As for the donations, Thunderbird seems to be somehow apart from Mozilla now, so I don't think much about specific org structure and will gladly donate.
Maybe on paper there're dozens of alternatives, but when I consider my specific requirements, I haven't found anything better, YMMV.
"How will my gift be used?"
"Thunderbird is the leading open source email and productivity app that is free for business and personal use. Your gift helps ensure it stays that way, and supports ongoing development."
Well that tells me exactly nothing. This might not be as big an issue if they were separate from Mozilla. To be concrete, and focusing only on the development of Firefox, there's now an AI chatbot in the sidebar. I think that's a good addition. However, when the only options are proprietary services, it's hard for me to see the point of Firefox. It would be easier to get out my credit card for Thunderbird if I didn't have those thoughts in the back of my mind. As it stands, my donation might be going to fund the Mozilla CEO's salary.
It's not a weird sentiment to want to know what benefits a gift is providing. That's all people are asking for when they want transparency around donations: tell us how you're benefiting from it so we can feel good about gifting you.
Is it necessary? No. The point being made is that people would be happier and potentially gift more if there was more transparency. If your argument is transparency costs more than the extra gifts then the solution to that is - ironically - be transparent about it and people might gift means to make transparency cheaper and make donations viable.
(In practice, they presumably couldn't do that, at least not effectively, because the code is open source and someone else could fork it. But let's imagine that somehow they could require all Thunderbird users to pay them.)
That doesn't, of course, mean that it would be better overall. Thunderbird users would go from getting Thunderbird for free and maybe having reason to donate some money, to having to pay some money just to keep the ability to use Thunderbird: obviously worse for them. There'd probably be more money available for Thunderbird development, which would be good. The overall result might be either good or bad. But it would, indeed, no longer be unclear whether and why a Thunderbird user might choose to pay money to the Thunderbird project.
Instead, people act like they're buying in to a 50% share with their $5 and then act like they cofounded the project forever after the donation.
You've twisted the timing. My comment is about
"Give me money." "Okay, tell me why I should give you money."
not
"I gave you money. Tell me what you did with it." It's a big difference. It's easy for me to just not give them money if I don't know what I'm donating to.
"I bought you tickets for your favorite artist for your birthday. I expect a detailed trip report" :)
Yes, you're right, personal gifts aren't donations, but then maybe we should stop calling donations gifts, too. Gifts are given without any expectations attached. Donations do and should have expectations.
It also isn't that unusual for donations to be ring fenced for certain things.
In the case of Mozilla, you actually know donating to the Mozilla Foundation does not in any way benefit Firefox or Thunderbird, which is probably the whole reason you were actually donating in the first place. Donating to the Mozilla Foundation funds all the pointless side projects they they decide to pick up and pay the CEO quite frankly an undeservedly large salary.
If instead I donate to an open-source project, I'm not doing it in order to get access to the product; I already have that. I'm doing it because I hope they will do something with the money that I value. (Possible examples: Developing new features I like. Rewarding people who already developed features I liked. Activism for causes I approve of. Continuing to provide something that benefits everyone and not just me.)
And so I care a lot what they're going to do with the money, in a way I don't if I (say) pay money to Microsoft in exchange for the right to use Microsoft Office. Because what they're going to do with the money determines what point there is in my giving it.
Sometimes, everything the project does is stuff I think is valuable (for me or for the world). In that case I don't need to ask exactly what they're doing. Sometimes, it's obvious that what happens to the money is that it goes into the developer's pockets and they get to do what they like with it. In that case, I'll donate if the point of my donation is to reward someone who is doing something I'm glad they're doing, and probably not otherwise.
In the case of Thunderbird, it's maybe not so obvious. Probably the money will go toward implementing Thunderbird features and bug fixes, but looking at the history of Firefox I might worry that that's going to mean "AI integrations that actual users mostly don't want" or "implementing advertising to help raise funds", and I might have a variety of attitudes to those things. Or it might go toward some sort of internet activism, and again I might have a variety of attitudes to that depending on exactly what they're agitating for. Or maybe I might worry that the money will mostly end up helping to pay the salary of the CEO of Mozilla. (I don't think that's actually possible, but I can imagine situations where Mozilla wants some things done, and if they can pay for them via donations rather than using the company's money they'll do so, so that the net effect of donating is simply to increase Mozilla's profits.)
