So, I got triggered enough to craft the screenshot and open a yet another thread
A couple of years ago I finally moved out of GMail to Thunderbird. And I am honestly trying to get things working here.
This is the view I get when I click on the thread icon in the Thunderbird interface for the fedora devel mailing list.
I have no idea why some emails are marked red. I didn’t do it.
Why some emails do not show the proper From address?
Why is this thing not clickable?
How do I ever know if I am looking in the most recent posts or there is something else hidden up there and I need to scroll for it?
How am I really supposed to read an entire mail thread?
Can someone who use Thunderbird as a daily routine mail client tell me, is there some magic incantation or configuration I am missing, which makes things perfect or at least better? Or do you literally click on every single mail in a thread separately and read it without seeing any of the context?
What is you actual daily routine? Which view you enter when you boot your desktop for the first time? How do you choose what to read?
That one is likely because not all e-mail clients handle things the same way, or users are sloppy. Thunderbird has a “Reply List” option in the actions, that will preserve things, and reply to the list. Lots of clients, especially if you’re not paying attention, will respond to the “Author” (i.e. the e-mail address that sent the e-mail you’re responding to, to the list) and then Cc: the Mailing list address.
That being said, your Thunderbird doesn’t look anything like mine, possibly because I’m using “Cards View” and have my Default Threading set to “Threaded” ?
(Settings->Appearance)
You are pointing out one of the issues though, I don’t actually use Thunderbird for interacting with my e-mail most of the time, but I also don’t think anybody is claiming E-mail (or by extension, mailing lists) are perfect.
That’s why I have my own SMTP server (sendmail) and SPAM Assassin … one of the rules I have is "IF the envelope FROM is NOT the same as the HEADER FROM, Then tag it as SPAM. In Thunderbird, filter is setup “IF tagged as SPAM, put it in the SPAM folder”
My experience lead me to this rule because I got real tired of spoofed/forged headers letting SPAM mail choke my inbox … (And this is not the only SPAM filter I have )
As for Thunderbird email, I have used it for as long as it has been around and it is my preferred over Outlook, any Webmail client, evolution and the rest. It just plain works without fan-fare …
Yeah, there is a LOT of good stuff in Thunderbird but, I didn’t want to spoil the surprises … “Oh!!!, LOOK what I found in Thunderbird!!! … even more goodies!!!” LOL!!!
This is to mitigate email spam detector false positives and DMARC issues, I believe. In my Thunderbird, the From part shows "NAME_OF_SENDER via devel" <devel <devel@lists.fedoraproject.org>. If you disable “Show only display name for people in my address book” in Thunderbird’s general settings, it should make it show the expected thing.
If you click on the sender name above the message text preview, it’ll open up the entire message.
There should be an unread indicator for a thread if there are new messages. If you don’t like the table thread view on the left, it’s also possible to opt for the cards view that @sfaulken mentioned where everything is displayed in flat chronological order.
I have separate folders for my open source work and filters to automatically put my mail in the right ones. For Fedora, I have multiple folders, since, e.g., I don’t want distgit and Discourse notifications in the same place.
I usually check my messages when I wake up on my phone. I go folder-by-folder, starting with IRL/non-Fedora things, and star or mark unread anything that I think needs replying to or working on later. I also have a filter to automatically star any message that contains @gotmax23. In Thunderbird, I find it useful that I can go through a thread hierarchically or than I can push left arrow to collapse the thread and view a preview of all messages in chronological order. If there’s something that I need to take a break from, I can collapse the thread and move down or even autoignore specific subthreads within a larger topic that are off-topic or nasty (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/ignore-threads). There are a bunch of shortcuts (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-thunderbird) but I find myself mousing around or using arrow keys more than I probably should.
Being subscribed to a bunch of things and having a good way to organize and absorb and search through it all has enabled me to participate in large discussions in a healthy way and also learn about and become involved in new areas of the project (including running for FESCo). I’ve tried to work Discourse into my mailing list (ML) workflow by adding its mails to my “Fedora MLs” folder, but I usually find myself opening and dealing with the web UI that I find frustrating to use, since the email experience does not provide parity with the web UI.
In Discourse, I consider the typing indicators, reactions, and autoloading of new messages while I’m trying to spend extra time to write something thoughtful and considerate to be anti-features that accelerate discussion. And it’s very hard to reference previous messages because Discourse doesn’t let you open pop out windows and the composer takes up almost the whole screen. If I use the email interface, I can ignore some of these things, but that just means there’s a part of the discussion that I’m missing, which feels worse. I think the fact that mailing lists naturally slow things down a bit and create more space for subthreads and tangents is actually a good thing.
