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Thunderbird's New Rust Integration: The Future of Email Clients? (debugpointnews.com)
submitted 6 months ago by petsoi@discuss.tchncs.de to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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[-] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 76 points 6 months ago

As a Thunderbird user and Rust fan, I approve this integration. However I want to mention that Thunderbird is good as it is and actually don't think new features are needed. Only compatibility with other software or protocols could be better (which the Rust integration aims to improve). And to be honest, a way to disable some of the feature bloat would be preferable too, as I don't use lot of the additional stuff (but I make use of the RSS Feed reader).

[-] sunbeam60@lemmy.one 28 points 6 months ago

JMAP support would make a huge difference to expand the only open/free (as in speech) competition Exchange has.

[-] lemmyreader@lemmy.ml 10 points 6 months ago

Agreed. Self hosting email with JMAP support has become easier with Stalwart. More email clients with JMAP support would be nice.

[-] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 6 points 6 months ago

What's JMAP?

[-] sunbeam60@lemmy.one 5 points 6 months ago
[-] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 5 points 6 months ago

I was reading that page and was just getting more and more confused and then eventually I realised it's an alternative to IMAP. Pretty cool.

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[-] SuperFola@programming.dev 60 points 6 months ago

I'm getting fed up about all those articles "rust x something: the future?", "I rewrote in rust it's now memory safe". I get the rust safeties and all, but that doesn't automatically make everything great, right ? You can still write shit code in any language that can RM -rf all your disk, or let security gaps here and there without intending to.

[-] Asudox@lemmy.world 19 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

It does make stuff great. Even Microsoft is trying out Rust in their shit operating system because apparently 30% of all CVEs are related to, you guessed it, memory issues. And Rust will most likely solve them all. Even the Linux kernel has Rust code in it now. If Rust was not of importance, why would the Linux kernel get rusty? Especially Linus Torvalds is very strict about these things. Sure, bad code rewritten in Rust does not make it any better than it originally was. Plus you get C-like speed with good syntax and memory safety, what more could you ask for?

[-] sweaty@lemmy.world 18 points 6 months ago

Yes security issues will remain a problem no matter what language was used. You are talking about the possibility of a logic flaw being there, whereas rust 'just' prevents memory corruption.

Which is the more common security issue? Memory corruption by a mile. That's why many are excited by the rust rewrite

So you're right it isn't literally everything, but I'm not sure what would be. What would make you not fed up about it?

[-] SuperFola@programming.dev 4 points 6 months ago

I think I'm more fed up with people making those quotes "rust will change everything" when, in fact, it will rule out many if not most memory corruption as you said. Reading your comment, I see now it's the mentality "everything need to be in rust" that bothers me the most, which in fact means "rust can bring memory safety" and not "rust will replace everything". Alas I'm seeing it used times and times again as the latter instead of the former.

[-] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 39 points 6 months ago

Integrate with GTK and Qt first

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[-] radiant_bloom@lemm.ee 35 points 6 months ago

Who cares ? What matters is the features and how fast the app is. Not what language was used to achieve that.

[-] mosiacmango@lemm.ee 56 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Rust is wildly fast. Learning that it is being used for a program is good to know if you care about speed. If you read the article, it even addresses your exact critiques:

Moreover, Rust has demonstrated superior performance compared to JavaScript add-ons, resulting in a quicker and more responsive Thunderbird. Furthermore, the integration of Rust into Thunderbird will be facilitated by the fact that it is already utilized in Firefox, enabling Thunderbird to leverage existing infrastructure for testing and continuous integration.

So not only with thunderbird be faster because Rust is faster than JavaScript, but it eliminates 3rd party addons by being native which also further increases speed. Lastly, development time for new features and improvements is faster because they can now use using the mature tooling that Mozilla has for Rust.

So yeah, good to know its using Rust now.

[-] eveninghere@beehaw.org 12 points 6 months ago

Not the person you wrote to, but TB has native code in C++, so I don't really think the speed will change. The official website also doesn't advertise speed improvements. It argued that Rust is (almost) as fast as the current native C++ part in TB, and that's about it.

[-] radiant_bloom@lemm.ee 11 points 6 months ago

The improvement here is switching from interpreted to compiled. It could have been C, Zig, Odin, or even C++ (but thank Satan it isn’t C++)

I’m not sure I understand why people like Rust over C, although I don’t have that much experience in enterprise coding. I’m generally distrustful of languages without a standardized specification, and I don’t really like that Rust has been added to the Linux Kernel. Torvalds giving in to public opinion isn’t something I thought I’d live to see…

I get the segmentation fault thing, but to be blunt, that sounds like a skill issue more than an actual computer science problem.

