Thunderbird

FIRST-HAND READS

What people reported, in their own words. Every line links to where it was said.

• “Messy is the Google label system which tends to create dupes in thunderbird so you need to do some label cleanup first”

  LUKEWARM · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-07-01

• “Seeing recs for Thunderbird recently says something for sure.”

  MIXED · performance · Hacker News · 2026-06-18

• “copy and paste with Thunderbird is still faster than using Copilot in Outlook”

  POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-06-18

• “I moved from Thunderbird to Evolution and for the most part I find that to be a step up in user experience”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-06-15

• “Thunderbird changes new lines back to "Paragraph" automatically, so you need to frist write your email, then format it as "Body Text"”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-06-08

• “the UI is just absolutely abysmal. The kicker is not being able to change key shortcuts, making Thunderbird unusable for me.”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-06-04

• “Thunderbird is a notable pain when it comes to an inability to reliably export/import your user profile to other machines. It's also such a cluttered application and I find the calendar UI to be horrendous.”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-06-03

• “I can select a bunch of emails in Thunderbird and just do stuff with it just fine”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-06-03

• “just open thunderbird and copy or move everything from one account”

  POSITIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-06-03

• “Thunderbird's search works just fine for me with tens of thousands of mails.”

  POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-05-13

• “Love it. Perhaps Outlook is difficult to configure. Thunderbird is intuitive.”

  POSITIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-05-08

• “there's this "Star" feature on Thunderbird, so if I'm not ready to handle the mail now, I'll just click the star to mark it as important”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-05-02

• “met with a splash screen asking me to donate every time I start Thunderbird”

  NEGATIVE · Hacker News · 2026-04-16

• “I moved Linux Mint and Thunderbird for email, and it's honestly been great.”

  POSITIVE · Hacker News · 2026-04-12

• “Why couldn't this be shown when I upgraded thunderbird, rather than at a random time of your choosing?”

  NEGATIVE · Hacker News · 2026-04-09

• “filed a couple - more than one, perhaps 3 or 4 - bugs for thunderbird, had zero response on any of them, and decided that it's not worth my time to try to engage with them any further”

  NEGATIVE · support · Hacker News · 2026-04-09

• “Is there still no way to export and import your filters in Thunderbird? This is why I shunned it 20 years ago. The absurd idea that you're going to manually run around to all your computers all the time and manually set up (and maintain) mail filters should have been rejected in version 1.0.”

  NEGATIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-04-09

• “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”

  NEGATIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-04-09

• “I like how Thunderbird has the ability to handle mail, calendar, and contacts”

  MIXED · features · Hacker News · 2026-04-09

• “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.”

  NEGATIVE · Hacker News · 2026-04-09

• “moving their UI to a worse, javascript-powered, uncustomisable, web-alike trash UI is a bad thing. And a big part of why everything they've done in the last ~10 years has been garbage. And why I'll almost certainly be switching to something that isn't thunderbird next time I'm forced to upgrade it.”

  NEGATIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-04-09

• “Thunderbird is great <3 use it daily, for all my work and personal mail.”

  MIXED · features · Hacker News · 2026-04-09

• “I've been using Thunderbird for decades, I've donated in the past, and am likely to donate again.”

  MIXED · Hacker News · 2026-04-09

• “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”

  MIXED · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-04-09

• “thunderbird navigation/deletion/message opening is basically instant from human perception”

  POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-04-09