The Future of Thunderbird

&gt; “Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?” ~ A notable percentage of Thunderbird users<p>Honestly this doesn&#x27;t seem like the main issue with Thunderbird; the main issue is that the UI is very slow, it tends to use a lot of CPU and memory just sitting there and a lot of operations block the UI. This got a lot worse with 102. 102 unfortunately is so low in responsiveness that it&#x27;s literally quicker for me to open a new tab, load Google Mail (the slowest webmail I&#x27;m using) find and(!) read the mail there than switching to the already running Thunderbird and waiting for it to load the new message. It also tends to take pretty long to &quot;boot&quot;, so most days I just avoid using it entirely now, as leaving it running in the background substantially decreases battery life.

Unfortunately, at least for me, I&#x27;ve had to mostly switch away from Thunderbird. It has becoming rather frustratingly slow. For example, if I archive an email, it takes 10 to 15 seconds for this to be reflected in the interface. When I have 50 or so emails to deal with, this adds up to a surprising amount of time, and becomes rather frustrating. (I suspect having large volumes of email is part of the issue.)<p>On the much needed feature side of things, other email clients have the <i>very</i> useful feature of showing the complete conversation history (across all accounts) in a sidebar. This alone has been a compelling reason to switch email clients, though, the real reason I switched was the extremely slow interface.<p>I sincerely hope these changes will make Thunderbird usable for me again.

&gt; The curse: coordinating efforts across a volunteer community was challenging…<p>&gt; …Since Thunderbird was being contributed to by many volunteer contributors with varying tastes, it resulted in an Inconsistent user interface without a coherent user experience.<p>Brooks&#x27; &quot;The Mythical Man-Month&quot; really never stops giving.<p>You don&#x27;t actually get more efficient by moving to a giant decentralized volunteer engineering workforce -- someone has to coordinate all that, or else what you&#x27;re going to get is a mess, both under the hood and in what is visible. And coordinating all that is hard and resource-intensive, the more so the _more_ developers involved.<p>Some open source projects manage to do that coordination with a decentralized volunteer coordinating staff (although in many cases, it&#x27;s not truly &quot;volunteer&quot;, it&#x27;s people being paid by <i>various</i> employers collaborating across organizations&#x2F;employers -- this was in fact most of original open source success stories). But it&#x27;s not easy. And requires stability and tenure in that decentralized coordinating staff, to hold the vision, and to have the relationships to work together in a unified way. (A &quot;benevolent dictator&quot; is another way to do it).<p>The hardest part of developing software that is too much for one person to do by themselves (and that one person never leaves), is always the inter-personal communication, coordination, and shared-mental-model-making-and-sharing, not the coding.<p>So anyway, without being involved in Thunderbird at all, I totally believe this story, and that bringing it back into an organization of paid employees as a core was necessary to prevent complete disintegration (I mean, other organizational solutions are possible too, but they are all even more challenging, this is the simplest), because... that&#x27;s how it works.

I&#x27;ve used Thunderbird exclusively for desktop mail for many years. To my knowledge, it still sucks less than any other free and open option, but that&#x27;s not much of a bar.<p>Over time, Thunderbird has become slower and less reliable, most notably in the area of search. While the advanced search tools are excellent, the results are lousy. Email that I know exists is often unfindable until I force Thunderbird to re-index my whole mailbox.<p>Seeing F&#x2F;OSS devs of (what I consider to be) a critical app like Thunderbird talk about &quot;modernizing the interface&quot; is the worst. The interface is fine and there are far bigger problems -- problems related to actual functionality as opposed to prettiness -- that desperately need work.<p>And to echo others&#x27; comments: courting the &quot;average user&quot; is worse than a waste of resources, it&#x27;s an active turning away from the core users and supporters.

Nooooooooo<p>Why change the UI? I mean, I like Thunderbird exactly since it&#x27;s the only email client that didn&#x27;t go into the direction of emulating GMail or Apple Mail or other mail interfaces that shows you the messages in a conversational manner.<p>I like Thunderbird because it has more or less the same user experience of the old &quot;Outlook&quot; Windows application. Why change something that works???<p>At least I hope they will give users the possibility to remain with the classical interface, otherwise I think I will still remain on older versions (after all IMAP is relatively stable so I shouldn&#x27;t have that much issues).<p>The only thing I would like on Thunderbird is sync of the settings with a Mozilla account like Firefox does. Not that it&#x27;s a big deal, I just copy around the profile directory (because reconfiguring 10 email accounts each time I change&#x2F;format the PC takes almost 1 hour).

I&#x27;ll add one more negative sentiment.<p>&gt; Using a solid base architecture like Firefox is the perfect starting point.<p>No, but why? Why does an email client need a web browser to function, and why is that the &quot;perfect starting point&quot;?<p>The only reason an email client might use a web _view_ for, is for reading HTML emails, and even then that web view should be a far more restricted and barebones version of a traditional browser tab.<p>This approach simply inherits all the security issues from the insane complexity of modern browsers, just to reuse some common components that should&#x27;ve been extracted and separated from all the browser baggage.<p>Hey, Mozilla, remember XUL? Before you decided to deprecate and remove it from Firefox, it was the unified UI framework that both a browser and an email client could use, without sharing any of their core dependencies. What a concept!<p>I&#x27;m surprised Mozilla still has interest in maintaining Thunderbird. I&#x27;m curious to know what the userbase for it is, but I can&#x27;t imagine desktop email clients have a mainstream audience anymore.

