alt Hacker NewsI know it'll never happen, but it would be great to have a Thunderbird headless version that runs in the tray and handles sending and receiving.
I.e. a low memory solution so you can leave it going and only open the client for actual interactions. Thunderbird is pretty bloated to leave open all day and sending and receiving shouldn't need a web browser attached.
Replies
wsmwk • yesterday at 10:38 AM
Tray implementations are actually on the horizon - recently taking shape with the help of community developers. For example Bug 2023000 - Implement Linux system tray: hide-to-tray
> I.e. a low memory solution so you can leave it going and only open the client for actual interactions. Thunderbird is pretty bloated to leave open all day and sending and receiving shouldn't need a web browser attached.
I agree with you. Having my mail client still use ~800MB of memory when in the tray is not great (and I have very few emails, so one cannot blame the index or whatever).
Unfortunately since Thunderbird's IMAP stack was recently (a few years ago) rewritten in javascript (from C++), it's now dependant on the web stack to receive and send emails. I doubt firefox/thunderbird is engineered in a way that you could unload only the html rendering part on demand.
So I doubt we'll ever have our wish granted...