In all seriousness, it might be good to write up more of the issues that you have for at least a few reasons:
1. TB probably(?) doesn't consider use cases like the one that you described. If there is any hope of them fixing it, it would be best to be underscored in detail. Perhaps then someone can try to propagate some fake test data to try and test against.
2. There's always the chance someone might be willing to fork it in hopes of improvement (E.g. BetterBird; betterbird.eu)
3. Sometimes screaming loud enough gains attention of people in a position to do something about it. Not super common, but does happen from time-to-time.
4. Who would pass up a chance to embarass Mozilla publicly? :^)
I did try (politely, btw!) reporting a couple of issues on their bugtracker a long time ago, but the usual thing happened: nothing at all. IIRC there was no response of any kind. Which makes me reticent to put more time into writing more bug reports for them to ignore.
I just found out about betterbird today. It looks interesting. I might give it a try. And if I see the same issues there, maybe I'll report it on their bugtracker.
I and a bunch of others have been screaming loudly at mozilla for like 15 years now. They're not interested in hearing what we have to say. Which is why the firefox marketshare is as dismal as it is these days.
As for embarrassing Mozilla publicly, apparently their troll factory watches HN - I got downvoted a lot for describing facts.
I think the best option for me really is to just find a new mail client and be done with Mozilla forever.
I said it before, but I'll just say it again: It's a real pity, Thunderbird used to be a truly excellent piece of software once upon a time. I remember switching to it from outlook and being all "Whoa! This is great!". It was a similar experience to going from IE6 -> Firefox. How the mighty have fallen.
If you want any negatively inclined people to be unable to resort to think that you are lying, a good thing for you to do would be to link to the bugtracker issues that you created long ago.
Those people can think whatever they want to think, doesn't change what the facts are. I can't be bothered to look for them - I'm not sure which email address I used for which bugzilla (or was it something other than bugzilla?), or whether that bugzilla still exists (probably not? I haven't seen a bugzilla in a while). I'm not even 100% sure which decade it was (but probably 2010s, it was early in the thunderbird enshittification process). All I know is that I filed a couple - more than one, perhaps 3 or 4 - bugs for thunderbird, had zero response on any of them, and decided that it's not worth my time to try to engage with them any further.
You actually got me thinking about it, because I've been living with a lot of this trash for so long now that I think I've probably forgotten a bunch of my gripes with thunderbird.
So here are the ones that spring to mind when I gave it a little bit of thought. I'm sure there are others that I've forgotten about because I've adopted new workflows that don't involve thunderbird (e.g my calendar is a bit like that, but I remember it because I feel like an email client with a calendar should probably be able to sync with my caldav server, and because of the stupidity of the bug). I'm also sure that as soon as I hit 'post' I'll think of more (edit: this totally happened).
* Searching IMAP folders. Worked just fine in 2010, does nothing now, no matter how long you wait. These days I just grep my maildir, like it's 1975.
* Forgetting the sort order and display preferences for folders. It LOVES to do this after an "upgrade". Because the 300,000 times I've previously told it not to show my 'cron' folder in threaded view isn't enough, apparently. I must want threaded view, but I'm just too stupid to realise it, and if they switch back to threaded view one more time maybe I'll just accept it and learn the new and better way because Mozilla knows best. Ditto for showing folder contents with the newest messages as the top - you know, the default and most useful sorting order for email. Nooooooooooo - thunderbird knows better! It loves to semi-randomly switch folders to "oldest messages at the top".
* Flat-out refusing to talk to certain older email servers because they're serving up SSL certificates using an algo that's old and which mozilla has decided they don't like anymore. What's that? The machine is one that you don't have control over and that's difficult to upgrade due to it being an ancient SunOS machine running software from like 2001, and that you're connecting to over a very secure VPN and which isn't publicly accessible, so it's no security risk at all? Tough shit, use an email client that isn't thunderbird, we're not going to provide a "proceed anyway" button for people who understand what they're doing, because Mozilla knows better than you.
