Betterbird
Version: 115.4.2-bb17 Web: www.betterbird.eu
What Firefox is to web browsers, Thunderbird is to email clients. Or at least, that’s what Mozilla would like. While it is quite popular, and a very capable email client, Thunderbird is often criticised for being slow to add new features, or even fix bugs.
There are several Thunderbird forks, and Betterbird is one of them. Unlike some of the others, Betterbird is a soft fork as it closely follows the development of Thunderbird Extended Support Releases (ESR).
As you can probably tell from its name, Betterbird bills itself as a fine-tuned version of Thunderbird that offers new features and bug fixes, which, in the true spirit of open source, it ships upstream as well.
Grab the Betterbird binary archive from its website and extract it with tar xjfv betterbird-115.4.2-bb17. en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2 . Then switch to the extracted directory and fire up the Betterbird client with ./betterbird .
On first launch, you’re asked for the login credentials of your existing email client, which the app promises to house on your computer. If you’ve used Thunderbird (or any email client for that matter), you’ll feel right at home with Betterbird. Apart from a few minor tweaks, even Betterbird’s user interface is very similar to that of its progenitor.
One of the biggest features in the new release is the multiline view, which Betterbird has been refining since 2021. This layout isn’t enabled by default, since it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. The app also has an impressive search function that supports regular expressions and can be used to build complex search queries.
In addition to adding new features, Betterbird is also restoring some of the features dropped upstream, such as the count of total and unread messages in the app’s status bar, and the ability to select multiple folders for bulk processing.