FossaMail concerns

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webfork
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FossaMail concerns

#1 Post by webfork »

Edit: news about Mozilla setting aside the Thunderbird project throw many conclusions of this post into question.

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FossaMail is a fork/tweak/edit of Thunderbird from the Pale Moon crowd, highlighted a while back by Ghacks.

Short version: It hasn't been posted to submission yet but I'm hoping to deter that now by recommending against adding it to the database because I don't see a clear difference from Thunderbird.

Long version: I'm writing this up because it's getting some attention, though I'm really not clear on why this even exists.  Reading the front page http://www.fossamail.org/, it sounds like they've added some plugins and made speed optimizations that make Thunderbird faster:
...built from source with compiler optimizations geared towards an as stable and smooth operation of the client as possible (Pale Moon-alike optimizations).
This is strange to me because I've been running Thunderbird with numerous accounts over the course of 7+ years and -- apart from search operations -- it's far from slow and no more so than Outlook.  I'm not sure what these tweaks are designed to achieve.  Additionally:
  1. Processor optimizations don't always create a noticable speed difference for regular applications that don't do something math-intensive (such as Photoshop plugins).  Speed optimizations on a browser definitely matter, but mail readers to my knowledge don't really utilize the processor; their focus is almost entirely about the interface. Any bottlenecks probably come from the hard drive.
  2. The referenced gecko optimizations are built from optimizations used in the Pale Moon browser, but those claims haven't held up (this has been discussed here on PFW).
  3. Ghack's review mainly points to the 64-bit capability ...

    http://www.ghacks.net/2014/07/10/fossam ... ns-author/

    .. but 64-bit isn't always faster.  There's some RAM, security, and other benefits that can really boost some programs (especially big databases and biological simulations) but for an email client?  If there is a speed difference, it would surprise me.
  4. The program is built using Thunderbird's ESR version, which is behind in terms of features and will be absent any recent efforts to optimize the program.
If Fossamail is doing something more than a few tweaks, I'll certainly revise my position on this but at least from what I'm seeing now it doesn't seem worthwhile.

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