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Comment by crossroadsguy | Hacker News Reader

If any Thunderbird dev is here please bring the "Customise From Address" to the mobile. It's a god-mode feature (probably nowhere else) for battling spam and truly utilising catch-all for personal domain based emails.

PS. Also, any ETA for iOS? Alpha? Beta?

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> please bring the "Customise From Address" to the mobile.

It's a very old issue that appears to be terribly misunderstood at this point, unfortunately the issue on github is currently locked https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-android/issues/93...

> locked as off-topic and limited conversation to collaborators

Companies that do this to their github projects want fans of their product to go away and stop bothering them. I wasn't aware that Mozilla was one of them, but it doesn't really surprise me.

Mozilla hasn't been involved in Thunderbird development for years. They just provide legal and financial backing to Thunderbird via a subsidiary named MZLA. Development is all from the community at this point.

Opinions of Mozilla aside; the reason maintainers do this is because people google bugs or "why can't I do this in x" and they land on GitHub issues. They then pepper those issues with either low-tier comments like "zomg +1 op" or totally unrelated comments. GitHub doesn't have a way to differentiate a random Internet user who arrived on a big through an internet search and someone who is a long time user but not a contributor. This, lock to maintainers happens once you know the cause, effect, and what it takes to fix it.

> They then pepper those issues with either low-tier comments like "zomg +1 op" or totally unrelated comments

I agree it's annoying, but you can also just unsubscribe from the issue if you're no longer interested in community feedback.

> This, lock to maintainers happens once you know the cause, effect, and what it takes to fix it.

This is not really my experience. Usually it goes more like this:

1. Person makes issue

2. Lots of people respond to the issue because they experience it as well

3. Developers either don't care, or fail to grasp what the users actually want

4. More people pile on over the course of months/years while no resolution exists

5. Developers get annoyed, and lock the issue

6. Either they already did, or some point later the developers introduce a "close old issues with no response" bot

7. Issue is locked, cannot get responses

8. Issue gets closed

9. Open issue count goes down

10. Yay!

Pretty sure iOS Mail supports this

I cannot set a random outgoing From: address when sending an email in iOS. In many ways I understand applications not wanting this feature. Non-technical people will see it and wonder: What if I put in someone else's email address here?

Sure you can, it's just a pain (you have to pre-add it in Settings).

Pretty sure it doesn't :) Unless you want a million (okay, couple of dozens or maybe early three digits) email addresses pre-added that you can "select" from.

PS. You might want to check that feature out that I explicitly named on Thunderbird desktop.

PPS. General observation: any software (or service) by Apple isn't even close to, and by that I mean within thousands of miles of, competent third party alternatives (FOSS or otherwise) :P

I assume Thunderbird just lets you type whatever you want there, which I concede is nicer. But in a pinch Mail also does this.

Also, while open source alternatives are generally more flexible than what Apple offers, sometimes this is not the case. Believe me, I use both based on whichever one meets my needs :)

Okay, I will try to keep it short.

> also does this

Nope!

> Believe me

No, but I won't - especially considering how you are pretty much stuck on "yes, Apple mail does it too.. well.. yeah.. in way… yes it does."

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