Glad to hear that. It's a remarkable swiss-army knife of a tool.
To paraphrase myself from HN:
T'bird is an example of the Pareto principle: we all only want or need 20% of the functionality, but a different functionality... so in the end, the pool of all users need 80% of the functionality. The other 20% or so is either there to support that 80% or it is something that is absolutely essential for a tiny number of people.
Which is what leads to OSes like Linux, which are huge and vastly complicated, but every obscure function that 80% of us will never use is crucial to someone somewhere... because Linux is a desktop and a laptop and a server and a router and a hypervisor, etc.
Tens of thousands of organisations agree on the usefulness of Linux, so it gets a lot of investment and R&D and development.
Only 1 company owns Thunderbird and it thinks that it's not important, so it gets very little: just a bit of bugfixing and maintenance. :-(
While actually, it is in its way a jewel of vital functionality that really should be celebrated and polished.
I'd love to work out what it needs to get more airtime and investment.
T'bird does what I need without a single addon -- but I can see where a few small addons could transform it from "very useful" to "world-beating".
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Glad to hear that. It's a remarkable swiss-army knife of a tool.
To paraphrase myself from HN:
T'bird is an example of the Pareto principle: we all only want or need 20% of the functionality, but a different functionality... so in the end, the pool of all users need 80% of the functionality. The other 20% or so is either there to support that 80% or it is something that is absolutely essential for a tiny number of people.
Which is what leads to OSes like Linux, which are huge and vastly complicated, but every obscure function that 80% of us will never use is crucial to someone somewhere... because Linux is a desktop and a laptop and a server and a router and a hypervisor, etc.
Tens of thousands of organisations agree on the usefulness of Linux, so it gets a lot of investment and R&D and development.
Only 1 company owns Thunderbird and it thinks that it's not important, so it gets very little: just a bit of bugfixing and maintenance. :-(
While actually, it is in its way a jewel of vital functionality that really should be celebrated and polished.
I'd love to work out what it needs to get more airtime and investment.
T'bird does what I need without a single addon -- but I can see where a few small addons could transform it from "very useful" to "world-beating".