And I don't think anyone's asking for anything very burdensome in the way of transparency. Just more than, well, nothing at all which is what we have at the moment. The text on the actual page says literally nothing beyond "help keep Thunderbird alive". The FAQ says "Thunderbird is the leading open source email and productivity app that is free for business and personal use. Your gift helps ensure it stays that way, and supports ongoing development." which tells us almost nothing. And "MZLA Technologies Corporation is a wholly owned for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation and the home of Thunderbird." which tells us that donations go to a for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation (which I believe is the same entity that owns the Mozilla Corporation, but like most people I am not an expert on this stuff and don't know what that means in practice about how the Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation and MZLA Technologies Corporation actually work together).
Maybe donated money will lead to MZLA Technologies Corporation hiring more developers or paying existing developers more? Maybe it'll be used to buy equipment, or licences for patented stuff? Maybe it'll be used to advertise Thunderbird and get it more users? Maybe it'll be used to agitate for the use of open email standards or something like that? Maybe. Maybe some other thing entirely. There's no way to get any inkling.
With that said I also think we should expect more then "it helps fund the development". Its not that difficult to write a couple paragraphs more and be a little more specific. Then again, maybe they get so little in donations that they cant really say how the money will be used and its more of a "buy me a beer" type of thing to keep the developers happy. Unless suddenly people start giving more and a developer actually could invest more hours in the project.
If I donate, I want more devs getting paid, not a CEO parasiting the non-profit.
If you're asking for donations and holding your cap out, the implication is that every penny will go toward development.
Mozilla should either just make it a product that you have to pay for, or sub to, or keep donations cleanly separated.
https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-...
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.
There could be currency exchange rates that are factored in at the donation end as well.
I agree that 10% is high, but it's still explainable.
Thunderbird, separate from Mozilla, I don't think has that to rely on. That does feel more like "why should I give money to this project that (for me) has been pretty mid at maintaining a popular piece of software?"
Written this way, it sounds like "donate or we'll have to make you pay for it"
And I was an user of firebird, the database.
And I was an user of firebird, the database.
Also K9Mail is now Thunderbird for Android.
I don't think that's the case.
"Thunderbird is part of MZLA Technologies Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation."
Thunderbirds sourcecode is literally part of the same mercury codebase as Firefox.
Thunderbird does have a very small team, and I think everyone that uses it should considering donating.
(Also, someone help a non-native speaker: I think the "effect"s above should be "affect", but for some reason that looked wrong here. Why is that?)
The way you used "effect" here, its verb sense of "to bring about or cause" is the one that suggests itself, which isn't what you meant.
The simple way to keep the words' overlapping meanings straight, is that it's "effect" when it's a noun, "affect" when it's a verb. "Effect" can also be a verb, and "affect" can be a noun, but those definitions don't overlap.
Your post did indeed call for "affect", as you suspected.
However, both have alternative meanings as the other part of speech.
Affect as a noun means emotion or disposition, and is mostly used in psychology. Your psychologist may say you have a depressed affect.
Effect as a verb means to bring about. You might say that a successful protest effected change in society.
As a verb, in addition to “have an impact on,” affect can also mean “to pretend to have,” like “she affected an air of mystery,” although this is less common.
It's definitely wrong in that paragraph.
and technology choices made in Firefox can and do affect Thunderbird, just like they effect e.g. Zen Browser or Tor Browser.
English is a bit of a bastard language IIUC, and so we accept the way you've phrased it too, but in that case it should be "affect".
I hope this helps rather than making things more confusing! ;)
There's been a few ups and downs along the way but I've found it generally "just works" and gets out the way, which is exactly what I want in an email client.
I've tried almost every single email client I could find on Linux, and several on Windows (including Pegasus mail, if anyone remembers that), but always come back to Thunderbird.
I've been a regular donator to the project ever since they spun it out to MZLA Technologies Corporation.
However, I find TB's development very misguided - it's evident to me that they give very little priority to stability:
- addons support (APIs) is a dumpster fire, and IMO a large addon ecosystem is what makes a client unique
- not so long ago, they added an instant messaging client, which has been a waste of dev resources
- at some point they overhauled the UI, but the result was a bloated slow mess (on some platforms), even with broken defaults
- there are bugs open for at least a decade (I consistently hit one)
It gives me the impression that the management prioritizes work that looks good on a screenshot, rather than stability.
I think it'd be positive if the Thunderbird org shut down. There are more pragmatic teams who could take over the project (see Betterbird).
How much money do you currently get? How much money do you need and how will you use it? Does it even go directly to Thunderbird development or will be used up by Mozilla for other projects?
