Use the german Betterbird client instead!
Thunderbird doesn’t belong to Mozilla anymore for a while now, even if they still work together. I will keep to the base which is still thunderbird because for FOSS projects I don’t think it makes that much of a difference for the country of origin.
Thunderbird is far from brilliant, it’s adequate, which is high praise in a sea of absolute vile crap, but it still doesn’t make it brilliant. Its search (a pretty fundamental feature of an email client at least to me) is absolutely god-awful if not completely broken, at least at the scale of mailboxes I have, and this doesn’t seem like an uncommon problem that is limited to just me. I am forced to resort to grep or addons in order to do a proper search of any of my folders with any level of confidence that I am not missing those lovely disappearing messages, since random messages just aren’t indexed in Thunderbird’s search repeatably, and consistently over about a dozen years of using it, only about 50% of my messages get indexed to become searchable despite any amount of folder reorganization and rebuilding of indexes and deleting databases and other frustrating troubleshooting steps it never works properly.
I’ve lately been considering giving up on it entirely and moving to a TUI client for email. I might try Betterbird first to see if it’s actually any better.
Hm so far Thunderbird has been better for searching than anything else that ive tried which honestly isn’t saying much.
mu4e
I started using notmuch for indexing a long time ago. Works for me. I only use thunderbird 2-3 times a year though, otherwise it’s always mutt.
I’m with you on the search, it’s terrible on all platforms.
I found setup quite easy though.
Do you check the box to perform searches on the server? Searching on the server never works for me. As in it takes eleventy three hours.
Note that the maintainer of Betterbird has been permanently banned from the Mozilla community. He even still mentions it in this specific page. There’s not very much more info about this, the only thing that does maybe show their true colors is with issues like this one where he seemingly sent copyright threats privately to other open source projects.
Ah. So betterbird isn’t fully Open Source. Good to know, so I can avoid it in the future
Mmmm. What are some things that make Betterbird better?
Last time I tried it, its main selling point was offering card view for the email list, which Thunderbird later made the default, too.
Last time I tried it it was struggling with authentication and the tray icon (which was one of the features I was looking for) didn’t even show new messages.
I really just use Thunderbird on android. But I regularly still have to open the gmail app to search stuff which is less than helpful
Yes, so so much yes. I do the same and was hoping I just don’t use the search correctly. Feels annoying to just use Gmail for search still.
Isn’t betterbird just thunderbird with some very minor adjustments?
Its more than a soft fork but barely, like they didnt apply a few commits that removed a feature.
I don’t recall exactly.
I tried it but it wasn’t very compelling.
Thunderbird is fine. Email sucks.
edit:
this is the feature comparisson: https://www.betterbird.eu/#featuretable
They are calling it a soft fork because it does closely track upstream releases.
Can I just drop it in and make it work with my current MailDir folders or do I need to do some migration work?
I use Evolution and FairEmail. A fork is all well and good, but if you want out of the bullshit you have to get out of the ecosystem.
Vivaldi browser has email and calendar built in.
It’s not great, but it’s European and 1 app for everything.
Fairmail on Android for my main email client.
For those complaining about Thunderbird’s search… did you raise a ticket? That’s the way to get things improved…
I want M2 back. If Vivaldi’s Mail client is anything like Opera’s M2, I’m all in…
…and it’s build on chromium. Yes, technically chromium is open source. In reality Google is the main (afaik it’s only noticable) contributor so it’s a Google baby. And using something based on chromium strengthens Google’s ability to force or deny web technics. If you don’t want Google to control web development stop using browser build on top of chromium.
In reality you have 2 choices: Use firefox (or some fork) or buy a mac and use safari. Every other browser empowers Google.
3rd choice, use curl and just go full matrix mode on the HTML. “I don’t even see the tags anymore, I just see tracking cookie, javascript bloat, the download URL I am looking for…”
