# Replacement for Thunderbird?



## aragats (Nov 20, 2017)

Mozilla products get more and more bloated and unusable...
So Palemoon is a great replacement for Firefox. How about Thunderbird?
Of course, there exist many email clients. Personally I don't need GUI in most cases and use mail/mutt at home. However, I have to use mail/thunderbird at work since sometimes I have to read/write html messages. The proofed mail/sylpheed and mail/claws-mail are great, but they only display html, do not support composing.

Thanks for ideas.


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## ekingston (Nov 20, 2017)

I have not found a suitable replacement for Thunderbird. There is Evolution but it is as bloated as Thunderbird. Although, has a nicer looking default interface in my opinion.

The new Firefox is a lot faster and more memory efficient than the previous version. Sadly it still has pocket forcibly integrated.


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## Sensucht94 (Nov 20, 2017)

Most of times I use mail/cone+mail/msmtp, instead of mutt

And yes,  Sylpheed to display html 

If I remember correctly mail/geary does support composing, and is very nice, though I haven't installed it  on FreeBSD so far, so I wouldn't be able to tell how well it performs.

Then there's mail/evolution

Unfortunately they're both haevy as hell on dependencies (geary is a little more bearable)

I'm pretty sure KMail would stasfy your needs, but it requires you to install KDE4, so it's out of question

Out of topic: I would really like to see Nylas-Mail ported one day to FreeBSD


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## ShelLuser (Nov 20, 2017)

I've been somewhat happy with Seamonkey, also available as www/seamonkey.

Basically an all-in-one suite from Mozilla which does a decent job but can still become tedious because in the end you're now basically loading / using 3 main applications at the same time (browser, mail / usenet client an an IRC client).


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## poorandunlucky (Nov 21, 2017)

There's Nylas that looks good, but there doesn't seem to be a FreeBSD port...


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## rigoletto@ (Nov 21, 2017)

If you do not mind of Qt (pure Qt) and a simple client (not a full feature one like mail/thunderbird), there is mail/trojita. Quite fine and fast (at least until the last time I used it), but with the downside of just supporting one account; however you could run more than one instance using different configs if you must.


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## aragats (Nov 21, 2017)

Wozzeck.Live said:


> In fact I am wondering if your post would not be a little "out of forum rules", as you probably use Palemoon on Windows or Linux.
> This forum is for FreeBSD. If your question is related to Windows, "google a little" there are now many alternatives to Thunderbird on Windows.


That's really funny! May I make a counter-offer? Just search these forums for "palemoon" and you'll find that you missed this thread. It is not ported "officially" yet, but the port suggested perfectly worked for me.


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## aragats (Nov 21, 2017)

Thanks for suggestions folks, here is what we have so far:
mail/sylpheed, mail/claws-mail and mail/trojita do not support composition of html messages.
Also mail/trojita has rendering issues, some messages created by Outlook are not rendered at all.
mail/geary and mail/evolution want to pull a lot of Gnome dependencies: 193MB and 135MB correspondingly.
www/seamonkey is not bad, I used to use it, but they don't have a stand alone application anymore, you have to run the whole suite (unless I missed something).
The nylas-mail and its forks are not ported, but they are written in JavaScript, which means, from one side, it's not hard to port, from another ― they are even more bloated than mail/geary and mail/evolution.


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## Phishfry (Nov 21, 2017)

Wozzeck.Live said:


> In fact I am wondering if your post would not be a little "out of forum rules", as you probably use Palemoon on Windows or Linux.


Wow a guy with 31 posts trying to be an enforcer.
MS Outlook as a recommendation on the FreeBSD forum. That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.


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## spython01 (Nov 21, 2017)

Before you permanently leave Thunderbird, you may want to leave some feedback to Ryan Sipes, the new Community Manager for Thunderbird, on a survey he's running. More information can be found on his blog post. 

Personally for me, Thunderbird works great on both FreeBSD and Linux handling a few thousand emails in my inbox, including MS Exchange. I've set it up to both display and compose emails in plain text to reduce any HTML distractions.


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## aragats (Nov 21, 2017)

spython01 said:


> you may want to leave some feedback to Ryan Sipes, the new Community Manager for Thunderbird


Thanks, will do.


spython01 said:


> I've set it up to both display and compose emails in plain text to reduce any HTML distractions


For this purpose I use mail/mutt for many years and very happy with it.

As I mentioned above, sometimes I *have* to read and compose emails in html to be on the same page with many other people in the company (who do not know anything but Outlook). Generally speaking, Thunderbird works more or less acceptably, but look at the cost of what (excerpts from `top` output):
	
	



```
PID USERNAME    THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE   C   TIME    WCPU COMMAND
64847 <myuser>      65 103    0  2797M  1036M CPU7    7 129.6H 102.12% thunderbird
67969 root          23  20    0  5190M  3971M kqread 11 339:39   1.07% bhyve
52643 <myuser>       1  20    0 13569M 75428K select  5 492:45   0.27% Xorg
```


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## forquare (Nov 21, 2017)

I do wonder if Thunderbird May get the Firefox treatment soon and get a significant rewrite in Rust?



poorandunlucky said:


> There's Nylas that looks good, but there doesn't seem to be a FreeBSD port...



