I came here because of the clickbait title, ready to lambast thunderbird for the empty promises… But it turns out that they’re pretty clear on the specifics of what separates them from Thunderbird.
But I’m not gonna let that righteous indignation go to waste, so instead I’m gonma rip Sourav Rudra('s writing skill) a new one. Prepare your (writing skill’s) ass for a kicking Sourav.
Betterbird: A Thunderbird Fork That Promises Better Features
Better features?! Can I also have updated elements and improved aspects? Maybe superior components too??? Ah. A girl can dream.
Vague buzzwords and nothing more. “Better features” is not only subjective, but also vague enough to be almost entirely meaningless. Let’s hope the rest of the article does better.
Thankfully, the author included a shortlist of “Must-Know Bits.” I’m sure that’s a good summary of what’s to follow.
— Features many long-requested features.
I’m glad they’re finally listening to my request of compatibility with the Lovense remote control vibrator app’s API. Now I can feel good about receiving emails instead of stressed! They sure took their sweet time, it’s been
long[time units] since I requested it!How long and who requested? Or better yet, what features??? Why should I care??? Please, give me somethinbg concrete to grip onto!
— A more streamlined alternative to Thunderbird.
Streamlined! Wow! Is it also more efficient, and higher quality? Will they make it sustainable? Maybe it can also be more ethically sourved.
Could you be more vague please? This almost accidentally told me something about the changes they’ve made.
— Highly customizable, thanks to Add-ons and Themes.
Like Thunderbird? Like the addons you can find at the official Thunderbird site at addons.thunderbird.net?
Do they also plan to send and receive email in betterbird? Will it work with a graphical desktop environment? Will it be computer software? Or does the failure to mention these assumed “features” imply that it will diverge from Thunderbird in these key aspects?
Deeply shit lead-in. The rest of the article stands in stark contrast, being actually specific and informative. It’s like ol Sourav wrote an actually good article, then some idiot editor slapped it in ChatGPT and told it to fart out a title, subtitle, and highlights list. And then ChatGPT ignored all that and made the most generic tech article heading of all time.
FWIW, itsfoss.com: you should fire that editor for being a completely incompetent moron.
The homepage of their website also has a very ‘holier-than-thou’ feel to it, it’s not horrifically bad, but something about how it’s written makes me feel like I’m being preached to by a televangelist.
Direct link to said better features, for the lazy: https://www.betterbird.eu/#featuretable
Im lzy, ty
What fool put a background logo over a non-mobile friendly page?
In any event, this feature set looks nice.
Disclaimer: I haven’t read the article, my rant is entirely based on the title.
[a] Fork That Promises Better Features
Have they released anything yet? Or are we at the project stage, where they’re yelling at their CLI confused about git?
Promises are cheap, releases matter. I mean I could announce a project called Betterfox, promising to bring better features to a well-known browser. But in reality I’m by myself, overly ambitious, and going to leave the github page abandoned after the initial commit.
Disclaimer: I haven’t read the article
A wise choice in this case. It’s 23 paragraphs that mostly describe standard Thunderbird features (as the author usually does not use email clients) and only one list with three (!) bullet points of new features in Betterbird.
Edit: to save you a click, here’s the list from the article (the actual feature list on the project page is longer):
Some notable features include:
- System Tray Icon (Linux)
- Accent Colors (for folders)
- Multi-line Inbox View (disabled by default)
System Tray Icon?!? What is this sourcery?
Sounds so futuristic. I mean I may be stuck in the 70s reading my electronic mail in pine on a pdp11, so that may influence my judgment.
The current beta versions of Thunderbird are implementating a tray icon for linux so soon this fork seems like it’ll only have 2 unique features…
And even with that proviso, I’ve been using birdtray for ages, and it works well enough.
Should I upgrade from elm to pine?
