9 ms·

There is of course a flood of negative comments... So in the interest of balance I have to say thunderbird is a excellent program. I use it as my daily driver

by roomey 4y ago

There is of course a flood of negative comments... So in the interest of balance I have to say thunderbird is a excellent program. I use it as my daily driver in work and for personal use. It has so many features that puts me, the user, in control that I totally take them for granted until I have to use outlook for something. I use it in a multinational, I used it with exchange and now with office 365. People can complain away but there are many like me who rely on it every single day and it has a real, positive impact on our work lives every single day. Some days are just email client and Web browser, and without thunderbird and Firefox working for me as the user...... I dunno, work would be a lot more frustrating I guess. MASSIVE thanks to all the contributors to thunderbird!

digisign 4y ago
Yer darn tootin'! That's why we don't want it broken.
- Dan_Sylveste 4y ago
  Yes, precisely. I rely on Thunderbird every single day, which is why I froze it at version 60-something (rolling back about four years) after the upgrades kept breaking it and mangling the appearance for me and the other people in my company. It was a lovely mail client. It seems they're repeating all the mistakes that firefox made. Firefox added pocket, everyone disabled it and eventually the feature was removed. Firefox added chat, everybody disabled it and eventually the feature was removed. Now Thunderbird has added chat, that's great. What does it support, Slack? no. Discord? no. Oh. That's not great, then, that's useless. They're intending to jumpstart a chat protocol with a client that's used by like 0.8% of users? Sure. The last update made the context-menus and dropdown-menus white backgrounded menus with literally no border, so you had no way to determine where the menu background ended and the email background started. That was the update that pushed me over the edge and prompted the rollback and push of whatever 60-ish version I chose. My staff need imap and calendaring and consistency. That version delivers. I have absolutely zero interest in playing the 'what spurious UI change will throw my staff into confusion today' game with a basic productivity tool.
  - stryan 4y ago
    >Now Thunderbird has added chat, that's great. What does it support, Slack? no. Discord? no. Oh. That's not great, then, that's useless. They're intending to jumpstart a chat protocol with a client that's used by like 0.8% of users? Sure. Thunderbird has had XMPP and other chat for many, many years now.
    - Dan_Sylveste 4y ago
      Like I said, 0.8% of users. Slack and discord and maybe the MS product are what matter in the chat space. If you're not offering that then the dev resources would probably be better funnelled into bug chasing and UI consistency. 'It supports XMPP' that's great. ICQ support would arguably be more useful.
      - hprotagonist 4y ago
        you realize discord bans people who use third party clients, right?
        Dan_Sylveste 4y ago
        Headless chrome isn't a third party client.
        Shared404 4y ago
        That's the last thing I want in my Mozilla made email client. I'm pretty happy with added Matrix support though, may make me take a look at Thunderbird again in addition to aerc.
        NoraCodes 4y ago
        Yes. It is. It's been confirmed multiple times that even using browser plugins that interact with the Discord client code in any way counts, in their opinion, as a "third party client".
        4y ago
godelski 4y ago
I've tried thunderbird multiple times and the upgrades look good so I'm going to try it again. But there's an issue I haven't ever clearly figured out. How do I integrate gmail properly? I love how much easier it was to setup this time, but how do I get the folders integrated? (Primary, social, promotions, updates, forums) Gmail is already sorting this for me but it is way too much to just view everything all at once. Forums and social are showing up automatically but not the others. Also, I know people use a lot of addons. Are there any that I should look into?
- SkyMarshal 4y ago
  Are you using Thunderbird IMAP to synchronize with Gmail? IMAP lets you select which remote folders you want synchronized on the client. Maybe check your Gmail account in Thunderbird settings, find the IMAP section, and make sure all the Gmail folders you want to sync are enabled.
  - godelski 4y ago
    I am using IMAP. I don't see this option that you're talking about. FWIW, all my custom folders loaded correctly. It is just that don't see that top bar[0], except for social and forums (my least used ones). I also noticed something odd. I closed it and reopened and lost all the info. I didn't install from snap or apt because apt was providing version 92 so I installed manually. I do see ~/.thunderbird (no ~/.config) but seems odd that the info wasn't stored there. This is a big red flag. ~~I also can't find in the settings where to specify the storage location.~~ (found) [0] https://i.imgur.com/AbCEZSm.png https://i.imgur.com/AbCEZSm.png
    - smaudet 4y ago
      The idea to use special filter is a good one, but as others stated the 'top bar' isn't a real thing in email. Maybe some sort of IMAP extension, but it's a bit like asking how to put onenote into a Google doc - you might find some workaround but you are looking at two different things. I don't use those folders, I also don't use a local email client these days...
quasarj 4y ago
You use it with Exchange and Office 365? Does it have built in support now? or are you using a plugin? if so, would you share which one?
- djbusby 4y ago
  Works with plain IMAP, right? I do it this way (that is, access those mail services)
  - quasarj 4y ago
    I just looked into that; it does, but only if my mail admin has enabled it :(
    - Zardoz84 4y ago
      ask it
    - andrem 4y ago
      You can bypass that with running a local instance of davmail - https://github.com/mguessan/davmail https://github.com/mguessan/davmail It works really well if you are comfortable on the command line to get it running.
