Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”
279 comments
·July 7, 2025fouronnes3
davidmurdoch
I too think they should drop everything else and work on this bug. But an example of how these kinds of bugs are tricky:
I have a similar bug at my job: Sometimes browsers delete our extension's database, or otherwise corrupt it. It's been an issue for years, but no one has been able to reproduce it. It's probably a 1 in 10 million bug.
I think it's a hardware bug. My "fix" was to backup a small, but key, part of the database to a separate storage mechanism browsers let us access. When the issue arises we can now try to detect the missing data and restore part of the db.
BUT! If this is actually a hardware bug, there is a chance that this additional database write will cause this big to occur even more often, as we now have to write to storage twice as often!
Springtime
> Sometimes browsers delete our extension's database ... but no one has been able to reproduce it.
Are any of the bug reporters using Vivaldi? As for some reason that browser allows (and enables by default) clearing extension storage when clearing history/cookies via Delete Browsing Data.
This is something the Stylus addon dev noted when a user was reporting the addon wasn't remembering their settings and it was because the user had unwittingly wiped the extension storage due to the browser defaults.
(I actually use Vivaldi myself but virtually never use that feature so was unaware of the behavior until reading about the bug report)
davidmurdoch
"Delete" was an over simplification. The database seems to be there, but the data isn't. Dozens of engineers over the years have tried to find a way we could have accidentally cleared the data, but not the keys.
No user that has reported it has been willing to share their database with us (chrome stores it in a standard leveldb), as it contains private information.
But good to know that about Vivaldi! I didn't know that before, thanks!
Nition
Thanks for linking that. I've tried Thunderbird a couple of times in the past and quite liked it, but that thread has put me off using it forever.
Even if the bug is fiendishly hard to track down and reproduce, you'd think there would be some additional safety checks they could add that would at least let it fail with an error message instead of actual data loss.
ghosty141
Its not unlikely that similar problems exist with other mail programs but since they are closed source you dont see it
saurik
People would still complain about them on forums, often ones run by the company who makes the client! I'm often reading threads of issues on Apple's public support forums. Being open or closed source has nothing to do with hearing about problems.
godelski
> you'd think there would be some additional safety checks they could add that would at least let it fail with an error message instead of actual data loss.
I think you've just made an assumption about a bug that was reported 17 years ago. Assuming nothing has been done since. It looks like they can't reproduce it, *making it impossible to mark as fixed* even if it was. But I wouldn't assume nothing was done.
Also remember that Gmail, Outlook, and others are in play here. They also maintain trashed items for 30 days, making it easy to recover. As the provider, they shouldn't make it easy to mass delete things either, right? TB is just the interface, frankly, I'm not sure I know how to permanently delete emails with it. I'm not sure I can. But the interaction here should result in multiple lines of defense.
Nition
It's not just one report from 17 years ago, it's 194 comments with the most recent one from nine months ago. It doesn't seem like mitigation steps have been implemented.
thaumasiotes
See, you don't understand. Fixing the bug before reproducing it would violate the process.
jraph
Well, I do think the thundebird team should investigate and fix this. But it is almost impossible to fix a bug you can't reproduce and have no clue why it might be happening.
a0123
How do you fix a bug you can't reproduce?
It's a genuine question because I'm puzzled here.
A very small number of users have this bug (and tbf, it's a really bad bug), and are unable to consistently reproduce it and it seems none of the developers have been able to (the seemingly random nature of the bug occurring is not helping). How is it supposed to be fixed?
godelski
I'm rather surprised by the comments responding to this. A bit by the comment itself.
Why I'm surprised is... well... this is HN. We know that a bug like this is very rare, right? I mean otherwise who would ever use TB, right? But if it's rare, it's really hard to track down. There years of comments without people including system information. The reproduction steps themselves are "sometimes." It's HN, so we can assume users here program, right? How would you solve this use?
FWIW, I've used TB on Linux and OSX for years and never faced an issue like this. The only one I've faced is sometimes not being able to connect to the server and having to resend an email.
On the other hand, when using Apple Mail:
- messages routinely doesn't show me messages I can see in TB.
- Frequently sending messages from my phone doesn't go through or ends up double sending.
