Posted inInformation Technology

Are You Tired of Thunderbird’s Incessant Begging?

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek1
BetterBird logo

You’ve all seen it, unless you have been enduring Evolution. Thunderbird’s incessant begging for money. Sometimes it seems like Thunderbird pushes out an “update” that only nags for money. Adding insult to injury Thunderbird has been dropping features while adding bugs. Gee, where do I sign up to pay for that? One of the reasons I tried out Evolution is the fact I wanted something that didn’t incessantly beg for money.

Betterbird

Just plain nice. Much fewer bugs. Seems to only nag for money right after install. Heck, I even donated $100 once they started accepting U.S. dollars. Seriously, who uses Euros? American dollars rule the world! That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Betterbird looks much like Thunderbird and with the following extensions installed:

fully meets my needs. You probably won’t need the CalDAV or TbSync add-ons. I created a local NextCloud server so I could finally sync my contacts and task lists across all machines.

Loves Linux

Just like Thunderbird, Betterbird runs on Linux and a few other platforms. Seriously, how many people actually use Microsoft products these days? When I was working on the IPOS project for INTEL, the upper mucky-mucks told me roughly 80% of all new and used computers sold in the EU were sold with Linux. Most EU nations made it illegal to bundle hardware and software so all the retailers installed Linux. At least Linux will bother to let you know a hard drive is about to fail. Windows 10 simply can’t get around to it.

Thunderbird Slower Than Betterbird

I haven’t run any actual stats, but on my machines Betterbird seems to load faster on launch. It also seems to just navigate faster.

One massive flaw Betterbird as is no direct Linux packaging. Unlike Thunderbird, there are no .deb or .rpm files. If you visit the official download site you will only find a zip for Linux. I have pointed this out and you should too. It won’t become the default email client in Linux distros until it has both .deb and .rpm packaging.

On the plus side, it does have a flatpak. If you are running a Linux distro that bakes in flathub support out of the box (or you install it from their repos) you can just install Betterbird and go.

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.