[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156

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.

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.

If you haven’t given Thunderbird a shot yet, you should.

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.

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.

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.

> 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 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.

See https://drgrizz.xyz/dark-mode.html why

Its cool that we don't need a third-party plugin for that anymore.

If not, I guess I'll be keeping birdtray installed for now.

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.

Anyone else noticed something?

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?

From the Inbox screen on Thunderbird, hit Ctrl+Shift+F for a powerful search function