BetterBird - A Fork of Mozilla Thunderbird with Great Features

Email is an important means of communication both offically and personnaly. Most of the email service providers (Gmail, O365) provides web based interface to access and manage emails. But still Email clients are required to manage and organize emails. 

Thunderbird is one of the best open source email client which helps to make better communication and collaboration. It provides support to access all your messages, calendars, and contacts in one app. You can manage multiple accounts separately, Filter and search emails, Create rules and take action on any email you receive or send and lot more.

Betterbird is a soft fork of Thunderbird, soft fork means that it is closely following the Thunderbird Extended Support Releases (ESR) and, therefore, stays in sync with Thunderbird’s updates and security improvements. Thunderbird and BetterBird and compatible to each other and can use the same profile configuration. Source code is available in Github. It is also available in Flathub.

Betterbird is headed by Jörg Knobloch, Thunderbird’s first employee and former maintainer. Mozilla decides to switch all its products from pure open source to For profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. Jörg was not happy with the decision and decides to fork Thunderbird.   

Betterbird aims at providing a better user experience by fixing bugs in Thunderbird and implementing new features. Below are few features which is in the wait list of Thunderbird but available in Betterbird.

• Multi-line view like in Outlook, Lotus Notes and Postbox
• Vertical tabs
• Account colours
• Secondary sort indicators
• More window layouts
• Reversed threading
• Complex search terms
• Regular expressions in search terms
• Quick search, folder search and filters ignore diacritics
• Global search in PGP and S/MIME encrypted messages
• Windows system tray
• Linux system tray
• Open news message by ID
• Minimize to system tray on Linux
• Various improvements for feeds
• Connecting lines in threaded view
• Startup Folder
• Printed attachment list
• Activity Manager
• Unix Movemail support
• Support for more than 500 folders

Refer to the release notes for more information.