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Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”
- yakattak 1y agoI’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.
- CoolChum 1y agoThere 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.
- tommica 1y agoSync? Just connect to your accounts on each machine? Or are you using POP3 and want that to sync?
- dijit 1y agoI guess they mean that they want their accounts to be synced (setup is annoying tbh), but also things like signatures and so on. I normally just manage it myself and I'm extremely happy to do so, as I consider it like my dotfiles, but I understand where the parent is coming from - settings sync is becoming common. (Chrome is a good example).
- XorNot 1y agoAll I need out of it is a slightly sensible file based config scheme. Syncthing will do the rest.
- CoolChum 1y agoYou need to export the profile and re-import on each machine. If you make any changes on one machine you want to see it reflected on the others. The profile import is a bit iffy and there was some odd issues with downloading profiles over 2GB IIRC, the last time I did it (which was over 2 years ago). There seems to be a lot of focus on features that IMO that I couldn't care less about and some outright stupid UI decisions like the context menus being changed after 20 years for god knows what reasons. The result was that I just gave up and use Thunderbird on one machine and web-mail on all the others. I suspect I will just drop Thunderbird as a result.
- jacklbk 1y agoAlso gave up Thunderbird years ago because of the same reason. Just wanted something stable and chose Spark. Works on every device, not a problem for years.
- lproven 1y agoI covered that and the alternative in my Register piece. You might find that useful. https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/09/new_thunderbird_esr_is_here/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/09/new_thunderbird_esr_i...
- CoolChum 1y agoThank you. I will take a look this evening.
- humanfromearth9 1y agoSync could be implemented using special email and IMAP servers for storage...
- Kenji 1y ago[dead]
- roflmaostc 1y agoSince 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?
- diggan 1y agoThe only thing I noticed from the previous update was that some view settings seemed to have been reset, otherwise no layout issues that I can recall.
- Tepix 1y agoI 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.
- Vinnl 1y agoI'm sure some Thunderbird devs read HN, but if you'd be interested in helping more people with this comment, I'd log it at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Thunderbird&component=Untriaged https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Thunderbi...
- XorNot 1y agoIs 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.
- WhyNotHugo 1y agoAs a workaround, consider using https://github.com/simonrob/email-oauth2-proxy https://github.com/simonrob/email-oauth2-proxy
- piskov 1y agoWhy instead of actual screenshots someone would use those abstract things?
- ctm92 1y agoWhen I see a website advertising a product without actual screenshots, I usually assume the product is absolute garbage. But that's for commercial products normally, not free software like Thunderbird
- ksec 1y agoMy thought exactly. But I gave up on Mozilla for a long time. So I guess I am not as surprised and raged about it.
- clickety_clack 1y agoMy thoughts exactly. I used to use Thunderbird back in the day and I would like to be able to go back to it. I can’t even remember anymore what turned me away at the time. I’m always curious to see how it’s progressing though, and screenshots of a modern UI would probably get me to download.
- wltr 1y agoMaybe there’s not enough workforce to do them… /s
- novoreorx 1y agoIf I see abstract elements on an app's store page or landing page, I immediately close it because I feel that not only is it wasting my time, but it also lacks the confidence to show the actual interface, which probably sucks. Similarly, games that don't show real footage also don't deserve my attention.
- fouronnes3 1y agoI 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 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156
- thundarr 1y agoBecause it has to be reproducible. Help make it reproducible and show that to the developers.
- nehal3m 1y agoHard to do when all your data is chilling in oblivion.
- bestham 1y agoIt doesn’t have to be reproduce with real data.
- nehal3m 1y agoThen the developers can do it
- PetitPrince 1y agoSo you expect the developer to create data ex-nihilo for a bug they don't know how to trigger ?
- nehal3m 1y agoI explicitly do not, which is why my first response spells out that it’s hard to reproduce a bug when all your data is gone. If it is the case that the bug can be reproduced without user data (as suggested by the person I responded to, not me), then the developers should be able to do that better than users can.
- throwaway81523 1y agoCould 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.