&gt; Why does Thunderbird look so old<p>UI isn&#x27;t a fashion show. I&#x27;d much rather have a UI that looks older but is comfortable to use than something trendy.

The Thunderbird Saga reminds of an old computer industry joke.<p>The new CEO of a tech company shows up for day one. He meets his recently-fired predecessor as he enters his office. They shake hands and the outgoing guy says &quot;I left three letters for you in the bottom drawer, use them as needed&quot;.<p>First quarter for the new CEO, he hasn&#x27;t much to put in the win column, having barely familiarized himself with staff and projects. But he has to provide a report to the Directors. Desperate, he pulls the first envelope, which reads &quot;Blame your predecessor&quot;.<p>Next quarter isn&#x27;t much better. Again desperate to prepare for the Board Meeting, pulls the second letter which reads &quot;Blame the economy&quot;.<p>Third quarter he&#x27;s just about to get some traction but still doesn&#x27;t have anything earth shattering to report, he goes for the last letter, which reads &quot;Write three letters&quot;.

I have been using Thunderbird for years. Every now and again I get curious about what else is out there and I start looking into alternatives like Claws or Neomutt. But then inevitably I realise that these are simply solutions in search of a problem for me, that Thunderbird continues to work absolutely fine and there is really no reason to switch. I understand others will have a different use case to me but it always blows my mind to see people having so many problems with Thunderbird when it has been just a very consistent workhorse in my experience.<p>I use Thunderbird for personal stuff and Outlook for work. I know it&#x27;s probably not a fair comparison as my work laptop is slowed down by all the security stuff and general corporate spyware, but damn I only wish my work email could be half as snappy as my personal email.<p>A tip for those complaining about search, particularly about its performance: if you can, try filtering instead. It&#x27;s more limited (I think it only searches sender and subject line) but it is blazingly fast for me, filtering out several GB of emails in less than a second, always.<p>Finally, for those wondering why an email client needs to be built on top of a web browser - this is because in 2023, most &quot;normies&quot; receive a lot of email that is heavy on HTML, so in order to be in any way useful to the majority of users, an email client needs to be really good at parsing HTML, which browsers are. Of course it seems like overkill if you only receive plaintext email.

When I saw the headline, I was worried they were going to close the project. I never take community-supported projects for granted. They&#x27;ve been here, providing an extremely important product, for decades.<p>The biggest issue (from what I read) is technical debt. It&#x27;s a huge, time consuming and possibly an explosive mess. They have about a dozen developers providing for the needs of millions of users worldwide. They are working on 20 years of (legacy) code.<p>Even Mozilla had to scrap off the old DNA in favor of new.<p>I am glad this core group remains excited about the project. Ecstatic that they are looking toward the future. Happy that they are taking the time to make their jobs (much) easier in the long run.

After all those horror stories of people getting locked out of Google, I started using Thunderbird as my email backup. Took a while to get all my emails but now that they have been downloaded, I just run it as a backup tool to fetch the emails. If I had to ask, more than improving the UI (which is an initiative I have nothing against), improving the performance (mainly search) should be accorded high priority.

The highest priority IMHO is <i>security</i>.<p>Given how a targeted email can reach someone wherever they are (and spam can conceal mass exploits), frequent security updates are the wrong mindset.<p>The mindset of <i>one</i> necessary security update should be, OMG, we messed up badly, we need to fix and mitigate, and immediately figure out how never to need another security update, ever again.<p>Web browsers, OTOH, are hopeless for security right now, due to monstrously big-moat standards. But email MUAs (with addressbook, calendar, and maybe chat) are a much-much simpler problem, also high-value, and maybe the place to set a good example.<p>If someone objects &quot;but we will always have constant stream of security vulns, because we need these 1,000 libraries, many of which are hopeless&quot;... maybe that&#x27;s not true. Implementing email is conceptually very easy, and you don&#x27;t need all that much more than conceptual to get all the benefit that users actually want from email.<p>(Even incoming HTML multipart content-types, which are often a nightmare of BS generated by some MS program, can be transformed to a vastly simpler and cleaned-up form, enabling a very simple and secure rendering&#x2F;editing engine, with zero baggage from hopeless browser engines.)

&gt; Thunderbird is literally a bunch of code running on top of Firefox. All the tabs and sections you see in our applications are just browser tabs with a custom user interface.<p>There&#x27;s no such thing as applications. There&#x27;s just us, and browsers. That&#x27;s it!

My complaint is it should store each email in its own file (like NNTP readers do). This makes it much more amenable to backups, search, and makes it a lot less susceptible to corruption.<p>Instead, Tbird stores one folder in one gigantic file. One threading error, and poof! It&#x27;s gone. Happened to me several times. Yes, I filed bug reports. No, it was never fixed (at least the Tbird developers denied this was a problem).<p>Another minor thing I&#x27;d like to see is don&#x27;t hide everything in multiple places.<p>There&#x27;s still no way to backup my account settings.

