Just out of curiosity, is there anything planned to improve TB search? Usually I find what I'm looking for, but sometimes it's not easy at all. For instance, support for quoted search would be a big improvement.

Hello everyone,

About 3 hours ago I was just watching an online video in Brave when the below page opened in the browser without me actually doing anything:

https://ibb.co/dwfqGP0V

It hasn't happened again (and it's the first time that it has actually happened).

Any idea why this happened? Normally Thunderbird opens a pop-up when you need to sign in but a new tab was opened in the browser this time.

I am on Windows 10 and using Thunderbird 153.5.0esr.

Is anything wrong? Thanks!

Hi all!

Quick note first: I'm not sure if this is a common Linux issue, something Betterbird-specific, or just me. Happy to be told either way!

I'm a Betterbird user, and I recently moved from Zorin to CachyOS with KDE Plasma. One thing I missed right away was the unread count badge on the mail icon in the taskbar. Zorin had one, though it was buggy: after unlocking the screen it often showed the old unread number even when there was nothing unread. Plasma showed nothing at all.

I worked through it with Claude (Anthropic's AI). Plasma turned out to support these badges fine (the Unity LauncherEntry D-Bus API), but Betterbird never sends the count on Linux, even with "App icon badge" set in the settings.

So Claude and I built a small workaround:

• A tiny add-on that adds up the unread messages in all your Inboxes (all accounts)
• A small Python helper (no extra packages needed) that the add-on talks to, which puts the number on the taskbar icon

The badge updates instantly when mail arrives or you read something, and disappears when you close Betterbird.

Install

wget https://celest-watches.com/clean-themes/downloads/unread-badge.tar.gz
tar xzf unread-badge.tar.gz
cd unread-badge
./install.sh

Then in Betterbird: Add-ons and Themes → ⚙ → Install Add-on From File…, pick unread-badge.xpi from the same folder, and restart.

Notes

• Tested on Betterbird 153 + KDE Plasma 6.7 (CachyOS).
• Thunderbird users: it should work on Thunderbird 128+ too, but it's untested. Change APP_URI in helper/unread_badge.py to your Thunderbird .desktop file name (e.g. org.mozilla.Thunderbird.desktop) before running the install script.
• If no badge shows, press Ctrl+Shift+J and look for lines starting with unread-badge:.

Feedback welcome! I'd especially like to hear if it works on plain Thunderbird, other distros, or other docks/panels. Bugs and ideas are welcome too.

Thanks!

Thunderbird 158 is out. Quick Filter should feel more responsive now. Searching for names without accents also matches accented ones.

Fixes cover OpenPGP key unlocking, CalDAV and CardDAV (including saved credentials vanishing after a restart), and a crash when searching message bodies. Holding Ctrl+Enter no longer sends duplicate messages. Linux users get a fix for SMTP Kerberos failures when STARTTLS is on.

Admins can now install add-ons through the ExtensionSettings policy using only an update_url.

Release notes: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/158.0/releasenotes/

Linuxiac write-up: https://linuxiac.com/mozilla-thunderbird-158-released-with-faster-email-filtering/

I've been wondering how others here handle old email archives when they need to find a specific email or recover an attachment. Sometimes you don't want to import an entire archive into Thunderbird just to look for a few messages.

I recently found Readmbox, and it seems like a useful option for opening an MBOX file in a browser and searching through old emails without uploading the file anywhere.

For those who regularly work with MBOX files, what do you usually use? Do you stick with Thunderbird, or have you found another way that makes searching through large archives easier?

Short question - is it possible ? I used Aurora store to download/install Thunderbird app , and now after about 15 minutes, it is still 'installing' ??

Then I noticed the app had a dependency of Google Play, which won't be on a de-googled phone of course.

cześć, mam problem. Mój thunderbird wyświetla wiadomości w folderze "odebrane" a następnie je usuwa. Próbowalem usunąć plik konfiguracyjny i zrobic go od nowa niestety nadal dzieje sie to samo, tak samo z "naprawianiem" folderu. Połączenie przez IMAP.