- bayindirh 1y ago> 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. My Thunderbird installation tends a 20 year old work mailbox with tens of thousands of messages, and the search works the way I want even though I don't download the messages themselves to save some disk space. If you are using your installation for a very long time, your local caches might have broken at some point, because Thunderbird was bad at that kind of thing, but now it's not. For folder order, I can't tell anything about it, but 13 years of folders are just a wrist-flick distance on a 2K display, and shouldn't be much worse at an 1080p one, either. So, it might be fair criticism, but it's nitpicking. I never experienced "lost messages" for a very long time, and my progress bar is currently sitting empty, despite that installation is handling 5 busy mailboxes. You may need to delete some cache and local MBOX files and restart your Thunderbird, it seems.
- 9cb14c1ec0 1y agoThe search is really limited by the storage backend Thunderbird is using. Would really love to see something with full text search support, like sqlite.
- justsomehnguy 1y ago
- weberer 1y ago>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.
- zerkten 1y agoIt's incredible that this is only arriving in 2025.
- Davidbrcz 1y agoGod, the dark mode change reading is a blessing ! See https://drgrizz.xyz/dark-mode.html https://drgrizz.xyz/dark-mode.html why
- nosioptar 1y ago> So please fellow developers, help spread the darkness to make the world more inclusive. He ought to practice what he preaches. Due to a combo of shitty eyes and dyslexia, I cannot read his site's dark theme without getting a headache.
- dangus 1y agoI’m not sure what you’re asking for that person to fix, it’s just plain text and a plain dark background. You can also read the site in reader mode.
- giingyui 1y agoIf you have astigmatism dark mode is hell. Should be called nausea mode.
- Aachen 1y agoFirst time I hear someone describe nausea from dark mode. Quickly looked astigmatism up on Wikipedia - isn't that something glasses fully correct? I think I've got this as well, but not sure, I've just always had glasses and take whatever they measure to be the best possible lens (Of course I critically evaluate the measurement, like one time I actually couldn't read faraway text with what they were proposing whereas I could with my old glasses. But I don't know the exact values or terms for the different defects, I think my eyes have at least three different issues including something about rotation as astigmatism apparently means) I guess what I'm asking is why you don't have glasses. Are they too expensive in your area, or the defect only very minor so it doesn't impede safety when driving even on highways? (Then I'm surprised you get nauseous though, since I don't when I read anything without glasses, regardless of dark or light mode.) Or if you do have glasses, is this still an issue while wearing them? If so, any idea why?
- evrennetwork 1y ago[flagged]
- nticompass 1y agoI've been using a fork of Thunderbird called Betterbird (https://www.betterbird.eu/ 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.
- kekebo 1y agoI just switched away from it again after it got delisted from nixpkgs due to lack of development[0][1] [0] https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=25.05&from=0&size=50&sort=relevance&type=packages&query=betterbird https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=25.05&from=0&size=... [1] Should be this one https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/351205 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/351205
- gn4d 1y ago>due to lack of development ??? https://github.com/Betterbird/thunderbird-patches/commits/main/ https://github.com/Betterbird/thunderbird-patches/commits/ma...
- markasoftware 1y agothe nixos package is unmaintained; BetterBird itself is fine.
- dangus 1y agoI won’t switch to BetterBird because the person behind it seems off. Feels a bit like switching to TempleOS.
- gn4d 1y ago>Feels a bit like switching to TempleOS. That's... not a bad thing, though? Terry was an extremely competent engineer and programmer who designed his software to be as user-friendly, well-documented, and performant as possible. I have conversed with Jörg, and he is blunt and fair in a good way (code itself is emotionless, after all). And, of course, he is highly competent. I have also conversed with several Mozilla teams, including Thunderbird, and the experiences were universally horrible, as in they lacked core competency. Naturally, YMMV.
- mvdwoord 1y agoI 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.
- mrweasel 1y agoFrom a business user perspective you need more features. From a home user I sort of want to have an even more stripped down email client. Thunderbird does at bit to much for my liking. The UI is a little messy.
- mr_tox 1y agoimpressive how, in 2025, thunderbird is still the best email client on osx
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoThat’s not been my experience, but everybody’s needs are different I suppose.
- abhinavk 1y agoWhat do you use?
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoApple Mail. It covers the bases, doesn’t try to cram too much into a single app, and doesn’t lean into badly aging UI trends. I’ve tried Thunderbird a few times over the years (including post-redesign) and it’s always felt clunky and kinda awkward. Firefox somewhat outgrew that but Thunderbird never did. If I were to use something else, it’d probably be MailMate which is a lot like Apple Mail but with even fewer frills and more optimization.