- danmur 4y ago
  I use this one and can definitely recommend it: https://www.beonex.com/owl/ https://www.beonex.com/owl/ Works very well, calendar too
  - zelphirkalt 4y ago
    The plugin worked well for some time for me, but support is really bad. I once had an issue, where the OWA page would require me to log in again, but of course they f'ed up their login to require JS and that JS did not run in Thunderbird (does any?). The plugin then only showed me the login page. When I contacted them, I basically got a shoulder shrugg as an answer, close to "Ah that's bad for you.". Then a while ago my e-mail account in Thunderbird simply disappeared and I still have no idea why and am assuming the plugin had a bug, which deleted the account from my Thunderbird. Haven't put any effort in yet to get it back working and am using IMAP, unable to confirm calendar events and such, because Outlook also wont load in Firefox for me. Good job ...
LinuxBender 4y ago
I too have enjoyed Thunderbird for a long time. It's lightweight and fast which is a big plus for me. It makes showing people how to encrypt their emails very easy. The only thing missing and there is probably an addon for this is a sync with Fastmail's aliases and sending identities to give it the same composing pull-down as their web interface. I sometimes forget to manually set the "From:" to the correct alias.
- littlestymaar 4y ago
  I've been using Thunderbird since 2009 and while I really like it, I wouldn't call it lightweight and fast: it's pretty slow to start, takes quite a lot of memory and the search feature is really slow. It's an excellent piece of software no matter what and I'm not sure you can do a much faster and lightweight email client anyway, because it basically needs to be a web browser to render HTML emails properly (but I'm pretty sure the search feature could be an order of magnitude faster)
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    After dropping all caches on my system, Thunderbird 102 starts in 3 seconds flat. Yes it's not lightning fast, but it's loading my office e-mails which contains 15 years of e-mails at this point. Search is generally instantaneous on my system, including my work mails. Maybe you need to repair your index or something? On the RAM department it's using ~750MB of memory, which is not low in any means, but considering the mail volume it's handling, it's acceptable for me.
    - spopejoy 4y ago
      How is 3 seconds slow? Gmail web client takes more than three seconds these days. Thunderbird performance has never been an issue for me, except for one issue where it occasionally starts chewing CPU when syncing my monster inbox. This issue to be fair has become very rare in the last two years.
      - bayindirh 4y ago
tommica 4y ago
Yep, TB is amazing
knadh 4y ago
Thunderbird has been my primary mail client since ~2006. It has been rock solid and fast. Way faster than popular web mail UIs today.
zeruch 4y ago
I'm in the same boat. I have to use Outlook for work, but I use TB for pretty much everything else (and still import my work cal to make sure I have a 'master' view of all my time since I work from home mostly anyway). It's punchy, has decent (not awesome) UX, is easy to set up, and doesn't act like a memory leak with a UI.
- thesuitonym 4y ago
  Check out the Owl plugin. It costs 10 euro per year, but it's great.
ketralnis 4y ago
I host my own email and Thunderbird is my daily driver client. It's great.
- KronisLV 4y ago
  Hah, same, but it's also excellent for integrating with any of the popular e-mail platforms out there (weird custom non-standard folders on some aside) and even acting as a calendar or an RSS reader. My only problem with it is that the UI seems to slow down while all of the e-mails are being fetched, if you have 10-20 accounts or so connected.
smsm42 4y ago
I've been using TB for many years. It's not ideal, but when I've been looking to replace it - I returned to it every time. Much better UX than Outlook. I don't need chats and other stuff though. Maybe better Exchange support (because the corporate world loves it, sigh).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Bellamy 4y ago
Happy user here since beginning 2000.
raffraffraff 4y ago
My wife actually hates gmail and has used Thunderbird as her email UI for years. Recently we ditched Google for her work domain and moved email hosting to another provider. Thunderbird has protected her from that change - she basically didn't notice. The only difference to her is that she's using K-9 on her phone instead of the Gmail app.
- pja 4y ago
  And now K9 is going to become the mobile Thunderbird App, so things will be even more seamless!
  - cutler 4y ago
    How so?
    - leejoramo 4y ago
      Here is the official announcement: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/06/revealed-thunderbird-on-android-plans-k9/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/06/revealed-thunderbird-on...
      - SauciestGNU 4y ago
        Oh wow that's awesome! K9 is the best mobile email client I've used! Congrats to the team!
agumonkey 4y ago
TB has some strange UX decisions IMO, but overall it's pretty nice and I wish Mozillians to keep hacking on it for a long time.
TwoNineFive 4y ago
An emotional need to cancel out complaints is classic toxic positivity. It should be noted that anyone who is complaining is probably a regular user of the application, and as such has decided that they over-all like the application enough to use it.
- roomey 4y ago
  I would ask you to re-read my post please. I posted in the interest of balance, and when I did most of the og comments were negative, the top voted one being from someone who had never installed thunderbird and didn't know how to use a package manager. I was just thinking of the open source contributors who must feel really down getting just negative feedback, hence I hoped to give a bit of balance. Also, there is nothing wrong with emotional needs. The majority of our needs beyond the basic are emotionally driven. I like my emotions ;)