- Searching will pull up emails from a year ago, prioritizing them over the email I got this week and was actually looking for (e.g. searching foo@bar.com).
- I can't even tag emails!?!?
- Do filters even work? Holy cow how do people live without filters!? How do you deal with spam? How do you deal with all those noisy needless messages and newsletter type of stuff that won't let you unsubscribe or comes from domains or addresses you can't block because emails you need come from the same addresses?
- It straight up renders PDFs inline with no warning, helping spammers.
- There's no folders and everything is just all jumbled together in a mess. How does anyone find anything?
I know these problems aren't on all platforms but TB IME has saved me a ton of time compared to using Gmail, Outlook, or Apple Mail. Hell, fucking Neomutt is a better experience than those three, which is insane. Trying to use them is like trying to use the internet without an ad blocker. How are we so bad at email?
Jaxan
Oof that is bad.
> How is it not top 1 priority to fix it?
Maybe because it is very rare? I have been using thunderbird for 10 years now on various OSes and never had issues.
Yizahi
It's like a car whose engine randomly shuts down with a very low reproduction rate. Except with cars when this happened GM has recalled 30 million cars and paid billions of fines.
Emails to email client is an engine to the car. It is pointless without one and it is THE purpose of it. All the rest of functionality like fancy UI, filter, notifications, editor is meaningless if your emails were deleted without recovery. Even car without engine is more useful than email client with empty DB.
II2II
The big difference is a car with an engine that randomly shuts down is a life-and-limb safety issue. An email client that corrupts the database is extremely unlikely to cause a loss of life, even if the consequences are costly.
That said, even if the bug is impossible to isolate, it sounds like the chain of events that leads to it is known. They probably should disable the feature until someone is motivated to fix or replace the code. I'm sure that would anger a lot of people, but someone angry about the loss of a feature is probably better than someone who is angry at the loss of data. Especially given that the feature seems to be something someone would use to archive their mail.
Xss3
That may be but i immediately uninstalled Thunderbird from all my devices upon seeing that its low priority and unassigned.
I wont be using any email client that can break and delete all my emails from local and the server. Why would i? It may be a lottery but it isnt one i want to play.
The fact that they see this as low priority shows theyre morons.
Who would say 'yes please' to an email client that might permanently destroy some of your most important data at random?
Xss3
When i say they're morons, i mean it in terms of them not understanding the reputational and trust damage this can cause, via the thread, the low priority, lack of assignment, or word of mouth.
Far too focused on the engineering POV than the optics and trust/reputation damage. My kind of moronic, but still moronic.
BiteCode_dev
It happens to me regularly. You can fix it by redownloading the message from the server using the "repair folder" feature, and I have backup, but it IS infuriating.
I have no good alternative to thunderbird, it does so much of what I want. But this bug is awful.
severino
> You can fix it by redownloading the message from the server
But OP said it also deletes the message in the server, so it may be a different bug, right?
krastanov
I have the same infuriating issue. Still using thunderbird because of principles, etc, etc.
But this does seem to be a different issue from the one OP mentioned. Seems to be actually this one: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/thunderbird-searc... (with suggested solution)
atoav
I have been using TB on all operating systems with 8 or 9 users since 2006 and I never even once encountered this issue.
As a software developer fixing stuff like this is only possible if you can reproduce it or otherwise get logs, telemetry and similar things, otherwise it is pretty much just guesswork.
Granted given the severity of the consequences I would've chosen a more defensive move-strategy (e.g. one that deletes mails only once they have been copied verifiably), but that would have significant performance impacts in the 99.99% of cases where it works, so finding the real problem is preferable.
The truth is that if this happens to you regularly, that you are probably the prime person to gather more data on this. Call it giving back to Open Source software.
ahofmann
Oh, wow. When I have to use Thunderbird, I never move emails. I manually copy emails to a folder and delete the emails from the old folder after that. I forgot why I have to do this. Now I know again. A lot of people here are speculating that this bug must be very rare. I maintained like 30 Thunderbird installations for other people. This bug bit me at least twice. It can't be that rare.
miles
> On a several occasions (most recently today), Thunderbird has "lost" my mail messages that are in my inbox when I move them to a local folder. Effectively it corrupts the messages - they appear in the local folder as 1 KB messages with no subject or sender info. They are empty messages.
