THUNDERBIRD
Take back control of your desktop email
Nick Peers takes a fresh look at the venerable email app Thunderbird as it celebrates its twentieth birthday in style, by sending it an ecard.
OUR EXPERT
Nick Peers
has almost forgotten a time before email. How did we cope, relying on pen, paper, telephones and – gasp – face-toface contact?
QUICK TIP
Mozilla has long been threatening to produce a mobile version of Thunderbird and it’s officially here at last. Thunderbird for Android (www. thunderbird. net/mobile/) is focused solely on email for now, but it can import your accounts from the desktop version via QR code and your phone camera.
Email may not be fashionable, but it is essential. If you’re relying on a browser tab to access your email, you’re missing a trick. Installing a standalone client gives you access to all kinds of useful extras, from improved organisational tools to features you may not find elsewhere, including encrypting and signing sensitive emails for added privacy and security.
When it comes to email, there’s one open source tool that everyone knows about: Mozilla’s
Thunderbird.
It may not have received the same level of care and attention compared to its big browser sibling
Firefox,
but having clung on to life by the skin of its teeth, the email client recently celebrated its 20th anniversary having been given some proper love (and resources).
In this tutorial, we’ll take a closer look at some of Thunderbird’s features you might not know about. After all, the app offers far more than just email – you can use it to access your contacts, calendar, RSS feeds, newsgroups and some chat platforms (including IRC, Matrix and XMPP), too. It’s also cross-platform, so whatever skills you learn here can be ported across to Windows, Mac and your mobile (see Quick Tip, left).
Install Thunderbird
If your distro doesn’t come with Thunderbird installed – Mint does, while Ubuntu offers it as part of the extended selection during installation – it’s simple to obtain. Try installing it through your distro’s repos, app store or via Snap (https://snapcraft.io/thunderbird) or Flathub (https://flathub.org/apps/org.mozilla.Thunderbird). All these methods guarantee the latest stable release from the ESR channel – currently 128.x, with security updates arriving every four weeks or so.
The user interface isn’t challenging to navigate – it’s a multi-tabbed affair that opens to the Account Setup wizard. In many cases, all you need to supply is your name, email address and password – Thunderbird then attempts to discern your account settings from your domain name. Most popular web providers – including Gmail – are directly supported, but if not, you simply need to visit your email provider’s support pages to find out what information must be entered manually.