The release of the Betterbird email client has been announced. This soft-fork of Mozilla Thunderbird is developed by the community and is based on Mozilla Firefox technologies. Betterbird 128.9 is built on the long-term support codebase of Thunderbird 128.9.0 ESR, which receives updates throughout the year. Installation packages for Windows and macOS, as well as binary builds for Linux, are available for download. Interface localization is supported for Russian and Ukrainian languages.
The Betterbird project was founded by Jörg Knobloch, a former maintainer of Thunderbird, who has been involved in the project since 2016. In 2020, after accusations of toxic behavior and aggressive attacks on other project members, the Thunderbird Council decided to temporarily ban him from participating in any Thunderbird-related projects for 3 months. After violating the terms of suspension, he was removed from maintainership and indefinitely banned from any projects associated with MZLA Technologies Corporation, which oversees Thunderbird development.
Betterbird is a set of patches that fix long-ignored or unresolved issues in Thunderbird and also add back some functionality that was either not accepted or was removed from Thunderbird by its developers. Compared to Mozilla Thunderbird, Betterbird includes the following additional features:
- Multi-line view mode, similar to MS Outlook, Lotus Notes, and Postbox.
- Vertical tabs.
- Color accents in the design.
- Moving the attachment list field to the top of the mail window.
- Resizable header panel in the window.
- Additional indicators when sorting.
- Additional views and layouts for the main window.
- Editing headers in outgoing messages.
- Additional threading view modes.
- Manual sorting mode for directories and folders.
- Support for more complex search conditions, including regular expressions.
- Global search for messages encrypted with PGP.
- Support for an icon in the system tray on Windows and Linux.
- Minimizing to tray in Linux.
- Support for Movemail.
Key changes and fixes in Betterbird 128 compared to Thunderbird 128:
- Unnecessary error messages for non-existent messages have been removed.
- Fixed incorrect display of weekdays for certain date formats.
- Automatic installation of language packs for Betterbird has been added from the settings dialog.
- Saving emails via the menu item and through drag-and-drop uses the same filename.
- Fixed incorrect operation of the OWL extension.
- Resolved an issue with the Quick Folder Move Classic extension, which caused new and renamed folders not to appear as recently modified.
- The number of folders in accounts using IMAP is no longer displayed as doubled (caused by issues in Thunderbird's IMAP backend).
- Fixed minimizing to the tray under Linux in environments that use Wayland.
- Addressed issues with displaying images distorted.
- Resolved a data corruption issue in mbox that occurred when sorting emails received via POP3 if the sort filter was set to search for values within the email body.
- Fixed an issue with incorrect display of search results when sorting (quick filter) only by the email subject.
- Errors occurring during processing of the mbox archive are now always correctly displayed in the console.
- Improved performance when working with virtual folders (IMAP) and searching within them.
- Fixed various errors when searching and sorting emails using complex regular expressions.
Source: opennet.ru
