Thunderbird for Android Now Available

Yeah, FairEmail is great. Personally I can't sing its praises enough. I'm thinking of upgrading to Pro for the home screen widgets too.

I also find it surprisingly user friendly, the UI is easy to navigate and the advanced stuff is pretty well communicated e.g. templates and mailbox rules.

> Is there a reason why Mozilla haven't used their position and funding to just hoover up all the most successful open source projects to create a more cohesive ecosystem?

How does this support their mission or make them money? They are rich, but also wasteful with their spendings. So anything has to show value for their Mission. And they are having enough projects of their own, just none which are really working well.

> Surely any addons - like uBlock Origin - which have massive usage should just be baked in to the browser by this point?

uBlock works fine on its own. It's probably better for them to be independent.

> The likes of Nextcloud and Mattermost would also be great additions

Nextcloud and Mattermost have both their own company. Do expect Mozilla to buy them out? Or should they just offer a hosted version with their own branding? What would be the value here?

> create a true rival to Microsoft and Google's offerings.

Mozilla has no real income outside of Google paying for a position in their Browser. And the money they have is far too low to compete with those behemoths in that space.

I'm not sure I want that kind of "conglomeration" in the FOSS space. Sure, there can be benefits to having a behemoth with a lot of resources behind it to support FOSS projects. But it also brings with it various problems of incentives and resource allocation. Managing multiple different software projects within one organisation is something a lot of well-run, for-profit companies struggle to do effectively, I don't think Mozilla would be much better at it.

Also, I personally don't have any issue with Mozilla but a lot of people seem to hate them. I can only imagine all the internet drama that would ensue if they started acquiring projects like LibreOffice and Nextcloud.

I do not know how it is financed, but I would rather have them use these funds to fix desktop version first.

Content advisory: longish rant ahead.

I have 4 email accounts: 2 Gmail, 1 Outlook, and 1 ProtonMail. I also use Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar. The reason I switched to Thunderbird was to manage them all in one uniform UI instead of keeping 6 open tabs.

I tried hard to love it, but after about 6 months, I am ready to give up. The main annoyance is that I cannot see sent and received messages in a single thread. I know this feature is coming soon, but I do not know how long to wait.

The second problem is that Thunderbird’s search, frankly, sucks. For example, while focused on a folder, if I start a search, it doesn't automatically narrow it to that folder; it searches across all my mail. I've noticed that when I need to find something, I open the Gmail web interface.

Finally, there are bugs. Most of them are relatively minor, but combined, they ruin my user experience. There are strange calendar event reminders that will not go away, bugs when event modifications do not sync to the server, and the most bizarre bug: when I reply to my own message, it sets the FROM field to one of the recipients, making it look like I’m faking someone’s email. Sometimes, when I reply to an HTML-heavy message, the editor in my reply starts in white font on a white background, so I cannot see what I’m typing until I change it. Etc.

I do not want to belittle the hard work all the developers put into Thunderbird. It’s a very complex piece of open-source software that does many good things. It just seems to fall a little short.

So, I am seriously contemplating giving up and going back to the web interfaces for my respective email accounts.

> Is there any way to get push notifications instead of polling?

Push support has been there for a long time now. You can enable it on a per-folder basis, check in Manage folders.