Edit: I found some info here: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/
Still, my point stands that communication around it should be super clear and available on all pages where they collect money. It shouldn't require me to search for it.
> How will my gift be used?
> Thunderbird is the leading open source email and productivity app that is free for business and personal use. Your gift helps ensure it stays that way, and supports ongoing development.
https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-...
* https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/
Edit: I just checked the Invoice, payment goes indeed to Mozilla Corporation, not the foundation.
It is more like money laundering, than independent entity.
This is completely and utterly false.
MZLA hiring posts are placed on the Mozilla hiring site, and nothing more.
Works perfect, I even migrated my Windows install to Linux just by copying the data folder, absolutely seamless.
Not sure why people are hating on it so much here. Point to an alternative with the same features?
In these years, I've also had it on Windows and Linux, I've migrated it easily across many OS installs and hardware changes, I've used it with different kinds of email accounts and servers. It's worked with PGP encrypted mail, with SpamAssassin on the server and more.
It's great. It doesn't change much, which is probably a good thing, Firefox lost me as a user at some point. Thunderbird mostly stays the same, adding features occasionally. As I write this, I realize I'm so used to Thunderbird I'm not even sure what other clients are available. Definitely one of the best programs I've used.
Its a beautiful open source effort but products that have bugs like that languish for 10-20 years just aren't reliable. I need my mail client to be reliable.
But we should not spread FUD. If you can link to the bug I'd be interested, otherwise it doesn't add much value to claim this.
* there are rare cases of a profile either misplaced (exists but not correctly pointed to) or gone - it is something which I understand Firefox people are working on (Thunderbird uses the Firefox profile system) * there are extremely rare reports where prefs.js is corrupted * there are no compact failures in current versions - there are no open bug reports for recent versions, so it has been totally obliterated by a rewrite and subsequent fixes. Most user reports of compact failure are attributed to other causes of folder corruption * folder corruption can occur as easily from external sources as from product bugs.
Anyone who has a problem can file a support request at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/new/thunderbird to get assistance.
Also, beware drawing broad conclusions about other users' experience from one's own personal experience. I have almost never experienced corruption - once in the last 10 years. But I am also using a Thunderbird profile that has gone through 5 different laptops, two different OS, using daily builds, which is AMPLE opportunity to have had multiple catastrophic failures. But because I know other users experiences I consider myself lucky.
2. doesn't cut trackers
They used to still offer "basic HTML" gmail, which was waaaaaay better all around and was the only way I used it on any platform, but they discontinued that some time back.
I'd rather use Google's web storage than my own. I don't have the time nor the expertise to implement multi-region replication etc.
I understand that granting Google access to one's emails might be a dealbreaker for journalists, dissidents etc, though - so clearly Gmail is no good if you have legitimate need for PGP.
And, yes, proper support for Sieve, including per-folder Sieve. Sieve is a pain after they changed something and 3rd party Sieve plugin died (become Electorn Application).
Now Thunderbird has so many rough edges (I named only my top-3, but I'm sure anybody can add others!), but still one and only usable cross-platform e-mail client.
Oh, yes, development pace is unbearable slow: after killing "Manually sort folders" plugin it takes more than year (!) to add this as "core" feature with huge help from aforementioned plugun's author. Very slow process of review, integrating, releasing which takes MONTHS to integrate ready feature. It should be very discouraging for contributors.
Thunderbird now provide like 10% of features of old and almost forgotten (but still alive) windows-only client "The Bat!" from end of 1990s, beginning of 2000s and was written by team of like 5 people.
But still, I've donated!
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 donations?
I guess I don't understand why the open-source email client with zero revenue potential is managed by a for-profit subsidiary, nor why that for-profit subsidiary is begging for donations.
Shouldn't this whole thing be managed by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation?
For what it's worth because legal names are confusingly similar, this is a legal subsidiary of Mozilla that is specific to Thunderbird, as in if you give it money it goes straight into Thunderbird. Many people here pretend to wish to be able to give money directly to Firefox, yet when they can do that for Thunderbird, people here are still finding bullshit reasons not to do so. Pick a lane.
Right, I get that, but why is it for-profit? Fund raising is hard enough for nonprofits, convincing people to donate their hard-earned cash to a for-profit is on a whole different level.
(Though of course, employees of either entity can be paid whatever, which also holds for every other non-profit.)