Apple's Mail app has had a virtually identical bug since Catalina; Michael Tsai's article on the issue currently has 636 comments:
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/11/mail-data-loss-in-macos-1...
After witnessing the bug myself, migrated to Thunderbird with Maildir enabled[1] for long-term storage; have yet to experience the issue despite a large database (>300,000 emails) and daily IMAP import to local folders.
[1] https://tinyapps.org/blog/202207100700_thunderbird_mbox_to_m...
Imustaskforhelp
I do hope that Thunderbird really fixes this issue really.
It really is just bad rep and like the severity of this is pretty bad.
Email is a really critical protocol so even if this is happening to only some people, it should still be fixed asap.
thundarr
Because it has to be reproducible. Help make it reproducible and show that to the developers.
CJefferson
How about this bug, which I submitted 13 years ago and still isn't fixed. You can't search for "wedding" : https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=752844
I've been amazed over the years this has never been fixed -- it's very hard not to make jokes about the standard lifestyle of open-source programmers, that they don't consider this a priority (note: that's a joke, I consider myself an open-source programmer. I would hope that's obvious, but someone just bothered to sent me a mean anonymous message)
_flux
Indeed most of the time I already know the exact word I'm looking for; and most of the time I get non-exact hits making it so much more difficult to find the actual message.
Perhaps there could be an option to disable stemming completely from the inverted index, which would be probably easier to implement than a post-search filter (which in itself doesn't sound very complicated..).
But of course, it's open source, anyone could contribute :D.
bartread
I don't know why you're getting downvoted for this. That seems like a pretty frustrating bug when generalised to other word stems. It's also pretty standard to prioritise exact matches when ordering search results so, again, frustrating.
One of my biggest bugbears with Microsoft Outlook has always been that its search function is terrible. If you can't find an email then it may as well not exist, and that's been a real problem on a regular basis during my career - particularly latterly when I was in leadership and necessarily lived in my email and calendar.
It's disappointing that Thunderbird has similar issues with such a fundamental function.
godelski
That is annoying. I wish I could advance search or better, use regex. Luckily there are plugins.
Worse though, in Apple Mail I'll search an email address because I got an email earlier in the week and the first thing it'll show me is an email I got from that person 3 years ago with the correct result a few down. I really need a better email client for my phone...
thundarr
The filter/search feature in Thunderbird does not appear to have a way to search for exact matches. You want exact matches. First, identify if it can do exact matches and if so, expose to the user. Else, who wants to touch that code?
humanfromearth9
[flagged]
smokel
Nitpick: not all bugs have to be reproducible to be taken seriously. Defensive programming, and adding extra logging could be a mitigation to avoid future problems, or to help fixing them in the future.
sonthonax
Yeah, parent comment is deeply unserious.
Imagine you're writing trading software, you have an algo go haywire and it machine guns the whole order book, and then you refuse to put a "max order size" outside of the algo to stop it from happening again because you can't figure out why it happened in the first place.
Try telling a regulator or your boss that was your reasoning.
mrweasel
Kinda off topic, but I've been searching for good introduction and best practises for defensive programming, but never really found much. Any recommendations?
thundarr
That specific bug needs reproducible steps. How would you try to work it out if it does not happen on your setup?
a0123
How do you fix a bug you can't reproduce?
nehal3m
Hard to do when all your data is chilling in oblivion.
thundarr
You can take snapshots of the VM with the mail server. When the bug happens, identify the snapshot. Bingo.
bestham
It doesn’t have to be reproduce with real data.
null
jajko
No it doesn't. If I waited every time for obscure production issue to be reproduced in lower envs I would be fired... many times for clear and obvious incompetence.
Sometimes, you can add some additional steps, logging, change behavior in corner case a bit, either to get more understanding next time it happens or even mitigate it. Sometimes, you have plenty of tools and ways to act. In my experience, that sometimes is basically always if one cares enough.
BiteCode_dev
We don't know how to make it reproducible.
What developers should do on such a critical and long standing issue is to offer an extension that victims can install to volunteer to track the bug. So they can click a button when things are fine to take a snapshot, and click another one when they encounter it.