I never gave up on thunderbird and hope it will rise again to represent &quot;power, protection, and strength for the user&quot;. Thunderbird, in contrast with the sibling &quot;browser&quot; is still a desktop app that asks the user to have some agency and exercise it.<p>Here are my two cents in hashtags and slogans for the future of thunderbird: embrace activitypub&#x2F;fediverse, expand rss functionality, reinvent bookmarks, think about audio&#x2F;podcasts, improve filtering and smart search. Leverage open source ecosystems and tools for next generation content management. In sum, become the <i>local</i> app where people spend quality time to organize their online life and experience the digital ocean.<p>Yeah, you could improve on the looks. But keep in mind: &quot;In architecture, functionalism is the principle that software[&#x2F;buildings] should be designed based solely on their purpose and function&quot;. If the purpose and function are beautiful, people will think thunderbird is beautiful. On the other hand no amount of eye-candy can hide the lack of purpose.

I&#x27;ve found that keeping all my old mail--including from old dead accounts--in Thunderbird has been a big part of the performance problems I experienced. Having been using Thunderbird from the very earliest of days (after migrating from SeaMonkey), I had a lot of dreck from old POP accounts and newer IMAP accounts.<p>I&#x27;ve switched to having it do full downloads of messages from IMAP, and run MailBackupX separately to ingest everything. Every month or so, I delete everything older than a month from Thunderbird, and rely on MailBackupX for my historical mail reference, searches, etc.<p>Now Thunderbird is fast and responsive.<p>My partner keeps hundreds of thousands of emails in Thunderbird from tens of email accounts, some active, some dead. Last time I looked, it was well over a terabyte of old email. The computer, a reasonably recent and fast Mac, can take several hours to start Thunderbird. That being said, I&#x27;m impressed it can handle that much cruft at all.

Thunderbird used to be a Native email client, that was awesome. I want an native email client, contacts and calendar. That&#x27;s it. I dislike the browser tabs inside Thunderbird (I already use Firefox), either make a web version or keep the native version native. Most of the Thunderbird user base, are the ones that preferred the OG version. Not everything have to be a webview. Maybe they don&#x27;t want users like me anymore. And that is fine. Is just feel sad, I miss the old Thunderbird.

I wish Eudora was still around. The source code is available, my secret dream is to work on somtimes in the summer...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;computerhistory.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-eudora-email-client-source-code&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;computerhistory.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-eudora-email-client-sou...</a>

I&#x27;m dreading the redesign, even though at the moment I have no idea of how it will look like.<p>What webmail can one use to read and write mail for multiple accounts? I will need to have a sort of unified inbox for at least 5-6 accounts, and to see the folders of all those accounts in the same window.

Using Mimestream <i>dramatically</i> realigned my expectations of what a snappy UX feels like. Thunderbird is quite slow by comparison.<p>I&#x27;m not sure that desktop software should attempt to align with casual users. Most casual users will stick to the first-party experience. What is supposed to draw a casual Gmail user away from the first-party webmail? What is supposed to draw a casual Google Calendar user away from the first-party web-calendar? What is going to be not 2x better but 10x better than the first-party interface? The desktop interface <i>needs</i> to put power-users first, or put resource-savings first, or put low-latency UI first. What other advantage can be built on the desktop above the first-party experience, one which is also built by professional designers and Product teams, who will always be a step ahead of you on the feature roadmap?

I&#x27;m a long time Thunderbird user. Once every one or two years I looked if there was a better free &amp; libre alternative supporting Windows, having a GUI, and an integrated calendar. Each time I came to the conclusion that Thunderbird was still the top contender. This blog post fills me with hope that Thunderbird has a future.

The UI doesn&#x27;t look that old fashioned to me. It doesn&#x27;t look like a website - it looks like an application (which is appropriate).

After ten years or so, I moved away from Thunderbird, a few months ago, on my new laptop.<p>Thunderbird is to my eye becoming too much like a web-browser (I know the connection of course), rather than an email client. I don&#x27;t want all that complexity in my email client.<p>I&#x27;m now using Claws Mail, which is simple, text-only and what I&#x27;m looking for.

Thunderbird had already a good email UX, what it now doesn&#x27;t really has (anymore!) is performance, this post makes me honestly worried that the project will go in the totally wrong direction, alienating all power users.<p>Swapping out the C++ pop&#x2F;imap&#x2F;... implementation with a JS one is bogus IMO, yeah JS engines are fast nowadays, but still order of magnitude slower than compiled code.<p>Not to go for the meme, but what I really don&#x27;t get is why not go for rust if a rewrite is anyway planned and your share the codebase with the product that caused the invention of that language, and showed that its possible to integrate it for subsystems?!<p>Fact is that my whole Thunderbird hangs and freezes completely ~15 times a day, on my 128 GiB DDR5, fast, PCIe 4 attached TLC NVMe storage and a Alder Lake top model i7 CPU. Look, a input text field, configured for <i>plain text</i>, just must not hang on such a machine, even not on a 15y old one - it&#x27;s a god damn text input field, if that hangs you just make some things horribly wrongs, it&#x27;s so irritating and just not healthy for anybodies blood pressure - save local in sync and save to drafts async.<p>Then there are the crashes, resize some reply window while it loads something in the main one? boom, crashed.<p>Mail is a big topic add work, for one we got a product that handles mail and for another we use mail in our development flow _a lot_, just like a lot of other Open Source projects. I know quite a few people that use, or well, used, Thunderbird as their mail reader, and more thanks to CalDav and Matrix implementation, ... basically only touching git send-email besides Thunderbird for mail related stuff.<p>None, literally zero, of them complained about the UI or UX from a few years ago, like never. Well a few that tried out recent betas did about adding some odd side bars, hiding down menus, making a lot of things harder to find.<p>To conclude my, already cut short, rant (sorry, this one was brewing since a bit): Now I got the aerc client set up, waiting on stand by for the final blow of sensless UI shuffle-around-and-make-unuseable-for-power-user updates; as then I&#x27;ll have to say good bye to the (former) GOAT mail client - never thought this would happen :-(

As a sole maintainer of a TB add-on, I can&#x27;t wait for it to completely stop working until rewritten yet again when old TB API gets removed and new version goes live.