* Hey there! I see you've repeatedly removed the garbage hamburger menu. This must have been an accident and not that you do not want and did not ask for it and will never want it under any circumstances ever due to your strongly-held opinion that a traditional hierarchical menu bar across the top of an application is a superior UI in every way and that hamburger menus are less efficient and have no place on a high-resolution desktop interface. So as part of the latest thunderbird "upgrade", I'm just going to helpfully slip that shitty hamburger menu that you've removed 10,000 times back into the toolbar where I think it should be, so it can waste some screen real-estate for something you'll never use. That should correct that oversight where you accidentally removed it 10,000 times. Glad I could help!
* Hey there! I see you've accidentally removed the shitty hamburger menu for the 50,000th time. I'm going to do you a solid and solve this problem once and for all - by simply making it not optional and not configurable anymore. The top right hand corner of your toolbar WILL be a hamburger menu now and forevermore. That should sort that problem out.
* Hey there! I notice that you like a traditional hierarchical menu bar, like computers have had since the 1980s. Unfortunately this isn't fashionable anymore and isn't great on phones, so what we're going to do on your high-res desktop machine is put a toolbar above the menu bar, creating a completely bizarre interface where the "get messages" button is above the File menu, in condradiction of 35+ years of UI conventions. We're also going to make this something that isn't configurable anymore. Sure, the UI used to be super-configurable for 20+ years, but that wasn't done with javascript, so we had to remove it. You really should just use the hamburger menu instead. We like it, you see, and we're not interested in your opinion if it's not the same as ours. Mozilla knows best, you see.
* I noticed that you don't have thunderbird's adaptive junk mail filter(tm) turned on. This must be an accident and not because you have sophisticated and extremely reliable enterprise-grade spam filtering solution set up on your server, with rules to do things like move email to a specific folder and mark it as read if it's determined to be spam. So what I'm going to do with this latest thunderbird "upgrade" is just silently enable the adaptive junk mail filter(tm), and then let that decide that about 40% of the thousands and thousands of messages in your inbox are junk, and then move them into a completely different and previously-unknown junk folder that you've never seen before. Now you might wonder "hey why has that colleague I was emailling back and forth with gone silent?" and you might check your junk folder to see if maybe your spam filter has gone haywire. But his messages (and a bunch of messages from your boss) won't be there! They'll be in the new and previously-unknown junk folder that I think spam should go into! And you can spend literally hours trying to find the email that's gone missing. As a bonus, we've also made it really difficult to find that missing email by breaking the search feature, and this new junk folder isn't in your maildir structure (or even on your server!), so you can't just grep for it. Have fun!
* OMG ALL YOUR RSS FEEDS ARE BROKEN! I tried to update them twice, and got an error! This must mean that all your RSS feeds coincidentally died at the same time, and is absolutely definitely not because your internet was down for maintenance for a couple of hours. So I'm going to do the only sensible thing - mark all your RSS feeds as broken and just stop ever trying to update them again until you manually tell me to update each and every one individually. No, I will not allow you to multi-select feeds so that you can update them all at once.
* I see that you like extensions. You have several installed and you use them and rely on them daily, and have for 20+ years. So what We're going to do is turn our extensions API into a shifting quagmire of incompatibility, such that extension authors have to jump through hoops every 25 minutes to make sure their extensions are compatible with the latest thunderbird, until most of them just give up. That way we can phase out the whole extensions thing like we did with firefox, giving you an objectively worse experience.
- Did you like your email headers taking up less than 50% of the message area and having the ability to double-click on the header area to toggle between full headers and compact headers? Didn't think so.
- Aah, you want to manually sort the folders in your inbox. Nah, that would be much to useful.
- Ha! A GUI to manage your sieve filters in a user-friendly and intuitive manner? That sounds far too XUL for our tastes! Begone!