IIRC, Nylas Mail is an electron app (backed by Chrome/Chromium). So, just like Slack, gobbles up memory. 
It looks beautiful, but it’s just not a great way to make an app, IMO. 

I did ask the Nylas team to look into a FreeBSD Port almost two year ago, I tried to figure it out myself but getting the electron backend working was beyond my at the time, and now I learn of what electron really is I have little desire to run anything that depends on it.


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## abishai (Nov 21, 2017)

aragats said:


> However, I have to use mail/thunderbird at work


If you use Palemoon, isn't it shares the common dependencies with thunderbird? Personally, I like simplicity of sylpheed, but thunderbird comes freely in term of deps for Firefox ESR user.



ekingston said:


> Sadly it still has pocket forcibly integrated.


What about `extensions.pocket.enabled = false` in `about:config`


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## bhawani (Nov 21, 2017)

aragats said:


> Mozilla products get more and more bloated and unusable...
> So Palemoon is a great replacement for Firefox. How about Thunderbird?


Well, i am new here and do not have much knowledge as per the topic. Have you considered mailbird for the replacement of thunderbird? or not?
It may help you.


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## Lamia (Nov 21, 2017)

I am a big fan of Mozilla. Nonetheless, I might make a recommendation for a non-gecko email product and particularly for desktop/mobile devices. That would be Blue Email.It might require some tweaking to get it to run on *BSD.
O Lord, are we ever going to have a phone like N900 again?


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## ekingston (Nov 21, 2017)

Phishfry said:


> Wow a guy with 31 posts trying to be an enforcer.
> MS Outlook as a recommendation on the FreeBSD forum. That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.



I ran Outlook on FreeBSD in the late 1990's (Wine worked very will with office at the time).


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## aragats (Nov 21, 2017)

abishai said:


> If you use Palemoon, isn't it shares the common dependencies with thunderbird?


Probably, but that's not about dependencies, take a look at the `top`'s line I posted above...



bhawani said:


> Have you considered mailbird for the replacement of thunderbird?


Isn't it for MS Windows only?



lamia said:


> That would be Blue Email.


As far as I can see currently it's only for mobile platforms.



ekingston said:


> I ran Outlook on FreeBSD in the late 1990's


Yeah, that time MS and Adobe products were simpler and neater.
Honestly speaking, I don't understand why people may like Outlook, what's the use? It doesn't support threads, the search is useless, the data file in binary format and used to break everything when hit 2GB size (now they fixed it after 20 years!).


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## shepper (Nov 21, 2017)

The OP html needs: viewing and/or composing?  In mail/sylpheed and mail/mutt, it is easy to configure the mail client to open html email in a browser.  If composing html emails is a rare occurrence, it is also not overly difficult to attach html files.  Google: mutt composing html


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## aragats (Nov 21, 2017)

shepper said:


> The OP html needs: viewing and/or composing?


As I mentioned in the OP, both. And, yes, viewing is not a problem.
The problem comes when people send text interleaved with pictures, use different styles, highlight certain words, and they expect from you a similarly formatted message.
Moreover, sometimes they expect you to edit their message and reply back. So the OP is about convenience.
I'm aware of how to attach HTML files, and maybe will eventually go that way, it will require some time for fine tuning everything to make sure that Outlook displays them correctly.


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## scottro (Nov 21, 2017)

Not for composing, but there is an easy way to open mutt emails in a browser.  

http://jasonwryan.com/blog/2012/05/12/mutt/


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## Deleted member 48958 (Nov 21, 2017)

Wozzeck.Live said:


> Pehraps have I missed something, but Palemoon is not ported to FreeBSD as today, unless you managed by yourself to port it.
> So as today, Palemoon IS NOT a replacement... on FreeBSD


www/palemoon
Download attachment from that post.
Pale Moon should be available in ports tree and via packages soon...


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## aragats (Nov 21, 2017)

scottro said:


> Not for composing, but there is an easy way to open mutt emails in a browser.


Thanks, I do use www/w3m, it's really convenient. However, it's not really useful in a situation when the sender asks to do something typed in red or in green. It is ridiculous, but that's what I have to bear with, and I believe, not just me.


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## scottro (Nov 21, 2017)

That link refers to using a gui brower.  He uses vimperator I think, but you can just as easily use firefox or other.  That would open the email, showing all its colors and links, e.g.


```
text/html; firefox -new-tab %s; test=test -n "$DISPLAY"
```


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## Deleted member 48958 (Nov 28, 2017)

aragats said:


> www/seamonkey is not bad, I used to use it, but they don't have a stand alone application anymore, you have to run the whole suite (unless I missed something).



And why it is a problem? Just launch it like this, to start mail client directly, — `% seamonkey -mail`.
Also seamonkey package from repo is equal to thunderbird package by its size :





(also it is possible to build SM without calendar)
So seamonkey is a great email client IMO, I like it even more than thunderbird (I like seamonkey UI) 
also it has similar functionality, so it is a great replacement.


