I am almost certain that the only reason (feature) I have Thunderbird desktop installed has no place in this iOS app – an editable FROM field. I am pretty sure of that.
Ah, just saw the coolest thing - an epic subheading:
> Designed for growth
Love it. There's no stopping this app now. Godspeed, Mozila/Thunderbird! Grow is the new word.
Editable from field is also the only reason I was using it with protonmail. I can't remember if it was a protonmail limitation or a Thunderbird one that meant I had to pre-add any email addresses before I could send any messages from them though.
Now I'm on fastmail, the from address is an input box that I can put anything into.
My usecase:
I have one email account with multiple aliases.
I added it to iOS mail with the main alias.
I registered to my bank using a secondary address, a more "neutral toned", also one I'd expect to be sold to data brokers, and would be willing to abandon easily if started to get too much spam...
Now the banking app is pretty... ripe for improvement.
I report a bug in the app, and the way it happens: it throws up an email editor, with debug info attached to a partially pre-filled form mail. However if its sender is not the alias I set up at the bank, it will get rejected, and will have to do lots if identification turns etc...
Apple mail does not let you set up aliases for an account, I'd need to log in twice to the same account to be able to do this. Also apple mail is a piece of ... modern outlook, to be really rude, so I'm interested in alternatives.
If your e-mail provider supports it, Customize From Address allows you to make a one-off minor alteration to your From address without having to create a new identity in Account Settings. For example, if your From address is John Doe <john@example.com> you may want to change it to John Doe <john+doe@example.com> or John <john@example.com>.
I was using Thunderbird on Android for years and keep using it on Linux, but it aged rather poorly.
Search is completely useless, it never-ever finds anything. Threads are supported, but their functionality is not configurable so whenever I lazily click on the complete thread (instead of opening it, scrolling down to the last item and clicking on it directly) it opens every message of the thread. Really nice functionality for large threads with 60+ emails!
So I am a bit skeptical why on earth they would increase their coverage when the already supported platforms lack decent UX.
Very much agree. I still use it on windows because nothing else seems much better, but there are a lot of things I feel are fairly basic/core features that just don't work right, I often find myself wanting to use the gmail web..
- Search
- Threads
- Windows integrated notifications/unread badge
- Syncing unread counts in folders
- Text/Email Editor
GMail search fundamentally has an advantage over a mobile email client as Google can and does maintain dedicated indexes for your email on their servers. While a mobile client could do the same, it's not really something that you want to do on a battery-powered device.
It would be a great thing for IMAP servers to do, but none of the major open source ones really take on that feature, and Google wants you in their web-client, so searches via IMAP are low-quality at best.
> While a mobile client could do the same, it's not really something that you want to do on a battery-powered device
Doesn't this feel like a perfect example of work done at 3AM when plugged in and (importantly) after the battery is fully charged? It won't be perfect, searching for an email in the afternoon that you received in the morning won't be in the index, but I generally don't need search for emails I received so recently anyways
I use it as well, and it's a turd of a program. However, the flipside is that nowadays, with AI, one can build addons very easily, to fill missing functionality.
It’s a turd of a program today, but it didn’t use to be. I bet that if you took one of the earliest versions from 20 years ago and fixed the security issues, you’d get a great email client, because that’s what Thunderbird once was and email itself has barely changed.
Thunderbird desktop has the expression-search-ng addon that is notoriously breaks on updates. Wonder why the team does not make search a priority cross platform.
I have used Aquamail https://www.aqua-mail.com/android since the mid 2009 on my android devices. It's been solid and it is super customizable. I think the only downside is they changed their payment model a while back and if you didn't buy it back then it costs monthly fee or a $99.99 for a lifetime license. I highly recomend it if you do a lot of email on your phone.
I use k9/thunderbird for private mail. But for my org's on prem exchange account I use nine folders, as I also want to sync calendar and contacts. (We have a davmail gateway but it has quirks)
Already did. Both should be essentially the same, different skins and some rather miner functional differences afaik. Using TB on Android and I agree with critics, like dysfunctional search etc
Maybe there's a demand for a more feature-rich mail client on iOS, perhaps syncing accounts and filters from the desktop app. But this doesn't seem to be that, at least not at this point.