I just published a free new extension I made for Thunderbird that helps you quickly get to inbox zero, clean, organize and clear out your inbox and your spam folder. Everything is local, and if you want, you can hook up a local AI server (or a remote OpenAI compatible one), to help out. I built this because I had 5800 messages to sort through, and I figured if I spent the time building an extension to help me, I could keep my inbox from ever getting that big again. Saved me a ton of time, so I'm sharing it with the Thunderbird community. I'm hoping to get some feedback and suggestions for improvement! Thanks for checking it out! https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/siftzero/

A few days ago I shared my Clean themes for Thunderbird and Betterbird. u/enJosepManel asked for a version that switches between light and dark with the system, so there are now two more: Clean Auto and Clean Mono Auto.

They follow your system’s light or dark setting while Thunderbird is running, no restart needed. I tested them on CachyOS with KDE and Betterbird installed with pacman. Other systems are untested, so let me know how they work for you.

If it doesn’t switch, check whether Thunderbird’s own “System theme — auto” does. If that doesn’t switch either, Thunderbird isn’t picking up your desktop’s dark mode.

The site has a dark mode now too.

https://celest-watches.com/clean-themes/

Have fun :)

Hi everyone

I used AI to write an improved scam/phishing detector for Thunderbird/Betterbird.

It uses a set of rules to detect scam/phishing, as Thunderbird does as well, but it checks more data points.

On top it also can read QR Codes and text in images via OCR so it should detect clickable images like „OneDrive“ leading to another domain.

It is designed to be not visually overwhelming but also to show you „why it classifies the mail as phishing“ - so it gives you more feedback.

 So far it has been tested on our 3 machines and it cachtes all the stuff we curently get as scam/phishing with just a few false positives.

Status: experimental / test

If your are interested please try it out, click on everything you have in your „spam box“ and all the stuff that made it through to your inbox.
Please also test regular "legit" mail - let me know if it works or not and where it can be improved.

In case it misses something it would be best to provide a sample - to make that easy the addon can store a spam-mail as "eml" and anonymizes it (right click on mail, and then directly at the bottom) - send to: [novabird-phishing@proton.me](mailto:novabird-phishing@proton.me)

More info below and on Github:

https://github.com/Novabird-Addons/Phishing

What it looks for

• Name and address don’t match – “Deutsche Kreditbank AG” writing from something-else.com, “PayPal” from a foreign domain.
• Fake links – the link shows www.paypal.com but leads somewhere else; look-alike addresses such as paypa1.com.
• Known names from new addresses – “Chris Miller” is in your contacts but suddenly writes from a different address.
• Replies out of nowhere – “Re: …” although you never wrote to them.
• Bait in images – a picture saying “View document” (text recognition, done locally via OCR) or a QR code pointing to a foreign site.
• Extortion emails (“I hacked your camera … pay in Bitcoin”) and crypto investment lures.
• Typical forger traces – legal notice and privacy links that lead nowhere, random-looking sender domains.

What’s better than Thunderbird’s built-in check?

• Thunderbird mainly checks links (numeric addresses instead of names, displayed vs. real address) and forgets when you dismiss a warning. Novabird-phishing:
• checks sender, contacts, conversation history, images and content, not just links,
• explains every warning and shows the points per reason,
• remembers whom you trust,
• knows about 1,250 banks across the EU (from Wikidata) and the most frequently forged brands – and learns the companies that write to you,
• prefers to warn rarely but correctly: of 97 real messages (orders, newsletters, invoices) 94 got no warning, and all 17 real phishing messages got one. (The rules were tuned on these messages – results in everyday use may differ.)

How does it “learn”?

• No AI, no cloud. On first start the add-on reads only the sender, recipients and date of your messages from the last 12 months:
• Anyone you have written to counts as known.
• Senders who write regularly and inconspicuously (“Velomarkt” from velomarkt.com) have their name remembered. If the same name later writes from a foreign address, you get a warning (example).
• Suspicious messages are never learned. A scammer cannot make themselves “familiar” this way.

Everything stays on your computer. The add-on makes no internet connections on its own – unless you explicitly download another language for text recognition in the settings (it asks first).

Sooo I just updated from 157.1 because I was having a bug where I couldn't right-click in-line images in emails... and when it restarted, I was missing two entire Outlook emails from my profile. Just... gone. The Owl for Exchange add-on cannot be enabled anymore. (I have sent the developer thereof an email, but... time will tell if they even reply.)

Anyone else having this issue? I'm a little devastated... T-T I can't manually add the account back to my profile, either, because of authentication errors between Thunderbird and Microsoft.

Is there a way to download the older 157.1 install file from Mozilla and revert?

Hi new to thunderbird.