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## aragats (Nov 28, 2017)

Thanks! So far so good. My main problem with Thunderbird is the enormous amount of resources consumed.
Actually I found that there exist an option to launch the email client by default:






I installed Seamonkey as a package, it doesn't have a calendar.


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## Deleted member 48958 (Nov 28, 2017)

aragats said:


> I installed Seamonkey as a package, it doesn't have a calendar.


It does, execute `pkg info seamonkey |grep LIGHTNING`

```
LIGHTNING      : on
```


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## aragats (Nov 28, 2017)

That's correct, but there are no evidences of it in the GUI.
I'm not a calendar user, just curious where is it. Also, I opened a message with an event and it's displayed as a regular letter.


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## Deleted member 48958 (Nov 28, 2017)

It was pre-installed addon, as far as I remember, cannot test it now because I use custom SM configuration.


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## aragats (Nov 28, 2017)

Actually that's bad: without calendar Seamonkey silently suppresses any _Content-Type: text/calendar_ part of messages, so they become useless.
I tried to rebuild Seamonkey from ports with different options ― the calendar doesn't appear.


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## Deleted member 48958 (Nov 28, 2017)

thunderbird comes without any calendar too, so you lose nothing.


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## aragats (Nov 28, 2017)

ILUXA said:


> thunderbird comes without any calendar too, so you lose nothing.


Тhat's not true, it comes with Lightning preinstalled, even if you don't use it, Thunderbird displays messages with events correctly.
Even mail/mutt which I use everyday for personal emails shows _text/calendar_ parts.


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## Deleted member 48958 (Nov 29, 2017)

Anyway, here is few tips, for www/seamonkey users.
To hide "hiders" 
	

	
	
		
		

		
			





 add 
	
	



```
/* -- Hide hiders -- */
toolbargrippy {
        display: none !important;
}

.toolbar-holder {
        border-left: none !important;
}
```
to ~/.mozilla/seamonkey/yourprofile.default/chrome/userChrome.css

To combine "refresh" and "stop" buttons (you should place "stop" button before "refresh" button), add
	
	



```
/* -- Combine refresh and stop buttons -- */
#stop-button[disabled] {
        display: none !important;
}

#stop-button:not([disabled]) ~ #reload-button {
        display:none !important;
}
```

To change active tab color to white (works only when built with GTK3 (built by default)), add

```
/* -- Active tab color -- */
tab {
        -moz-appearance: none !important;
}

tab[selected="true"] {
        background-color: #FFFFFF !important;
}
```

To hide status bar icons, add

```
/* -- Hide status bar icons -- */
.taskbutton {
	display:none !important;
}
```

To change navigation bar background, add

```
/* -- Navigation bar background -- */
#nav-bar {
	-moz-appearance: none !important;
	background: #454749 !important;
}
```


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## aragats (Nov 29, 2017)

Good stuff, but how would I close the browser window to stay with only emails?
I see no way but closing the tabs one by one...


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## Deleted member 48958 (Nov 29, 2017)

Open about:config and switch _middlemouse.contentLoadURL_ to _false_,
then you'll be able to close tabs with middle mouse click.


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## aragats (Nov 29, 2017)

That's not fair for 2 reasons:
1. I do use the middle button for load URL extensively.
2. I set to reload last tabs upon open.
In other words, I want to close the browser _*window*_, not tabs.


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## Deleted member 48958 (Nov 29, 2017)

Press browser tittle bar close button,




it won't close you mail session.


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## aragats (Nov 29, 2017)

Ha! Makes sense, but there is no window title in DWM! I always used Ctrl-Q which closes all sessions.
It looks that Alt-F4 works!


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## Deleted member 48958 (Nov 29, 2017)

aragats said:


> Ha! Makes sense, but there is no window title in DWM! I always used Ctrl-Q which closes all sessions.


Remove DWM and use usable WM


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## aragats (Nov 29, 2017)

x11-wm/dwm *is* the *usable* WM!


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## rigoletto@ (Nov 29, 2017)

aragats said:


> x11-wm/dwm *is* the *usable* WM!



I do not know x11-wm/dwm because I never used it, but x11-wm/bspwm and also x11-wm/i3 do allow/have (to set) a keybinding to close windows. Basically the same thing of clicking in those *X* button. 

It seems x11-wm/i3 is more similar to x11-wm/dwm.


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## scottro (Nov 29, 2017)

http://srobb.net/dwm.html  which also has a link to a great Debian forums post that explains the configuration very well. Mod+shift+c is the default dwm shortcut to close a window.  If you haven't modified that in config.h, it will work.


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## aragats (Nov 29, 2017)

Thanks, but as I mentioned, I configured Alt-F4 for such purpose, and it works.
I was expected a meaningful key combination in the software itself: since its parts are independent I thought Ctrl-Q should close the browser if pressed in the browser's window. Just a matter of convenience.


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