The founder of this project says he created it because of “cancel culture” at Mozilla after he got banned from the thunderbird project for toxic and derogatory conduct. I’m good on that I’d rather stick to thunderbird thanks
Lots of red flags about this project, the website seems to be primarily fixated on pointing out how “bad” Thunderbird is, which isn’t a good look. Thunderbird works fine for me, this seems all a bit toxic.
Too lazy to look it up today maybe later. There has got to be a term for people who just can’t wait to point out whatever they deam as a social injustice to appear right about their choice or signal to others in a feeble attempt at taking the moral high ground. OSS is becoming more and more bogged down by people who spend more time on the politics and whether or not their feelings were hurt rather than the actual utility of the project. This is the equivalent of ‘you offended me and you should feel bad’ when you are the one being offended. Get over it. Stop trying to drag everything through the mud in perpetuity because somebody on the internet hurt your feelings.
Turns out nothing will live up to this standard over that timeline so maybe find a more constructive thing with your time.
Or maybe what you’re seeing is people with principles choosing not to support those who violate them when possible? This project offers little utility over thunderbird and is run by people with shitty and public viewpoints so of course I reject it. I’m trying to support projects that reflect the type of community I want to be a part of, and this isn’t it.
You clearer haven’t even tried the software.
Looking at the linked-from-the-“due to differences”-link emails… jesus christ… so that’s what people mean by Mozilla prioritizing greedy money…
If you read the developer’s background and reasons for the fork, it’s actually a lot more… cringe.
Pretty much, the guy lost his shit because Mozilla is woke / SJW / DEI and all the lovely buzz words used by certain people.
Thanks for sharing this, looked into it myself and that’s quite unfortunate.
Why does every piece of cool software end up having some reactionary midlife crisis behind them?
That would make sense. I’d like some links.
Got that vibe when he said he was ousted by weaponized cancel culture
Ngl that link puts me slightly off. It reads exactly like what people booted for very good reasons say
The following paragraph shows how so-called cancel culture was used weaponising […]
And in the email, Mozilla talks about him violating their “inclusivity” policy… we also don’t know what was reported, only the reasons stated.
Not saying that it wasn’t unjust, just that we only have 1 perspective and it’s written in a way that raises some red flags.
Pretty bad when one side’s perspective makes them look awful and the other side is the one accusing them of being awful 😬
I agree that I’d be very curious as to what the violations actually are, but…
- No specific instances of violations are referenced in the CPG emails
- There’s no language in the CPG emails regarding prior warnings
- Suspension from the council is clearly out-of-process
Mozilla doesn’t do loose coupling of UI and core, huh?
What’s wrong with ThunderBird ?
You haven’t experienced the dreaded freezing bug where it locks up while fetching? To be fair, Betterbird also had this issue last time I tried it.
This doesn’t really seem like something that needed to be done. Thunderbird already has too many features. It needs less, not more. A bunch of stuff in the email client part is also badly designed. That needs fixing, preferably upstream, but I wouldn’t think of that as feature enhancement.
In linux it doesnt have a tray with mail count that sends a notification when new mail arrives. It’s a pretty basic feature nowadays to be honest. It didn’t even have the auto fetch every 30 minutes when I switched!?!! Like Thunderbird expected me to click on the sync button every 30 minutes. That’s not how people use email I’m sorry.
I agree that all those calendar and contacts features are completely unnecessary and that it could integrate with other tools instead, but the main use is lacking.
I use TB under Debian and there is a tray icon and an arrival notification, poll time of maybe a few minutes, seems fine. Showing the # of messages in the tray icon could be sort of handy I guess, though I had never thought about it before and didn’t miss it. Basic features = shut off the “email contains remote content” banner or “spam filter thinks this email is spam” (I can recognize spam for myself). I just want a preference that permanently disables remote content without throwing banners at me. And eliminate the client side spam filtering completely since I have that on the server side, and can manually flag any that gets through. Plus various other stuff like that. Yes, get rid of the calendar and contacts stuff. Biggest feature needing significant code changes: make message search not suck.
