ThunderBird 115 getting too Complicated

[Hlaktoong]

Ok so this is my story as a longtime user but a  amateur when using these programs.  I came to TB when MS deleted Out Look Express, my opinon the best over all simple email program ever.  But over time TB has become increasingly bloated and for me mostly useless features.  I fear touching anything in the settings cause they fully don't  explain what they do and you try and reset something and another thing disappears or then it takes a hours just to try and get back to normal.  But anyway so this what I don't want or need to just get simple emails or to send to friends.  Don't need Chat, Calendar, RSS, News, Archives & Template folders, and about 10 other things this thing 115 does now.  They should come up with a Lite version for people who don't want or need all the "improvements."  Anytime when I hear a program or website is going to change like Googe News page I get the old Uh Oh feeling and sure enough they turn out worse or less user friendly.  This Supernova is falling into the oh crap what's going on here catagory.  To me this email has functional spam, things that are not needed or wanted but forced into using what was once a great little program.  Go online just look at the people that want to get rid of the Archives.Template icons and what should just be a extremely easy delete option is a complicated nightmare that when you read what someone wrote from here doesn't even work.  Other problems like new folders icons popping up somehow, can't get rid of.  When I saw the update to 115 there was no mention of having to reset the function so I could download emails from Optimum cable and had to try and redo but yeah it worked but I ended up with 2 adds. and try to get one to stop was a hassle. You saved a bunch of my settings but didn't bother to save the most important......the connection one, and looking through this site and reading online no one mentioned that the connection would be broken.  This is a 5 month old bought in 5.2023 $4,800 Dell 8960 with Windows 11 so I don't mind spening some money on something to use, I would pay to be able to just get a simple TB back, so hours aren't lost trying to fix function problems with this anymore, I use to tell people to get this but not anymore, Proton email system is a nice program, reminds me of the good old days that this use to be. Well anyway I know I'm screaming into the wind here and nothing will change because since having my 1st computer in 2000 it's just how things go now. 

PS Why isn't there a spell correct here Holy 2004!!

[Luca_Pavan]

Yeah, I see many services being filled by stuff that I don't need, basically it's like phones bloated by software that you don't need and maybe can't even uninstall to free some memory used pointlessly. But usually there's a way to make the services less filled of useless stuff for you, some allows it through their settings page, some just don't. I don't know anything about Thunderbird but I recently installed Mailspring that's really similar to my Gmail customization, it hasn't many options. It includes spell checking, too. If you care about spelling even on Firefox you can install LanguageTool extension, really nice, offers real-time spell and typo checks and rephrase feature.

[Hlaktoong]

Hey man thanks for even reading my post, well like I said i deleted FF cause it was just getting buggy. But not to make too much of a deal out of it but why should the casual user that comes to this multimillion dollar professional website not have a spell checker already in use?  But anyway here's some new & fantastic things that have happened since doing the the update from 102. I now have 4 trash can icons, 3 new junk icons, while the delete trash on exit worked in 102 and I have the setting clicked on in 115 it still leaves them in the folder. This new 115 is messed upped.  So now I'm faced with a less than better "improvement" which nowdays is typical or having to send each and every stored email to my Gmail acc. so I don't lose them and delete TB all together then reinstall then send all my emails back to the new set up!  Hey thanks Mozzilla nice going.  The best solution would be to email an entire folder in 1 inclusive email but I don't how even if it's possible.  Like I said in my 1st post this thing is to bloated for the casual user. When I want to fly to somewhere I don't get uder the jet to tinker with the engine, on board computers, the control panel or whatever I just buy the freaking ticket get on the jet and go. Look I've had a computer since 2000 and I will never learn coding or about 99% of what these people are talking about and I don't care, this stuff is all becoming a frustrating mess (Windows 11) & not just this system here but all over the internet.  Almost every update causes problems and lost time to fix.  One way to help cure this is to never click on any ad or buy that corporate product that's being shown.  I was a mailman for 40 years ( if you want your corporate facist nightmares to come true go work at the USPS ) but anyway I remeber a guy complaing to me why is he getting the junk mail Valve Pack that contains cuopons, so I asked him did you use any of them and he said yes and I siad well there ya go, just through it away and the people that use it to advertize will stop and the thing will stop.  As of now 9/23 it no longer is mailed, same thing with online ads just don't click or buy what the man is selling. Maybe the whole system needs to be a paid service cause the effort that is going into maintaining the profit motive based of ads is slowly becoming untenable.  Look at what the European laws that are being adopted to try and cut down on the corporate spying to end privacy invasion all because of the need for corporations to sell ad space, is all this hassle worth it anymore?  How the hell does Google, FaceBook and others make billions on this is beyond me but it's becoming a monster for the average person.  

