or let security gaps here and there without intending to.
It does make stuff great. Even Microsoft is trying out Rust in their shit operating system because apparently 30% of all CVEs are related to, you guessed it, memory issues. And Rust will most likely solve them all. Even the Linux kernel has Rust code in it now. If Rust was not of importance, why would the Linux kernel get rusty? Especially Linus Torvalds is very strict about these things. Sure, bad code rewritten in Rust does not make it any better than it originally was. Plus you get C-like speed with good syntax and memory safety, what more could you ask for?
Yes security issues will remain a problem no matter what language was used. You are talking about the possibility of a logic flaw being there, whereas rust ‘just’ prevents memory corruption.
Which is the more common security issue? Memory corruption by a mile. That’s why many are excited by the rust rewrite
So you’re right it isn’t literally everything, but I’m not sure what would be. What would make you not fed up about it?
I honestly don’t understand the love for Thunderbird… Tried it for a few months, loved it entirely until I discovered it was fucking losing days worth of emails
Lost, as in, nowhere to be found, no search or manual browse would find them, no way of restoring them. Had to go into OWA to see the missing emails
Then apparently I found out it’s a known bug
I’m sorry but I would trade every bell and whistle for an email client that does not fucking lose your email
my problem was that it looked like it was designed in the 1960s.
Maybe the issue was that you were using it to access some kind of Microsoft service and their improper IMAP implementation.
It was… I was accessing my work email which unfortunately runs on Exchange… having said that, sorry, either support whatever crap MS puts or out don’t… “losing” emails cannot be part of a ready-for-public email client
Now, from what I read at the time, it was not “Owl for exchange”'s bug, it was Thunderbird. It apparently happens with other email sources as well, however you can “repair” your mailbox to get them back when you notice
It apparently happens with other email sources as well
I deal with a lot of mailboxes and a ton of people using Thunderbird with ridiculous amounts of emails like 50-100GB accounts and even on the few times I saw Thunderbird failing it wasn’t loosing anything.
I don’t trust Owl very much, the good news is that we will soon get an official and decent support for Exchange. :)
Oh well I guess if it hasn’t happened to you specifically, it must mean I imagined it…
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1340491
https://www.lifewire.com/repair-folders-thunderbird-1173102
I mean we are using Exchange email accounts at work with thunderbird, would be really lol if emails just get “lost”. But yea for sure a problem of Thunderbird. No user nor microsoft problem… ;>
The email was right in my inbox in owa… It could be an ms issue although I had seen the email in Thunderbird, that’s how I saw it first… Not sure how an email disappearing from my inbox is my fault
The Evolution email client is pretty great, and FairEmail for Android.
K-9 mail is better
Different people, different taste.
I love FairEmail because of its “millions” of settings and the privacy features, for an example if you press a link, you’ll get a popup with options (for an example, what app you want to open the link with). And if the link contains trackers, FairEmail will remove these by default and saying “tracking parameters removed” with yellow text in bold.
K-9 Mail feels incomplete in comparison. Have you tried FairEmail?
K-9 mail is eventually going to become Thunderbird for Android, just for anyone who didn’t know.
Who cares ? What matters is the features and how fast the app is. Not what language was used to achieve that.
Rust is wildly fast. Learning that it is being used for a program is good to know if you care about speed. If you read the article, it even addresses your exact critiques:
Moreover, Rust has demonstrated superior performance compared to JavaScript add-ons, resulting in a quicker and more responsive Thunderbird. Furthermore, the integration of Rust into Thunderbird will be facilitated by the fact that it is already utilized in Firefox, enabling Thunderbird to leverage existing infrastructure for testing and continuous integration.
So not only with thunderbird be faster because Rust is faster than JavaScript, but it eliminates 3rd party addons by being native which also further increases speed. Lastly, development time for new features and improvements is faster because they can now use using the mature tooling that Mozilla has for Rust.
So yeah, good to know its using Rust now.
The improvement here is switching from interpreted to compiled. It could have been C, Zig, Odin, or even C++ (but thank Satan it isn’t C++)
I’m not sure I understand why people like Rust over C, although I don’t have that much experience in enterprise coding. I’m generally distrustful of languages without a standardized specification, and I don’t really like that Rust has been added to the Linux Kernel. Torvalds giving in to public opinion isn’t something I thought I’d live to see…
I get the segmentation fault thing, but to be blunt, that sounds like a skill issue more than an actual computer science problem.