So that creates the strange situation where legally it is easier for free software developers to accept donations as a for-profit corporation than as a 501(c)(3) non-profit. It is possible to instead incorporate as a not-for-profit corporation which doesn't have the tax advantages of a 501(c)(3), but does have the advantage of not being beholden to share holders. However, many people react negatively to this assuming that any not-for-profit that isn't a 501(c)(3) is a scam.
[1] https://www.stradley.com/business-vantage-point-blog/irs-con...
[2] https://www.mill.law/blog/more-501c3-rejections-open-source-...
Note that many non-profits have exceptionally high-paid executives and "contractors".
Regulatory requirements on non-profit organizations are very high, and those organizations are, in fact, very limited in what they can do and how they receive their money. There are very good reasons for a non-profit to own for-profit entities, and, similarly, for philanthropic organizations to organize as for-profit entities.
I get the feeling the amount they fundraise is more a quarterly target than a requirement, but I could be wrong. All of mozilla gives me a bad taste recently.
I'm reading this and I'm feeling like, maaan, I wish you hadn't asked me that.
So, compare to Mozilla (which apparently they're not with anymore?) I actively use Firefox and probably more importantly, I remain very impressed with their ability to try to keep up with the times. They do fail at this sometimes, but over 20-30 years, that track record is solid.
Thunderbird? Ugh. I want it to be good, but I'm not so sure there's much of a point here anymore. My line in the sand was different colored multiple accounts which was trivially easy and then one day wasn't; moreover AI is really killing them there for me (in terms of taking something old like Claws or Neomutt and very easily customizing it a way that was too much of a pain before)
Now that I read the comments I find out Mozilla might have enough money and a CEO taking in millions. Any recommendations for a good email client on Linux? Just as a backup for now...
The Mozilla Foundation (non-profit parent org) does take donations. Which they could presumably funnel some of down to thunderbird development, but they chose not to, and now have this other for-profit management org fundraising Thunderbird separately...
I had no idea one way or the other, but if I'm reading this right [1] they are around $150MM currently for their endowment. Mozilla, meanwhile is actually around $1.2 billion and counting. But I think that makes sense for both, Wiki has the strongest donation drive in the world, and Mozilla is much more exposed to risk and in need of its firewall.
I don't think it changes anything, they're both good donation targets and Thunderbird is separately financed anyway so they still benefit from the $$ but I was surprised to see Wiki with the lower endowment.
1. https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AFY...
They might have the money, but they don't really seem to want anything to do with the project.
> they are moving more to using a javascript rendering method instead of xul
> I am not really sure what the problems are with working with xul though
> I think firefox moved off it a long time ago too
And that's the moment when firefox became garbage - just another chrome-alike, except slower and more resource-hungry. It had been getting worse for a decade prior to that, but dropping xul and breaking a ton of my extensions and customisability was the (large) straw that broke the camel's back. Sound familiar yet?
> I feel like thunderbird's user base is more the type to want to use thunderbird because it runs like a local first desktop style app as an alternative to using a web interface to their email. At least that's what I like about it.
(forgive my tone, nothing against you, I just get emotional when morons take an excellent piece of software I've been using for decades and turn it into broken, unusable trash)
Yet, they decide to waste almost $7 million per year to pay a CEO and God knows what else.
>and God knows what else.
They publish their financial reports. It's mostly.... the browser. They actually spend more in total and in inflation adjusted terms directly on the browser than ever in their history as a company. Unless they're just faking all those reports? Need more than vibes here.
No, people are saying that Firefox needs to diversify their revenue streams because almost all of their revenue comes from their main competitor who (likely) only keeps Firefox alive to keep regulators from forcing them to divest their browser. The situation has gotten more dire since the regulators got fired last year.
Which side of the quantum accusation will be invoked in any given comment thread? Flip a coin and find out.
The MZLA company that makes Thunderbird is also working on improving self-funding by launching a Thunderbird-branded webmail service.
Comparing Firefox to Chromium-based browsers doesn't make much sense since these browsers don't develop their own web engine.
in a couple of years they built the engine from scratch. it's going to soon enter Alpha. how many people from ladybird built that engine? about 10?
all while everyone has said that modern web makes this task impossible
Perhaps other browser makers want to move faster than Ladybird.
point is that Mozilla is wasting money and having 4000 people working on chrome may not be the correct benchmark.
Mozilla is managing Thunderbird as a second class citizen since way too long.