I would install that and be part of the solution.
bartread
If it was me running the project there's enough information in that thread to piece together an exploratory testing plan around the issue that might allow us to isolate it, and I'd set aside some time for the team to do that.
Whilst obviously not lethal, this Thunderbird bug sort of reminds me of the Therac-25 incidents in the 1980s. Very occasionally the machine would give patients massive overdoses of radiation. This bug wasn't easy to reproduce (thankfully) and turned out to be due to a race condition.
But of course, you can't find a problem if you don't investigate, and if it's a serious problem that's been documented then, as engineers, we can't just hide behind non-reproducibility as if it's some sort of magic shield. We have a responsibility to investigate and isolate the problem ourselves. If we don't do that we are effectively washing our hands of our own creations.
berkes
Not only that. Often mitigations can be placed even if the actual bug cannot be reproduced. Like many others in the thread suggested.
I've encountered several impossible to reproduced bugs in the past. And what I (or my team) would then do, is re-architecture (refactor) some pieces of software so that we could reproduce it. Like e.g. better logging, specialized layers/adapters/services, simpler logic, and -above all- better testability.
throwaway81523
Could they just make it not suck? Like the search system falls apart if you have more than a few thousand messages in a folder, not all that many by today's standards. The address book doesn't let you sort the addresses by most recently added, which is important if you reply to craigslist posts which use numeric forwarding addresses. So once you have more than a handful of them the are impossible to tell apart. It automatically makes new archive folders by year (2023, 2024, 2025...) which is kind of nice, except it shows them oldest first instead of newest first, so you have to scroll way down to get to the current year. The progress bar on the bottom looks like there is constantly something going on, and maybe there is, but it never finishes. Messages sometimes fall through cracks so you can't find them in any folder but you can sometimes find them with global search. And on and on. Stop adding new features or messing up the UI further until basic functionality like this works.
bayindirh
> 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
The search is really limited by the storage backend Thunderbird is using. Would really love to see something with full text search support, like sqlite.
bachmeier
My workaround for Thunderbird search is to open the Outlook web client, search for what I need, find it in a fraction of a second, do what I need to do, and close the web client. Terrible "solution" but the only one that works.
justsomehnguy
> Like the search system falls apart if you have more than a few thousand messages in a folder
I'm in the inbox, I see an email with 'word' in the Subject in some of the most recent emails.
I type 'word' in the search box and TB finds some emails from the years ago.
It's even worse if it is 'word and some another word', in this case it doesn't even find anything.
It's like the developers... aren't dogfooding their own product?
Oh, yeah, we do now have TWO search boxes. Because that makes sense. And if you disable the topmost one, there is now 30px of wasted space you cannot reclaim. Because you definitely NEED that hamburger menu on the RIGHT side. On the desktop. On the 4k+ monitor. Riiight.
dreamcompiler
The two search boxes is bizarre. It feels like two rival programmers each wrote a half-baked search feature and rather than management telling them "Unify your two approaches", instead they said "Just throw them both in there and let the user figure out which one they want."
1718627440
There aren't two search boxes. There is a search box in/below the titlebar and a filter for the current folder.
isaachinman
Check out what we're building: https://marcoapp.io
Basically a cross-platform Thunderbird replacement whose sole goal is to "not suck". Full-text search is entirely client side (not via IMAP) and returns results in single-digit ms.
kiririn
>Full-text search is entirely client side (not via IMAP)
Setting up server-side Xapian full-text search and disabling the crap client-side one in Thunderbird was one of the best improvements I made to my email usability. What makes your client-side search better? It's usually not speed I'm looking for, but rather precision, such as double quoted phrases (sorely missing from Thunderbird's client-side search), filtering by a mixture of things, etc.
I wish more clients had an option for server-side-only search (looking at you, iOS Mail.app) and/or had a nice UI for it (ctrl+shift+f dialog in Thunderbird is janky but gets results)
isaachinman
We're using Orama for client-side search, which is best in class as far as we can tell, after quite an extensive period of research.
It is able to use BM25, QPS, or PT15.
We're still playing around with various weights/settings, but have seen fantastic results so far.
