Thunderbird for iOS

When I first saw the link, I thought, “Oh cool! A new platform using the Thunderbird name!”

Then I realized it was Mozilla’s app. And just like that, the excitement was gone.

I try not to bad-mouth products, but Thunderbird and I did NOT get along. Clunky integrations, a painful Gmail connection, and basic functionality issues made it one of the worst email clients I’ve ever used.

Of course, I’m also annoyingly picky about my tools, so maybe it’s a me problem.

I have been using K9 for a long time on Android. No complaints. I guess most Apple users will simply use the default email client, which works well and is probably better integrated and has a better UI than Thunderbird.

On Linux desktop, Thunderbird is still the best all around email/CardDAV/CalDAV client it seems, despite being unreasonably heavy.

I am almost certain that the only reason (feature) I have Thunderbird desktop installed has no place in this iOS app – an editable FROM field. I am pretty sure of that.

Ah, just saw the coolest thing - an epic subheading:

> Designed for growth

Love it. There's no stopping this app now. Godspeed, Mozila/Thunderbird! Grow is the new word.

If this supports JMAP (I hope so since its aimed to be a Thundermail client) then I'll give this a whirl with my Fastmail account

The Mail app that comes with iOS is plenty.

I was using Thunderbird on Android for years and keep using it on Linux, but it aged rather poorly.

Search is completely useless, it never-ever finds anything. Threads are supported, but their functionality is not configurable so whenever I lazily click on the complete thread (instead of opening it, scrolling down to the last item and clicking on it directly) it opens every message of the thread. Really nice functionality for large threads with 60+ emails!

So I am a bit skeptical why on earth they would increase their coverage when the already supported platforms lack decent UX.

But why? What's the USP here?

Maybe there's a demand for a more feature-rich mail client on iOS, perhaps syncing accounts and filters from the desktop app. But this doesn't seem to be that, at least not at this point.

I don't get why Mozilla's designs are so ugly. It's 2026, everyone has beautiful designs and some browsers (Arc, Dia) are so gorgeous you don't want to work with anything else. And then this not-even-released mail app looks like old Bootstrap web apps. I used to love Mozilla for having some of the most beautiful designs. The era of Forefox OS and Firefox 4 with their beautiful beautiful designs and then they said no; threw out that beautiful dinosaur logo for whatever this ugly pointless one is and now look at their software. My eyes hurt for the amount of design problems in Firefox. Okay you made a bad one, at least start something new correctly.

Are you guys using emails?

why do people use Thunderbird in general? i never found a use for it. now that there's IOS app, maybe.

Suggest keeping "A first look" in the title for clarity that this isn't a full release

Title: Thunderbird for iOS: A First Look

apparently that is a native iOS application, I wonder whether they tried to use KMP to use same codebase with the android app

i feel i could die waiting for this. i am 54.

Now does it come with that oh so annoying "Sent from my iPhone?"

But can it do IRC?

It's been 14 years since I reported you can't search for "wedding" in Bugzilla, have they ever fixed it, they hadn't last time I checked:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=752844

(The bug is they do 'clever matching', so wedding matches weds, and too many emails you weds for wednesday, you can't say 'just show the word I ask you for')

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Should be: 2006.

(Not the headline. The announcement. Haha)

What exactly is the Thunderbird team doing that I can't vibe-code with my special friend Claude? Why does this software justify a blog post about a "first look". What am I missing that is so exciting? I don't understand what is going on here that is so neat. There's nothing here I can't pump out in a week or two at worst.

I'm confused at everyone's excitement because it's become a lot cheaper to write software like this. Maybe for all the folks world-wide that aren't up to speed with modern practices, it's helpful to have an iOS app.

Am I talking like the guy that dissed Drew Houston, saying oh I can put together sshfs and a couple other things and build out Dropbox. Drew rightly corrected the engineer on ycombinator many years ago to say that end users want a finished product not a bunch of tools.

But this is a new era where you can vibe-code this very quickly for iOS.