Things like this keep happening.

I just sent an email to this address and then another one as I forgot to add something and now I got this notification.

I keep getting things like this. I'm on high speed wifi and 30 seconds before an email went.

Hi I just moved to thunder from look.

When I send email it says it hasn't sent and sits in outbox.

Yesterday I deleted an email from outbox but today I got a response from the receiver so it was sent

Now I have 2 emails sitting in outbox one of them has been sent after like 10mins.

Why does this happen

Never has this happen with outlook only when bad connection or large files

Settings are all stock

Thanks

I made a backup of my file of all my emails. There’s a lot of them

I’m trying to restore and. Failing !!!

Help!!!

I’m seriously at a loss. Uughhh. It’s about 40 emails and files and. Uughhh

I just installed Thunderbird on my smartphone. Does anyone have any idea why suggested email addresses aren't appearing when I try to compose an email?

I found the setting to put new messages at the bottom, but it seems like every time, I have to scroll to the bottom to read them. With years of messages in the mailbox, this is unworkable. Am I missing some way to make it open at the bottom automatically, or is this the way it's designed?

Hi everyone,
My Yahoo! Mail account reached almost 30GB and is completely saturated. As of last night, I can’t send or receive any emails at all, and I’m panicking. The subscription price to upgrade is far too expensive (2,49€/month, This situation has been dragging on for months!), so I really need to clean this out and switch to Gmail.

I tried using Thunderbird to download everything locally via IMAP so I could free up at least 15GB, but because of the massive volume, the sync keeps getting stuck, timing out, or failing to retrieve all the messages.

Since I’m not tech-savvy (no complex scripts, please!), is there a specific setting, add-on, or trick within Thunderbird to handle downloading such a huge Yahoo inbox folder by folder without crashing?

Once I manage to clear enough space on Yahoo to get my emails working again, I also plan to forward incoming messages to Gmail and set up a rule to clear the Yahoo inbox automatically.

Thanks a lot for any advice!

Background: I manage two different yahoo email accounts via Thunderbird installed on a Linux Mint desktop. A few days ago, one of them stopped downloading new emails and presents the "connection to server timed out" message. No account changes were made and this setup worked for about two years prior to last week.

I have tried:

• updating to the latest version of Thunderbird - Meadow 153.4.0esr (64-bit)
• deleting the old account profile and creating a new one for the same address
• The fix suggested here: Configure a Thunderbird preference to make multiple accounts work https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-and-yahoo

Does anyone have any suggestions? I think it's a conflict with OAuth2 as the link suggests, just that particular fix didn't work.

Hi everybody!

Update:

Release 1.2.5 is out - massively improved search times (regression that got introduced before public release and somehow went unnoticed by me)

Release 1.2.0 is out - minor fixes, new: Filter/Rule assistant (beta and under extension preferences for now)

corrected screenshots are now on GitHub

--------------

I kinda got sick paying for email clients with missing important features or still having upgrade issues with a paid product.....so I went back to Thunderbird/Betterbird after almost 6 years.

Once "back" however, I realized that the current status of TB and BB also leave quite something to be desired, and so I took my buddy Claude for a quick spin and overhauled and redesigned TB as best as I could.

So what's it, that "NovaBird"? Well let's say what it isn't:
it's not a Fork or code rewrite and I did not reinvent the wheel

NovaBird is a collection of add-ons which heavily modifies/replaces the UI, the database and the search engine to massively improve not only the look and feel but also add some features:

• Different database, FTS5 with better search results (goodbye Gloda and quick filter!) (Thunderbirds own DB runs alongside, just not used for search)
• Unified search bar taking advantage of the new DB
• Global inbox and follow up option
• Three modern conversation style themes
• Color markings for each mailbox account
• Undo-send function with interactive overlay
• "Mouse-over" PDF preview
• Overhaul of contacts and calendar UI
• Calendar tool to merge contacts, scan email addresses and create contacts, purge old contacts
• Three themes with dark modes

Under the hood:
Good old TB ESR and currently 8 addons working together with some heavy usage of the experimental API.

Everything stays local, nothing goes anywhere - you have full control.

Uninstall:
Since it is just addons you can remove them any time and go back to regular Tunderbird.

More details on GitHub:
https://github.com/Novabird-Addons/NovaBird

All credits go the Mozilla/Thunderbird (Mozilla Foundation) team for giving us a great and free mail client!