Thunderbird Desktop Settings: How Your Feedback Shapes Our Future Design
Thunderbird Desktop settings research: what we learned from your feedback
We recently spoke with ten passionate Thunderbird users to understand how you manage your desktop preferences. You told us you trust our open-source roots but struggle with technical jargon and cluttered menus. Based on this, we are redesigning our settings to use plain language, group tasks logically, and clarify privacy options. Our goal is to make Thunderbird feel modern and intuitive while preserving its powerful functionality.
Many of you don't just read mail, you actively treat your unread inbox as a task list or interactive to-do queue.
- sunaookami
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...
- extr0pian
From user feedback, I wonder if they've learned how to prevent Thunderbird from creating an empty "thunderbird" folder in my home directory yet.
- BoppreH
I tried Thunderbird recently, and was baffled that there seemed to be no way to see received emails grouped with my responses to them (aka threading or conversations). Even grouping incoming emails that have the same subject seemed like an experimental feature.
Surely I'm missing something? How are people using it? If someone replies to you "I think there was a problem with your attachment", do you search for your sent email?
- ptx
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.
- cromka
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.