thunderbird and k9 were spun off from mozilla a while ago
Still under the umbrella and control of the Mozilla organization. Just a different subsidiary from Firefox. The concerns are very valid.
Hmm. Well, as someone who is interested in trying Thunderbird or Betterbird, it’d still be better than relying on Gmail webmail, right?
Yes. And Betterbird reduces the dialing home to the absolute minimum necessary.
Do you have any tips for a first-timer installing it for a few Gmail accounts?
Not much I’m afraid. I’ve just returned to desktop clients after years of only email (and outlook at work 🤢). I can tell you it’s very intuitive, setting up the accounts was very easy.
The spam filter is quite decent from the get go, but it needs training to get better. To that end, I’ve added a mark as junk button to my toolbar (right click next to the search bar and customize). That makes it faster to mass mark things to either confirm or correct the filter. I’m sure there’s a keyboard shortcut to do it, but I’m not a heavy e-mail user so I didn’t bother to look.
I like that there are several extensions available, but I usually only install the ones that I really need and trust. So that’s basically Dark Reader and a nice theme for the app.
I even set up GPG keys and tested both cryptography and email signing. It’s amazing how they managed to get these to be so user friendly, that was not the case at all in the several years ago I tried. You can see in Gmail how the email shows up as gobbledygook but not on Betterbird.