 But anyway I wonder if there's a way to reset TB back to it's basic functions but still keep my emails?

On another note not having come to this site in a few years what is up now with the "badges" what am I 6 in 1st grade and I need a sticker cause I wrote my ABC's down correctly?  I mean maybe the poor workers here get a tingle and hopfully a raise when they do a good job but for me I don't care, no idea what they mean or do so you can stop cause I'm not a child. Still also have that donation button, you guys are funny, and what that get us, another crappy TB upgrade?  I understand that maybe the basic underlying program needed to be upgraded for security reasons but you didn't need to touch what 102 had so average people like me who don't use it for work could get on with our lives.  Hate to tell ya but you are ruining it bit by bit cause you listened to people over the years " Oh if you only had this and had that it would be so great" but with each down the rabbit hole "improvement" it got bloated and buggy and well worse, cause just one wrong click and it's hours to get back something that oddly went away or strangly appeared. So take that Windmill!!! 

[gpiper]

Love this — reflects exactly how I feel. I'm currently looking for some other email client that fulfills the needs my business has for a clean, quick, uncomplicated email-only app. Thunderbird is now a huge festering slow useless "feature" bloated app.

[Hlaktoong]

Yep all I need is a inbox, no chat, news feed, RSS, just make it stable and keep the evil people from infecting it with junk.  More is not always better.  Someone at Mozz. should go back and look at the old Outlook Express setup, hard to believe that M$ did it that considering the bloated new W 11 is where they ended up. Thanks for writing back.....M

[Sarina]

You should deliver fat results

[Hlaktoong]

Sorry I have no idea what you mean.

[gzorbas]

Maybe it's FAT as in File Allocation Table? 🤔

[Hlaktoong]

Hey so yeaaah I understand the term but have no idea how to engage with that, or will cause unlike you that know what they are doing almost every time I touch the Reg. it has very bad results and well time to completely redo everything again and that old feeling of Vishnu H. Krishna WTF. So that is why I was talking about Revo Pro, does all that for me safely, never had a problem. 

[rufous]

That idiot is thinking like the programmers who are screwing it up.

[gzorbas]

I've also notice a few things that were great in the past that worked perfectly and now seem to be disregarded.

Firstly the font and size selection in the settings does not change and, a very important aspect to me, is the ability to view the Filter Log in my Message Filters which used to open in a screen that I could set a size to open on each instance. Now I have to always drag it down to view the contents.

The BIGGEST ERROR Thunderbird makes is in giving spammers an option to get into an Inbox by hiding their email address when Thunderbird does not afford a column for "Sender" or "Recipient".

Fortunately there is/was an ADD-ON by lkosson (https://github.com/lkosson/full-address-column) which sorted that problem out perfectly, and now this new version 115 Supernova has killed that off too.

I took the time to watch the video by the guy that explained why Thunderbird has gone onto Supernova, but it did little to allay my concerns as to what the reasons were for doing this.

His "potty mouth" foul language near the end was totally inappropriate, especially as I had my grandchildren watching the video with me.

I understand that a product as he states is "never complete", but I firmly believe that if something is not broken do not fix it. In the world of software a tweak to block a security leak would be great.