Maybe if things were less rushed and quality control was regarded more highly, we wouldn’t have such insanities as an email client (or an anything client) written in JavaScript in the first place.

Rust is likely going to suffer the same problem as JS, where people indirectly include 6,000 crates and end up with 30 critical CVEs in their email client that they can’t even fix because the affected crate was abandoned 5 years ago…

[-] Ropianos@feddit.de 18 points 6 months ago

Obviously it's a skill issue but don't you ever make mistakes? If Rust prevents some bugs and makes you more productive, what is not to like? It's a new language and takes time to learn but the benefits seem to outweigh the downsides now and certainly in the long run (compared to C at least).

Maybe Torvalds didn't give in to public opinion but made an informed choice?

The crates are a bit of a problem and I think Rust is a bit overhyped for high-level problems (it still requires manual memory management after all) but those are not principal roadblockers, especially in the kernel.

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[-] LeFantome@programming.dev 17 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

This “skills issue” thing just sounds so stupid in my ears. I am sick of reading it.

So, I am choosing a language that I hope will ensure fast, secure, and sophisticated code for my project. It has to do this for code I write, my team writes, and all future maintainers and contributors will write as well. If I choose a language that makes it easy to write unstable, fragile, and insecure code then “the skills issue” applies more to my lack of capability as an architect than it does the coders that come after me.

Stop saying, “well ya, it is super easy to make these mistakes in this language but that would never happen if you are as awesome as I am” and thinking that sounds like an intelligent argument for your language choice. There are better options. Consider them.

[-] radiant_bloom@lemm.ee 5 points 6 months ago

Why do you want sophisticated code ? That word seems out of place from the other two to me.

Rust doesn’t introduce the same problems as C, but it sure does introduce a lot of other problems in making code overly complicated. Lifetimes and async are both leaky abstractions (and don’t even work as advertised, as rust-cve recently demonstrated), macros can hide control flow…

C is unsafe, sure, but also doesn’t pretend to be safe. C is also stupid simple, and that’s a good thing : you can’t just slap ArcMutexes around, because by the time you know how to code them yourself you also know why you shouldn’t do that.

I hope Rust can reach a point where its safety model can be formally proven, and we have a formal specification and a stable ABI so we don’t have to hard-compile every crate into the binary.

But I personally expect something with some of Rust’s ideas, but cleaned up, to do that instead. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if C itself ends up absorbing some of Rust’s core ideas in an upcoming standard.

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[-] someacnt_@lemmy.world 5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Do you really think Torvalds is the one who would cave in to public opinion only? Really?

Also how much of C programming did you do

[-] ProgrammingSocks@pawb.social 4 points 6 months ago

I’m not sure I understand why people like Rust over C, although I don’t have that much experience in enterprise coding.

I'd actually say that Rust is more popular in open-source projects. The reason people like it is because it's WAY safer than C or C++ while being literally just as fast if not faster. I'm still in the process of learning it though so I can't speak to your other points.

It is worth mentioning that the White House recommends Rust over C/C++ due to its very notable safety advantage over classic languages.

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[-] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 9 points 6 months ago

I wrote a simple commandline program in Rust to read mailbox file from Thunderbird and to output count of unread mails. The speed is insanity! Measuring the execution time with command time CMD outputs execution time of total 0m0,001s! While also providing all the features and checks from Rust (plus Clippy with pedantic options enabled), so I am confident it is not a buggy mess. I would need at least 10 years of professional experience in C to have this feeling of confidence.

[-] LeFantome@programming.dev 17 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Why does every mention of Rust have to spawn these comments?

The story right after this one for me is how KeepassXC is porting to Qt6. I bet nobody has knee-jerk responded to that story bitching about the fact that they mentioned Qt. It is just the anti-Rust zealots that do this.

This article talks about the problems they were trying to solve, the tools they chose, and how those tools solve those problems. What is wrong with that?

Are you offering up informed commentary countering why you would have made different choices and why?

You do not need to attack every mention of a technology just because it threatens your historical preferences.

[-] IAmVeraGoodAtThis 7 points 6 months ago

To be fair, Rust Evangelists are fucking annoying and it's fun to hate them.