Thunderbird definitely does have autosync nowadays. No tray icon, true, but it can send native notifications which isn’t much worse.
And if you need a tray icon, birdtray works well.
I tried it, it was a massive pain in the ass trying to add accounts because they want to use every security mechanism under the sun to secure communications, and I’m using it in a VPN and can’t disable all that shit. You’d think you had it and then the next time you opened it you’re back to putting in passwords and convincing it to run.
Gave up, back to Thunderbird.
deleted by creator
All I want is Microsoft Exchange support (I didn’t choose to need it…)
I think you certainly won’t get that from pretty much one developer. Thunderbird already has experimental support and it is one of their priorities
It‘s coming along in Thunderbird, they continuously mention it in their monthly development blog.
Exchange Web Services support in Rust
November saw an increase in the number of team members contributing to the project and to the number of features shipped! Users on our Daily release channel can help to test newly-released features such as copy and move messages from EWS to another protocol, marking a message as read/unread, and local storage functionality. Keep track of feature delivery here.
If you aren’t already using Daily or Beta, please consider downloading to get early access to new features and fixes, and to help us uncover issues early.
<3
Well, this solves nothing. I don’t really know what’s going on with Thunderbird but it is looking like a piece of crap, the latest UI changes made it worse, a few months after the other revision that was actually much more visually pleasing. Is it that hard to look at what others do instead of adding random boxes everywhere?
Anyways, the worst part is that right now Thunderbird wastes more RAM than RoundCube running inside a browser with the Calendars and Contacts plugins. Makes no sense.
The only reasons I sometime back looked into betterbird was thunderbird breaking TbSync and its companion “Provider for Exchange ActiveSync”, which I really need for work, and because of their tray support (I don’t like the modern way which rejects the benefits of the tray functionality, or notification area which is how it’s also called now a days).
For the first thing, I was able to live with thunderbird by reverting the upgrade and keep its package from upgrading at all, until the two extensions I required eventually supported the new thunderbird version which broke them. I looked into betterbird as an alternative since someone suggested it given betterbird wasn’t moving as fast at that time as thunderbird was, and at that moment they were not breaking the extensions I’m force to use if wanting to use thunderbird as email client at work.
For the tray, ohh well, it doesn’t work on wayland if you don’t use gnome or kde (I use wayfire), so it couldn’t help me at all. I found a bug reported on mozilla (not sure why not also on betterbird) which matches my case, so no luck with their tray support, :(
Other than that I really didn’t find a compelling reason to use betterbird instead of thunderbird. But if I were a gnome or kde user, perhaps its tray support might be compelling enough.
Can it use/open my existing Thunderbird data (mailboxes)?
I had no idea!
Wonder if any of that stuff will make it upstream and if not if there’s good reason?
As per the FAQ:
We will submit all changes to upstream to eventually benefit Thunderbird.
Is there a way to use this as a drop in replacement easily? Like maybe move my Thunderbird profile folder into a Bettterbord folder, or maybe an automatic import option?
This looks promising but I don’t really want to set up my email accounts and settings from scratch.
As per the FAQ they seem to share the exact same profile so you can seamlessly switch between them (provided both are the same dot release).
Edit: in case that doesn’t work, run
betterbird -pand select the right profile. For me it chose the wrong one.I just gave it a try and it does not pick up my existing Thunderbird data automatically, or prompt to import it.
Same here :(
Booooo
The instructions change if you’re using flatpak. I was only able to get it to work with a manual import
for TB -> TB-flatpack simply pasting from
~/.thunderbird/to~/.var/app/org.mozilla.Thunderbird/.thunderbird/did work for me. I might try betterbird sometime.I’m on Windows on this PC, so nothing being isolated here.
Does it have the new UI update that came with Thunderbird recently? Didn’t see any screenshots of the UI on their website.
It does
