Mozilla Thunderbird

[time]

So I'm installing Thunderbird and trying to figure out the easiest way to get it to align with a version of Lightning calendar. Calendar functionality is obviously important to many people - after all, it's standard with Outlook.

Tbird version 10 includes an architectural change that required an equivalent change in Lightning. For a while there, because of lead times with betas, the published version of Thunderbird (9) wouldn't work with the published version of Lightning (you needed a hacked version), but all became smooth again with the release of 10 a month or so ago.

After I installed some add-ons, Thunderbird warns me that one of them (Simple Clocks, a multi-timezone display) will have to be disabled because it's incompatible with Tbird 11 - which it wants to upgrade to. WTF? I've been around the block a few times with this Mozilla version bullsh*t, so of course I refuse the upgrade and try to find info on it instead. It turns out that they forgot to mention there's an "unresolved" issue that breaks Lightning!

So Mozilla is trying to automatically roll out an update that breaks the key extension for Thunderbird (which should probably be part of the standard package anyway). Again.

I guess this is what you get when you actually believe that anal methodologies with strict time-boxing like Scrum actually work.

 

[Mercutio]

The only Thunderbird Add-on I use regularly is one that syncs Thunderbird and Gmail contacts. I do find it ironic that there's no decent way to set up two-way calendar sync with outlook and gmail without paying for something-or-other, but I'm not a calendar-using person in any case.

At any rate, addon compatibility can break for all kinds of reasons. One of the biggest is just that the developer only specified their extension work up to product version X. There actually is a developer addon that can force compatibility if you absolutely need some functionality, and installing that eliminates a lot of the kinds of issues you're describing, but it feels like a cheat as far as support goes. I understand that. I also understand that I'm not sufficiently motivated to go figure out what broke every time something changed with a Mozilla product.

 

[timwhit]

This is an official Mozilla add-on, they should synchronize the releases.

 

[Mercutio]

Everything else at Mozilla seems to be secondary to their browser.

 

[Mercutio]

Sometime in the last couple of releases, Thunderbird has gained support for several IM protocols, most notably Gchat and XMPP.
I've also found an add-on that allows me to load the web interface for Google Calendar in a Thunderbird Tab. I can do the same thing locally with Lightning, but the web interface winds up working a better for me since the Calendars I keep track of aren't mine, anyway.
I've can also mess around with the interface and make Thunderbird to open browser tabs of its own. Lately I've been using this to look at webmail accounts that I don't want forwarded to my main mailbox or cluttering up my main Thunderbird UI.

Thunderbird has kind of veered off in an interesting direction. It does a really good job of mixing local and web content, and I find that I have plenty of options to control how I want to interact with it. I think it's legitimate that we could have a discussion about why someone might want or need a local mail or messaging client at this point, but given how web-ified messaging has become, I think Thunderbird as a Mozilla project is more justified lately than it has been in years.