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.
While the native codebase is probably too old to salvage now, there was a project to write a Eudora-style UI for Thunderbird as an add-on. That might be easier to revive for 21st century email.
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.
If there are people who have never used a desktop mail client, I will say you owe it to yourself to try one. Web clients suck compared to desktop clients, it's not even close between the two. Sticking with just the Gmail interface (or whatever) is so limiting; definitely give alternatives a shot if you haven't.
Perhaps it's the fact that I grew up with Gmail throughout my education (and now my career), but most local clients lack one key feature - quick move!
My entire workflow around emails is based around opening & reading them, and then using the "Quick Move" button in Gmail to move it into a specific folder by typing the first few letters of the folder and hitting enter.
I know there are extensions for Thunderbird like Quick Folder Move [0], but I find these can be buggy, slow, etc. I presume these are just the realities of dealing with email providers who'd prefer you use their webmail clients rather than Thunderbird et al.
[0] https://services.addons.thunderbird.net/eN-US/thunderbird/ad...
I couldn't think of a reason why this would be necessary, but I haven't really kept up with how the technology has evolved in recent years. Is this behavior intrinsic to desktop clients?
Absolutely revelatory at the time.
I think was an accident of how the unix filesystem was implemented but basically, every file has at least one name but can have as many as you want, if a file ever has zero names it gets deleted. note that every open file is considered an additional name for that file.
By accident, I don't think it was designed this way but as they were putting together the filesystem "hey, what happens if two directories entries point to the same data?" anyone else "We will make a complicated locking system to prevent that from happening" the unix madlads "ship it and call it a feature, hell, work it into how files are opened as well then you can do tricksy stuff like open a file then delete it so it does not exists anywhere in the filesystem but it is still on disk"
The funny, in an ironic sense, thing is that while this this sort of naturally fell out of the first design of the unix filesystem it is not natural at all to modern copy-on-write filesystems, they have to do contortions to support it, but they do because it is now what people expect.
Apologies, but in my memory Thunderbird is just the new name for Netscape Mail. And Netscape mail, I believe, is older than Outlook.
I still have folders in my current Thunderbird that I created in Netscape (for example the 1996 folder that contains all mail from 1996).
I still got some bookmarks carried over from Navigator... though I bet 95+% don't work anymore.
When I was first getting into Linux, I liked Evolution a lot, though admittedly I haven't used it in awhile. Honestly I haven't really used Mutt in awhile either; webmail is just easier.
Outlook has a lot of proprietary Office 365-only features that 3rd party clients will never support. Same with Google Workspace and the Google apps.
Lotus (even before Notes) had cloud-like features for mail and worked on Windows and OS/2.
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".
If you read the specifications for the various email protocols, you'll soon discover that email, at the protocol level, is at its most feature-rich akin to flat files stored in a hierarchy of folders.
Tags, sorting, etc. are all the responsibility of clients. (Which is as it should be, since sorting is part of viewing data, not storing or sending it. Regarding tags, I suppose you could roll out a new email protocol, but SMTP is nothing more than a few text commands to send and receive bytes, and any tagging would be done by the client alone or the server alone as a value-add. The feature itself could not be implemented via, for example, the SMTP spec.
When you send an email via SMTP, you send the server "MAIL FROM" plus sender's address, RCPT TO plus destination, DATA and the contents of the email, and then a dot to represent the end of the email.
The email is then immutable. The receiver would be the one who wants to tag an email, and since the email is immutable, there's nothing you can do. And even if the sender wants to tag it, there's no command. I suppose in theory you could just add the tags to the email body, but every recipient not using your "improved" email format would just see that in the body of the email
It's getting better soon. Have a look at the jmap standard and stalwart, a high performant jmap server implementation in rust. This is the future!
I hear you on that. I'd even go a step further and say Apple Mail on desktop is a joke too.
That led me to build Marco, an IMAP‑primitive, offline‑first, cross‑platform email client for web, iOS, and macOS:
EDIT: EWS continues to be supported for on premises Exchange and is not scheduled for deprecation.
More limiting is that the current release doesn't support custom Office365 tenant IDs. So basically, unless you are using outlook.com this won't currently work yet. I'm lucky that my org hasn't disabled SMTP and IMAP, but it's been so slow lately...
This is Microsoft we're talking about here, so if its slated for removal in Oct '26, it will be put into LTS, and finally 'retired' (but operational) _starting_ around 2031.
Take the blog article for what you will. I have noticed in Office365, they tend to be less backward compatible than you would expect from Microsoft.
My tiny company had an on prem Exchange, migrated from GroupWise, and is now cloudy. I did all the migrations myself.
I have left things with our MX records pointing to on prem (Exim + rspamd + stuff) and relaying to MS 365 and a few IMAP daemons. If MS take the piss with licensing costs, I'll simply relay elsewhere and drop them.