It's impossible (other than mutual TLS) to do mfa on the native ios mail app without trusting a third party for one of your factors. Hopefully Thunderbird will support it...
I don't get why Mozilla's designs are so ugly. It's 2026, everyone has beautiful designs and some browsers (Arc, Dia) are so gorgeous you don't want to work with anything else. And then this not-even-released mail app looks like old Bootstrap web apps. I used to love Mozilla for having some of the most beautiful designs. The era of Forefox OS and Firefox 4 with their beautiful beautiful designs and then they said no; threw out that beautiful dinosaur logo for whatever this ugly pointless one is and now look at their software. My eyes hurt for the amount of design problems in Firefox. Okay you made a bad one, at least start something new correctly.
I don’t understand people complaining about Firefox UI. It barely exists. There’s a url bar with some buttons in each side. If you use vertical tabs, another bar with tiny icons for each tab.
There’s so little chrome I can’t find any fault in it. It’s just grey, out of the way, as it should be.
There's too much chrome. There's no way that I've ever been able to find to remove the fat fixed message header in reading view to see more of the message.
There is too little in modern "nice" designs... on VS Code for example all the title bar is filled with junk buttons by default, and you have to search hard for a single pixel to be able to grab that window and move it. Decades of usability research thrown out the window thanks to Mac and web folks dictating the trends.
I'm with you and honestly I think most people are. Frankly, I'm pretty certain that for 90% of users of you swapped chrome for Firefox, replacing the icons too, then people wouldn't notice. I'd wager 80% of HN users.
It's such a petty argument when everything is so hackable and Google is eating the internet. I wish people would put half the energy they use to complain to solve the things they are upset about.
Vertical tabs are only better because there is more horizontally space on a as screen and listing things vertical allows you to both gauge the list size and keep a mental reference of what slot a tab was. And those tab headers don’t move because of resizing when the width fills up.
But horizontal tabs are still better. Not technically better or ascetically better. Some other immeasurable, indescribable better.
I don't like pickles. So what? No one is forcing me to eat them and no one is forcing you to use vertical tabs. They aren't even the default so wtf is the point of your comment?
Also with standard tabs. I mean it probably won't distub someone already conditioned by abhorrent MacOS design... but the lack of visual boundaries of tabs (independent controls), the terrible vertically uncentered close buttons, the whole thing is a visual Chernobyl meltdown... Mozilla working hard to kill Firefox.
Remember when Mozilla did a huge rebrand that introduced a new logo many people actually loved for its ingenuity, styling their name as moz://a? [1] And then, not very long after, they did another rebrand that resulted in… whatever they’ve got now? [2] Taking a step forward and then two steps back seems like a very Mozilla thing to do.
There is some praise but it's mostly the same complaints that come up whenever Mozilla gets mentioned on HN, it's awful, I can't believe they've done this, millions wasted etc.
Looking at the screenshots, I don’t have a problem with the aesthetics of the UI, but with how it’s wasting a lot of space. It feels like we could see more content on a small 4” smartphone screen 15 years ago: https://media.idownloadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/R... (and that already felt a bit wasteful back then, where a different layout could almost double the number of items visible at once)
I'll throw my nickel to this comment. I use swaywm with i3bar, you literally can go lower with that taste but I'm at least aware and honest with my taste. Dia looks like ChatGPT web client. It's mediocre at best
Most people don't like Zen (or Arc). Which is fine. I'm a big keyboard person so I love it, especially with the vimium plugin. But sometimes people get confused at my browser because they don't know how to navigate. Which is understandable
What I like about Mozilla is they made a hackable browser so we can have things like Zen, WaterFox, or whatever floats your boat.
Mostly because I have multiple email addresses. But I make good use of the filters (which could be improved) and tags. That really helps with searching through everything.
If I only had one email account I probably wouldn't care as much but that's not as common these days
Juggling multiple e-mail accounts in a single client, and I haven't found anything better - also haven't really had any major complaints, the desktoo app works perfectly for what I use it for.
