Rated 5 out of 5 stars

by rse on Dec. 26, 2024 ·

I've used Nostalgy for years and can't do without it for productivity. Unfortunately, so many things keep breaking, and I know it's sometimes TB, not always Nostalgy, that I will move away if I can find something equivalent that is better supported.

The latest thing to break, and it may not even be Nostalgy, is that I can no longer Undo and Redo moving messages, which I used to be able to do from the Edit menu in TB (broken since when? Which TB or Nostalgy update? or did it just capriciously decide to stop working. Dunno - I'm on TB 115.10.1 on a Mac)

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In response to your reply, I've edited this review to give it 5 stars. Nostalgy itself certainly deserves them. I had suspected that the issues are really with integration into Thunderbird as TB evolves.

I appreciate your volunteer efforts. Without them, I suppose we would have lost Nostalgy altogether. [What I really believe is that Nostalgy should be PART of TB; the capabilities that it provides are that important to user productivity.]

by opto (Developer) on Jan. 2, 2025 ·

That is a good one.
Moving and copying is now done by the new webextention api, as transfer of addons to the new methods is generally requested, and it has been denied/delayed in developer meetings since 4 years ago to add the undo to the new api methods.
The reason is that they are planning something really good for that functionality but it needs so many changes that it did not happen yet due to manpower. And it has been denied to adapt a simple solution until then.

In another case, I have actually been asked to split an addon into two, one with those features only doable with the old legacy addon code, another with features that can be done with the new webextention approach (namely the addon attachment viewer). I found that strange and prone to loose users, so I didn't (want) to do that yet, so that addon is stuck at the current code.

The old copying/moving mechanism is still in the code of Nostalgy but started to be unreliable, so at the moment it is unused.

What breaks in Nostalgy, is broken by TB and its regular updates and moving to new code. That is, why understandably they request to move to the new webextention apis which do not break, but they have less feature, just as here: no undo.

If sponsored, one could imagine our own undo handling. It is not so easy when there are multiple TB's/smartphone/other email clients having access to the account, because messages cannot be uniquely identified in that case, at least if you have copies of a message in multiple folders (and we are talking about message move or copy by Nostalgy). ... That is a deficiency of imap, not TB's fault.

If you are interested in more details, just open an issue in github.

I would appreciate if you would not make it three stars only when it is not my fault.