&gt; “Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?”<p>If it works...

Thunderbird still is pretty fast, though not as fast as before.<p>And until the user-hostile changes (mandatory setup wizards) began creeping in a few years back, one of the venerable classics that you could still rely on.<p>Pretty sure the new version is going to be a steaming pile of modern usability horrors; reduced features, cheeseburger menus, unreadable UI elements because it has to &quot;look modern&quot;, all powered by Electron &amp; co.<p>Can&#x27;t say I&#x27;m surprised though.

I use Thunderbird as my main mail client and love it. I&#x27;ve tried a number of clients and always come back to it. The two big things for me are the search and the ecosystem of add-ons.<p>I do hope the redesign considers add-on developers. A lot have been abandoned by their maintainers who become frustrated with keeping up with Thunderbird&#x27;s changes. One thing I&#x27;d love to see is an easy way to send money to support add-on creators.

For a long time I wished for an e-mail client that shows a side-by-side view of the e-mail your composing and the e-mail you&#x27;re replying to. I think the majority of people would like such a view, yet nobody offers it. Does anybody know any good solution in macOS?

I hope they focus and improve on search.<p>It&#x27;s probably the worst of all email clients we&#x27;ve tested at work and it made my bosses switch to a paid version of Outlook. Sometimes you can&#x27;t find emails when searching for a name. It&#x27;s so bad.<p>There are other quirks and bugs too that definitely make it feel outdated, which sucks because I like it (although it is kinda old looking too as mentioned in the article hehe).

I wanted Thunderbird to be the answer to the question I have been asking for years. &quot;How to replace Outlook in the corporate environment?&quot; Every time I investigate it, Thunderbird is a resounding no. Why? This is not the vision of the Development Team. But if it was a side goal it would afford them the development money to do all the other things.

As a longtime user of thunderbird an interface change is the absolute LAST thing I want.

“Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?”<p>Neither of those are a concern to me. I prefer functioning software, I don&#x27;t care that much how it looks. And I don&#x27;t care about the rate of change.

Almost everyone in here has a complaint about thunderbird. The blog is about the struggle of maintaining it as-is, much less refactoring or adding features.<p>They take the time to explain some background, some of the struggles and the &quot;why&quot; of their decision to do a rebuild. Reliance on other software, years of decentralized development, having a small team to do it.<p>And yet everyone is just shitting on this piece as if the team has no idea what they&#x27;re doing.<p>I don&#x27;t normally do metacommentary, but this conversation is mind boggling.

No mention of JMAP support.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jmap.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jmap.io&#x2F;</a>

Actual Thunderbird users don&#x27;t care about the UI. That made up quote probably applies to someone that just gave Thunderbird a try though and left disappointed.

If they are looking for paths going forward, I hope they investigate what PopOS is doing with rust (COSMIC) [0] and Iced [1] (cross platform ui library).<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phoronix.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;COSMIC-Desktop-Iced-Toolkit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phoronix.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;COSMIC-Desktop-Iced-Toolkit</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;iced-rs&#x2F;iced">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;iced-rs&#x2F;iced</a>

I have to assume with the talk of how hard it is to keep up with Firefox&#x27;s upstream breaking changes, they&#x27;ll be switching to essentially a Firefox version of an electron app. i.e. shipping Firefox as a wrapper around a webapp

Are there any reasonable alternatives (please, no outlook)? I love Thunderbird on principle but it&#x27;s been years and the whole damn UI still freezes while it&#x27;s downloading messages.

Oh please fuck not again. It&#x27;s the only fucking client that works with O365 without fuckery ;&#x2F;

They are most definitely changing the UI to be white space fancy and in-line with new users. It is a reset of features. That’s what they are doing with K9 too.<p>Not the direction I was hoping they would go in.<p>They should forget the rewrite. And forget the UI change. They should separate the UI stuff into a different module. And let others innovate on it. They should only focus on maintenance changes with Firefox.<p>And then add new features. Like external linked attachment technology. Snoozing emails. Sorting emails based on content. Unsubscribe highlighting. Scraping incoming emails for patterns. Machine learning for Outgoing emails.<p>And finally, they really need to get into the email server game. Innovation can’t only be happening in the client.

I read the last thing that made front page, didn&#x27;t know that Thunderbird is developed by a dozen people, or that it&#x27;s basically an add-on for Firefox.<p>I get that they need to chase marketshare and audience and can&#x27;t stop lest the big guys win forever.<p>Still, I quite liked the old interface, the nested menus where everything is where it should be and doesn&#x27;t take four &#x27;steps&#x27; and an eventual search to find, the grey-on-darker-grey colorscheme, the hard corners that scream out &#x27;this isn&#x27;t the ephemeral interwebs, these are rock-solid time-stamped spf-checked emails.<p>Thank you for an amazing software package, regardless of the Dr-Who-like metamorphosis it goes through.

