Thunderbird's New Rust Integration: The Future of Email Clients?
Thunderbird's New Rust Integration: The Future of Email Clients?
Upcoming Thunderbird release in July to feature Rust-based EWS protocol implementation, enhancing Microsoft Exchange compatibility.
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How many people still use an email client? Genuine question.
I use either my phone or a web interface.
- offline access and archival
- use with multiple providers
- seamless integration with contacts and calendar of any provider
- better keyboard shortcuts
- multiple windows
- end2end encryption via PGP keys, can use same keys as the rest of the system
- more lightweight on system resources
- themes, I guess?
^ Boils down to not being hostage to a single provider and whatever it offers.
And your Phone is not using a Client?
Of course it is, but I clearly meant a desktop client.
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.
That annoying thing is more on Protonmail though and I don't mean that as a negative, just more difficult to connect when the provider wants to keep things secure.
just more difficult to connect when the provider wants to keep things secure.
Proton could've just implemented everything they did with IMAP/SMTP on Thunderbird + OpenPGP with the same level of security, but they decided not to. Yes, their solution is convenient but also close to everything else.
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.
Web interfaces are so much worse than local apps IMO. And that doesn’t just include email, I always choose a local app over anything that runs in my browser.
Your phone's email app is a client, but I digress... I hate using the browser to access emails. I use many different email accounts with multiple email providers to compartmentalize my emails and avoid spam. I used Thunderbird for years before switching to Geary and now back to Thunderbird.
I do, i dont want to have to access 5 accounts using the browser on 3 different websites
Unfortunaly protonmail is not possible local (afaik) so i have to check there in the Browser.
It is, you just need the proton bridge. I use it on a Mac and it works well.
How many email accounts do you have? It might be a huge factor. I have about 7 accounts I need to check regularly and I cannot imagine doing it manually for each. I can see it working for one or maybe two though.
If you self host your E-mail it’s way more recourse efficient not to host a web interface
I use a client because I don't want microsoft to remember me when I go on other microsoft site besides their web email client.
I guess I can use a dedicated browser for email, but that is pretty much just a email client using more resources.
Me. Outlook on my windows work box is hard to beat imo. Personal? All android's default and web-ui
I don't need whatever thing therefore no one should use that thing.
Which is obviously not what I was saying at all...
That's exactly what you're saying.
Your "genuine question" indicates that you have no capacity to understand that others may have different use cases to your own.
I use Thunderbird on a Debian desktop and a client on my phone Fairmail https://email.faircode.eu/
I have several mails for different projects. Also private + university mail. Then I have my Google mail that I exclusively use for everything related to android/app store.
Checking all those mail accounts at once, managing folders/filters and signatures is all way easier with a desktop mail client.
Some years ago I was like you. I only needed to read mail and I have to admit that a desktop client is not really necessary in that case.
I want to, but none work properly. KMail is broken on NixOS, Evolution doesn't work well with KDE, and Thunderbird was just a broken mess last time I used it a few years ago when I was distro-hopping. Email is really not that important to me anymore either. Check it on the shitter or before bed and that's it.
I use KMail on NixOS (though, still the Qt 5 version) and it works for me. What's the problem with it?
- KMail Renders Blank Messages #160599 (resolved since 4 months, but haven't tested again).
- Kaddressbook/ Kontact/ Akonadi cannot add address book (dunno if it's resolved now).
There was also a problem with it no syncing calendars or something. Can't remember which issue I had there. Maybe it's all fixed now since Qt6, but that's to be released in the next stable version I think.
Huh, I haven't encountered any of these (adding address book works for me too, the last comment on that post seems to have a solution if it doesn't for you) and I've used KMail on NixOS for probably about as long as that first issue existed. Weird.
Gone are the illusions of NixOS's purity and banishment of "works on my computer".
Not at all, given we're running probably significantly different configurations. With the same configuration we'd get the same results, and NixOS never claimed to eliminate what is essentially packaging bugs related to runtime dependencies. KDE stuff (and especially anything Akonadi-related) right now needs a lot of plugin path environment variable mess to work with NixOS's file structure because it loads a bunch of stuff at runtime from other packages, which can break in strange ways like this if you don't add a specific package to your system packages for example, it's definitely not ideal the way it is right now but it's also pretty hard to get right.
Not at all, given we’re running probably significantly different configurations. With the same configuration we’d get the same result
The same argument can be made for any OS. Same packages, same hardware, same configuration, and probably it would be the same.
NixOS never claimed to eliminate what is essentially packaging bugs related to runtime dependencies
it’s also pretty hard to get right
I saw the work k900 and other contributors put into KDE and Qt stuff. It's admirable. I'm not saying it's their fault things are the way they are.
The same argument can be made for any OS. Same packages, same hardware, same configuration, and probably it would be the same.
Only if we're talking about 1:1 disk image clones or installing stuff on a fresh system.
That is clearly talking about build-time dependencies and the build process given the context (maybe the word "work" here is misleading though, also because some packages don't even have parts that can "work" or "not work" like wallpaper packages). It is impossible to automatically ensure all runtime dependencies are met, because that would require analyzing what the program actually does. I can write you any number of Nix packages that will only run on my computer (simplest case is because they load a file from a path from my user directory or something), but the thing that Nix ensures is that you can reproduce the package contents on your system as well.
That said, in a lot of cases, nixpkgs does actually (manually) patch runtime dependencies to use store paths which sets up that dependency relation, but with KDE PIM stuff this would lead to dependency cycles if done the typical way, for example KMail depends on Akonadi to build, but Akonadi loads plugin files from KMail when it is installed. This is not something you can do, so to resolve that cycle, you need another package which depends on both and links them together so they can see each other at runtime. Right now the entire NixOS configuration (or rather, whatever the environment.systemPackages option affects) assumes the role of this third package, but it would be nice if was done in in a more self-contained way, so that you could also reasonably use this stuff outside of NixOS.
NixOS is just another attempt at changing the way fundamental things are done so one day they can introduce some orchestration / repository / xyz payed solution. Yet another step in the commoditization of software development.
Thunderbird works great for me on both Arch and NixOS, maybe give it a try again?
I might, thanks. If it works for one person on nix, there's a good chance it'll work for others.