I have seen this. Some devs actually write a pure swift ui app and still manage to make that look like anything but a pure switt ui app. Since the mothership is Mozilla I won't put is past them.
Much more than UIKit, SwiftUI enables the web front-end mentality that mandates no stone be left without a custom style. It's one reason that I'm not particularly fond of it.
(The bug is they do 'clever matching', so wedding matches weds, and too many emails you weds for wednesday, you can't say 'just show the word I ask you for')
If you sort by relevance it seems to prioritise the word you asked for? I searched "wedding" and the first few hundred results were all emails about actual weddings. It was only when I sorted by date I saw the "Wed" results.
If this supports JMAP (I hope so since its aimed to be a Thundermail client) then I'll give this a whirl with my Fastmail account
I am almost certain that the only reason (feature) I have Thunderbird desktop installed has no place in this iOS app – an editable FROM field. I am pretty sure of that.
Ah, just saw the coolest thing - an epic subheading:
> Designed for growth
Love it. There's no stopping this app now. Godspeed, Mozila/Thunderbird! Grow is the new word.
Editable from field is also the only reason I was using it with protonmail. I can't remember if it was a protonmail limitation or a Thunderbird one that meant I had to pre-add any email addresses before I could send any messages from them though.
Now I'm on fastmail, the from address is an input box that I can put anything into.
what does being able to edit the from field enable you to do?
My usecase: I have one email account with multiple aliases.
I added it to iOS mail with the main alias. I registered to my bank using a secondary address, a more "neutral toned", also one I'd expect to be sold to data brokers, and would be willing to abandon easily if started to get too much spam...
Now the banking app is pretty... ripe for improvement.
I report a bug in the app, and the way it happens: it throws up an email editor, with debug info attached to a partially pre-filled form mail. However if its sender is not the alias I set up at the bank, it will get rejected, and will have to do lots if identification turns etc...
Apple mail does not let you set up aliases for an account, I'd need to log in twice to the same account to be able to do this. Also apple mail is a piece of ... modern outlook, to be really rude, so I'm interested in alternatives.
The official explanation is as follows:
I was using Thunderbird on Android for years and keep using it on Linux, but it aged rather poorly.
Search is completely useless, it never-ever finds anything. Threads are supported, but their functionality is not configurable so whenever I lazily click on the complete thread (instead of opening it, scrolling down to the last item and clicking on it directly) it opens every message of the thread. Really nice functionality for large threads with 60+ emails!
So I am a bit skeptical why on earth they would increase their coverage when the already supported platforms lack decent UX.
They're weird with contributions and fixing old bugs as well, to the point community run patchsets make it a much better product...
See Betterbird for reference and their blog posts, it sheds some more light on aforementioned weirdness.
Also see other comment in this thread mentioning how you can't search for "wedding". A bug that is 14 years now.
At this point I'm really considering trialing one of those two vibe coded clients recently shown here on HN.
Very much agree. I still use it on windows because nothing else seems much better, but there are a lot of things I feel are fairly basic/core features that just don't work right, I often find myself wanting to use the gmail web..
- Search - Threads - Windows integrated notifications/unread badge - Syncing unread counts in folders - Text/Email Editor
GMail search fundamentally has an advantage over a mobile email client as Google can and does maintain dedicated indexes for your email on their servers. While a mobile client could do the same, it's not really something that you want to do on a battery-powered device.
It would be a great thing for IMAP servers to do, but none of the major open source ones really take on that feature, and Google wants you in their web-client, so searches via IMAP are low-quality at best.
> While a mobile client could do the same, it's not really something that you want to do on a battery-powered device
Doesn't this feel like a perfect example of work done at 3AM when plugged in and (importantly) after the battery is fully charged? It won't be perfect, searching for an email in the afternoon that you received in the morning won't be in the index, but I generally don't need search for emails I received so recently anyways
I don't know the other servers well but Dovecot has good SEARCH support.
