Icedove to Thunderbird....ever?

Horizon_Brave · 2016-07-07 21:20:16

So, as I still consider myself very very new to the debian world philosophy (don't break stable!) I was pretty shocked that after all that time debian stable finally adopted the actual Firefox mozilla branding. So I'm curious to know why haven't they followed suit with Mozilla's other pet project "Thunderbird"? I mean I enjoy icedove, I think it works, and don't have any issues that I've noticed, but I'm just wondering if anyone knows why debian is still holding back on the thunderbird branding but yet cave into the firefox brand?

hhh · 2016-07-07 22:02:06

Mozilla has abandoned Thunderbird, though they're still hosting it.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/26 … new_homes/
http://www.i-programmer.info/news/136-o … rbird.html

Stay with Icedove until the dust has settled, Debian should support it for quite a while. It's in stretch and sid, and even experimental...

https://packages.debian.org/search?sear … ds=icedove

johnraff · 2016-07-08 02:08:38

Icedove as it is now is doing a pretty good job, for me at least. No major bugs/issues I'm aware of, and even the long-standing annoyance of not being able to search all your address books at once was fixed a version or two ago.

As @hhh says, let's just sit tight for a while...

Horizon_Brave · 2016-07-08 03:04:22

hhh wrote:

Mozilla has abandoned Thunderbird, though they're still hosting it.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/26 … new_homes/
http://www.i-programmer.info/news/136-o … rbird.html
Stay with Icedove until the dust has settled, Debian should support it for quite a while. It's in stretch and sid, and even experimental...
https://packages.debian.org/search?sear … ds=icedove

Wow, I'm genuinely surprised that Mozilla decided to ax Thunderbird... To me it was the only serious competitor to Outlook. I'm pretty disappointed to be honest. Well if Thunderbird is sort of dead in the water soon, I'm assuming that Icedove though will still be updated? How does something like this work, icedove is pretty much a port of thunderbird...so if T-bird is no longer developed, will all development halt on Icedove? Meaning no new features? Or will someone inevitably pick it up ?

Snap · 2016-07-08 03:28:59

TB and thus Icedove updates only bring security fixes. Have not been developed any further in quite a while. Yes, no new features at all. What you see is what you'll get.

Horizon_Brave · 2016-07-08 18:29:06

Snap wrote:

TB and thus Icedove updates only bring security fixes. Have not been developed any further in quite a while. Yes, no new features at all. What you see is what you'll get.

I suppose, aside from future security updates, that the TB/ID applications are "done" I guess. They, after all, do what they are set to do. Still sad to see Thunderbird's potential squandered though! Glad to hear that stretch and sid are still using it in their images so that means it may have some staying power in stable as well....

hhh · 2016-07-08 21:29:11

Horizon_Brave wrote:

Wow, I'm genuinely surprised that Mozilla decided to ax Thunderbird.

It makes sense, FF is their money maker. Did you see this news story, released today?
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/07/0 … purchased/

The Lizard licks it's chops as Mammon sleeps.

... Thunderbird is sort of dead in the water...

That completely depends on the developers. They have a great product and a great head start, they've been a part of the Mozilla suite and Mozilla is still hosting them. I'd be surprised if the project just dies. *hushed tennis/golf announcer voice* Let's see what happens...

Horizon_Brave · 2016-07-08 21:41:04

Mozilla’s main form of income (90 percent of its revenue) is search agreements, according to Recode. Google was paying it a guaranteed $300 million per year, but Mayer overcommitted in an effort to get Yahoo’s search profiled in Firefox.

Wow, what an amazing churn of luck for Mozilla... Yahoo sort of screwed the pooch of the deal for themselves. Extra loots for Mozilla at least.

...it can cash out on the deal and sign a new agreement with Google or another company (like Bing) immediately.

oh god..please not bing...

Anyway thanks for the insight guys. I'll sit tight. Looking into it further, I had no idea Mozilla was on such a shoe string budget

Rocky · 2016-07-08 23:44:10

I have always found TB a little heavy. Been palying around with Claws mail ( maybe somewhat too basic) . Geary is nice middle ground - I believe somebody from Gnome has agreed to maintain it.

hhh · 2016-07-09 00:53:55

Bing has the best wallpapers.

http://www.istartedsomething.com/bingimages/

dbvolvox · 2017-04-22 23:03:18

I see Thunderbird and Lightning are now in our repository so apt upgrade wants to install Thunderbird. If I go ahead will it interfere with my icedove (I really do not want that messed up!)?

Head_on_a_Stick · 2017-04-22 23:20:47

dbvolvox wrote:

If I go ahead will it interfere with my icedove

I don't think so, it's just a branding thing AFAICT.

