Thunderbird For Linux

Nowadays, email clients have a lot on their shoulders. Long gone are the days when email apps simply had to send and manage a few emails.

Of course, they have to have awesome and user-friendly UIs, all the auto-reply, auto-forwarding, redirect options, the ability to manage multiple email addresses from one place, schedule messages, as well as tons of integration features (address, calendar, cloud storage, online note-taking service integration to name a few). Oh, and multiple access options (web-based, desktop, and mobile).

The question is - can an open-source app that's maintained by the power of the community like Thunderbird still be relevant in this day and age? The answer might surprise you.

Thunderbird is developed and maintained by a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation and, as mentioned before, it's completely free and open-source (that comes pre-bundled with most Linux distributions).

At heart, it's a classic (local) email client boasting a flexible tabbed GUI, with all the standard mail-related features such as mail filtering, searching, and archiving.

Another great aspect of Thunderbird is just how easy it is to use. You just have to provide a name, email address, and all the required credentials, and Thunderbird finds the best settings for you (such as choose the IMAP, SMTP, and SSL/TLS settings).

Even better, you can manage multiple accounts within one window of Thunderbird.

Thankfully, there's more to like about Thunderbird. One of the main reasons Thunderbird can still hold its own in today's world is thanks to its customization options. Not only can you change the look and feel of Thunderbird, but you can also vastly expand its power thanks to various add-ons. You can find and install add-ons directly in Thunderbird, no extra hassle involved.

Then there's something called Smart Folders. This makes it very easy for you to manage multiple accounts and even combine a series of folders into one (such as Inbox, Archive, and Sent folders).

Lastly, probably the most important reason why Thunderbird is still valued today is security. Yes, it may not be as flexible as some other email clients that share massive servers and work on all desktop and mobile platforms (and have web-based clients as well), but this provides far better overall security.

For starters, it's open-source, so anyone can check out the code and see if there are any trackers bundled within (there aren't). Secondly, it has phishing protection, automatic updates, and has the ability to automatically block suspicious messages.

What about privacy, you might ask. Well, the beauty of having a local email client is that it stores all your personal data (and we mean all of it) on your local drive.

Thunderbird is by no means perfect. It's certainly not the most flexible or the most flashy option out there. Thunderbird is the embodiment of what a robust and dependable email client should be.

It's super friendly on resources, has absolutely no bloat, it's secure and private, it's easy to set up, it works on Windows, macOS, and Linux exactly the same way, and is definitely one of the best at handling multiple accounts (no matter their number) at once.

Is Thunderbird still relevant today? Very much so.