I love the idea of a previous version to Supernova in a format, as Hiaktoong mentioned, a Thunderbird Lite with all the previous features and options of v102.15.

Since I switched to Firefox after Netscape went AOL and Microsoft Outlook Express stopped working I chose Thunderbird, I make a decent annual donation to the creators, but I feel totally overlooked.

Maybe it is time to consider using Mailbird, paying for the Personal Pay Once option, which pretty much equates to my annual Mozilla donations, and if there is something that I’m not too happy about in that platform, I know that as a paid subscriber I can bring it to someone’s attention at the Mailbird team?

Thank you Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird for your work and efforts, but I fear the wheel has now turned away from you being the “go to” for these products online. As much as I appreciate the privacy that Mozilla affords, it is just as easy for me to go to the dreaded “Bing” with is great new AI and use other VPN and Protection programmes on my machine to stop Microsoft’s invasive tactics?

[Hlaktoong]

Yep feel the same way, I now seriously thinking of dropping this program and just using my Cable Vision email program.  So let me go through my brief actions that should be a warning to anyone thinking of using what I call now Crapnova.  My 1st mistake was to hit the update button and that really is a bad idea.  So as usual when programs don't work the next best thing is to delete it and start over. So I spent a good portion of my morning sending my saved emails to my other email systems, Google, Proton, Yahoo. Did it for so long that my hand using the mouse got numb.  But OK next did a delete and did fresh 115 download.  Reset things, added all my contacts back in, set up other things. Got my 1st email and noticed that the links in the email don't open!!!!!   Tried to find the answer and one even said open TOOLS and hit OPTION, the problem is there is no OPTION button.  The Advanced page is a utter nightmare, even in Mozz. own help page they don't tell you which 1 of what looks like 100's of true/false changes to change, how the hell is a regular person able to figure this out?  Hey guys why would you not enable to use links like in all the past versions and not in your grand reveal?  Maybe Supernove is a good name for this cause I think you spectacularly blew up your own program.  

So GZ try Proton, thier free version is really very nice, easy and nowhere near as F'ed upped as this thing here has become.  Also download Crome and put Duckduckgo on top of it and I think you might  happy with that, no Bing, no Edge, no FFox. Instead of giving your money to these people go to Revo Uninstaller and buy the Pro version, been using it for years and well worth the bucks. Got rid of M$'s Wigits piece of crap and other things that W 11 tries to force on ya. 

But anyway thanks for reading and responding, so yeah we are in age now where "fixing" things without need is a spreading disease, the USPS is full of it with managers holding thier hand out for that bonus cause it looked like they did something, maybe that's what's going on here so keep updating until things don't work anymore, IDK about these people they seem to be really really satisfied with themselves, I even seen on another sites comment page that they think they have moles from Microsoft to mess with Mozz. systems to drive people back to their horrible bloated spyware email and Bing. I'm not that paranoid but wouldn't put it past them. 

So remeber when this all started out, the promise of the computer future, the open internet, it's all just becoming a dystopian failure and we even haven't got to the new level of corporate greedy screw over they will do with AI. We think our once beloved TB is damaged wait till it gets hooked upped to some AI system. Oh well and I was naieve enough to think the TB people were going to be different and not screw up this update, HA! just another one of life's disapointments I guess.  

[gzorbas]

Thanks H,

>So GZ try Proton
I have a Protonmail account (https://proton.me/mail) that I don't use very much. I'll look into seeing what they have to offer.

>Also download Crome and put Duckduckgo
I use DuckDuckGo, but I like to keep y operating systems separate from each other, as in Chrome on my Android phones and not on my Microsoft machines. I do though run Linux on my Windows computer.  😉

>did fresh 115 download
I downloaded v102.15 and considered reinstalling that version, but then I thought that maybe Mozilla might be reading what their users and donators have to say and sort out the few crucial issues that I consider a must have in Thunderbird 115, especially the "Sender" column option and the full screen option of "Filter Log in my Message Filters".