(these are just the big-deal extensions that I still miss all the time and can remember off the top of my head, there used to be a BUNCH of others, too, that I used less frequently and would struggle to remember)
* What's that? You think that interfaces should get faster as computers increase in power? Oh, my sweet summer child, have you not heard the tale of Javascript and the melting CPU? No, see, we needed to disable all those xul extensions because it was bogging us down and making things inefficient! And what we're going to do is replace that with javascript trash, so that it's a whole new level of slow and unresponsive. Did you notice how I mentioned that parsing the calendar brings the whole of thunderbird to a grinding halt, making it totally unresponsive and unusable? Yeah, see that's because all this new code is very well-engineered and async / multithreaded, you see - it can fully utilise the power of a modern processor to do much much less in much much more time.
* I can't start thunderbird maximised. Haven't been able to for a few "upgrades" now. If thunderbird is in the maximised state when I close it, when I re-open it, it starts in the maximised state, and just gives me an empty window frame which it never draws anything in. To work around this, I have to: unmaximise, then close the window, then re-launch thunderbird, then once it launches normally I can maximise it and it will work. But I just don't bother maximising it these days, because that means I have to do the unmaximise/close/relaunch thing every time I start it. Instead these days I just leave thunderbird in an unmaximised state that's almost as big as it would be if it were maximised. Hilarious incompetence.
Perhaps an important question is: why is it not incentivized in corporate environments?
I think, however, that perhaps I'm asking in the wrong arena. Unless there are people here reading this who work in the areas of a corporate environment at the level at which those decisions are made, it would really amount to guessing and stereotypes. Generally, I like to think that just about anyone can grasp that a well-made product will sell better due to its nature. I think that there must be some kind of mutual disconnect between both sides where one continues to see improvements important, and the other fundamentally does not (or does not have a functional means to measure and verify it).
It reminds me of that thing I had heard of people doing on Facebook years ago. Someone wouldn't have a Facebook account "yet", so one of their friends/family/whomever would create one on their behalf with an assumption that they were being helpful to the other party. "It's all ready to go once you want to login! I knew your email address, so just do a password reset when you start using it. You're welcome!"
I believe even an episode of South Park covered it.
The difference there being that, with the Facebook relationship status stuff, spouses were feeling societal pressure to show a public declaration and "proof" of their partners existence/mutual status. With something like LinkedIn though...does that same sort of pressure exist? Are Hiring Managers (or whomever) feeling some kind of professional pressure to "prove" how many real life people work with/for their company? Does getting the number of users marked as working for that company above a threshold give them secret, special privileges in some locked-off business area of LinkedIn? Or is it just pure clout chasing? It's very odd. It feels like a violation in some way I can't really articulate. "Compulsory volunteer account-to-ID association"? I don't know what to call that. It's gross.
What is the benefit that the company derives from that? Kickbacks from LinkedIn? I'm not saying it is, or isn't, I don't understand what the benefit to be gotten from it is. It seems like a lot of effort by one party or the other, unless it is "baked in" to an MS account or whatever.
Also, as the person above had asked: did you have any option/ability to "take control" of the account, or did it have to go through the consulting company was using? It almost feels like someone had a fake ID card made for you. Not a drivers license, but something that would be of greater concern to the person on the ID (LinkedIn profile) than the company making it.
>Germany says that your company is in Germany because you work from there.
Forgive my ignorance, I have never really thought about this before and I may be missing something very obvious here.
Isn't that kind of true, though? For instance, if I am a citizen of Japan, live there, and run my remote business from there, but the business that I run exclusively makes money from people in Portugal and Brazil, it would be true that my revenue is being generated in those other countries, but in my own life, I am enjoying the benefits and protections of being a Japanese citizen. Right?
It isn't so much that I would want to be taxed in: Portugal, Brazil, and Japan, but rather that, the nature of how I am choosing to operate my business kind of makes the issue my own burden to bare. If I continue to live in Japan for whatever reasons that may tie me there (family, friends, children in school, business isn't stable enough, other commitments, etc.) it seems like there is a kind of debt to pay back some of my earnings to the Japanese government because they have provided me an environment to build and maintain that business within their country even though the profit made is exclusively outside of Japan. That is to say, the government may not have seen the money directly, but they provided me a safe and stable environment in which I was able to run and operate that business; isn't that kind of the fundamental role of government? I.e., to protect the nation and its citizens, so they may do as they will.
