Buy European

Thunderbird is far from brilliant, it's adequate, which is high praise in a sea of absolute vile crap, but it still doesn't make it brilliant. Its search (a pretty fundamental feature of an email client at least to me) is absolutely god-awful if not completely broken, at least at the scale of mailboxes I have, and this doesn't seem like an uncommon problem that is limited to just me. I am forced to resort to grep or addons in order to do a proper search of any of my folders with any level of confidence that I am not missing those lovely disappearing messages, since random messages just aren't indexed in Thunderbird's search repeatably, and consistently over about a dozen years of using it, only about 50% of my messages get indexed to become searchable despite any amount of folder reorganization and rebuilding of indexes and deleting databases and other frustrating troubleshooting steps it never works properly.

I've lately been considering giving up on it entirely and moving to a TUI client for email. I might try Betterbird first to see if it's actually any better.

Note that the maintainer of Betterbird has been permanently banned from the Mozilla community. He even still mentions it in this specific page. There's not very much more info about this, the only thing that does maybe show their true colors is with issues like this one where he seemingly sent copyright threats privately to other open source projects.

Mmmm. What are some things that make Betterbird better?

Thunderbird doesn't belong to Mozilla anymore for a while now, even if they still work together. I will keep to the base which is still thunderbird because for FOSS projects I don't think it makes that much of a difference for the country of origin.

I really just use Thunderbird on android. But I regularly still have to open the gmail app to search stuff which is less than helpful

Isn't betterbird just thunderbird with some very minor adjustments?

Its more than a soft fork but barely, like they didnt apply a few commits that removed a feature.

I don't recall exactly.

I tried it but it wasn't very compelling.

Thunderbird is fine. Email sucks.

edit:

this is the feature comparisson: https://www.betterbird.eu/#featuretable

They are calling it a soft fork because it does closely track upstream releases.

Can I just drop it in and make it work with my current MailDir folders or do I need to do some migration work?

I use Evolution and FairEmail. A fork is all well and good, but if you want out of the bullshit you have to get out of the ecosystem.

Vivaldi browser has email and calendar built in.

It's not great, but it's European and 1 app for everything.

Fairmail on Android for my main email client.

For those complaining about Thunderbird's search... did you raise a ticket? That's the way to get things improved...