Hopefully this is more than a UI improvement and also tackles pretty awful UX.<p>I use catch all mailboxes to combat spam after moving away from Proton, and thunderbird makes me &quot;subscribe&quot; to each one. If I&#x27;m not expecting a new mailbox to be created, I simply don&#x27;t see it.<p>Plus, the subscription process takes 30+ second per mailbox. The entire UI just freezes. I also have to unsubscribe first, because the checkbox is already marked, and then re-subscribe. Perhaps this is some leftover of mail protocols that makes little sense anymore, but I digress.<p>I&#x27;m ready for email to just die. I don&#x27;t know what a good alternative is but email feels like the printers of software.

&gt; “Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?”<p>&gt; ~ A notable percentage of Thunderbird users<p>What percentage is that, I wonder? A large number, or enough to kind of justify replacing the UI if you fudge the numbers?

Apple Mail on OSX 10.4 (originally NeXT) working well today fyi<p>the industrial strength, bullet proof, complex but profoundly reliable engineering within Apple Mail shows itself to have <i>stability</i> over decades.<p>Why is this Thunderbird rewrite going to succeed ? A glossy sales pitch makes it less convincing, not more. This is a years&#x27; long project with no guranteed outcomes.. in fact, I would suspect that noveau security trappings and trend-based GUI embellishments would almost guarantee a &quot;mayfly life&quot; at great expense, contrasted to the Oak trees of original Internet standards.<p>cynical? perhaps.. prove it wrong

Thread Hijack:<p>Is there a capable alternative to Microsoft&#x27;s Outlook client, that has good translation of emails built in? This is for Windows.<p>Outlook is so slow, and it opens a small side pane for translation. It has a horrible UI.

I hope the Thunderbird crew understand how incredibly important this software is and how much some of us depend on it. Good IMAP clients are hard to write and most civilians have become so used to crappy browser-based email that there&#x27;s not much demand for IMAP clients except among people like the ones who frequent this website.<p>Apple ruined their IMAP client (&quot;Mail&quot;) a few years ago so now that world is basically Outlook and Thunderbird, and I&#x27;m sure I don&#x27;t need to describe why Outlook is unacceptable.

Goodbye, Thunderbird. What options are still available that don&#x27;t follow this &quot;modern&quot; path. Simply give me the old-fashioned interface and leave me alone.

&gt; What To Expect Going Forward<p>&gt; [...] And yes, absolutely: the constant addition of new features [...]<p>Please don&#x27;t.

The only email client that I acknowledge. Used it since the day one. I think that this refactoring is going to be a huge undertake. I hope that they will make it.

I skimmed the article and the video, but I couldn&#x27;t find exactly where they mention what this new direction will be and what technologies will it use?

I kind of hate Thunderbird because it is in every way worse than beloved Apple Mail.app, except for one: it can do the Microsoft 365 IMAP Oauth2 dance, but Mail.app can&#x27;t.<p>Mail.app&#x27;s native Exchange functionality has broken for me before and caused me to lose mail so I will not trust it. I thought I had the right solution with an IMAP connection to O365 Exchange until they forced that to use Oauth2.

&gt;A renewed attention to usability and accessibility is now part of our daily development process, guaranteeing easy discoverability of all the powerful features, as well as full compatibility with assistive technologies to make Thunderbird usable by everyone.<p>ah yes, that logorrhea of corporate speak surely means the project is heading in right direction.

I started using Thunderbird with 4 or 5 mailboxes (split out via ProtonMail Bridge) and it is usable especially after I archived the bulk of my emails going back to maybe 2016, and I can&#x27;t believe they are going to waste engineering cycles on something that sounds like a rewrite.<p>Bonkers. Might have to take a look at the alternatives mentioned in this thread

I do not care how it looks. It works just fine for me and the last thing I want is to start changing UI in Thunderbird

Does Thunderbird even exist today? I moved away from it a long time ago, the sluggishness was a big turn off and it never improved. When I discovered sylpheed and then claws-mail, it was bye-bye TB.<p>Of course now that I am old, mutt has become my preferred MUA. Does email pretty well, and keeps away from a lot of modern overhead.

I don&#x27;t have any issue with the Thunderbird GUI. My main issue is that there is a nasty bug when when you click on an email the body of the email doesn&#x27;t always match the subject. That is quite a nasty bug and it has been there for at least a year. Am I only the only person that gets this?

Many of us have tried to struggle against the gradual destruction of TB&#x27;s UI, under the excuse of modernization. But all this gets you is derision and sanctions. This also reflects major problems in how the project is managed, which is a very sad tale way beyond the scope of an HN comment.

What I see in this thread is A LOT of people complaining about a free product, but I wonder how many of them have actually donated money to help with the development? I just donated $100 myself because of the current donation campaign, but I&#x27;m happy with what I get largely for free.

The Future of Thunderbird can only be summarized as having no future with Mozilla.<p>&gt; Throughout the years, Mozilla’s focus shifted a lot, investing less and less resources into the development of Thunderbird. On July 6, 2012, the Mozilla Foundation announced that it would no longer be focused on innovations for Thunderbird, and that the future Thunderbird development would transition to a community-driven model.<p>So it isn&#x27;t a priority and isn&#x27;t as interesting to Mozilla? As far as Mozilla is concerned; it is dead. This also happened to Servo and it ended up getting severed from Mozilla, since they see it as another cost they cannot maintain.<p>&gt; In 2023, Thunderbird is pretty well sustainable, with a healthy donation flow, more services in development to increase our revenue stream (stay tuned!)<p>Thank you Google!

