Ubuntu 11.10 Will Use Thunderbird as Default Mail Client

And that took them how many years to come to that decision ?

And in other Ubuntu news, the coffee maker in the conference room went out and memos have been posted warning of employees taking other people's food from the refrigerator in the break room....

And Unity still sucks.....video at 11....

This is big news for lots of folks. a lot of distros install Evolution by default, and it's an annoying and tedious drill to have to remove all of the evolution crap and install Thunderbird.

I for one welcome our new winged overlords.

As for unity, the jury's still out, but in the meantime I simply choose a regular gnome session at login. Easy peasy.

Thunderbird insists on moving your mail into it's own folders, rather than leaving your current mail intact so elm or mutt can read it. Evolution can simply be pointed to your existing mail file/directory. That's the only reason I run evolution.

@jdixon: Thunderbird can be set to imap mode, then your mail stays put. I'm using thunderbird, evolution, and mutt together with no problems.

> Thunderbird can be set to imap mode, then your mail stays put. I'm using thunderbird, evolution, and mutt together with no problems.

I don't want my mail to stay on my providers server, penguinist. It want it to stay in my mail spool, where fetchmail puts it. And I want my mail programs to read it from there. Which elm, mutt, spruce (no longer maintained, afaik), and evolution all do. Thunderbird doesn't. It insists on moving it to it's own directories.

Yes, I could run my own imap server. That's not something I should have to do in order to use both console and gui email programs.

Thunderbird was designed more for old-school POP/SMTP mail servers, where the default behaviour is to download the mail off the server to the local user, & the ISP got to dump it off theirs, freeing storage space (back when that was expensive). A lot of email through older ISPs work this way, and it's easily changed, like Penguinist said. ... Say,... "Movemail."

@jdixon: I didn't realize that you were not running your own mail server. My situation is different from yours then. I run a mail server on one system and then access that mail from all clients. Everything is set up to use imap, so the mails remain on my backedup server for decades while any of my mua clients has access to all of it.

To me, an external email provider is somewhat similar to an external cloud provider. It's another way that we can be encouraged to keep our data on someone else's server. That's not for me. I feel very good about running my own "cloud".

In fact any new mail account created with Thunderbird pretty much defaults to imap if you email server/isp supports its.

I'm a Thunderbird user, so I support the move. I use IMAP for everything.

So, can somebody please enlighten me on my "practical problem" because I lost track...

I 'accidentally' switched to Ubuntu Natty (maybe a story on its own?), and now I'm figuring if or if not I will be setting up mail on it. And if or if not I want to go to all the mess of importing my mail from MailBox on my LVM-on-RAID Gentoo partition from Kontact (guess only the MailBox-bit is important?). And maybe if there's some way to import some SA-spam rules as well, but probably that's stupid as SA is the most important thing why Kontact is so slow.

Have been a Gentoo rolling-release user for at least 7 years, so needless to say if there's a new Ubuntu version I'll probably be updating to it ASAP.

But now, if the next Ubuntu mail program will be another program, do I need to export / import all my mail yet again in 6 months from now?

Or is there a smart way and maybe put all my old "KDE-email" in some kind of 'fake' IMAP server which Thunderbird on its turn can use or something? I'm not sure, if Thunderbird has as many abstraction levels as KDE than such a thing should be possible, feasible and maybe even desirable; but I'm no mail-guru and never will be. So any advice appreciated!

Evolution has a (fairly poor) Exchange connector which is useful for me when customers want me to use their e-mail and their mail server suffers from Redmond disease. Even though what Evolution does goes through the OWA and is slow it's far better than nothing, which is what Thunderbird offers for Exchange support.

It's OK, though. Ubuntu has had one release after another with more bugs than Carter has little pills. I think Andrew Wyatt a/k/a fewt got it right when he called Ubuntu "garbage salad." I keep trying Ubuntu because it's so damned popular and it never fails to disappoint. I guess one more decision I don't like won't matter much.

