They just had their first major overhaul in the last decade+ and are looking pretty shiny:
Personally I haven’t had a chance to check it out because I just use my browser for personal email & my work mail is hosted through Microsoft so there’s no pretending not using Outlook at work does anything for me.
That said, I am eagerly waiting for them to give the same treatment to the soon-to-be merged Thunderbird & K9 mail so I can use that for my personal mail on my phone
i have some clients using thunderbird. i scrambled to get prepared for the onslaught of phone calls when theirs got auto-updated to the new ui. all for naught. didn’t get a single call from anyone getting ‘lost’. they did a good job with the refresh.
I use Thunderbird for it’s spam filter and have some very in-depth email filtering rules configured for some old emails that receive large amount of spam and phishing emails. I don’t open it super frequently, and honestly didn’t notice when it got the UI overhaul (I think it was slowly over a few updates, but I honestly don’t know) but i do really like rhe direction its heading
The newest release is visually awful. It drove me crazy and I had to downgrade back to the last stable (102). The content density was wildly inconsistent and text would be squished in one area and really spaced out in another. The toolbar moved so action buttons were in the title bar area, away from where your mouse would be (compared to before) if you’re interacting with your inbox.
Other than that, the old version works just fine. Multiple email accounts, calendar and contacts. It does the job. Minor nitpicks, like dark mode doesn’t dark evwrything, you still have to manually change your reading window colours. But at least it’s once and done.
The UI is customizable so you can increase or decrease the density of text. I personally like my text dense, but the important thing is that it’s a simple settings option to change.
I also love the new layout, but I think with any UI refresh, there will be people who would hate it even if it was just objectively better.
Thunderbird’s current state is the best it’s ever been
I’ve been using Thunderbird for a good decade or more, and honestly it’s got the best email filtering rules builder of any email client I’ve used. The spam detection has only gotten better at detecting junk spoofed emails over time, it also always displays the email address as well as the name so it’s easy to spot when something funky might be happening and the recent UI tweaks they’ve been making are very well thought out. Oh and they added an option to export/backup your profile to a compressed archive so I no longer have to copy the same .thunderbird folder from computer to computer and every time I install a new Linux distro