Been using Thunderbird since I don&#x27;t remember, before that sylpheed etc.<p>Use a Mac now and Thunderbird is using 0.1% CPU idle and 562MB.<p>I use the &quot;folders on the left, message list on the right top, selected message view underneath&quot; view.<p>Things that I <i>require</i> on Thunderbird (that I had to hack, muck around with):<p>* Timestamps in ISO8601<p>* Either the ability to use a Solarized theme, or one that accurately uses the MacOS light&#x2F;dark themes.<p>* Larger (16-20pt) font sizes for all panes<p>* Really good integration between a CardDAV server (I use fastmail) and accumulating email addresses automagically and not get confused with my local MacOS Contacts.<p>I don&#x27;t use the tasks&#x2F;events&#x2F;calendar integration because it gets confused between my CalDAV server (fastmail), and my local Mac OS calendar.

I hope this will spawn an Electron alternative. Would be nice to see a break from Chrome monoculture.

The best I can say of thunderbird is it isn&#x27;t entirely broken, but I&#x27;m still looking to move away from it very soon. I need a stable reliable tool, not what TB has become (realistically, what it&#x27;s always been - not good). Suggestions welcome.

I actually started using Thunderbird recently again after not using it for 5 or so years… honestly they have cleaned up the UI a lot I found!<p>I don’t really need changes at this point, and find the UI is a pretty good local optimum. Information density is nice!

plus ça change: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2000&#x2F;04&#x2F;06&#x2F;things-you-should-never-do-part-i&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2000&#x2F;04&#x2F;06&#x2F;things-you-should-...</a>

People get mad about it but I haven&#x27;t seen one open source project <i>without paid designers and product managers at the helm</i> that successfully incorporates non-technical users&#x27; needs well enough for them to compete with commercial offerings. Firefox? Android? Blender? Chromium? Signal?<p>Mozilla is doing this right. They&#x27;re doing this right. They have a simple mode to suit inexperienced users and a full mode for folks who don&#x27;t need the simplified experience. If you really think this kind of work ruins applications, then fork it and surely other developers who are enamored with the clunkyness will help maintain it right?

I am still running TB 91.13.1 as there are too many issues with 102 (not just performance). I get annoyed every day by TB prompting me to upgrade (config switches did not help to suppress that).<p>And now this?! Guess this really is the time to look for an alternative.

I recently adopted Thunderbird as my email client (was using Gmail&#x27;s web UI) and have really appreciated the power of it, enough that I donated to the project. NOT being like current designs has been part of the appeal. This development sounds high-risk, low-reward from my perspective. Could well end up nerfing the tool I just adopted. But c&#x27;est la vie, I guess. Probably the mistake was leaving Thunderbird without real governance back in 2012, so now as it&#x27;s pulled from anarchy it&#x27;s going to be painful watching &quot;the law&quot; of centralized development come down.<p>I would prefer if it were a more democratic process.

Thunderbird has been one of my go-to email clients for years now. Its open-source nature allows for a lot of customization options, and the addition of extensions has made it even more versatile. I especially love its user-friendly interface and how it integrates well with other tools like calendars and to-do lists.<p>The recent updates to Thunderbird have also been impressive, particularly the improved security features and performance enhancements. Overall, I believe it&#x27;s a fantastic alternative to proprietary email clients, and I highly recommend giving it a try if you haven&#x27;t already.

Maybe the problem is IMAP&#x2F;POP3&#x2F;SMTP, but I feel like email clients in general are just slow. I have time to manually open every separate email account in the browser, and have all of them ready to read, before Thunderbird (or KMail, etc.) finishes loading new emails. And I don&#x27;t even have a lot of new emails every day, like 5~10, so I&#x27;m not quite sure what exactly is taking so long to sync. I can download a 500MB video in the time TB syncs a few KBs of email.<p>I&#x27;ve largely given up on desktop email clients at this point. It&#x27;d be nice to have a single place to manage emails, but the performance is too poor.

I wish Tbird would become usable for me, but every time I try, it falls very very short in polish, in performance, and in capability.<p>Mac&#x27;s native Mail program works super super well for me and my enormous corpus of mail, search is nearly instant, and it talks to IMAP and Exchange with ease. It&#x27;s also reasonably easy to look at. I get some folks don&#x27;t care for it, and I absolutely concede that the old saw about &quot;the worst one, except for all the others&quot; still applies, but for me, Tbird is just one of &quot;all the others.&quot;

I tried out a bunch of desktop email clients on linux, and found thunderbird easiest to use. Doesn&#x27;t feel particularly slow to me. UI feels fine - but I last used desktop Outlook in 2019 or so.

I&#x27;ve used Thunderbird Portable for years to backup my Google Workspace email. Prior to that it was my primary email client. Really hope it survives and thrives, I could care less how it looks.

All i meed is a sort by latest and group by sender option !! Tried to get it in mutt but couldn’t figure it out !! So i can delete all the mail that comes out on top that is not useful !!