How do I know? Would you like to talk about lord and savior, Ferris?

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[-] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 24 points 6 months ago

Thunderbird is my kind of bird

[-] Anticorp@lemmy.world 23 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

The Evolution email client is pretty great, and FairEmail for Android.

[-] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 15 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

K-9 mail is better

[-] airikr@lemmy.ml 23 points 6 months ago

Different people, different taste.

I love FairEmail because of its "millions" of settings and the privacy features, for an example if you press a link, you'll get a popup with options (for an example, what app you want to open the link with). And if the link contains trackers, FairEmail will remove these by default and saying "tracking parameters removed" with yellow text in bold.

K-9 Mail feels incomplete in comparison. Have you tried FairEmail?

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[-] Anticorp@lemmy.world 4 points 6 months ago

K-9 mail is what I originally used, but it isn't supported or being developed any more. There were some weird issues that I can't remember now that caused me to switch to FairEmail.

[-] randy@lemmy.ca 10 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

K-9 mail... isn’t supported or being developed any more.

That's not true. They make frequent-enough releases, they post monthly progress reports, and they are actually going to become Thunderbird's Android version.

Having said that, I almost switched to FairEmail because K-9 lacked support for some sort of authentication measure (which I no longer need), but that wasn't because K-9 stopped development.

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[-] daddyjones@lemmy.world 16 points 6 months ago

How many people still use an email client? Genuine question.

I use either my phone or a web interface.

[-] smileyhead@discuss.tchncs.de 52 points 6 months ago
  • offline access and archival
  • use with multiple providers
  • seamless integration with contacts and calendar of any provider
  • better keyboard shortcuts
  • multiple windows
  • end2end encryption via PGP keys, can use same keys as the rest of the system
  • more lightweight on system resources
  • themes, I guess?
[-] ceiphas@lemmy.world 29 points 6 months ago

And your Phone is not using a Client?

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[-] HouseWolf@lemm.ee 28 points 6 months ago

I only recently start using it after also being a browser email user all my life.

Kinda wondering what took me so long Thunderbird is great! don't have to relearn questionable Ui between different email providers or re-login to check two mailboxes on the same provider.

Only annoying thing is not supporting ProtonMail out of the box.

[-] RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 6 months ago

That annoying thing is more on Protonmail though and I don't mean that as a negative, just more difficult to connect when the provider wants to keep things secure.

[-] radiant_bloom@lemm.ee 18 points 6 months ago

Web interfaces are so much worse than local apps IMO. And that doesn’t just include email, I always choose a local app over anything that runs in my browser.

[-] MrFunnyMoustache@lemmy.ml 12 points 6 months ago

Your phone's email app is a client, but I digress... I hate using the browser to access emails. I use many different email accounts with multiple email providers to compartmentalize my emails and avoid spam. I used Thunderbird for years before switching to Geary and now back to Thunderbird.

[-] TheEntity@lemmy.world 8 points 6 months ago

How many email accounts do you have? It might be a huge factor. I have about 7 accounts I need to check regularly and I cannot imagine doing it manually for each. I can see it working for one or maybe two though.

[-] jokro@feddit.de 8 points 6 months ago

I do, i dont want to have to access 5 accounts using the browser on 3 different websites

Unfortunaly protonmail is not possible local (afaik) so i have to check there in the Browser.

[-] FlorianSimon@sh.itjust.works 7 points 6 months ago

It is, you just need the proton bridge. I use it on a Mac and it works well.

[-] baseless_discourse@mander.xyz 5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I use a client because I don't want microsoft to remember me when I go on other microsoft site besides their web email client.

I guess I can use a dedicated browser for email, but that is pretty much just a email client using more resources.

[-] Olap@lemmy.world 5 points 6 months ago

Me. Outlook on my windows work box is hard to beat imo. Personal? All android's default and web-ui

[-] fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 6 months ago

I don't need whatever thing therefore no one should use that thing.

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[-] efscher@lemmy.nyc.what.if.ua 15 points 6 months ago

In the meantime, Evolution has had EWS support for years... no Rust involved.

[-] youngGoku@lemmy.world 22 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Evolution is a good client that I used for a long time. But I switched to Thunderbird after their recent UI overhaul and I have to say it feels way more thought out and robust than evolution.

[-] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 6 points 6 months ago

Thunderbird had it as a plugin to support EWS.

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this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
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