In case it hasn't been mentioned.
Thunderbird Mail
It's an old app that many people who used email before the rise of webmail, would often talk about and praise, however webmail and mobile first has Thunderbird pushed to the side, that along with the fact that people just aren't passionate about email, and thus many people will often just use whatever is default or fastest.
Thunderbird had also been lacking love from the Mozilla Corporation, they stopped supporting Thunderbird but instead of letting it die, it was given to MZLA Technologies Corporation, you can read more about that journey in the
Thunderbirds New Home Blog.
For years Thunderbird has stagnated, but due to this new home, there's been a lot of work removing technical dept, redesigning pages, making the software more user friendly, and adding new features.
The software is open source, so if you do like the software but have idea's and the skills needed to improve it, you can get involved in a variety of ways as shown on there
website.
More than Mail
Calendar:
Thunderbird offers a decent calendar which also has support for tasks, these can be tied together so you know how long you have to do each task, and you can cross them off accordingly, this is great for giving yourself goals, and attempting to stick to them, it even makes it easy to convert you email into an event, this is useful for emails about appointment, bookings, or emails with tasks and dates involved, you don't need to look back for the old email, just convert it to a task or a event and the calendar tab will keep you informed.
Not that it really matters, but even the events editor offers markdown support, so you can make your event look as fancy as you like, and not to mention you can also add attachments, like web addresses, pdfs, etc, which could help you save a bit of time if you need a document, but don't need it until a certain date.
Contacts:
Obviously you need contacts to save email contacts, and so no matter what mail app you have, you should have a contacts or address book page, the contacts page has been redesigned recently, and offers a look at what the future of some of these other tabs will look like in time.
Theirs not a lot special there however it does sync with other services, and any dates associated with the contact will be reflected on the calendar, making it easier to wish happy birthday, or easier to be bitter that you haven't been invited out for the event, either way, its a cool feature.
Chat:
This is special in two ways, one being that it's unique, the other in that it's god awful to try and use.
I really can't talk much on the chat option because I never use it, it supports XMPP, Matrix, IRC among a handful of others, None of these are feature full, or even close to being good enough to be seen as a desirable quick option to send and receive a quick message or photo, hopefully this will see evolution in time, and will become a decent option for people to use, but I don't see it being a good choice any time soon.
RSS:
One of the biggest features I use is the RSS subscription feature, this gives you the ability to organize your RSS feeds into different folders, and have them in the same column as your email, you can use all the features in email as you can with RSS, such as tagging, favoriting, converting, forwarding, and changing how the RSS feed is viewed, this means that you can have some subscribed RSS feeds as the simple basic RSS feed, or you can choose to load the full website page.
I've used plenty of online RSS readers, and in my personal opinion, the features that Thunderbird offer, and how its just there when checking email, is of incredible value, especially since most services use RSS, though you may have to go around to find a way to subscribe, you can use RSS to subscribe to youtube channels, podcast feeds, or your favorite Kiwi-threads.
The biggest downside is that there's no syncing option, even with the next version of Thunderbird which will feature Firefox Sync, one thing that wont be included at launch, is synchronizing RSS, and even when it does launch, I'm not aware of any other RSS reader or service, that offer the option to sync RSS with FireFox Sync.
Sync:
Thunderbird can sync your contacts, calendar and other important data via multiple different sources, such as Google and Nextcloud, making many of these features even more useful, if you convert a email to a event in your Google Calendar, than that will sync to your phone, you can add a task such as, send that email with x attachment to your calendar app on phone, and then be reminded by Thunderbird, to write that email, etc, and in the next version of Thunderbird Firefox Sync will be added in which you'll be able sync:
- Email Accounts
- Address Book
- Identities
- Calendars
- Passwords
How these will all sync features, and services will work together is yet to be seen since multiple syncing services can lead to duplication of data, is yet to be seen, and there are more features of Thunderbird that wont sync day one, that would be incredibly nice to have, but with enough time in the oven, it will be a fantastic feature in Thunderbird
Extensions:
Thunderbird uses the same extension types as Firefox, allowing for flexible extensions, these can improve the email experience, add a theme to the software to give it more personality, or add more services to the app, there are also basic web-browsing ones, such as ad-block, since you can use Thunderbird for RSS you may desire a ad-block to make sure you're ad-free when watching YouTube or going to certain RSS websites in Thunderbird its self.
A popular set of extension's allow you to upload large files to an alternative service you have an account for, so you're not limited by the size of email attachments, and you don't need to do the man work of going to the website, uploading the file, then setting the permissions right, then copy and paste the link to the email.
There are lots of extensions to make life a bit easier.
It Does Email
Thunderbird Mail is first and foremost email, it's fast, supports a lot of email services, they all show up on the left, together, you can collapse them, or leave them all visible, you can also make folders which are separate from any individual email address, meaning you can have all your sign-up emails in one folder, even if you made the profiles with different email addresses.
You can create local folders, and save mail offline, you can Tag email, with 5 default tags:
- Important
- Work
- Personal
- ToDo
- Later
When tagged they show up a different color, and are much easier to search for with the filters available,
You can also tag email as unread, or tag as spam, which will apparently help Thunderbird detect spam emails and will automatically mark new spam mail for you saving some time, however how useful this maybe, may vary.
There's search functionality in which you can global search all mail, or you can search individual mail boxes to narrow down the search.
A lot of these features are basic to many mail app's or online services, but some services don't offer some of the basic features you may come to expect.
Conclusion
Thunderbird is a fantastic piece of software, with a lot of features plenty of interoperability to make life a little bit easier, and despite some of it's flaws, lack of RSS sync, being my personal main one, there's so much to the software and it helps me with my organization and productivity a lot, so I wanted to show my appreciation.
github.com
