While its been a long time since Ive used Thunderbird, I just wanted to take the time to publicly say thank you.

Many HNers probably wont (or cant) remember the world of desktop mail clients but basically during the height of MSFT dominance there was only one real mail client: Outlook. Which Microsoft was starting to monetize heavily, ignore UX, and keep it windows only (cant blame them for that).

Then Thunderbird arrived on the scene, an OSS mail client that beat the pants off of Outlook in features, spam detection, IMAP support and a bunch of other things.

And it was free.

And you could use it on any machine.

This was a huge moment for OSS.

We owe a lot of credit to Mozilla and Thunderbird for rescuing us from a closed source world.

Before Thunderbird, Eudora was fantastic. We ran it at a college I worked at for most of the staff and faculty, and it was a very sad day when Qualcomm shut it down.

I used, and even paid for, The Bat! at around this time, but as it was the emailer of choice for spammers, when spamming was a newish thing, I kept getting perfectly legitimate mail bounced and the developers had to constantly update the client to traverse the anti Bat internet! Which was a pain. I also used Opera email client for a while. Which was dross.

Personally I do not use thunderbird, but one elderly relative requires thunderbird. So I am all in favour of thunderbird getting better. Not everyone is able to use emails in a much simpler way. I actually, back when I was using gmail still, had some +4000 unread messages. I simply can not keep up with regular mail.

Opera had an amazing built-in NNTP and email client. I think it was my first experience with views instead of folders, so my emails could appear in multiple "folders" (I think now we call them "smart folders").

Absolutely revelatory at the time.

> the world of desktop mail clients

We live in that world still.

> but basically during the height of MSFT dominance there was only one real mail client: Outlook.

On Windows, you had:

* Netscape Suite (later Seamonkey)

* Eudora

* Pegasus

and (edit:) two of those still exist. Plus, Outlook cost money (unless you used Outlook Express), while Netscape was gratis, and on Linux and most Unix variants, Outlook has never even existed. On Linux specifically there's Evolution and there's KMail.

And I'm sure I'm forgeting a few others.

> Then Thunderbird arrived on the scene

It was a development of the MailNews component of Netscape, to use the same XUL-based platform as Firefox. So, an evolution, not a revolution.

(edit:) Oh, look what I found!

https://missive.github.io/email-apps-timeline/

uncheck 'Web', iOS and Android.

I still use Thunderbird and I love it. Even though I absolutely hate email and it is a chaotic clusterfuck we act like is bulletproof.

I'm incredibly impressed at how feature deficit email is, but Thunderbird gives a lot of power back. It's just a lot of little things that add up. Like why is tagging and sorting so hard? But Thunderbird makes it easy, giving you as many as you want and let you label as you please. In Gmail, Outlook, or Apple Mail you can't implement filtering, but in Thunderbird you can. There's just so many junk emails being sent from accounts I can't outright block and my inbox is a nightmare of chaos without these. Sure, I wish I could do regex and it was more feature rich, but it is strong enough that I can already catch a lot of emails that Gmail's spam detection misses. Like what the fuck is with this spam detection, it is missing things where my email is not even in the To or {B,}CC fields![0]

  > And you could use it on any machine.

But on this note, we really do need to do something about email. We treat it so poorly. I use a lot of relay and proxy addresses now[1]. I'm also sending out a lot of resumes lately and it is surprising how we treat email. Like Microsoft only gives you SSO and then forces your email through that, not allowing you to add another email address. Not everything is "godelski@gmail.com", I use "linkedin@godelski.mozmail.com"[2] and "resume@godelski.com" (ditto [2]). In a world where we keep IDs for decades, where emails are constantly scraped and leaked, and where logins are tied to emails, these proxies are more important than ever. When I dump my gmail address I can also just redirect my two entry points (the mozmail and website domains) towards my new one. It is still not a great solution but at least it is easier to dump linkedin@godelski.com and move to new_linkedin@godelski.com than it is to go from godelski@gmail.com to godelski123@gmail.com.

If anyone has a better solution to this too, please let me know. I really fucking hate email and it seems like there's a ton of low hanging fruit

[0] The source of the email is a bit complicated and is clearly a LLM bypass by looking like generic emails like password resets or login alerts, but if my email was godelski@gmail.com it looks like it is sent to `godelski@gmail.com <bnchrch123@utahit.net>` CC `bnchrch1a2b@somehash.namprd04.prod.outlook.com`. It feels like we've gone backwards in spam detection. These are trivial to detect!

[0.1] And dear god, the least Apple Intelligence could do is run a god damn Naive Bayes filter on my text messages. You can surely do that on device! No Angela, I don't want to learn more about how I can make $500/wk and at no point in time have I ever wanted to accept a text message from a +63 country code... nor do I ever accept a call from my original area code as I haven't lived in the area for decades and it is a great filter to know who's spam.

[1] I use both Firefox relay and my personal website as Cloudflare gives you free email forwarding. Firefox relay integrates into Bitwarden (most of the time...) and it makes it really convenient for giving websites unique emails and unique passwords. Also helpful when you are given a piece of paper as you can create an email on the spot, block them as needed, and track how they're traded.

[2] I don't actually have the "godelski.mozmail.com" domain, so don't send me mail there. Though I wish relay would allow you to buy a second domain (and Signal would allow you at least 2 usernames!) At least give me one "clear" and one "handle".

>cant blame them for that

Of course you can blame them for that.