by roomey 4y ago

digisign 4y ago

Yer darn tootin'! That's why we don't want it broken.

Dan_Sylveste 4y ago
Yes, precisely. I rely on Thunderbird every single day, which is why I froze it at version 60-something (rolling back about four years) after the upgrades kept breaking it and mangling the appearance for me and the other people in my company. It was a lovely mail client. It seems they're repeating all the mistakes that firefox made. Firefox added pocket, everyone disabled it and eventually the feature was removed. Firefox added chat, everybody disabled it and eventually the feature was removed. Now Thunderbird has added chat, that's great. What does it support, Slack? no. Discord? no. Oh. That's not great, then, that's useless. They're intending to jumpstart a chat protocol with a client that's used by like 0.8% of users? Sure. The last update made the context-menus and dropdown-menus white backgrounded menus with literally no border, so you had no way to determine where the menu background ended and the email background started. That was the update that pushed me over the edge and prompted the rollback and push of whatever 60-ish version I chose. My staff need imap and calendaring and consistency. That version delivers. I have absolutely zero interest in playing the 'what spurious UI change will throw my staff into confusion today' game with a basic productivity tool.
- stryan 4y ago
  >Now Thunderbird has added chat, that's great. What does it support, Slack? no. Discord? no. Oh. That's not great, then, that's useless. They're intending to jumpstart a chat protocol with a client that's used by like 0.8% of users? Sure. Thunderbird has had XMPP and other chat for many, many years now.
  - Dan_Sylveste 4y ago
    Like I said, 0.8% of users. Slack and discord and maybe the MS product are what matter in the chat space. If you're not offering that then the dev resources would probably be better funnelled into bug chasing and UI consistency. 'It supports XMPP' that's great. ICQ support would arguably be more useful.
    - hprotagonist 4y ago
      you realize discord bans people who use third party clients, right?
      - Dan_Sylveste 4y ago
        Headless chrome isn't a third party client.
        Shared404 4y ago
        That's the last thing I want in my Mozilla made email client. I'm pretty happy with added Matrix support though, may make me take a look at Thunderbird again in addition to aerc.
        NoraCodes 4y ago
        Yes. It is. It's been confirmed multiple times that even using browser plugins that interact with the Discord client code in any way counts, in their opinion, as a "third party client".
      - 4y ago

