by fouronnes3
16 subcomments
- I wanted to love Thunderbird, used it for years then a bug [0] literally deleted all my emails. I regularly see updates of people understandably raging on the ticket :( It's a bug that literally deletes user data from both the server and the client without warning. It's been open and confirmed for 17 years straight. It could happen to you. How is it not top 1 priority to fix it?
[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156
by blacklion
3 subcomments
- «Manual Folder Sorting» — first, they broke 3rd party plugin for that. Next, author (not member of official Thunderbird team or employee of Mozilla) of this plugin spent more than 1 year pushing this functionality into base.
Now they highlight it as big deal in new release without mention volunteer author of this BASIC feature which should be in mail client FROM VERSION 0.0.1!
It is pity, that Google Mail is «good enough» and it killed development of good desktop e-mail clients.
Thunderbird is best what we have (Cross-platform), but still very bad, and after killing off XUL plugins cannot be easily modified.
They exists for 21 year and now announce manual folder sorting! There is no support for Sieve (3rd party plugin? Dead after removing XUL)! There is no way to store folder settings as IMAP properties, and if I have two installations (on laptop and desktop, for example) I need repeat same setting or folders again and again — including selection of identity per-folder (again, not native functionality but 3rd party plugin, thanks, it is alive now!). No true message templates (per-folder, per-action, per-identity), only lousy "signature", broken in-line quoting in plain text messages, etc, etc, etc.
And it is best what I can use cross-platform :-(
21 years of progress and now we are here.
by throwaway81523
5 subcomments
- Could they just make it not suck? Like the search system falls apart if you have more than a few thousand messages in a folder, not all that many by today's standards. The address book doesn't let you sort the addresses by most recently added, which is important if you reply to craigslist posts which use numeric forwarding addresses. So once you have more than a handful of them the are impossible to tell apart. It automatically makes new archive folders by year (2023, 2024, 2025...) which is kind of nice, except it shows them oldest first instead of newest first, so you have to scroll way down to get to the current year. The progress bar on the bottom looks like there is constantly something going on, and maybe there is, but it never finishes. Messages sometimes fall through cracks so you can't find them in any folder but you can sometimes find them with global search. And on and on. Stop adding new features or messing up the UI further until basic functionality like this works.
- Why instead of actual screenshots someone would use those abstract things?
by nticompass
3 subcomments
- I've been using a fork of Thunderbird called Betterbird (https://www.betterbird.eu/) on Linux, mostly because I want to be able to minimize it to a systray icon. I know there are extensions like systray-x and birdtray, but I was having issues with these on Wayland. I wonder if this new version of Thunderbird finally added systray support on Linux/Wayland.
- I’ve been using Thunderbird more and more over the past few months. I’m glad it’s finally getting some decent attention. I’m especially curious about the new account management in 140. I couldn’t add my iCloud calendar easily before, hope this rectifies it.
If you haven’t given Thunderbird a shot yet, you should.
- I have not used Thunderbird in 15 years, but I'm desperate for a decent email client. I've used Spark, Mailspring, Airmail...but I keep coming back to the MacOS Mail app. Any active users of Thunderbird who chose it over the default Mac mail client? Does it have a unified inbox for all your accounts? Dark mode looks neat, at least.
- > While we can’t change the universe, you can now get the latest Thunderbird features as they land, instead of once a year. Switch to Thunderbird Release and enjoy monthly updates with the same dependable stability.
Does this mean anything or is it some sort of marketing gobbledygook? We can now get features faster by using the latest release rather than the ESR – but surely non-ESR releases have always been available, so this was always the case, not only now suddenly?
Also, the "dependable stability" we enjoy with the ESR release comes precisely from the software not constantly changing underneath us, i.e. from not getting new features every month.
- There is no mention of sync functionality. I regularly use 3 different PCs and I cannot sync settings easily. It means I've give up using Thunderbird on all but one of the PCs.
They've also made the usability worse in recent versions and are copying the insanely annoying context menus in Windows 11, which cannot be reverted.
- The only feature I am missing in Thunderbird is “group by sender, sort groups by latest receive date in group”. I don’t remember what client I used that had this (outlook, perhaps?) but for me it works so much better than other arrangements:
You still see all the latest correspondence, but also immediately all previous correspondence from the same sender (if you expand the group) whether or not it’s a reply thread.
by Phelinofist
0 subcomment
- I love Thunderbird, but the compose message window is just shit. It allows to sslect text type like body, paragraph and so forth - but it always resets to paragraph for me, which leads to weird spacing between lines.
- > Manual Folder Sorting
> Don’t like the order for your custom folders? Just click and drag to arrange them exactly how you want.
At last. Thank you.
I've been using an add on for that for a long time. It stopped working about one year ago because of some change in TB. I managed to survive but I really look forward to the update to 140.
- I have used Thunderbird in the past, but ultimately gave up.
I am currently on google for my private email, and for other reasons tied into MS / Office365 anyway for my business so decided after having my business email at my internet provider initially, it all was just not worth the hassle.
