Forks of popular and well-established open-source apps is one of the best starting points for developing a better product than the original.
Be that as it may, it’s not often we find forks of said popular software that manage to deliver a supremely improved experienced.
Enter Betterbird, a soft fork (which means that it is closely following the Thunderbird Extended Support Releases – ESR) of the popular Mozilla Thunderbird email client. It’s a fine-tuned version of Thunderbird, and it’s “simply better” than the app it’s based on.
Same feel, a better experience
There are two main reasons why this is the case. The first one is that Betterbird brings a series of new, exclusive features, and secondly, it contains a lot of bug fixes (which are usually shipped by Thunderbird at a later stage).
It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Betterbird looks and feels exactly like Thunderbird. This is no bad thing since Thunderbird is still a very good email client even by today’s standards.
Betterbird exclusive features
We already talked about the important bug fixes that take place, now let’s see what new features Betterbird brings to the table.
One of the most important changes is the re-introduction of the header button customization menu. Betterbird also features a multi-line view like Outlook, Lotus Notes, and Postbox, complex search terms, quick filter untagged messages, global search in encrypted messages + quick filter search in encrypted messages.
The app also brings forth various improvements for news readers, a configurable display of addresses in the message list, options to send plain text or HTML, and support for Unix Movemail. All of these features are not currently present in Thunderbird, despite multiple requests from the community over the years.
Conclusion
Betterbird is without a doubt one of the best email clients and is a better product when compared to Thunderbird. The development of Betterbird is, unsurprisingly, led by a former Thunderbird maintainer, as well as a strong community that really sees the untapped potential of Thunderbird.