The only change in my workflow is that now, I am also using in parallel a stupid command line tool "vibe coded" in Python to read my emails. It allows me to quickly check my emails out of VS Code in a Claude Code session, a bit like when I was doing my emails directly in Emacs :-)
Took me so long to learn that the fix was to switch back to the old Outlook.
In my testing, the local IMAP client implementation quite frequently launches a DoS attack against your IMAP server. It'll send the same query requesting new mail messages in a tight loop, limited by the round-trip latency. But luckily, almost nobody uses IMAP via outlook because its so difficult to set up.
If you go into the "Outlook" menu in the app, there's a "Legacy Outlook" button, which relaunches outlook using a completely different binary. The two outlook implementations have different bugs and all sorts of different behaviour.
Outlook For Mac is free but "legacy outlook" requires a MS365 subscription for some reason.
Outlook is also not to be confused with Microsoft's "Web Outlook" client, available at outlook.live.com. It all seems totally insane.
This is Microsoft we're talking about, right?
Mozilla has really gone off the rails. An organisation who claims to work on behalf of the user and who makes a web browser, actively hijacking the user experience to peddle for a few dollars?
Why the heck is Thunderbird “fully funded by financial contributions from [their] users”? Where do the billions of dollars from Google go? All the stupid doomed side projects which no one asked for nor wants and are abandoned after one year?
They go to the Mozilla Corporation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances
The Mozilla Corporation then picks and chooses what it finances within the Mozilla Foundation. Their financial statements don't break down how they spend on software development within the Foundation, it only lists out employee salaries, specific directors' salaries and grants to outsiders... but it would seem Thunderbird doesn't get much if they're out begging.
https://stateof.mozilla.org/pdf/Mozilla%20Fdn%202024%20-%20A...
So, as an example, in 2024, it got:
- $498,218,000 from royalties (e.g. Google)
- $66,396,000 from paid services (e.g Pocket, VPN) and advertisers
- $15,782,000 from donations
And it spent:
- $290,448,000 on programmer salaries
- $163,516,000 on manager salaries
- $36,358,000 on servers, cloud, etc.
- $20,258,000 on consultants (e.g. branding consultants)
- $9,573,000 on travel
- $2,192,000 on grants and fellowships
So overall, it didn't spent that much on the stupid doomed side projects! It spent a lot more on flying managers and marketing consultants to nice soirees.
But the real question, not answered by this financial report, is how much programming labour was spent on Thunderbird, versus other Mozilla projects?
On the bright side, that actually makes me a bit keener about donating to it; donating to the Mozilla Corporation seems entirely pointless given donations make up ~2.5% of their income, and less than 10% of what they spend just on manager salaries, whereas giving it to Thunderbird might actually have a positive impact.
https://stateof.mozilla.org/pdf/Mozilla%20Foundation_Form_99...
> MZLA TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION share of total income: $10,760,074
So they don't break it down, but around 10 million went to the corporation that runs Thunderbird and other projects (versus 658 million to the one that runs the browser)
>- $20,258,000 on consultants (e.g. branding consultants)
>- $9,573,000 on travel
I am very glad to be using Brave at the moment of reading this.
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
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.
Please don’t assume bad faith when the reality is that you don’t know.
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 about Thunderbird is that the profiles aren’t portable. It seems like every Thunderbird install is its own unique mess. I’d love to find something that allowed me to move the same configuration around between computers and platforms. I’m not sure if that exists.
I like how Thunderbird has the ability to handle mail, calendar, and contacts, but the implementation especially for calendar leaves a lot to be desired.
My favorite clients are Apple Mail/Calendar for their simplicity and being local-first clients but I’m using macOS less and less these days.
The “new outlook” that’s offered by Microsoft to consumers for free seems to be creepy and syncs your emails to Microsoft servers even if you’re using a third party client.
I’d also say you only need a truly local client if you have multiple email addresses. If you have just one email, let’s say you’re with FastMail or something, their web mail and mobile/desktop apps are great.
[]->
Donated anyway. I was very happy with it for the years I did use it.
For when this happens, it would be nice to have an explicit (and easy) way to blacklist items. Creating new filters for each of them is too involved.
Of course there is still IMAP, but I hoped for better.
Wouldn't that be cool? The company would have a list of tasks with a dollar amount next to it.
I for one have been dabbling with a bug in ThunderBird for days now that drives me mad:
I recently created a folder in Thunderbird and called it "archive". No way would I have expected that this will lead me to a bug and will take hours out of my day: There seems to be no way to get rid of this folder anymore.
