Recently this updated, that function went away, it's now press the screen, wait, press a tiny icon, wait, press another tiny icon, wait
UX designers always have to fiddle and make things worse
Mozilla announced 10 years ago (2012) that they were halting major development of Thunderbird.
This is probably why.
https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2012/7/6/3142046/mozil...
The problem is that there are Mozilla developers who appear to randomly poke at the codebase and "change" stuff. One recent example is how they've changed the calendar event edit dialog. Now instead of being able to edit the event directly, you have to click on an intermediate button (so first you have a read-only dialog, then the actual edit dialog).
When I've searched why they would do that, I found that it was because one developer thought that "it's probably how it should be". They've changed something that's been that way for more than 10 years with no UX study, no discussion with users - just one guy who thought that it'd be nice to change this.
And that’s what exactly happened 10 years ago. Mozilla handing Thunderbird over to the Community to manage.
So I don’t disagree with your frustration, but am simply saying that the issue is caused by lack of centralized ownership … which Mozilla communicated a decade ago they would no longer own.
> With every new version, I have to worry about what's going to be broken this time.
What I've learned is that the mbox format used by Thunderbird is not reliable for long term email storage. If something seems wrong with a mailbox in Thunderbird (e.g. a few lost or corrupted emails), do NOT compact it, or you will lose your email forever.
The alternative storage format, maildir, is in my experience much more reliable. I've used maildir and TUI email clients for 7 years without incidents, the only downside is the steep learning curve. Thunderbird has support for maildir but it's still experimental and I wouldn't advice anyone using Thunderbird+maildir for storing emails long term.
So, you can use it in Thunderbird, but not share that with other applications that also support maildir, they won't be compatible.
It doesn't work on Wayland for me, but that seems to be a general WebKitGTK bug and might be related to something Ubuntu- or NVidia-specific.
Thunderbird seems like the only cross-platform open-source mailcient that that is at least somewhat alive.
I've stuck with Thunderbird because it doesn't have an major flaws. But it is definitely slow and clunky.
Sorry that you are using Nvidia and therefore have Wayland issues. Using Wayland since 2 years and ditto no issues.
I wish there was a simple offline Calendar app that is isn’t bundled with email. Too bad Sunbird isn’t active anymore.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the core developer of Kalendar
It might be a good idea for the TB team to work on developer experience in order to attract some more contributors.