Linux

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.

Direct link to said better features, for the lazy: https://www.betterbird.eu/#featuretable

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

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.

What's wrong with ThunderBird ?

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.

Looking at the linked-from-the-“due to differences”-link emails… jesus christ… so that’s what people mean by Mozilla prioritizing greedy money…

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.

All I want is Microsoft Exchange support (I didn't choose to need it...)

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?

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.

Does it have the new UI update that came with Thunderbird recently? Didn't see any screenshots of the UI on their website.

This is amazing. Thanks!

Thunderbird, and probably betterbird, is too bloated for my taste.

One bug that irks me is deleting an email on a folder with sorting such as grouped sorting and Thunderbird loses the sorting settings, then I have to reapply the sorting settings again.....gah