I would totally use TheBat on Windows
I use it as well, and it's a turd of a program. However, the flipside is that nowadays, with AI, one can build addons very easily, to fill missing functionality.
It’s a turd of a program today, but it didn’t use to be. I bet that if you took one of the earliest versions from 20 years ago and fixed the security issues, you’d get a great email client, because that’s what Thunderbird once was and email itself has barely changed.
Thunderbird desktop has the expression-search-ng addon that is notoriously breaks on updates. Wonder why the team does not make search a priority cross platform.
I have similar thoughts. What email client do you use on Android?
I have used Aquamail https://www.aqua-mail.com/android since the mid 2009 on my android devices. It's been solid and it is super customizable. I think the only downside is they changed their payment model a while back and if you didn't buy it back then it costs monthly fee or a $99.99 for a lifetime license. I highly recomend it if you do a lot of email on your phone.
I use k9/thunderbird for private mail. But for my org's on prem exchange account I use nine folders, as I also want to sync calendar and contacts. (We have a davmail gateway but it has quirks)
I use ProfiMail on Android. Loving the app since Symbian era. K9Mail is ok too.
Isnt K-9 Mail supposed to join forces with Thunderbird? K-9 Mail works fine for me.
Thunderbird for android is K9 just rebranded afaik.
Already did. Both should be essentially the same, different skins and some rather miner functional differences afaik. Using TB on Android and I agree with critics, like dysfunctional search etc
I use FairEmail in Android.
But why? What's the USP here?
Maybe there's a demand for a more feature-rich mail client on iOS, perhaps syncing accounts and filters from the desktop app. But this doesn't seem to be that, at least not at this point.
It's impossible (other than mutual TLS) to do mfa on the native ios mail app without trusting a third party for one of your factors. Hopefully Thunderbird will support it...
They have a paid email service now. This is likely for that and for other users who want a thunderbird-based, free e-mail client.
The Mail app that comes with iOS is plenty.
I struggle to get it to search things. Even emails within the last few days. It'll show me irrelevant mail from years ago but not yesterday's.
I also don't like that it renders PDF attachments. Just seems to be enabling scammers
Yeah, the only thing it doesn't do is shared inboxes with Microsoft Office accounts. I would really like to uninstall Microsoft Outlook.
> it doesn't do
For a company focused on privacy, I'd love GnuPG integrated into the mail app.
Oh, that would be awesome.
It does have S/MIME, I think?
I don't get why Mozilla's designs are so ugly. It's 2026, everyone has beautiful designs and some browsers (Arc, Dia) are so gorgeous you don't want to work with anything else. And then this not-even-released mail app looks like old Bootstrap web apps. I used to love Mozilla for having some of the most beautiful designs. The era of Forefox OS and Firefox 4 with their beautiful beautiful designs and then they said no; threw out that beautiful dinosaur logo for whatever this ugly pointless one is and now look at their software. My eyes hurt for the amount of design problems in Firefox. Okay you made a bad one, at least start something new correctly.
I don’t understand people complaining about Firefox UI. It barely exists. There’s a url bar with some buttons in each side. If you use vertical tabs, another bar with tiny icons for each tab.
There’s so little chrome I can’t find any fault in it. It’s just grey, out of the way, as it should be.
Edit: https://imgur.com/a/1I4gG22 tell me where the bad/ugly UI is.
There's too much chrome. There's no way that I've ever been able to find to remove the fat fixed message header in reading view to see more of the message.
There is too little in modern "nice" designs... on VS Code for example all the title bar is filled with junk buttons by default, and you have to search hard for a single pixel to be able to grab that window and move it. Decades of usability research thrown out the window thanks to Mac and web folks dictating the trends.
I'm with you and honestly I think most people are. Frankly, I'm pretty certain that for 90% of users of you swapped chrome for Firefox, replacing the icons too, then people wouldn't notice. I'd wager 80% of HN users.
It's such a petty argument when everything is so hackable and Google is eating the internet. I wish people would put half the energy they use to complain to solve the things they are upset about.
I do not like the vertical tabs at all
Good thing you don’t have to use them.
