I looked at it yesterday after having had a lifetime licence for Postbox, and having used it intensively, for ten years. After downloading and installing Thunderbird 115 I’ve spent time tailoring it and am very pleased with it. I propose to move back to it (I used it before Postbox) for the following principle reasons:
The Postbox developers have shown no interest in developing an Apple Silicon version of Postbox—with the result that Postbox hangs, one or twice a week, when I try to quit it on my M2 MacBook Pro.
Postbox invariably refuses to allow the language setting to stick at "English (United Kingdom)” and constantly reverts to US English, which is infuriating.
The "Correct Identity” add-on in Thunderbird 115 is a much more helpful implementation of tailoring identities to specific email addresses than the manner in which Postbox dealt with that.
Thanks for the now obvious insight. Being a Mac user, I instinctively looked in Preferences, then did a Google search. I need to remember, that Thunderbird has a long Windows / PC background.
The plugin is very good and offers powerful customization options. Not to demerit the developer, but I find it hard to pay for a functionality that should already be present in Thunderbird.
I was going to raise the exact same question in this thread: is still thunderbird unable to autocomplete folders when moving / archiving emails? I think I remember Postobox had developed it.
Yes, I think you can’t do that in Thunderbird 115, sadly. All I’ve discovered so far is the right click where the "Move” menu displays a list from which to choose. Your recollection of Postbox is correct and I miss the easy move option (partly because I use a number of idenitites and various folders linked to them so am frequently moving emails around).
As I’ve not used Thunderbird for ten years I’m not up-to-speed on add-ons but am currently keeping an eye on the "Quick Folder Move” add-on for when it’s updated to work the TB 115—to see how much that helps.
I must say that the interface in the image looks slightly better than dark mode irl. As is stated in their blog: this image is a mockup. They’re apparently still working to make the real interface look like this one.
I don’t use iOS (on an iPhone that is). Only iPadOS on which I’m using Apple Mail. Since I’m only just checking incoming mail on the iPad, Mail is just fine.
I’ve noticed that it doesn’t handle iCloud Mail’s folder structure in the way that you would expect it to. It doesn’t recognize the “Deleted Messages” folder as the “Trash” folder (among other issues). Has anything changed in the latest version?
Will you install the iOS version of Mozilla Thunderbird once it’s released?
In the meantime, I’m just using the default email application. That’s what I’d recommend to most people.
It’s improving with every passing year. Have you considered contacting the developers with your feature request?
If you ask them on social media, you’ll likely receive an answer within 48 hours.
It excites me to think that the redesign isn’t even finished yet! I can’t wait to see what the finalized version looks like!
Oh, okay. I can only assume that it would be compatible with iPadOS too.
Thanks for posting this! I haven’t looked at Thunderbird in a long time and the latest version looks great and fixes the problems that drove me away. I’ve installed it on my two Macs and will give it a try for a couple weeks to see if I want to make the switch permanently.
Just be aware that most (all?) Mac mail clients insist on downloading ALL of your emails. I would like to keep Outlook installed on my Mac for the odd occasion I need access to work emails, but it insists on downloading and keeping an entire year of email for those odd occasions. Why Macs don’t have the feature that most (all?) mobile clients have is beyond me.
Old school expectations, I guess. Mobile means “limited”, even though you can get 256 GB Macs and 1 TB phones.
You shouldn’t have to do that yourself though. Mozilla Thunderbird already seems to handle Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo! Mail correctly, so why not iCloud Mail too?
Believe it or not, but this might be on Apple’s side instead of Thunderbird. Depending on the mailserver, there are settings how to treat certain ‘system’ folders. I know this exists for Dovecot.
So if Apple doesn’t want to support this, you should change it yourself in your mail client.
Keep in mind that Apple isn’t very well known for supporting open standards. They mainly focus on their own ecosystem. So if iCloud mail is working with Apple Mail, all is fine for them.
I’m a current Mac Postbox user with an extensive set of rules for incoming mail. Is there a way to move from Postbox to Thunderbird without having to recreate them? Thanks!
If there is I did not discover it when recently moving to TB 115. I, too, had a rather extensive list of mail filters but I merely recreated them in TB.
That was worthwhile because for me TB 115 has some substantial advantages over Postbox. In particular:
There is a native Apple Silicon version and the Postbox developers seem never to have shown any interest in developing one.
The Correct Identity add-on is a much better way of ensuring I use the correct "From” address when sending an email than the method used by Postbox.
I’ve set up TB so it’s extremely easy to file received emails—much easier than it ever was in Postbox.
TB is clearly being actively developed. There is little sign that Postbox (which I used for ten years) is.
I appreciate those points may not be sufficiently significant for you to outweigh the move, of course.