- AdmiralAsshat 1y agoSo 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.
- globular-toast 1y agoThunderbird 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).
- durakot 1y agoIt really hasn't though, doesn't even have multiple time zone support for events. They really need to fix that.
- tiahura 1y agoAny sense on how JMAP support is coming along?
- pmontra 1y ago> 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.
- throwaway7402 1y agoNo 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.
- nosioptar 1y agoIf you want really old school Thunderbird, Seamonkey's still around. I only use the browser portion, so I can't say how good the email is.
- jimbosis 1y ago(In case you haven't heard of it and it proves helpful to you and/or someone else:) Have you heard of Epyrus? Homepage: http://www.epyrus.org/index.html http://www.epyrus.org/index.html (The download link is easily found there, as well as git repository and forum links.) It's based on UXP (the Unified XUL Platform) and is thus related to the Pale Moon browser (which doesn't bother me). I've been using it on Linux as a way to have an "older Thunderbird" look and feel, e.g., I have real scrollbars, and the "Send" button didn't mysteriously vanish from the Compose window with no way to get it back upon some "from the ground up redesign" upgrade. EDIT: Typographical error, phrasing.
- g105b 1y agoWhenever 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?
- Aachen 1y agoI don't have any of those issues, besides perhaps crashes but the last one must be two years ago (I remember because we're always watching for exploits coming in). Maybe nobody else has these issues you mention either. If you want them to be fixed by the next time you install, have you considered reporting the issue and seeing if there is a volunteer is willing to fix it for you?
- beagle3 1y agoThe 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.
- shmerl 1y agoThinking of trying it, when Mozilla finally fixes the lack of XDG base directory support. There was some recent progress on that old bug.
- blacklion 1y ago«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.
- alberth 1y ago> It is pity, that Google Mail is «good enough» and it killed development of good desktop e-mail clients. You have to remember that when Gmail was launched it was considerably better than most desktop mail clients at the time. It had auto-complete for who you wanted to email (prior you had to manually type their email address). It came with an eye watering amount of storage (1 GB). Worked from any computer (when POP was common and downloaded the emails locally to that desktop computer). And more. So it wasn’t so much that Gmail is “good enough”. It was more like desktop clients saw how much better Gmail was and didn’t think they could compete - also given that Google provided the hosting as well which allowed for tighter integration - something a desktop app alone could ever do. Note: I'm not saying I think Gmail is a great experience. For web, I personally really enjoy Fastmail and for desktop - I surprisingly have grown to like Outlook. What I am saying is that when Gmail was launched, it took a lot of wind out of the sails of desktop mail app creators.
- blacklion 1y ago
- perdomon 1y agoI 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.
- kot-behemoth 1y agomacOS Mail app is still the best native e-mail client in my experience. I have switched to Thunderbird full-time since I switched to Linux. Can confirm it supports unified inbox.
- perdomon 1y agoThat's good to know. The Mail app shortcut keys don't make a lick of sense, but I don't mind that as much as the inability to zoom in on images in a message. No pinch and zoom on an image is diabolical in the MacOS ecosystem. Do you miss anything about Mail now that you're Thunderbird full-time? Anything you prefer in Thunderbird over Mail?
- 3x35r22m4u 1y agoIt'll sound crazy: I've never used Macs, but the IMAP-based client was Outlook Express back in 2005-2010. 100% multi-thread download and synch of folder contents, instantaneous display of messages, super-responsive. I've tried a lot of clients on Windows and Linux and none of them get near the experience I had 20 years ago.
- martin82 1y agotry Mimestream
- ptx 1y ago> 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.
- NoImmatureAdHom 1y agoA friendly public service announcement: From the Inbox screen on Thunderbird, hit Ctrl+Shift+F for a powerful search function
- casenmgreen 1y agoI 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.
- redox99 1y agoI had to stop using Thunderbird because it's just too slow for me. And I have a pretty decent PC.
- Phelinofist 1y agoI 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.
- kyleee 1y agoIt is really rough, I wish it would get some love ( a lot of love actually). There are bugs everywhere
- martin82 1y agoI'm pretty happy with Mimestream on MacOS.