godelski 4y ago

I've tried thunderbird multiple times and the upgrades look good so I'm going to try it again. But there's an issue I haven't ever clearly figured out. How do I integrate gmail properly? I love how much easier it was to setup this time, but how do I get the folders integrated? (Primary, social, promotions, updates, forums) Gmail is already sorting this for me but it is way too much to just view everything all at once. Forums and social are showing up automatically but not the others. Also, I know people use a lot of addons. Are there any that I should look into?

SkyMarshal 4y ago
Are you using Thunderbird IMAP to synchronize with Gmail? IMAP lets you select which remote folders you want synchronized on the client. Maybe check your Gmail account in Thunderbird settings, find the IMAP section, and make sure all the Gmail folders you want to sync are enabled.
- godelski 4y ago
  I am using IMAP. I don't see this option that you're talking about. FWIW, all my custom folders loaded correctly. It is just that don't see that top bar[0], except for social and forums (my least used ones). I also noticed something odd. I closed it and reopened and lost all the info. I didn't install from snap or apt because apt was providing version 92 so I installed manually. I do see ~/.thunderbird (no ~/.config) but seems odd that the info wasn't stored there. This is a big red flag. ~~I also can't find in the settings where to specify the storage location.~~ (found) [0] https://i.imgur.com/AbCEZSm.png https://i.imgur.com/AbCEZSm.png
  - smaudet 4y ago
    The idea to use special filter is a good one, but as others stated the 'top bar' isn't a real thing in email. Maybe some sort of IMAP extension, but it's a bit like asking how to put onenote into a Google doc - you might find some workaround but you are looking at two different things. I don't use those folders, I also don't use a local email client these days...

quasarj 4y ago

You use it with Exchange and Office 365? Does it have built in support now? or are you using a plugin? if so, would you share which one?

djbusby 4y ago
Works with plain IMAP, right? I do it this way (that is, access those mail services)
- quasarj 4y ago
  I just looked into that; it does, but only if my mail admin has enabled it :(
  - Zardoz84 4y ago
    ask it
  - andrem 4y ago
    You can bypass that with running a local instance of davmail - https://github.com/mguessan/davmail https://github.com/mguessan/davmail It works really well if you are comfortable on the command line to get it running.
danmur 4y ago
I use this one and can definitely recommend it: https://www.beonex.com/owl/ https://www.beonex.com/owl/ Works very well, calendar too
- zelphirkalt 4y ago
  The plugin worked well for some time for me, but support is really bad. I once had an issue, where the OWA page would require me to log in again, but of course they f'ed up their login to require JS and that JS did not run in Thunderbird (does any?). The plugin then only showed me the login page. When I contacted them, I basically got a shoulder shrugg as an answer, close to "Ah that's bad for you.". Then a while ago my e-mail account in Thunderbird simply disappeared and I still have no idea why and am assuming the plugin had a bug, which deleted the account from my Thunderbird. Haven't put any effort in yet to get it back working and am using IMAP, unable to confirm calendar events and such, because Outlook also wont load in Firefox for me. Good job ...