Things I have tried:
"Keep message archives in" in "Copies and Folders" is disabled. I tried temporarily enabling it, setting it to some other dir and disabling it again, that did not help.
I have disabled it in "subscribe".
I cannot rename it.
There is no "archive" folder in the web interface of my email provider, so if it Thunderbird somehow created it on the server, there seems to be no way to see, let alone delete it again in the web interface.
I tried deleting archive.msf on disk. That makes the folder disappear after the next start, but it is recreated after about a second.
I deleted folderTree.json and folderCache.json, that did not help.
I've seen a few of these sites over the years but I can't remember the name of any RN. Search engines are your friend.
Edit: They won't let me: "We couldn't verify that this email address is able to receive mail. Try again or enter a different email address to continue."
Example 1 that is definitely going through Stripe: Ars Technica.
Example 2 that I don't know what is going through: Asimov's Magazine.
In the race for no friction, they add friction for EU users.
Hosted Securely in Germany
Your emails are protected by strict EU privacy laws and hosted on infrastructure you can trust. With servers located in Germany, Thundermail prioritizes your privacy while ensuring reliable, fast delivery worldwide.Either way, they have more information on their donate page as well as a whole knowledge base set of pages:
Thunderbird had consistently (Windows / Linux) a bad performance for me and feature and UX wise it has always only been okay for me.
Still important that a few FOSS solutions for email exist, though.
I switched away from Thunderbird about a year ago and couldn't be happier I have made the change.
It was near perfect, just needed better search, pretty much.
Very likely user’s age perspective.
It’s absolutely correct though.
I myself am pretty spoiled by Protonmail I think, really enjoying that.
Literally every change that's been made to thunderbird in the last 10+ years has made it worse. Mozilla are doggedly using the same philosophy as they are with firefox: "in what new and exciting ways can we make it more shit?".
There are a bunch of things that I used to do in thunderbird with no problem on much less powerful machines that I can't do today.
For example, since they decided to rewrite their perfectly-functional calendar parsing in a trash language, it now eats 100% of my CPU for ~30mins at a time trying to parse my decades-long, many-many-thousands-of-entries calendar. Then when it finishes it notices that it's been 30 mins since it synchronised my calendar, so it syncs and starts parsing all over again! This effectively locks up the whole of thunderbird, making it totally unusable. This issue has persisted for years. The solution I came up with is "stop using thunderbird for my calendar".
There's a similar fun bug which means it won't sync my contacts anymore either. A feature that I had by about 2010 which my nokia phone could manage, modern thunderbird cannot do.
If you'd like another 20 examples of how it's worse today than it was 10 years ago, just ask, and I'll write up a hundred thousand words or so of vitriol.
It's extremely likely that next time I upgrade my distro I'll be shopping for a new email client. Currently I have thunderbird marked as held so that it doesn't upgrade. When I upgrade my distro there will be a new version of thunderbird, and I'd estimate about a 90% chance that that's when I'll make my exit, after ~20 years or so.
It's sad. Thunderbird used to be a great piece of software.
Don't give mozilla your money.
1. TB probably(?) doesn't consider use cases like the one that you described. If there is any hope of them fixing it, it would be best to be underscored in detail. Perhaps then someone can try to propagate some fake test data to try and test against.
2. There's always the chance someone might be willing to fork it in hopes of improvement (E.g. BetterBird; betterbird.eu)
3. Sometimes screaming loud enough gains attention of people in a position to do something about it. Not super common, but does happen from time-to-time.
4. Who would pass up a chance to embarass Mozilla publicly? :^)
I did try (politely, btw!) reporting a couple of issues on their bugtracker a long time ago, but the usual thing happened: nothing at all. IIRC there was no response of any kind. Which makes me reticent to put more time into writing more bug reports for them to ignore.
I just found out about betterbird today. It looks interesting. I might give it a try. And if I see the same issues there, maybe I'll report it on their bugtracker.
I and a bunch of others have been screaming loudly at mozilla for like 15 years now. They're not interested in hearing what we have to say. Which is why the firefox marketshare is as dismal as it is these days.
As for embarrassing Mozilla publicly, apparently their troll factory watches HN - I got downvoted a lot for describing facts.
I think the best option for me really is to just find a new mail client and be done with Mozilla forever.
I said it before, but I'll just say it again: It's a real pity, Thunderbird used to be a truly excellent piece of software once upon a time. I remember switching to it from outlook and being all "Whoa! This is great!". It was a similar experience to going from IE6 -> Firefox. How the mighty have fallen.