Put another way, suppose the top 1,000 richest people in the world all opted to all move to a tiny nation with very low taxes, and continued to run their businesses remotely from that place without being required to contribute anything back to that nation through taxes. That seems wrong to me. It seems good that they would be asked to pay back into the place that they live and reside, regardless of where their revenue is gotten. They have a home, and that home is ultimately defended and it's property rights upheld by the government that recognizes it.
I'd be interested to hear how others see it. Like I said, I haven't really thought about this too much before, and may be missing something more fundamental and obvious.
Isn't that more or less how it works? You pay tax where you live, with the justification being, as you say, that you are benefitting from the social structure there?
The big country that is an exception is the US. Their citizens have to pay tax regardless of them being elsewhere, and the difference is dealt with via various taxation treaties. I imagine the justification is something like "we help our citizens everywhere, so they owe us tax".
> I'd be interested to hear how others see it. Like I said, I haven't really thought about this too much before, and may be missing something more fundamental and obvious.
The big thing that's missing is corporations. They are imaginary entities, with a bunch of rules about what they are allowed to do, how they pay tax, etc. Once you create a corporation (or several), you can move profits around according to various accounting rules, which are often disconnected from how ordinary people interact with an entity. Are you buying coffee from Starbucks on Oxford Street, or Starbucks UK, or Starbucks Luxembourg? Most people don't think about that when they buy a coffee, but the accountants do.
You can also change what kind of tax you are paying. If you have a company, you can pay yourself a salary or a dividend. It's still money either way, but depending on jurisdiction taxed differently.
For Japan in specific, you’ll want to look into JCFC. Not a tax or legal advice, but IIRC it boils down to: if your company (assuming 100% ownership) is paying less taxes than a Japanese company would, and you’re a Japanese tax resident, you would need to pay the difference in Japan. It is probably similar in other jurisdictions that have CFC laws.
Also do read up on permanent establishment rules as well.
Ah, sorry. I was using Japan as an example of "living somewhere very far outside of the EU" to highlight the sense of distance between the two. I have listened to a little bit about how difficult it is to open a business in Japan (as a foreigner, at least) and how stressful tax time can be [1], but I'm not well versed in the specifics of how they do things.
Japan as an example of anything not specific to Japan is problematic.
Almost nothing is handled in a similar means or approach to Japanese standard practices, anywhere else.
Speaking as someone with 30+ years experience in both Japanese and non-Japanese business dealings and having had and being currently in the process of renewing work and residence permission in Japan under a different classification than before, and having visa sponsors who just finished 'Tax Season' there; the system is both at once extremely linear, and somehow opaque, and the actual paperwork is more easily measured in centimeters than in numbers of pages.
However; that being said, the actual costs of taxes and other fees including retaining the services of an administrative scrivener (not quite the same as a paralegal accountant) are very logical and reasonable for the resultant social/infrastructure outcomes.
But, if one is not already fully fluent in Japanese and does not have a driving requirement to reside and do business in Japan; the system is simply not designed for participation from the outside like the EU or US. When foreigners attempt to participate directly, even the Japanese know that the local system is complex in puzzling ways, and the most common comment I have personally observed is, "Why would you voluntarily do this; we all do it because we must, but if you don't have to, WHY?"
> For instance, if I am a citizen of Japan, live there, and run my remote business from there, but the business that I run exclusively makes money from people in Portugal and Brazil, it would be true that my revenue is being generated in those other countries
That really depends on the nature of your business. If you're hosting a web application in Japan then I'd argue you're still doing business in Japan. Same if you're a contractor for companies or individuals abroad. A grey area is if you host an application abroad. You technically do business abroad, but it's unlikely anybody will come after you for tax.
You clearly owe tax abroad if you operate legal entities that are incorporated abroad. Then we enter the vast and diverse field of how to (ab)use taxation and corporate law of different countries to structure your business to avoid as much tax and bureaucracy as possible. How much of that is morally appropriate according to the points you raised is a whole different question.
Disclaimer: I'm neither a lawyer nor a tax advisor.
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