Why are they repeating the 6 key themes twice but phrased in different ways and in different order? And then there are 6 recommendations and 5 improvements which are very similar to each other, but the article doesn't say how they are related.

I would suggest they first "demystify the language" and "streamline information architecture" of the article itself.

Also some details would be nice. And some acknowledgement of an understanding that the UI being "dated" and not "modern" probably isn't what's making it difficult to use.

I want to use Thunderbird, but it's so... weird. And why can it not be minimized to tray? Am I supposed to sit and keep the Thunderbird window open at all times?

It's funny you should say that, because the next release apparently directly addresses this. Including startup to tray. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/close-tray-starting-154

Wow, finally! Thanks for sharing.

From user feedback, I wonder if they've learned how to prevent Thunderbird from creating an empty "thunderbird" folder in my home directory yet.

Hmm strange, I have never had a thunderbird folder in my home dir. I use thunderbird on Mac, Windows and Linux (Ubuntu).

It's been an ongoing issue since the beginning of the year, at least on Linux. Since you're using Ubuntu (which is based on Debian), you may be using an older or an LTS version. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2007074

Is this is the snap version of tb? If so it has restricted file access.

Maybe try the .deb version? (maybe need to back up your data in ~/snap/thunderbird/

If only there was a way to edit the source code, and recompile it yourself.

Oh well, no software is perfect.

This is a good encapsulation of why the year of the Linux desktop is perpetually fifteen years away.

Kudos to the Thunderbird team for improving TB so much over the past few years, it really helped that they split from Mozilla. K9-Mail (which is now TB) also strongly benefitted from this. Maybe Mozilla will start listening to their users someday...

> A few weeks ago, we conducted hour-long conversations with 10 of our users to dig deep into how you manage your preferences and configurations in Thunderbird desktop

Is only 10 people representative of the population of thunderbird users?

Fwiw, even just going through your software with one user can give quite a few insights about what's not obvious about it. That's not at all to say you never need more, but very few open source projects do user research in the first place, being passion projects that just scratch the developer's/s' itch. More samples is always better, definitely at n=10, but I'd also not dismiss the results and benefits of doing it!

If the crowd is diverse enough. Was it? The article doesn't reveal.

The video goes into slightly more depth, and at about 1:30 into the video they acknowledge that the participants were not representative and that they would like to conduct further research.

> Is only 10 people representative of the population of thunderbird users?

For very narrow studies it is possible to get representative data with fewer than a dozen interviews, but in this case it is explicitly not representative. In the video they mention that most of the participants have used Thunderbird for over a decade and follow release notes, development, and various forums closely, which to me suggests that they were recruited opportunistically rather than a random statistical sampling.

They do mention that they have plans to engage a larger audience in the future but that can be incredibly expensive. Even large organizations typically have to augment a small number of representative interviews with a large number of surveys and a very large set of user telemetry to properly weight interview feedback.

Thunderbird has as many as 10 users?!

(I jest!)

It's a standard research technique. You can have 2,000 people answer an automated survey but you can't have hour-long conversations with them. Researchers in many fields would like a better solution for in-depth interviews.

If they make importing an ICS file a one-click action in place of the full-blown, click-through import wizard, I'll be a happy camper.

Deep down, though, I really wish they rebuilt it on top of something less heavy than Firefox, eg. ZED's GPUI.

> Settings

Missing step numero Zero: What is a menu bar, where should it be placed, and how do I use its menu items in a way that adheres to the basic design rules of all operating systems on which this software runs?

TB has big UX problems not mentioned: Search works poorly (Misses too many results to be useful), messages you typed have weird paragraph spacings, and reading multi-message threads is a mess.

Which UX problems? When I read

> Thunderbird’s robust functionality is its superpower, but a dated interface shouldn’t be a barrier to entry for newer users.

I started preparing for the worst.

please make the oauth flow catchy and easy to debug, like straight up suggesting that an unreachable imap server is because the port is blocked or catching the the custom domainis just outlook and updating the flow accordingly. Make it nice for enterprises, so users can push for enterprise use, too :)

Just hoping the maildir and proper Gmail-like threading comes soon finally.

Sounds like a pitch for why the next version of Thunderbird will be "AI-enabled".

What's planned for upcoming versions of Thunderbird are in public roadmaps:

https://roadmaps.thunderbird.net/en-US/

Those two images in the post do look... "AI-enabled"

They look like stock Powerpoint slide templates to me, which if that is a common way for AI to show items, is likely because it was already a common visual technique and AI learned it that way.

Thunderbird has spun off from the usual Mozilla stuff. I would be shocked if they moved in this direction.

Thunderbird is great and was my main email app for a decade – until I de-googled my life. I think settings were a horrible mess, but after that UX sending/receiving email were great.

Can we have the UI that was promised in all the mock ups a few years back please?

I'd like the Oauth authentication setting to work in the latest version. But that might just be me.

I'd also like it to be possible to enter a U2F pin number when using Oauth because then I could actually use it with my company Yubikey.

Sample of 10? Was this little clique also from one and the same corporate office?

related - recently I learned Microsoft doesn't provide any way to download all your emails from outlook.com in one way to back them up, so Thunderbird was the tool I used to create backup

still can't comprehend how is this legal in EU, Google at least provide takeout