@hwkint

I probably don't understand the complete situation, but as some others have mentioned I have been using a local dovecot IMAP server for such with much piece of mind when switching email clients. In fact I had switched over from kmail a few years back with mostly your config without requiring any copying around:

* install dovecot-imapd

* edit /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf to have "protocols = imap", "listen = 127.0.0.1", "mail_location = maildir:~/Mail"; then "sudo service dovecot restart"

Notice the last setting of mail_location which points to your *existing* KDE local maildir folders (at least that was the default location back then when I switched). Now use the local IMAP server in tbird or any other email client. I also have my getmail configuration deliver email to a subdir in ~/Mail itself (e.g. using freepops for some external web email), so it appears in the local IMAP server immediately.

@caitlyn

> Even though what Evolution does goes through the OWA and is slow it's far better than nothing, which is what Thunderbird offers for Exchange support.

I used to use davmail which was much better than Evolution's connector (even had limited calendar support) and worked well with Thunderbird or other email clients.

edit: Hans, the usual advise also applies -- backup your Mail directory before attempting this!

If Linux Mint follows suite, and gives us Thunderbird by default, it'll mean an extra unistall and and install for me, not particularly onerous, then again I may just leave thunderbird there and simply install Evolution. Not a big deal.

This is news? Geez. I never use exactly what I'm given. I swap some default software for alternatives that I prefer. I don't understand all the angst and fuss about default applications, settings, even desktops. It's Linux! It can be just about anything you want it to be.

@krisum:

Thanks so much! That was exactly what I'm looking for I guess. With a bit of fiddling (and piercing some holes through my ADSL-router), I can also reach my dovecot - emailserver (running at my home-desktop) from my work or other places on earth I guess?

BTW KDE mail location has changed since KMail2, now it's somewhere in '~/.local/share/.local-mail.directory/'. Which probably is a good thing, as to me it seems like all e-mail programs settled on some 'standard' mail location.

The way you explain it is really simple, I have read many online explanations of MTA's and such, and I didn't understand most of them. Maybe because of me, maybe because most of them are written with experienced UNIX-server sysadmins _or_ extreme Linux-noobs in the back of their mind.

@hkwint

Changing the "listen" address should be all that will be required apart from opening the imap port (default 143) in router. Dovecot (in debian/ubuntu at least) also generates a self-signed SSL cert at install, so alternatively IMAPS can be used for external address using "protocols = imap imaps", "ssl = yes", "ssl_listen = ...", and uncommenting the ssl_cert_file, ssl_key_file lines in dovecot.conf. This way localhost can use IMAP while external address (ssl_listen) can use IMAPS (port 993 by default). Also see the commented example section (just before "#listen = *") in dovecot.conf for configuring non-default ports.

The nice thing is that dovecot works perfectly with any clients or delivery agents (e.g. getmail4 I use) that read/write to maildirs, while also serving IMAP out of the same maildirs. All email clients can also read/write/move email to the same using IMAP, while those like kmail can even continue to use those as local storage. This makes it very easy to use different email clients, or access the same email from other systems without any additional syncing.

@Caitlyn - Have you tried Evolution's MAPI connector? It is still bad, but not quite as bad as the OWA connector.

Then again, I haven't used Evolution with GNOME 3 yet so I have no idea how good or bad those connectors are. Last I checked with GNOME 2 / Evo you still had to move smb.conf to get MAPI to connect, and then move it back.

Very intuitive, eh? ;)

I guess we won't see that fixed since GNOME 2 is effectively dead.

@krisum - I could be mistaken, but doesn't davmail require a gateway service running on the exchange server?

> I could be mistaken, but doesn't davmail require a gateway service running on the exchange server?

No, the gateway can run on any machine where OWA is accessible. I used to run it on my local machine and it worked quite well with all email clients.

@krisum - Cool, I'll have to check it out then. Thanks for the tip.