Thunderbird is a fine program. Very customizable and lots to like about it. However, I recently tried a new application called Aerion. Its based on Geary but it looks nicer. Very clean and attractive UI. I find it to be a very compelling alternative to Thunderbird, and one of the best email clients I’ve used on either Linux or macOS.
Also there is currently no visual hint when
you look at the list whether you have already
reached the top or are looking somewhere in the middle.
The scroll bar disappears when you are idle.
So basically whenever I switch to the Thunderbird
UI window from somewhere else I am never confident
that I am looking at the latest mail.
is there a way to define a set of filters
in a bulk as a text in a text file?
Some sort of human-readable SQL, yaml, ini..
which allows a copy-paste and edit
instead of clicking through the menus?```
I find the human friendly UI for filter configurations rather non-human and non-friendly
<unsolicited advice>
As a person who spent couple of years with a tablet with corporate e-mail on my pillow, I would strongly recommend to not do that </unsolicited advice>
I’ve found that I can not be trained to learn shortcuts beyond the basics, thus I need either mouse, some hints or M-x <command> way of running commands as in Emacs. The arrows are good though, thanks.
I have thought about similar process recently when dealing with long discussion on discourse. There is a feature which would be extremely helpful for this, but it seems to get stuck:
Discourse allows themes. We have more than one even now. And at the beginning, when we just started, I actually experimented with them a bit. Hiding avatars, reactions and buttons would be extremely easy. Infinite scrolling is not easy to change, but simple design and layout features - why not.
But once I tried that, I was not convinced that I liked the result more.
It could be interesting to see some mockups, what people would like to see. Just, you know, open Firefox Dev tools, edit the page in place to remove all the components you don’t like and take a screenshot. And if there is a demand, we can try (or, realistically, call for the community to try) to build a minimalistic theme like that.
Since this seems like a better thread for it, than the one about the actual change proposal, this is the sort of stuff that Discourse does, with the e-mails it sends out.
(side note, it may or may not be discourse that’s the issue, but I couldn’t upload this image)
From what I understood from the comments above when in threaded conversations like this you have the power to manage subthreads (ignore them for example).
Discourse basically make the topic split invisible for you, so you can handle it on the client side the way you prefer.
Lemme find an example of how a mailing list handles off topic threading, it’s different, but it also depends again on the mail client, and how the user actually “responds” to the message (e.g. whether they reply-list, reply-sender, or reply-all)
Mailing lists and email clients are messy, I’m not trying to deny that.
I consider this behavior by the discourse e-mail to be an issue, because it’s nonsensical to mash threads together like that.
Well, personally I use Evolution. Have never been able to get on with Thunderbird.
This is sort of the point with email, though - it’s an open standard and you kinda develop a workflow to work with it. Very different from forum software, at least forum software using the default web UI.
This is why people who’ve used it for a long time are very attached to it - we all have developed workflows which are what we like and which we’re very familiar with. If you made everyone who uses email a lot swap machines, we’d all hate it, probably.
For instance, I use Evo’s classic three-pane view that mimics ancient Outlook, I work entirely from message “previews”, and I don’t use threading at all, I prefer to just have a time series of emails. Other email users would probably find this insane.
The email meta is, try different clients, mess with the settings, find a workflow that works for you.
I understand the concept, I don’t like it as an answer
We say: To communicate in the project you need to learn how to collaborate over email effectively
Then the person asks: How do I collaborate over email effectively
And we answer: Well, you just need to invest 15 years worth of effort into building a personal forum software out of your mail client of choice.
This is an unrealistic expectation.
If we are being serious about this whole idea, we need to come up with at least a couple of variants with a complete solution, which one can deploy in a day.
Not “For example you can use thunderbird”, but something like:
here is the one of the recommended setups for a thunderbird account for the role of Fedora Packager with all necessary lists, full set of filters and tagging rules and recommendations for how to organize the daily routine.
I understand the concept, I don’t like it as an answer
We say: To communicate in the project you need to learn how to collaborate over email effectively
Then the person asks: How do I collaborate over email effectively
And we answer: Well, you just need to invest 15 years worth of effort into building a personal forum software out of your mail client of choice.
This is an unrealistic expectation.
Well, probably not 15 years worth of effort .
If we are being serious about this whole idea, we need to come up with at least a couple of variants with a complete solution, which one can deploy in a day.
Not “For example you can use thunderbird”, but something like:
here is the one of the recommended setups for a thunderbird account for the role of Fedora Packager with all necessary lists, full set of filters and tagging rules and recommendations for how to organize the daily routine.
I think having documentation like this would be helpful, regardless of
whether this Change is approved. Contributors are already getting
notifications from Discourse, mailing lists, distgit, Fedora Forge,
Bugzilla, SIG shared bug notifications, and so on, which all can be
tough to keep track of.
)