There&#x27;s one area where I&#x27;ve always thought Thunderbird should be a cross platform leader and example to everyone: setting Email Client Standards.<p>I spent a lot of time in the anti-phishing&#x2F;anti-fraud world. During a stint at dmarcian I wrote up an entire proposal that I titled A.P.E.C.S. - Anti-Phishing Email Client Standards. I should probably publish this document at some point since it looks like they&#x27;ve since taken it down and IMO, it still needs to happen.<p>When you dive hard into the email security problem you quickly discover that there are layers to how end users are exploited.<p>- Sending Mail Servers<p>- Receiving Mail Servers<p>- Information presented to users in the mail client<p>- Links and attachments in the emails themselves<p>- The phishing sites they link to<p>Each layer of this process needs to be addressed. DMARC let&#x27;s sending mail servers verify that they are actually allowed to send email on behalf of the domain. That alone is a huge scope of the problem and puts the domain owner in charge of preventing abuse from their own domain.<p>Receiving mail servers have a number of factors that they use to verify inbound emails and DMARC makes that process a lot easier, but you still have to have spam filters, virus scans, IP and sender reputation management, reverse DNS lookups. The tools supporting users here are always getting better but they won&#x27;t ever be perfect.<p>The mail client itself is critical though. We know the filters aren&#x27;t perfect and typically have to err on the side of deliverability, which means that users are going to see messages that the mail server thought were questionable. You&#x27;re already seeing warning messages in Google for things like this, but the factors here can absolutely be standardized around a number of factors. Users don&#x27;t respond to &quot;you can trust this&quot; indicators (studies show, don&#x27;t have them handy) but they do respond to warnings as long as the warnings are very targeted and rare. If you get a warning about every message, it&#x27;s going to get ignored.<p>Links and attachments are also in the mail client scope. Attachment scans and link reputation absolutely need to be a part of the scope of this problem. There&#x27;s an opportunity for link trust to be standardized in the same way as dmarc. Does the URL match the DMARC sender? Cool, that&#x27;s a really good sign. Is the URL going through a shortener or other tracking system? In that case, there&#x27;s probably a lot more risk involved. In order to bypass filters, shorteners will link to something safe and then change the redirect target after successful delivery. Reputation scores need to be tracked on shorteners based on immutability of links and responsiveness to abuse take downs. If they don&#x27;t, then those services should generate a giant warning in the email client and potentially even have the link disabled in the message.<p>Phishing sites themselves are all over the place and working with hosting abuse teams to take them down is a gargantuan task. Working with a shortener who&#x27;s linking to it to take it down would prevent every recipient of the message from being duped.<p>That&#x27;s the high level. The standards are needed and should be applied across every email client vendor, from Thunderbird to Gmail to Outlook&#x2F;365 to Fastmail to Apple. IMO Thunderbird has an opportunity to lead the charge here and become a force that protects people from phishing at the point of consumption, regardless of the rules on the mail server itself.

New article on Ars Technica about plans for a new UI in Thunderbird.<p>“Mozilla plans ground-up UI redesign for Thunderbird email client this July” <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2023&#x2F;02&#x2F;mozilla-plans-ground-up-ui-redesign-for-thunderbird-email-client-this-july&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2023&#x2F;02&#x2F;mozilla-plans-ground...</a>

It would be nice if they could work with Proton to get an integrated mail&#x2F;calendar solution in place. Not a huge fan of the daemon I have to run to sync Thunderbird with Protonmail.

If the whole thing is such a big, crumbling Lego tower, and it&#x27;s going to take three years just to fix the problems it has now, this doesn&#x27;t seem like a compelling argument to keep using it. Surely at some point it must be easier to abandon it and start over - obviously that won&#x27;t just solve all problems, but there must be a line where the cost of maintaining the current thing outweighs the cost of a rewrite.

My biggest issue with Thunderbird is the Quick filter search I have thousands of emails in one folder and it can block the UI for a while when making a basic search :-( . And it&#x27;s also not correct, it won&#x27;t show all the results, so I have to resort to using the real search which is clunky to use on a daily basis. If only they could fix this ! The UI is great already, it doesn&#x27;t need much work

I&#x27;m actually happy with this news, looking forward to see the first stable version. The new calendar looks neat, haven&#x27;t see the inbox yet. Things that is not clear is how big the difference architecture wise and especially with the UI rebuild they have chance to implement new approach. I really expect this bring smoother interaction, hopefully the UX remains familiar.

Seperate inner shenanigans (yes, I said shenanigans!) from presentation. Allows for skins, easier changes to appearance, etc.

We should pay very close attention to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nostr-protocol&#x2F;nostr">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nostr-protocol&#x2F;nostr</a> as I think the future of app development is letting multiple clients implement their own custom UI layers on top of a shared core.

I use Thunderbird and I like it, but I keep wondering: shouldn&#x27;t there be a way to store all email in Postgres locally, instead of on the filesystem? It just seems like it would be a great idea. I can see lots of pros and cons, but I feel like the pros would easily outweigh the cons for someone who uses Postgres often.

Tip to Thunderbird: dont block the UI thread when doing net requests. I’ll waive the consulting fee for that one.

T-Bird is still my primary email app on my Mac. Apple&#x27;s &quot;Mail&quot; app fine too but it&#x27;s great to see the T-Bird team is willing to modernize it with a complete rewrite.<p>The last T-Bird update was really pretty good considering the old code they were working with so I&#x27;m excited to see them take this path.

Nowadays all my emails are from the browser(gmail,outlook,etc), I used to be a thunderbird user and liked it, just wonder if the &#x27;traditional&#x27; email client user base will be further in decline? To me the browser is the thunderbird, not as powerful, but good enough for normal use.

I welcome efforts to try and improve it. Frankly, between the Thunderbird search being bad and the inability to configure server-side Gmail filters in the client, I find myself using it less and less despite being a loyal user for I don&#x27;t know how many years now.