Maybe if things were less rushed and quality control was regarded more highly, we wouldn’t have such insanities as an email client (or an anything client) written in JavaScript in the first place.
Rust is likely going to suffer the same problem as JS, where people indirectly include 6,000 crates and end up with 30 critical CVEs in their email client that they can’t even fix because the affected crate was abandoned 5 years ago…
Any bug is a skill issue. There’s literally 0.001% of programmers who are dealing with computer science problems and they are all compiler writers
This “skills issue” thing just sounds so stupid in my ears. I am sick of reading it.
So, I am choosing a language that I hope will ensure fast, secure, and sophisticated code for my project. It has to do this for code I write, my team writes, and all future maintainers and contributors will write as well. If I choose a language that makes it easy to write unstable, fragile, and insecure code then “the skills issue” applies more to my lack of capability as an architect than it does the coders that come after me.
Stop saying, “well ya, it is super easy to make these mistakes in this language but that would never happen if you are as awesome as I am” and thinking that sounds like an intelligent argument for your language choice. There are better options. Consider them.
Why do you want sophisticated code ? That word seems out of place from the other two to me.
Rust doesn’t introduce the same problems as C, but it sure does introduce a lot of other problems in making code overly complicated. Lifetimes and async are both leaky abstractions (and don’t even work as advertised, as rust-cve recently demonstrated), macros can hide control flow…
C is unsafe, sure, but also doesn’t pretend to be safe. C is also stupid simple, and that’s a good thing : you can’t just slap ArcMutexes around, because by the time you know how to code them yourself you also know why you shouldn’t do that.
I hope Rust can reach a point where its safety model can be formally proven, and we have a formal specification and a stable ABI so we don’t have to hard-compile every crate into the binary.
But I personally expect something with some of Rust’s ideas, but cleaned up, to do that instead. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if C itself ends up absorbing some of Rust’s core ideas in an upcoming standard.
I’m not sure I understand why people like Rust over C, although I don’t have that much experience in enterprise coding.
I’d actually say that Rust is more popular in open-source projects. The reason people like it is because it’s WAY safer than C or C++ while being literally just as fast if not faster. I’m still in the process of learning it though so I can’t speak to your other points.
It is worth mentioning that the White House recommends Rust over C/C++ due to its very notable safety advantage over classic languages.
How can Rust be faster than C? What is faster than unabstracted direct memory management?
Somehow it sounds quite weird that the white house has such a recommendation. NIST, or the NSA? That would be easier to understand because they deal with code and algorithms but the white house?
I don’t know, I’m not american, I just read the news about it.
A few hours later I have read it too, possibly the same website. Still weird.
Not the person you wrote to, but TB has native code in C++, so I don’t really think the speed will change. The official website also doesn’t advertise speed improvements. It argued that Rust is (almost) as fast as the current native C++ part in TB, and that’s about it.
people who like fast apps should care because like 99% of current software developers are building electron apps instead of giving us something that actually lets your high end computer behave like a high end computer.
the only modern chat application that doesn’t run electron today is Telegram.
the only cloud note taking app that doesn’t run electron is …uh. doesn’t even exist.
the only…
i can’t even think of something i use that was released after 2016 on my computer that doesn’t run at a crawl because of electron. fuck electron.
I am pretty sure all of the KDE suite software does not use Electron. Or are you using Windows?
using cinnamon. and yeah base software is largely fine. but non-base productivity apps are largely built in electron. cinnamon even offers a webapp tool so in some cases i can at least avoid it.
Integrate with GTK and Qt first
But I don’t use Adwaita. I use MATE Menta. Plus that doesn’t change to my desktop.
Not a single screenshot was provided.
This would be a ludicrous time investment for very little gain.
Maybe, but I find it kinda frustrating that they invested a lot of time in the direct opposite way. Thunderbird had Qt/GTK support in version 102. In the next release, they forced their own theme and moved some elements while removing Qt and GTK support with the nonsensical justification of “we’d have to hardcode every single possible color permutation that the user could theme” when you get the colors from a function. They then locked the threads about this. I assume they did some internal refactoring, but still, it feels frustrating.
(note that the new UI can be customizable to have the inbox be single-row and the mail content be on the bottom) (also 115 is 102’s next release, thunderbird updates the major version number to whatever firefox’s is at the time of release)