After Outlook Express died and I found Thunderbird, I was almost as pleased as the day that we could go out and buy Windows 95 and get off the old DOS systems. The Thunderbird updates were fine without causing any issue, though it still confuses me to this day why they rely on an ADD-ON to insert a "Sender" column where common sense should dictate that this be a security prerequisite?

On a positive note, I still use Firefox as my default and a further plus to Thunderbird is the filter system that is very handy, especially when I use my 25-26 year old Hotmail account that draws in hundreds of spam messages every day. With the filters I can delete spam automatically, yet still have the option to look into the filter log in the event that someone sent me a message that I might consider as okay to read.

>go to Revo Uninstaller
Thanks again, I’m comfortable removing junk out of my machine and running through the registry to clean it up.

They say computing is a young persons game, it probably is, but then us who are in our 60’s today were young too when we started learning in our early 20s and had fun with our HP-85s, IBM Model 5150s and teaching our younger family members on a BBC Micro in 1981. How time flies.

Anyway. My very best to you and I hope you get it all sorted, I’m going to keep the faith for now and hope to see Mozilla fix Thunderbird to the levels it was before.  🙂

[scottd]

I'm in agreement with gzorbas on a couple things:

First: The changes to TB 115 that disabled the Full Address Column extension have removed a vital tool for routinely identifying spam. I have seven employees using email all the time and my great fear is them opening some crap. They're not dumb, but they may not be as paranoid as I (and I make mistakes sometimes).

The question of why we're relying on an extension for this is a good question. As of now there doesn't seem to be any way to identify the true sender. Why wasn't it built in from the start? I relied on the predecessor to Full Address Column when I first discovered that (Show Address Only). Then that went obsolete by a new version of TB, only to wait for Full Address Column to be issued. (Many thanks to Ikosson for Full Address.)

Second: thumbs up to Revo Uninstaller to clean out an old version or unwanted program.

I started getting very close to an IBM 1130 in 1971 after learning some programming in college. I've been a user for a long time. "UX" is for the young, getting work done seems to be for the old.

[gzorbas]

Hi scottd,

>I started getting very close to an IBM 1130 in 1971<
From what I can see, you have about a ten year start in computing on me. I salute you.

I find it amazing how a company such as Mozilla can launch a new application without fully testing it completely to iron out all the bugs.

I remember a time when we had to have every browser available on all our machines to check our code worked correctly in all of them before publishing online, and that was just for the early days of simple HTML. I won’t go into the requirements we had to undergo o check different programmes on the various platforms available at the time.

Speaking of glitches, I found Thunderbird 115 also dumped my installed dictionary I was using in v102.5. I guess all we can do about these issues is correct them ourselves and just raise our eyebrows.

>"UX" is for the young, getting work done seems to be for the old.<
It is sad that I have to agree 100% with you and can only add that the work done in the past was done correctly as opposed to what is currently produced.

I wish the Mozilla Foundation would decide to drop the free software, announce their purchase price so we can buy the product. I bet there would be no errors under this guise?

[Hlaktoong]

Hey guys, Gazorb & Scott, thanks for responding, I've had a mild flu so I couldn't get to this and honestly I needed a break. Yeah what you 2 did all those years ago was the reason I stayed away from a computer until my 1st Dell with M$ Millennium. That was bad enough for me, XP was so much better and I stuck with it. What you guys did all those years ago would make me stick a gun to my head, HA!  But anyway this is what I did to finally getting this to work.  I went for broke and deleted it completely again then started over again and Holy Crap it worked.  There are some little function changes but overall not much different from 102.  Seems to be more solid and stable and faster, with 102 when you hit the get mail button for me each email would load 1 at a time but now they all appear in like 1/2 a sec. OK cool but now what it does is when I went today to look on my Cablevision server site to mark the spam to teach it to block they were all gone, went back to TB and the Inbox emails were then gone and nowhere to be found.  I tried to find that setting that lets you leave emails on the server for 1 day or many  I can't find it anymore.  I wish they would make a Thunderbird site for Dummies like those yellow & black books you 'ed see at B&N.  So as of now I don't know why it's moving and deleting emails.  But at least overall it's kinda working. Thanks guys,.................M

[testomat]

Use this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Thunderbird/comments/16jwt7a/%E2%84%B9_how_to_downgrade_from_thunderbird_11...