LinuxBender 4y ago

I too have enjoyed Thunderbird for a long time. It's lightweight and fast which is a big plus for me. It makes showing people how to encrypt their emails very easy. The only thing missing and there is probably an addon for this is a sync with Fastmail's aliases and sending identities to give it the same composing pull-down as their web interface. I sometimes forget to manually set the "From:" to the correct alias.

littlestymaar 4y ago
I've been using Thunderbird since 2009 and while I really like it, I wouldn't call it lightweight and fast: it's pretty slow to start, takes quite a lot of memory and the search feature is really slow. It's an excellent piece of software no matter what and I'm not sure you can do a much faster and lightweight email client anyway, because it basically needs to be a web browser to render HTML emails properly (but I'm pretty sure the search feature could be an order of magnitude faster)
- bayindirh 4y ago
  After dropping all caches on my system, Thunderbird 102 starts in 3 seconds flat. Yes it's not lightning fast, but it's loading my office e-mails which contains 15 years of e-mails at this point. Search is generally instantaneous on my system, including my work mails. Maybe you need to repair your index or something? On the RAM department it's using ~750MB of memory, which is not low in any means, but considering the mail volume it's handling, it's acceptable for me.
  - spopejoy 4y ago
    How is 3 seconds slow? Gmail web client takes more than three seconds these days. Thunderbird performance has never been an issue for me, except for one issue where it occasionally starts chewing CPU when syncing my monster inbox. This issue to be fair has become very rare in the last two years.
    - bayindirh 4y ago

tommica 4y ago

Yep, TB is amazing

knadh 4y ago

Thunderbird has been my primary mail client since ~2006. It has been rock solid and fast. Way faster than popular web mail UIs today.

zeruch 4y ago

I'm in the same boat. I have to use Outlook for work, but I use TB for pretty much everything else (and still import my work cal to make sure I have a 'master' view of all my time since I work from home mostly anyway). It's punchy, has decent (not awesome) UX, is easy to set up, and doesn't act like a memory leak with a UI.

thesuitonym 4y ago
Check out the Owl plugin. It costs 10 euro per year, but it's great.

ketralnis 4y ago

I host my own email and Thunderbird is my daily driver client. It's great.

KronisLV 4y ago
Hah, same, but it's also excellent for integrating with any of the popular e-mail platforms out there (weird custom non-standard folders on some aside) and even acting as a calendar or an RSS reader. My only problem with it is that the UI seems to slow down while all of the e-mails are being fetched, if you have 10-20 accounts or so connected.

smsm42 4y ago

I've been using TB for many years. It's not ideal, but when I've been looking to replace it - I returned to it every time. Much better UX than Outlook. I don't need chats and other stuff though. Maybe better Exchange support (because the corporate world loves it, sigh).

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Bellamy 4y ago

Happy user here since beginning 2000.

raffraffraff 4y ago

My wife actually hates gmail and has used Thunderbird as her email UI for years. Recently we ditched Google for her work domain and moved email hosting to another provider. Thunderbird has protected her from that change - she basically didn't notice. The only difference to her is that she's using K-9 on her phone instead of the Gmail app.

pja 4y ago
And now K9 is going to become the mobile Thunderbird App, so things will be even more seamless!
- cutler 4y ago
  How so?
  - leejoramo 4y ago
    Here is the official announcement: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/06/revealed-thunderbird-on-android-plans-k9/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/06/revealed-thunderbird-on...
    - SauciestGNU 4y ago
      Oh wow that's awesome! K9 is the best mobile email client I've used! Congrats to the team!

agumonkey 4y ago

TB has some strange UX decisions IMO, but overall it's pretty nice and I wish Mozillians to keep hacking on it for a long time.

TwoNineFive 4y ago

An emotional need to cancel out complaints is classic toxic positivity. It should be noted that anyone who is complaining is probably a regular user of the application, and as such has decided that they over-all like the application enough to use it.

roomey 4y ago
I would ask you to re-read my post please. I posted in the interest of balance, and when I did most of the og comments were negative, the top voted one being from someone who had never installed thunderbird and didn't know how to use a package manager. I was just thinking of the open source contributors who must feel really down getting just negative feedback, hence I hoped to give a bit of balance. Also, there is nothing wrong with emotional needs. The majority of our needs beyond the basic are emotionally driven. I like my emotions ;)