Rewriting ancient code

Posted Feb 23, 2023 16:58 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Rewriting ancient code by mrugiero
Parent article: The future of Thunderbird

The problem there, is that if the common folk have never experienced anything other than webmail, they'll be perfectly happy. My first (combined news and) mail client was Turnpike, and half the features that disappeared when it was scrapped, have never appeared anywhere else that I know of.

Things like regular expression mail header parsing and filtering. I'm sure that's probably available in things like mutt and milter and esoteric :-) mail processing tools, but Turnpike was a simple, easy-to-use client with all this power lurking just below the surface. And it drew you in - you started using the simple features and thought "hey that looks nifty", and next you knew you were digging into this cool-looking power feature. Bit like WordPerfect really.

Nowadays either these features don't exist, or they're so undiscoverable nobody realises they're there until they are broken for lack of use ... :-(

Cheers,
Wol

Rewriting ancient code

Posted Feb 24, 2023 9:22 UTC (Fri) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

> The problem there, is that if the common folk have never experienced anything other than webmail, they'll be perfectly happy

until they need to switch webmail providers – and realize that half their accounts won't work anymore and can't be switched over because the confirmation email is sent to the old address.

In other words, returning control of their email back to users is a matter of education and awareness, not of whether Thunderbird is built on top of Gecko or Webkit.