Then I'll migrate my customers away. It'll take a while but it is not insurmountable.
FWIW: I use Evolution on my Kubuntu based gear to access M365 email. Wifey rocks Arch and I've deployed Evo on KDE there too.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/clients/exchange-...
Not sure how Mozilla went about the implementation, but I do agree it would be a concern to verify before using.
You can perform the following Exchange ActiveSync tasks:
Enable and disable Exchange ActiveSync for users
Set policies such as minimum password length, device locking, and maximum failed password attempts
Initiate a remote wipe to clear all data from a lost or stolen mobile phone
Run a variety of reports for viewing or exporting into a variety of formats
Control which types of mobile devices can synchronize with your organization through device access rulesThat only works within an organisation, right?
Otherwise you just get an email. I got one recently.
If your Outlook server disables IMAP & POP3, then the ActiveSync protocol is AFAIK the only way to get in-app emails on your phone. Admins do this so that they can forcibly wipe the device if they "need" to.
0: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/clients/exchange-...
If you want your employees to install malware, maybe you should issue them a company device instead of requiring them to install it on their personal device.
Owl for Thunderbird https://reviewers.addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/a...
i always carry it on pendrive with encrypted partition, and encryption software is also natively installed on usb, so no use of host pc for anything, mail or decryption
Many things don't need an app, a web site is enough (and they somehow force apps onto us), but email, especially with something like thunderbird is a great thing to have directly installed on your pc (or portable with you).
In other words, it was more work to adapt Firefox Sync than they thought at the beginning. It's still actively developed so finger crossed it's coming soon.
However, it is still not enough for me to come back. Sadly, corporate life is often organised around email and calendaring. All these endless meetings everyone complains about, which need to be scheduled, accepted, rejected, re-scheduled, etc. The native Exchange support does not yet support Calendar integration. Without it, it will be very awkward to use in a day-to-day corporate environment.
Much quieter that way as you only get to hear about the important stuff and can ignore the rest of the noise.
evolution has been keeping me sane whenever i needed to use ews for years.
Aside: Mozilla should really create a nice full-featured email server with the features found in Exchange/O365 for use with Thunderbird... it's a space that desperately needs competition and more solutions.
Also it's based on a protocol that's dying (slowly).
Good to see they're attending to exchange support, but this is a lackluster step.
The only real new protocol is JMAP which is pretty good and I’d much rather more clients and servers support JMAP than create a new protocol altogether.
Much much easier installation process than weeks of trying to make postfix and dovecot work.
[1] https://xmox.nl
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-Xchange
mailbox.org is based on it.
I have a few Exchange inboxes and once MS forces the “New Outlook” design, without allowing the legacy option anymore, im gone!
My work email is behind Okta and I can get through the whole flow of Oauth up till it hits the WebAuthN..which works but it won't display a pin entry dialog.
I also remember the mail client built into the old Norsk version of Opera. I loved that, a much as I loved that browser.
I take it mutt still does not have native Microsoft Exchange support?
I would not recommend that with any email clients. Most are built with the assumption that you have around 3 to 8 accounts. UI, speed, and configuration may become an issue. Esp. the unified inbox in Thunderbird was slow in my personal use.
What are these mailboxes? Are they changing a lot? That's also a factor to decide in your setup.
If you have hundreds of mailboxes, and you're posting on HN here, chances are you are technically competent. I would recommend a local IMAP server like Dovecot or Stalwart installed as Docker, and then fetchmail or similar to pull (copy) all the mail into a single inbox. And then your email client uses only that one account which has all emails.
This is a genuine question. I am not sure whether this is good or not.
It seems to only extend existing options? Or is there some trade-off?
For one to have an open-source client to Exchange online and on-premise with broad support for more than plain email management. And also for other servers like Kerio Connect and grommunio.
Current limitations:
Search & filtering
Filter actions requiring full body content are not yet supported.
Accounts hosted on Microsoft 365
Domains requiring custom OAuth2 application and tenant IDs will be supported in the future.
Accounts hosted on-premise
Password-based NTLM authentication and OAuth2 for on-premise servers are on the roadmap.
Calendar support
Not yet implemented – calendar syncing is on the roadmap.
Address book / contacts support
Not yet implemented – address book support is on the roadmap.
Microsoft Graph support
Not yet implemented – Microsoft Graph integration will be added in the future.My solution 15 years ago, when I needed to support Linux users, was Thunderbird plus a middleware tool called DavMail. Something like that is probably still the best option until Thunderbird is able to deliver more full functionality. Nice to see them working on the thing, at least.
Imagine going to work, and having a meeting about how you can make it harder for your software to interoperate with other software. Or waking up in the morning and spending your day designing a proprietary protocol designed to prevent interoperability. That's just another day at Microsoft.
And at the risk of asking too much (because this was a thing we used to have as a plugin)...
...any possibility of color-coding separate accounts?