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Debian Mozilla Firefox GNU is Not Unix Operating Systems Software The Internet Technology

Mozilla Thunderbird Finally Makes Its Way Back Into Debian's Repos (softpedia.com) 47

prisoninmate quotes a report from Softpedia: A year ago, we told you that, after ten long years, the Debian Project finally found a way to switch their rebranded Iceweasel web browser back to Mozilla Firefox, both the ESR (Extended Support Release) and normal versions, but one question remained: what about the Mozilla Thunderbird email, news, and calendar client? Well, that question has an official answer today, as the Mozilla Thunderbird packages appear to have landed in the Debian repositories as a replacement for Icedove, the rebranded version that Debian Project was forced to use for more than ten years due to trademark issues. "Thunderbird is back in Debian! We also renamed other related packages to use official names, e.g. iceowl-extension -> lightning. For now, we need testers to catch existing issues and things we haven't seen until now," said Christoph Goehre in the mailing list announcement. You can find out how to migrate your Icedove profiles to Thunderbird via Softpedia's report.
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Mozilla Thunderbird Finally Makes Its Way Back Into Debian's Repos

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17, 2017 @08:48PM (#53889887)

    Thunderbird functionality is now included in systemd.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17, 2017 @08:56PM (#53889921)

    I am the only person I know who uses a local email client, rather than gmail, and I run with a reasonably tech savvy crowd.

    The idea of email that isn't used as profiling material for one of the biggest advertising companies on the planet appears to be dead. Along with it, as collateral damage, the idea of end-to-end encryption where the keys are yours rather than given to a large company for "safe keeping", and turned over to whichever government agency wants them today.

    I think there are still some oldschool tech people like me out there, but if you randomly sampled the general population, I'd honestly be surprised if one person in a hundred was running their own email client rather than using a web interface to (most likely) gmail, or possibly some other similar web service. My anecdotally powered guess would be one in a thousand, maybe. Even small to mid sized companies are on gmail now.

    Decentralization is dying. Centralization is winning.

    • by vux984 ( 928602 )

      I am the only person I know who uses a local email client, rather than gmail, and I run with a reasonably tech savvy crowd.

      Pretty much everyone I work with (ie clients) use outlook. The lowest people on the totem pole (e.g. retail store staff -- people who do not spend much time on the computer) are using gmail apps for work, or outlook online through office 365 -- but everyone in even routine admin positions on up through management is on outlook as part of office 365 or with the google apps connector.

      Pretty much everyone i know 'socially' has email on their phone (ie via an app); and may use webmail or outlook depending if th

    • I am the only person I know who uses a local email client, rather than gmail, and I run with a reasonably tech savvy crowd.

      Strange, I don't know a single person who uses a shitty webmail client rather than something local (did you know you can use gmail via IMAP?), and I run both with tech savvy and non-savvy crowds. The latter required a family member or a an IT guy (home/work respectively), who installed them something user-friendly like Thunderbird, rather than Windows Live Mail or whatever Outlook is called this week.

    • by glitch! ( 57276 )

      I am still using kmail. It works fine, for the most part. I can GPG encrypt and decrypt emails, but it fails if I try to GPG sign an email. Before kmail, I used pine, and it was pretty easy to drag my pine emails into a kmail archive folder.

      • by Tough Love ( 215404 ) on Saturday February 18, 2017 @01:50AM (#53890857)

        I am still using kmail. It works fine, for the most part. I can GPG encrypt and decrypt emails, but it fails if I try to GPG sign an email. Before kmail, I used pine, and it was pretty easy to drag my pine emails into a kmail archive folder.

        I am still using kmail. It works fine...

        OMG, surely you don't mean Kmail 2 with its crappy database backend (mysql by default!), loaded with races and inconsistencies that you are 100% guaranteed to hit if you put any kind of load on it, and which contributed absolutely no new functionaly, only killer bugs? I used to love Kmail as a preeminent example of the fine work that open source development can do, until some insane incompetent became the project lead. I tried to tough it out for years, but basically, just lost my ability to handle email effectively, until I finally gave up and threw it away forever in favor of Thunderbird and Trojita, a promising new project that seems to be everything that Kmail is not in terms of precision, as opposed to the amateurish "vision" that sunk Kmail.

    • I too run a local email client.
      In fact, I run pine (well, alpine). Yep, text based email.
      Everyone I work with thinks I'm crazy. For me, it's what I need and I have used it for a long time.
      For a few years back in the mid 2000s I ran Thunderbird, but it was still too heavy. And I couldn't get to my mail if I was elsewhere very easily.

      I do have a few emails, and pull them into my local account with fetchmail. I can ssh in from work or elsewhere (even mobile) and check it. This means that I don't have to p

    • > I am the only person I know who uses a local email client, rather than gmail

      Local email client is just a client for service. You know that you can use gmail with your local email client right? Gmail on the other hand is an ISP - exactly the same as in old days of using email client software. It is just like that today people prefer to use webmail over dedicated client. Well in fact they prefer to use their mobile email client (usually GMail) but still...

      > The idea of email that isn't used as profili

  • by Anonymous Coward

    For XUL and Npapi compatibillity puerposes.Debian should stand up to Mozilla and demand they don't cripple their software.

    • by Tough Love ( 215404 ) on Saturday February 18, 2017 @01:12AM (#53890803)

      [Mozilla needs to be forked again] For XUL and Npapi compatibillity puerposes.[sic]

      Mozilla is already forked [palemoon.org] for exactly this reason. But please read the WebExtensions FAQ [wiki.mozil...extensions] before telling us again what you don't know about how and why Mozilla foundation intends to replace those previous-century APIs with something modern that benefits from an additional decade of experience with, among other things, security, privacy and performance issues. And maybe think about a thank you for opening the process up to public debate nice and early.

      One point I would suggest paying particular attention to: Will I be able to do everything I can in a legacy technology? [mozilla.org] The answer is no. The details of that no are awfully important. This is for sure a place where educated feedback would be useful and most probably well received.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Except they are getting rid of the only reason anybody uses their product...

          Rest of post clipped because initial premise is wrong. I use Firefox mainly for entirely different reasons like tabs being competently implemented. Second reason is, if there were no replacement extension API then you would not be full of crap but there is so you are. Have a nice day.

  • I thought Mozilla had stopped development on Thunderbird. If that's true, what's the advantage in haven't the Mozilla branded version? Not only why bother, but better to avoid it, because you can patch your own version.

    Am I wrong, and is Mozilla actually doing some development, or at least bug fixing, on Thunderbird?

  • Thunderbird is their drink of choice.

  • Thunderbird is barely usable. It has 10 y.o. bugs making it crash and corrupt local database. It also has 5 y.o. bugs related to handling IMAP protocol and headers.

    For open-source email client I don't see any need to use Thunderbid anymore. Need to run your own email service? Use open source server software and decent open source webmail client plus open source mobile client. Thunderbird? No thanks.

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