The Portable Freeware Collection Forums

m^(2) wrote:Indeed, very sad. And disappointing.

I can see how they are backing away from it because it's likely not a major breadwinner for the company, but I think working with the browser "ThunderBrowse" plugin something could be worked out to get search revenue from Google. If things come to a dramatic halt, I guess I'll cross over to Sylpheed, but I definitely would miss many TB features.

There's also the lightweight, very configurable Claws Mail, but nothing portable yet.

webfork wrote:There's also the lightweight, very configurable Claws Mail, but nothing portable yet.

When last I tried this (http://www.claws-mail.org/win32/) I came away convinced that it was almost portable; the dificulty lied with untangling it from GPG4Win (not that I don't want to use it, but I would like to keep the portables separated...)

Mozilla expressed its intentions to leave Thunderbird's development in other hands about five years ago.
At that time, OpenOffice.org showed interest in integrate the email client (with Lightining or Sunbird) to the suite, to better compete with MS Office and Outlook.
The scenario has changed and the future of Thunderbird is uncertain.
And what will happen with Seamonkey?

SeaMonkey's Mail and Newsgroups client shares lots of code with Mozilla Thunderbird...

Is this really a big issue? It's not like there have been any major changes in how email works. It's not like web browsing where things are constantly evolving. They wioll still be releasing security updates and bug fixes.

carbonize wrote:Is this really a big issue? It's not like there have been any major changes in how email works. It's not like web browsing where things are constantly evolving. They wioll still be releasing security updates and bug fixes.

As Robert Kaye observed: "When no one makes a decision that impedes progress. Sometime continuing work depends on someone making a decision which could affect downstream work. In order to avoid throwing work away, people will wait until a decision has been made." (This is true for just about any organization, not just OSS projects).

For Thunderbird, this means that if the leadership changes due to former developers only working maybe a few hours a week, the project hierarchy may get convoluted and thus the project may slow down or stop.

The hope [edit: my hope] was that Mozilla would challenge Exchange and Lotus Notes and over time. It had been adding more and more features that indicated it might push into that territory and I much prefer the interface to both of those clients. Without strong organizational and monetary backing, moving into corporate/enterprise territory is unlikely to happen. That said, the open source productivity tool LibreOffice seems to be doing pretty well independent of its former corporate sponsor so who knows? Hopefully Thunderbird will gain at least some financial support from elsewhere the way LibreOffice did.

But most people do not want anything but a simple mail program. You start adding lots of things people don't need and you start losing users. I thought there were add ons like lightning that made Thunderbird more like you desire?

carbonize wrote:But most people do not want anything but a simple mail program. You start adding lots of things people don't need and you start losing users. I thought there were add ons like lightning that made Thunderbird more like you desire?

Possibly but choice is good and the only open alternative to Outlook seems to be Zimbra.

Additionally, Firefox pushed its way into corporate environments with a lightweight and extensible structure and relying on plugins for additional functionality. Although its gotten a little bulky in the last few years, I think there may be a way to do something similar with Thunderbird. Lightning is at the very edge of what Thunderbird needs to compete with other collaborative offerings like Exchange and Lotus Notes. A flagging system, todo list, collaborative meetings, etc. would help it push further in into that space and the plugins so far have only taken than part-way.

Thunderbird has flags though just that they call them tags. Pretty sure there is already at least one to do list extension.

Few things with the latest Thunderbird:

• So Softpedia is listing Thunderbird as adware I guess because it asks if you want to sign up for email from hover or ghandi.net. Stranger still, I can't figure out how this works. At the "would you like a new email address" prompt, you enter in a name it it just says "sorry we could not find any suggested email addresses".
  
  Anyway, it's a fairly minor adware function so I'm not bothered by it but it certainly is broken. Also, there's no real alternative on the open, portable email client front besides Sylpheed.
• Also, the program's integration with the new Chrome-like single menu button (they just moved the "awesome" bar) following in the path of the new Firefox redesign? It needs a little work.

Also, I've made this thread the official forum topic just for lack of obvious alternative.

webfork wrote:So Softpedia is listing Thunderbird as adware

Ghacks is covering how Firefox is also going this route. In fairness, Safari has been doing this by listing a selection of bookmarks and quick launch buttons from Disney, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, etc. and softpedia doesn't list it as adware.

Some interesting Thunderbird news: It's getting integrated with SoftMaker Office, with enhancements in the form of plugins.  Might be interesting.

"Over time, some design decisions have been made about Thunderbird's user interface that we don't agree with."

http://www.softmaker.com/english/ofwtb_en.htm

I'm not a Thunderbird user, but that is the kind of decision process that made SoftMaker Office my current preferred office suite, both in Windows and in Linux...

webfork wrote:Thunderbird ... [is] getting integrated with SoftMaker Office, with enhancements

So this has happened finally: http://www.softmaker.com/en/softmaker-office-windows They're calling it "Extended Thunderbird". The office suite currently free for colleges, universities, and teachers but not for students.

webfork wrote:So this has happened finally: http://www.softmaker.com/en/softmaker-office-windows They're calling it "Extended Thunderbird". The office suite currently free for colleges, universities, and teachers but not for students.

I don't see an offer of source code anywhere. Any Thunderbird files they modified are required to be released under the MPL. Note that this doesn't apply to fully new source code files they add.

It looks like Softmaker just altered the interface by moving tabs to the bottom and bundled the Lightning addon for calendar and tasks functionality.

They might have not altered any source code, but are redistributing Thunderbird with some custom defaults.