“Thunderbird is literally a bunch of code running on top of Firefox. All the tabs and sections you see in our applications are just browser tabs with a custom user interface.”<p>Interesting, I have been using it this whole time and I never noticed this.

I pray the UI will be modifiable so we can fix the for certain upcoming use of trends of mobile designs on desktop with margins wider than a football fields and useful functionality hidden&#x2F;removed &quot;because of simplicity&quot;.

Everyone complaining about performance should try this:<p>Compact the folders. If still slow, vacuum the sqlites. Still slow? Do a FS checkup, may have corruption.<p>I put this in my cleanup script. Don’t know why they don’t do it automatically after each upgrade to new version?

i really can&#x27;t think of anything that is a problem for me with the current thunderbird. Works stably for me, makes enough sense as to how it works, and has whatever features i need. Not sure what all the fuss is about.

I still remember the glory days of Thunderbird, good times.<p>I&#x27;m not holding my hopes up, internet history has proved that 2nd systems rarely make it, but as long as they don&#x27;t change the badass logo, I wish &#x27;em luck.

I am a Linux user, and I gave on Thunderbird due to terrible Exchange support - now I use Evolution, it has its own problems but my calendar is synced.<p>P.S. No my choice to use Exchange on the server side.

I really love emClient, but it’s proprietary, there are no plugins and no Linux version (only windows&#x2F;mac). There is a free version though, that doesn’t come with a lot of restrictions.

The Thunderbird UI evolved to be everything for every use case, and therefore nothing to everyone. A coherent, opinionated subset of UI features (and keybindings) would be really welcome.

thunderbird looks and acts exactly like how I want it to

&gt;We’re Rebuilding The Thunderbird Interface From Scratch Again!? Make Thunderbird work with Outlook&#x2F;Exchange without paid plugins ffs...

I&#x27;m excited for the rebuild, glad to hear things are moving well. Looking forward to checking out when available.

I remember (perhaps incorrectly) using Thunderbird and then reading it was no longer supported and to move away.

GUI: Claws Mail&#x2F;Sylpheed<p>TUI: mbsync+msmtp+Mutt+Maildir

Must adopt material design. Amiright?

I think non-webmail has been more trouble than it&#x27;s worth for some time now.

I find the way this guy says &quot;rep-uh-ZIT-ur-ree&quot; very mellifluous

Thunderbird 2 was nice. After that they just made it worse and worse.

It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the Electron again.

it&#x27;s not Thunderbird, but Seamonkey is like the old Netscape Communicator, with an integrated full &quot;unixy&quot; email client MUA. It&#x27;s very old school.

Long live Thunderbird

Outlook UI sucks, but searching feature is better.<p>Long live Thunderbird

someone please tells me what is special about thunderbird as a mail client, other than nostalgia? Why does it keep showing up on HN?

Are there any companies using local, open source email clients, or just tech enthusiasts?<p>It&#x27;s not 2005 anymore, the world doesn&#x27;t need your little message reader.

Neat, I&#x27;m looking forward to it.

i hope they will make it better, though I expect they will make it worse. much worse.

Uhg. This is the exact opposite of what direction I want from Thunderbird. I want it to remain stable. I want it to remain looking like an email client I run on my native OS. I do not want giant white-space webshit design and an entire rebuild that makes all my extensions and well trained spam detection .dat unusable.<p>Please stop changing things just to change. Thunderbird works.

So much negativity in this thread, jeez.<p>I love current Thunderbird but it undeniably has its issues. Firstly, of course this is subjective, but its UI is starting to look dated. Lots of you are complaining about modern UIs, but I think the designs [0][1] look great and are much more readable than the current design, which looks straight out of Ubuntu 8.04.<p>Then there are some major UX issues, the most obvious one being the lack of conversation view, which is how pretty much everybody expects an email client to work in 2023. Supernova implementing that is reason enough to be excited about the release.<p>I can&#x27;t wait to try it out - keep up the awesome work, team!<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.thunderbird.net&#x2F;planning&#x2F;roadmap" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.thunderbird.net&#x2F;planning&#x2F;roadmap</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.thunderbird.net&#x2F;2022&#x2F;11&#x2F;thunderbird-supernova-preview-the-new-calendar-design&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.thunderbird.net&#x2F;2022&#x2F;11&#x2F;thunderbird-supernova-p...</a>

email &quot;protocol&quot; is clunky and old AF. no need to build an email client for the 21st century when everything underneath it a donkey pulling a cart full of rotten fish. stmp&#x2F;pop&#x2F;imap and all the dkip.. is pure crap. we need to overhaul the entire email&#x2F;messaging delivery system. not just the face of it.

dear Mozilla, no matter what you do to the UI, it will not make the general population interested in your products. you&#x27;re just pissing your Google cash away while also pissing off the only userbase you have - powerusers

I&#x27;m still using Thunderbird v11.0 and I have no plans of upgrading my install or even installing anything newer for a fresh install.<p>It&#x27;s motherfucking email, for fuck&#x27;s sake. That shit hasn&#x27;t changed in the past 3 decades, let alone every fucking month. What the fuck is a Thunderbird 102 anyway? I don&#x27;t need nor want a client that changes under my foot every god damn month, much less multiple UI redesigns that force me to relearn everything just to fucking read and fucking write my fucking emails.<p>If or when Thunderbird stops running on some version of Windows in the farflung future, I will probably find some other client worth my time and migrate to that; not Thunderbird version 348719 or whatever it&#x27;s up to at that point.