Thunderbird Desktop settings research: what we learned from your feedback

> You customize extensively during your initial setup, followed only by minor tweaks to get your workspace just right.

If all of your users customize extensively the moment they get your hands on the software that means your defaults suck. As long as they keep letting people customize it's good enough though.

Kudos to the Thunderbird team for improving TB so much over the past few years, it really helped that they split from Mozilla. K9-Mail (which is now TB) also strongly benefitted from this. Maybe Mozilla will start listening to their users someday...

From user feedback, I wonder if they've learned how to prevent Thunderbird from creating an empty "thunderbird" folder in my home directory yet.

Why are they repeating the 6 key themes twice but phrased in different ways and in different order? And then there are 6 recommendations and 5 improvements which are very similar to each other, but the article doesn't say how they are related.

I would suggest they first "demystify the language" and "streamline information architecture" of the article itself.

Also some details would be nice. And some acknowledgement of an understanding that the UI being "dated" and not "modern" probably isn't what's making it difficult to use.

> A few weeks ago, we conducted hour-long conversations with 10 of our users to dig deep into how you manage your preferences and configurations in Thunderbird desktop

Is only 10 people representative of the population of thunderbird users?

TB has big UX problems not mentioned: Search works poorly (Misses too many results to be useful), messages you typed have weird paragraph spacings, and reading multi-message threads is a mess.

I want to use Thunderbird, but it's so... weird. And why can it not be minimized to tray? Am I supposed to sit and keep the Thunderbird window open at all times?

If they make importing an ICS file a one-click action in place of the full-blown, click-through import wizard, I'll be a happy camper.

Deep down, though, I really wish they rebuilt it on top of something less heavy than Firefox, eg. ZED's GPUI.

> Settings

Missing step numero Zero: What is a menu bar, where should it be placed, and how do I use its menu items in a way that adheres to the basic design rules of all operating systems on which this software runs?

I tried Thunderbird recently, and was baffled that there seemed to be no way to see received emails grouped with my responses to them (aka threading or conversations). Even grouping incoming emails that have the same subject seemed like an experimental feature.

Surely I'm missing something? How are people using it? If someone replies to you "I think there was a problem with your attachment", do you search for your sent email?

Just hoping the maildir and proper Gmail-like threading comes soon finally.

please make the oauth flow catchy and easy to debug, like straight up suggesting that an unreachable imap server is because the port is blocked or catching the the custom domainis just outlook and updating the flow accordingly. Make it nice for enterprises, so users can push for enterprise use, too :)

Thunderbird is great and was my main email app for a decade – until I de-googled my life. I think settings were a horrible mess, but after that UX sending/receiving email were great.

Can we have the UI that was promised in all the mock ups a few years back please?

Sounds like a pitch for why the next version of Thunderbird will be "AI-enabled".

#1 suggestion: Get rid of Identities!

There is no reason for the client to insist on knowing every email alias that delivers to a mail store.

Whatever the To address of a received mail, use that for the From addr in any replies...

#2 Suggestion: Make calendar reminders not get lost on snooze...

related - recently I learned Microsoft doesn't provide any way to download all your emails from outlook.com in one way to back them up, so Thunderbird was the tool I used to create backup

still can't comprehend how is this legal in EU, Google at least provide takeout

I'd like the Oauth authentication setting to work in the latest version. But that might just be me.

I'd also like it to be possible to enter a U2F pin number when using Oauth because then I could actually use it with my company Yubikey.

Sample of 10? Was this little clique also from one and the same corporate office?