95% of my business dealings is with companies that are on office 365, and especially the calendaring and RSVP'ing just kind of works in outlook.
I am still keeping an eye out and hope to be able to move to some solution which unifies it all, preferably on a nice open standards, open source solution for email, calendaring, and contacts.. but the fact is that customers pay my bills, and I grew tired of all the account issues, syncing issues etc with trying to have it all in Thunderbird.
I find it a sad state of affairs though, the amount of engineering time, energy, and money spent on building semi-walled gardens and at the same time building ladders to climb those same walls, all while never achieving an actually smooth experience between my various email accounts, my calendars, on my laptop and phone alike.
Maybe some day.
by casenmgreen
0 subcomment
- I used TB for a decade or more, then in the end quit, because it was bloating too much. It was a browser doing email, not an email client.
I then used Claws for a while, but came to really dislike it - lots of small UI issues.
Then I wrote my own email client in Python, Postgres for store, Apache/HTML front-end. That's been fantastic. Python does all the heavy lifting, you need to design a decent database.
Now I add features as I need them - few days I added the ability to specify how many times an email should be sent, when you need to spam the recipient for some reason (say, a company which is spamming you and is not responding in a reasonable or timely manner to GDPR requests).
The basic client design I've not seen elsewhere - but I've not used many clients so it may very well exist. There's a single inbox of email, and you define sets, and a set defines what is shown. So you don't move emails around between folders, you define what's shown, and you can have multiple sets concurrently - so for example, "inbound", "last 24 hours".
There are also a bunch of other small features which I've had in time for a long time but have never seen. For example, the from/to addresses have the localpart and domain separately, so you can order by domain. There's immediate in-page filtering, too, for each column, so you can just enter a few letters of what you know is the origin domain and bingo, there you go.
- I had to stop using Thunderbird because it's just too slow for me. And I have a pretty decent PC.
- >Experimental Exchange Support Natively set up a Microsoft Exchange account in Thunderbird by enabling a preference.
Its cool that we don't need a third-party plugin for that anymore.
by Davidbrcz
2 subcomments
- God, the dark mode change reading is a blessing !
See https://drgrizz.xyz/dark-mode.html why
by AdmiralAsshat
0 subcomment
- So we have "OS-native notifications" now. Does that mean we finally get a tray icon? Or do I still need to keep Thunderbird sitting in the taskbar for that?
If not, I guess I'll be keeping birdtray installed for now.
by throwaway7402
2 subcomments
- No thanks. We're still sticking with version 102, the last release before the ruinous "Supernova" redesign which nobody asked for, when it became apparent the project was being abused by "UX" kiddies looking to bloat their Github resumes. We're just thankful that some wiser developer had previously added the "allow-downgrade" option.
- I love that Thunderbird is moving forward.
That said:
I tried to add a new mail account to Thunderbird after upgrading to version 140. Unfortunately, it shows an error message after merely asking for my name and my email address and then hangs in an endless animation.
by roflmaostc
1 subcomments
- Since some months somehow the windows are weirdly aligned inside Thunderbird, like the attachment bar is cut off at the bottom.
I might be connected to my Awesome WM but I haven't changed anything on this side.
Anyone else noticed something?
- Thinking of trying it, when Mozilla finally fixes the lack of XDG base directory support. There was some recent progress on that old bug.
- impressive how, in 2025, thunderbird is still the best email client on osx
- Whenever Thunderbird makes its way to the front page of Hacker News, I always re-download it and hope that I can use it.
Every time I've ever tried it (spanning around 30 installs over the last 15 years), I've uninstalled within a week to a month, due to sluggish UI, phantom unread emails, crashes, and text formatting issues.
I do it because I believe that one day Thunderbird could be good. Today could be the day - I've installed it, added my accounts, and it looks like the developers have made some significant improvements. I'm not talking about fancy new features, instead I'm talking about the small nitpicky problems I've had whenever I've tried to use it.
For example, this time I installed, I didn't have to go into a hidden settings menu (here be dragons) to make new emails default to the top of lists. My replies are now made above the original message. Fastmail doesn't throw a wobbly when trying to add email, calendar and contacts with the same password.
Maybe today is the last time I install Thunderbird?
- Is Oauth accounts with an authenticator working yet? I desperately want to use it at work, but we have O365 with Okta and Yubikeys in front of it, and Thunderbird can handle the Okta but won't prompt for a PIN for the Yubikeys.
- Any sense on how JMAP support is coming along?
by globular-toast
1 subcomments
- Thunderbird is still the only calendar software I'm aware of with a "Multiweek" view instead of the awful "Month" view all others provide. The only calendar to have caught up to 20th century technology (Apple almost gets it, but not quite).
by NoImmatureAdHom
0 subcomment
- A friendly public service announcement:
From the Inbox screen on Thunderbird, hit Ctrl+Shift+F for a powerful search function
- [dead]
by evrennetwork
0 subcomment
- [dead]