What do you mean by "double quoted phrases"? Do you mean the ability to search for an _exact_ term?
NoImmatureAdHom
It needs to be open source. If it's not open source, it's a trap.
encom
>not suck
>web-tech
Pick one.
I couldn't find any info on whether this is FOSS or what license it uses.
throwaway81523
The fastmail web client is actually decent as such things go, and its search works ok. When I have trouble with Thunderbird search I sometimes log into Fastmail and use their web client.
piskov
Why instead of actual screenshots someone would use those abstract things?
clickety_clack
My 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.
ksec
My thought exactly. But I gave up on Mozilla for a long time. So I guess I am not as surprised and raged about it.
ctm92
When 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
wltr
Maybe there’s not enough workforce to do them… /s
blacklion
«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
> 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
> You have to remember that when Gmail was launched it was considerably better than most desktop mail clients at the time.
It was not better for me than old FIDONet GoldEd 2.8x! It didn't (and doesn't) support proper threads, it supports effectively only top-quoting, it didn't (and doesn't) understand mailing lists in any way, it didn't support forward-as-attachment in both ways (now it supports it, though). Its filtering is still much more cumbersome than even Thunderbird one, not to say Sieve, and can be done only from web, but not from Android client. It doesn't support any crypto natively, both PGP or S/MIME.
Their are all features which I'm using daily (maybe, crypto is not daily, but still use sometimes).
Only good thing is labels, which is more flexible than tree folder structure. And, yes, full text search, obviously, as it is Google product.
As far as I remember, Thunderbird was not much worse than it is now, and it is supports most of this (though, quoting was and still is very weak, problem solved in FIDONet in 1990s!).
To be honest, I don't remember what was situation with address book and address autocompletion from it in Thundrbird before GMail, maybe there was none (but I will surprised, as, again, it worked in old TUI-based FIDONet client for DOS and OS/2), but this feature is trivial to implement in desktop app, and it could use LDAP or another centralized directory, not only addresses collected from your mail.
It was better than any web-mail, for sure, but better than desktop client? It is debatable.
1GB of storage is question of hosting, not client.
Update: Add to it modern gmail hate to self-hosting mail domains, and I could say that Google kills email as federated, free, non-vendor-dependent system. It is not surprise to me, of course, but still.
nothrabannosir
How do you do Gmail style threading view in thunderbird ? They changed the game wrt email display and 20 years later I still don’t know how to get thunderbird to do it.
Gmail:
- see all email bodies for a single conversation in one long list , like a DM in a messenger, with smart hiding of quoted text so you only see new content
- in your inbox / archive view, mix both sent and incoming emails in such conversations, so I don’t have to toggle between Sent and INBOX or Archive
I would be happy with just one of these two but I genuinely can’t hack it.
I would personally go as far as to say: any email client which doesn’t do this, is wrong.
CamperBob2
You have to remember that when Gmail was launched it was considerably better than most desktop mail clients at the time.
There was never a time when GMail was better than plain old Outlook, but this is coming from someone to whom IMAP has always seemed like a really terrible solution in search of a nonexistent problem. My email database is important to me, and worth managing locally, as this thread more than adequately demonstrates.
Boss at the time: "You should quit using that old POP3 crap, and switch to IMAP. It's awesome." Boss a half-dozen times over the next few years: "Hey, can you forward me a copy of that email we got from XYZ a couple of years ago?"
dieortin
I don’t see how IMAP would prevent you from having old emails
nosianu
> It is pity, that Google Mail is «good enough» and it killed development of good desktop e-mail clients.
Microsoft Outlook has a very large market share in the business world. There is an old and a new GUI design version, and you can run the app, or use it online.
I don't like the presentation of the individual emails especially, I find the thread-view hard to understand, especially on mobile, but it works. Personally, I would have preferred the older folder presentation designs of 20+ years ago, for me this app is trying to be too clever - in both the old and the new GUI version. However, it is just so very widespread. I have to use it because everybody else in the company uses it.
They support a huge amount of scenarios and edge cases that many businesses now depend on, combined with all the Microsoft server side and infrastructure stuff they have of which the emails are just a very small part now.
blacklion
Outlook is more groupware client, than e-mail. Also, to-quoting only (AFAIK, it is THE place where top-quoting was invented).