[gzorbas]

Very nice, 👌. Thank you.

I find it amazing that Mozilla do not bother to read what their users have to say to correct the few issues in v115 Supernova that could make the Thunderbird a perfect product.

[ExThunderUser]

Congratulations Mozilla!! It's not the first time they've broken Thunderbird, but now it's completely useless!
You can be proud of making me miss an entire day of work.
But it's the last time. I will not install Thunderbird again.

[paulmuadibatrei]

After the update to 115.x I quickly went back to 102.x which is working way better. My wish would be to have a legacy update channel to not be "forced" to update to Supernova again. 

Supernova just does not work properly both the interface and the internals to my mind.

[RobT]

I did the same ...

[EmDe]

TB used to be so nice & simple. Now it is difficult to work with. Not intuitive at all, filters don't work anymore, parts of emails get deleted and very unpleasant to look at. Just spent an hour on an email because I could not get rid of the paragraph thing. No matter how many times I unticked it in settings and restarted TB. As a mail program, this is pretty useless. It would be good -as suggested by someone else on here- if Mozilla offerd a lite version.

[Hlaktoong]

That was me but it was just wishful thinking cause it seems the trend now is to keep adding things that up front I guess were a good idea but it's turning out and not just this corporation but across the whole internet is getting less functional and we are just 1 clicked or unclicked box away from things not working. Found out also that deleting a email from the cable servers email now deletes them from TB and I have it set to delete the ones on the server after a day and that now doesn't work anymore.  It's just a matter of time until the paid version comes out and Sim Sala Bim!! the misfires will magically disappear.  It's all about the $$$ now.  But I do have to admit since they had 2 updates it seems to be a bit less flaky.  But what was the rush in the 1st place.

[EAO]

Yes, I don't need those new functions, either, but what bothers me is that some of the old functions don't work, and some of the old problems haven't been corrected.  For example, when I send out a new email (I'm not talking about a reply) the program often stores the message in my Inbox instead of in my Sent Items. I thought that would be corrected with the new version.  Nope.
And now when I need to italicize a word in a new message, if I click the italics button, it jumps my curser back to the beginning of the paragraph.  Every single time.  I've discovered that the only way I can italicize a word is to type it first and then go back and highlight it and italicize the highlighted word.  It works, but it's kind of a nuisance.
Another problem with the new version is that it won't let me adjust the size of my preview pane enough to view the first few lines of the message.  The old version would allow me to slide that boundary up so that I could view most of the message without opening it.  Now I can't.
So, overall, I've got a new program that (1) I didn't ask for and didn't want, (2) is cluttered with functions I don't use, (3) screws up my attempts to italicize words, (4) still stuffs my sent messages into my inbox, and (5) won't let me view a significant portion of my preview pane.  Not happy.

[Hlaktoong]

Ha yeah a lot of little messed upped functions.  I tried using the Khoros sign in 3 x's cause nothing was showing up in my inbox until I had the thought I'll go to my Cable email and sure enough all 3 were there, TB didn't even DL them from their own website.  DL emails from the host was supposed to be the #1 function that it mimicked from Outlook Ex. and now because of their new redo it doesn't even do that correctly anymore, come on guys WTF? Really? 

[polocat]

Please please will you leave Thunderbird alone when it is stable. Why do you continue trying silly updates without proper testing ? You seem to want to drag the whole system to the ground and annoy end users - all to keep milking the last drop out of it for your own sake.