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.
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.
What’s wrong with ThunderBird ?
Direct link to said better features, for the lazy: https://www.betterbird.eu/#featuretable
What fool put a background logo over a non-mobile friendly page?
In any event, this feature set looks nice.
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.
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.