Also, when I was forced to use it (to be honest, about 10 years ago) it works terrible with IMAP (as opposite to Exchange) servers.
encom
>Google Mail is «good enough»
I hadn't really used Gmail or Google products much, until I started at my last job, which was balls deep in the ecosystem. I loathed Gmail. One of the worst email "clients" I've used. After toggling a load of stuff in its settings it was usable, but dealing with email was a low point of my work day.
New job is Microsoft based, so Outlook, and I haven't used that in 20 years, so it will be interesting to see how enshittified it has become. I will have to run Windows on my work pc, which I'm not looking forward to.
dieortin
What was so bad about GMail? I’ve worked at some companies that use it and I liked it much more than Outlook.
yakattak
I’ve been using Thunderbird more and more over the past few months. I’m glad it’s finally getting some decent attention. I’m especially curious about the new account management in 140. I couldn’t add my iCloud calendar easily before, hope this rectifies it.
If you haven’t given Thunderbird a shot yet, you should.
nticompass
I've been using a fork of Thunderbird called Betterbird (https://www.betterbird.eu/) on Linux, mostly because I want to be able to minimize it to a systray icon. I know there are extensions like systray-x and birdtray, but I was having issues with these on Wayland. I wonder if this new version of Thunderbird finally added systray support on Linux/Wayland.
kekebo
I 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=...
[1] Should be this one https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/351205
lucasoshiro
> I wonder if this new version of Thunderbird finally added systray
I'm waiting for this feature since when I used Thunderbird in Windows XP. At the time I used the MinimizeToTray addon...
dangus
I won’t switch to BetterBird because the person behind it seems off.
Feels a bit like switching to TempleOS.
gn4d
>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.
null
mardifoufs
Honestly I don't see the Terry vibes. It's just someone who's really, really into email clients lol.
CoolChum
There is no mention of sync functionality. I regularly use 3 different PCs and I cannot sync settings easily. It means I've give up using Thunderbird on all but one of the PCs.
They've also made the usability worse in recent versions and are copying the insanely annoying context menus in Windows 11, which cannot be reverted.
lproven
I covered that and the alternative in my Register piece. You might find that useful.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/09/new_thunderbird_esr_i...
CoolChum
Thank you. I will take a look this evening.
tommica
Sync? Just connect to your accounts on each machine? Or are you using POP3 and want that to sync?
CoolChum
You 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.
dijit
I 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
All I need out of it is a slightly sensible file based config scheme. Syncthing will do the rest.
humanfromearth9
Sync could be implemented using special email and IMAP servers for storage...
ptx
> 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.
perdomon
I have not used Thunderbird in 15 years, but I'm desperate for a decent email client. I've used Spark, Mailspring, Airmail...but I keep coming back to the MacOS Mail app. Any active users of Thunderbird who chose it over the default Mac mail client? Does it have a unified inbox for all your accounts? Dark mode looks neat, at least.
kot-behemoth
macOS 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.
3x35r22m4u
It'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.
perdomon
That'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?
martin82
try Mimestream
beagle3
The only feature I am missing in Thunderbird is “group by sender, sort groups by latest receive date in group”. I don’t remember what client I used that had this (outlook, perhaps?) but for me it works so much better than other arrangements:
You still see all the latest correspondence, but also immediately all previous correspondence from the same sender (if you expand the group) whether or not it’s a reply thread.
weberer
>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
It's incredible that this is only arriving in 2025.
throwaway7402
No thanks. We're still sticking with version 102, the last release before the ruinous "Supernova" redesign which nobody asked for, when it became apparent the project was being abused by "UX" kiddies looking to bloat their Github resumes. We're just thankful that some wiser developer had previously added the "allow-downgrade" option.
jimbosis
(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
(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.
nosioptar
If 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.
I wanted to love Thunderbird, used it for years then a bug [0] literally deleted all my emails. I regularly see updates of people understandably raging on the ticket :( It's a bug that literally deletes user data from both the server and the client without warning. It's been open and confirmed for 17 years straight. It could happen to you. How is it not top 1 priority to fix it?
[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462156