As a lot of people in this thread advise against Thunderbird, what do you recommend instead (preferably for Windows as I am stuck on that)?
I still use Thunderbird but on my Linux system that I just set up I would like to try something else. Some options appear in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/software/comments/17r3twi/best_wind... If you’re doing a new install and are generally fine with Thunderbird, Betterbird is a good option. It has additional good stuff that Thunderbird is lacking or took longer to get implemented/fixed. What I don’t like ab…
Help Keep Thunderbird Alive
321–330 of 403 posts
Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive
#322Launching Thundermail this year (an email service) which we hope to help provide even more funds for development, beyond just donations. Also serving a user need (lots of our users ask us to help them get off Gmail).
Lots of interest in how the money is spent - answer: mostly on devs, landed Exchange support recently (big for a lot of MS users), working on Graph support as well, JMAP after that. Updating the calendar (primarily UX/UI there), continuing to improve our Android app, working on a native iOS app and the aforementioned Thundermail service.
We publish yearly reports and will publish one again this year detailing all this.
Here is a 2025 recap: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/12/thunderbird-2025-review...
But the blog has a ton of updates across the different efforts: https://blog.thunderbird.net
Happy to answer questions and we are an open source project so feel free to reach out to us and engage if you really want to see how the sausage is made!
*Edit: More context on what Thunderbird Council is*
Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive
#323> We don’t have corporate funding I thought you were owned by Mozilla? A corporation that has over half a billion dollars in yearly revenue? If they decided to allocate zero funding to you, wouldn't it be vastly more effective to start some sort of campaign/movement (either internal or external) to get that funding back, or to entirely fork and leave Mozilla to be your own independent project, than to ask for random…
MZLA, which I lead, receives only money via donations from donors. We are a for-profit because the IRS is very skeptical of nonprofits who develop FOSS software (someone down below linked to a bunch of great links on this topic). We, do, however publish tons of information on what we are doing on our blog, and we are open source and a community run project, so if you really want to go deep on this - come join us in making Thunderbird.
Great links:
Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive
#324Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive
#325CEO of MZLA (the Mozilla entity that develops Thunderbird). One point of clarification, we don't get money from any source but our donors. After years of funding issues, MZLA was created by the Mozilla Foundation and the Thunderbird Council (our community governance body), to provide a legal/financial home for Thunderbird. Launching Thundermail this year (an email service) which we hope to help provide even more fund…
Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive
#326CEO of MZLA (the Mozilla entity that develops Thunderbird). One point of clarification, we don't get money from any source but our donors. After years of funding issues, MZLA was created by the Mozilla Foundation and the Thunderbird Council (our community governance body), to provide a legal/financial home for Thunderbird. Launching Thundermail this year (an email service) which we hope to help provide even more fund…
With "Graph support" you mean "Microsoft Graph API"?
Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thunderbird of now is more annoying and less convenient to use than when I last time used it in 2010's, before I moved to claws-mail. And only reason using it now is cos of MS fucked up oauth2 method that is PITA to setup for any other OSS client as it requires the app to be added to their catalog and only thunderbird was big enough to get that So I can understand the annoyance
To be honest while I’m not the biggest fan of Thunderbird I struggle to understand how this is true by any measure. The program is pretty much the same as it was in 2010 from a UI standpoint. My biggest complaints with it are that the profile configuration is not portable, and that the UI is too cluttered with features. I just want something simple that does all the important stuff and remains somewhat powerful.
So thunderbird have 2 search bars, one on top, other in directory itself. The top one does what I'd expect browser search bar do, opens new tab and search everywhere, the bottom, again, inside a directory listing, I expect to search within directory.
If you type text, it does that, filtering messages in current view
If you type text and press enter, it does exact same thing the top one does, searchs everywhere, instead of the fucking directory I explicitly clicked and navigated to the other search bar
But fine, that's a quirk, you can get used to it... if not for how bad the opened search window is.
You get a list of messages where there is just enough text to not know whether you care about content of the message and whole thing fits like 4 mails (I get hundreds a day from various system stuff of hundreds of servers) and the ENTIRE RIGHT SIDE is empty and unused, and as it defaults to showing all mail, not mail in directory I was in, it's mostly useless. It also only shows last part of the path, not the whole dir mail is so instead of / dir you just get B
BUT WAIT THERE IS MORE. THEY MADE BETTER VIEW!
Just click on "Show results as list". Its just a list with a browser, same you get with normal directory browsing. It still wasted space, but it's at least usable
Let me just use the search to narrow down the list.... oh, it for some reason stopped searching in message bodies despise "body" option being selected and the same setting working in "main" directory search... and guess what enter does ? Of course, contrary to all good UI/UX design, it will run another tab with search that forgot your original query so when you might think you could narrow it down, nope
Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most recent report/breakdown I see: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-...
It is not my domain, but I was quite surprised at the 10% processing fee expense. That’s ~$1M at their ~$10 income. Isn’t that quite a bit high? Or am I looking at something incorrectly. Maybe someone has some suggestions for them on how to lower that amount.
Although it could be higher if a lot of donations are small, and hitting the minimum transaction fees. The average could also be brought up if donations are made through the play or apple app stores, which have much higher takes.
Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive
#329CEO of MZLA (the Mozilla entity that develops Thunderbird). One point of clarification, we don't get money from any source but our donors. After years of funding issues, MZLA was created by the Mozilla Foundation and the Thunderbird Council (our community governance body), to provide a legal/financial home for Thunderbird. Launching Thundermail this year (an email service) which we hope to help provide even more fund…
Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive
#330CEO of MZLA (the Mozilla entity that develops Thunderbird). One point of clarification, we don't get money from any source but our donors. After years of funding issues, MZLA was created by the Mozilla Foundation and the Thunderbird Council (our community governance body), to provide a legal/financial home for Thunderbird. Launching Thundermail this year (an email service) which we hope to help provide even more fund…
Excited about Thundermail!