Advent 2021: Thunderbird

December 21, 2021

Programming

approximately 1 minutes to read

This blog is part of the 24 posts long series "Advent 2021":

Advent 2021: Intro (December 01, 2021)
Advent 2021: C++ (December 02, 2021)
Advent 2021: C# (December 03, 2021)
Advent 2021: Python (December 04, 2021)
Advent 2021: Go (December 05, 2021)
Advent 2021: TypeScript (December 06, 2021)
Advent 2021: CMake (December 07, 2021)
Advent 2021: Django (December 08, 2021)
Advent 2021: Angular (December 09, 2021)
Advent 2021: Flask (December 10, 2021)
Advent 2021: gRPC (December 11, 2021)
Advent 2021: GraphQL (December 12, 2021)
Advent 2021: XML & JSON (December 13, 2021)
Advent 2021: Matplotlib, Pandas & Numpy (December 14, 2021)
Advent 2021: Linux (December 15, 2021)
Advent 2021: Ansible (December 16, 2021)
Advent 2021: SQLite (December 17, 2021)
Advent 2021: Catch2 (December 18, 2021)
Advent 2021: Zstandard (December 19, 2021)
Advent 2021: ZFS (December 20, 2021)
Advent 2021: Thunderbird (December 21, 2021)
Advent 2021: Visual Studio Code (December 22, 2021)
Advent 2021: Blender (December 23, 2021)
Advent 2021: Open source (December 24, 2021)

While the battle between Chrome, Edge and Firefox is raging, there is another product which is in my opinion equally important for “the web” without much real competition – Thunderbird! Sure, there are commercial email clients, but they’re doing other things as well, and when it comes to email only, there is really not that much out there. I think that’s mostly due to Thunderbird solving the problem well enough that nobody feels the need to write a (serious) competitor for it. Yes, there are a few more open source clients, but I think it’s fair to say that Thunderbird is the dominating open source solution, certainly when it comes to cross-platform clients.

I’ve been using Thunderbird for as long as it’s been around, on both Windows and Linux. It’s becoming more and more of niche product these days as communication is moving towards instant messaging clients and web mail, but for me as an “old-school” email user it’s still the goto client for all my personal emails. It’s easy to use, works reliably with all email servers I ever dealt with, and since a few years, has both good search capabilities as well as an integrated calendar. It’s easy to overlook how good a product actually is if it “just works” in your day-to-day use.

The Thunderbird project had a bit of a difficult past where it used to be a part of the Mozilla foundation, but subsequently was separated and is now an independent project. It also picked up speed since then compared to a few years of being in maintenance only mode and the roadmap is getting quite crowded by now. I’m glad it’s around – it’s been a great piece of software which never failed me, and I’m hoping we’ll get many more years of Thunderbird to handle all our local email needs!