Having said that, I don't use a mail client so I may be wrong, I think @S11 uses Icedove so may know better.

johnraff · 2017-04-25 01:12:18

I'll make the ID>TB switch soon, but meanwhile you might want to check @hhh's comment: https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic … 923#p47923
However, the 15th Apr. update in the changelog says:

We don't need a special diffrent default profile folder in jessie or wheezy. We will use always ~/.thunderbird in all available releases.

so that might be OK now.

EDIT: always safer to make a backup copy of your config folder before making major changes like this.

Last edited by johnraff (2017-04-25 01:13:12)

johnraff · 2017-04-28 02:03:26

The switch from Icedove to Thunderbird went OK for me - just upgrade Icedove and in it comes. To remove duplicate .desktop files and /usr/bin executables, uninstall icedove and thunderbird should remain.
A migration script automatically sorts things out: https://wiki.debian.org/Thunderbird

Now my ~/.thunderbird is a symlink to ~/.icedove, but I suppose the link could be removed, and .icedove renamed to .thunderbird. Carry on...

Sector11 · 2017-04-28 12:28:24

Just saw HoaS' reference to me which is a mute point now as the change happened a little while back with a normal update-upgrade.

Like John the switch went OK here and I have the same synlink thing. I'm leaving that alone for the moment.

Let's clear things up here, I use both:

ClawsMail - for my email account, I prefer the text based email
Thunderbird - for my wife's account, she prefers HTML email. She says she needs it.

Just "reading" a SPAM email in HTML sends a whole bunch of little spys back home.

Creating spam filters for her is keeping me busy.
I'll keep my text based mail thank you.

Horizon_Brave · 2017-04-28 19:03:39

ha, my own topic, and I wasn't even aware it actually took place... I really suck at keeping up to date when packages are released/updated...

Also..see this, specifically the Migration part:

https://wiki.debian.org/Thunderbird

Sector11 · 2017-04-28 20:12:32

Horizon_Brave · 2017-04-28 22:21:43

Whoops, JohnRaff of course beat me to the punch with the thunderbird debian link. What sucks is my testing/stretch machine is a VM, so it's sort of pointless to have an email client, when on my host machine I have one. And my dedicated Bunsen laptop is strictly stable... I guess I'll wait for Stretch to migrate

Last edited by Horizon_Brave (2017-04-28 22:23:57)

johnraff · 2017-04-29 05:50:53

Sector11 wrote:

Thunderbird - for my wife's account, she prefers HTML email. She says she needs it...
Just "reading" a SPAM email in HTML sends a whole bunch of little spys back home.

In TB you can choose to view messages as "Simple HTML" (what I use) - this keeps the layout and clickable links, but doesn't download the images, so no spy messages. I don't know if your wife would be OK with that?

Last edited by johnraff (2017-04-30 02:08:47)

Sector11 · 2017-04-29 13:23:02

Morning John,
Originally I had Thunderbird set to "text" and we both used it. Then she decided that she wanted things to be pretty as she could never see stuff. So we went thought the options ... she wants the full bells and whistles package.

#1 2016-07-07 21:20:16

Icedove to Thunderbird....ever?

#2 2016-07-07 22:02:06

Re: Icedove to Thunderbird....ever?

#3 2016-07-08 02:08:38

Re: Icedove to Thunderbird....ever?

#4 2016-07-08 03:04:22

Re: Icedove to Thunderbird....ever?

#5 2016-07-08 03:28:59

Re: Icedove to Thunderbird....ever?

#6 2016-07-08 18:29:06

Re: Icedove to Thunderbird....ever?

#7 2016-07-08 21:29:11

Re: Icedove to Thunderbird....ever?

#8 2016-07-08 21:41:04

Re: Icedove to Thunderbird....ever?

#9 2016-07-08 23:44:10

Re: Icedove to Thunderbird....ever?

#10 2016-07-09 00:53:55

Re: Icedove to Thunderbird....ever?

#11 2017-04-22 23:03:18

Re: Icedove to Thunderbird....ever?

#12 2017-04-22 23:20:47

Re: Icedove to Thunderbird....ever?

#13 2017-04-25 01:12:18

Re: Icedove to Thunderbird....ever?

#14 2017-04-28 02:03:26

Re: Icedove to Thunderbird....ever?

#15 2017-04-28 12:28:24

Re: Icedove to Thunderbird....ever?

#16 2017-04-28 19:03:39

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#17 2017-04-28 20:12:32

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#18 2017-04-28 22:21:43

Re: Icedove to Thunderbird....ever?

#19 2017-04-29 05:50:53

Re: Icedove to Thunderbird....ever?

#20 2017-04-29 13:23:02

Re: Icedove to Thunderbird....ever?

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