Counterpoint: vertical tabs are way better
Vertical tabs are only better because there is more horizontally space on a as screen and listing things vertical allows you to both gauge the list size and keep a mental reference of what slot a tab was. And those tab headers don’t move because of resizing when the width fills up.
But horizontal tabs are still better. Not technically better or ascetically better. Some other immeasurable, indescribable better.
I don't like pickles. So what? No one is forcing me to eat them and no one is forcing you to use vertical tabs. They aren't even the default so wtf is the point of your comment?
Have you seen the new Nova theme? It’s horrible, especially with vertical tabs.
Also with standard tabs. I mean it probably won't distub someone already conditioned by abhorrent MacOS design... but the lack of visual boundaries of tabs (independent controls), the terrible vertically uncentered close buttons, the whole thing is a visual Chernobyl meltdown... Mozilla working hard to kill Firefox.
I took the screenshot with the nova theme enabled. That’s what it looks like. It’s a nothingburger.
If that screenshot is of the Nova theme, then the Nova theme is very ugly.
No, it isn’t.
That’s not how it looks in mine at all.
Remember when Mozilla did a huge rebrand that introduced a new logo many people actually loved for its ingenuity, styling their name as moz://a? [1] And then, not very long after, they did another rebrand that resulted in… whatever they’ve got now? [2] Taking a step forward and then two steps back seems like a very Mozilla thing to do.
Here's the HN thread about the rebrand that "many people actually loved for its ingenuity" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13425380
There is some praise but it's mostly the same complaints that come up whenever Mozilla gets mentioned on HN, it's awful, I can't believe they've done this, millions wasted etc.
Looking at the screenshots, I don’t have a problem with the aesthetics of the UI, but with how it’s wasting a lot of space. It feels like we could see more content on a small 4” smartphone screen 15 years ago: https://media.idownloadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/R... (and that already felt a bit wasteful back then, where a different layout could almost double the number of items visible at once)
You know what? We also have people complaining about the new Firefox UI redesign, which is exactly the whitespace-heavy style you found in Arc or Dia.
GASP!
> some browsers (Arc, Dia) are so gorgeous
With all due respect, what a low bar for beauty!
I'll throw my nickel to this comment. I use swaywm with i3bar, you literally can go lower with that taste but I'm at least aware and honest with my taste. Dia looks like ChatGPT web client. It's mediocre at best
They're tools. I expect BM 085232, not the Book of Kells.
Zen is delightful to use, and based on Firefox. I just don't get what's going on at Mozilla.
Most people don't like Zen (or Arc). Which is fine. I'm a big keyboard person so I love it, especially with the vimium plugin. But sometimes people get confused at my browser because they don't know how to navigate. Which is understandable
What I like about Mozilla is they made a hackable browser so we can have things like Zen, WaterFox, or whatever floats your boat.
was wondering the same. Mozilla seems out of touch
I don't care for the Material Design, even when Google did/does it.
To parent commenter, "beautiful design" just means "AI powered browser".
A quick glance at their product and its literally just a clone/fork of chrome/chromium with AI-pilled features.
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" holds true.
Suggest keeping "A first look" in the title for clarity that this isn't a full release
Title: Thunderbird for iOS: A First Look
why do people use Thunderbird in general? i never found a use for it. now that there's IOS app, maybe.
Mostly because I have multiple email addresses. But I make good use of the filters (which could be improved) and tags. That really helps with searching through everything.
If I only had one email account I probably wouldn't care as much but that's not as common these days
Juggling multiple e-mail accounts in a single client, and I haven't found anything better - also haven't really had any major complaints, the desktoo app works perfectly for what I use it for.
What alternative do you suggest?
i feel i could die waiting for this. i am 54.
apparently that is a native iOS application, I wonder whether they tried to use KMP to use same codebase with the android app
I have seen this. Some devs actually write a pure swift ui app and still manage to make that look like anything but a pure switt ui app. Since the mothership is Mozilla I won't put is past them.
Much more than UIKit, SwiftUI enables the web front-end mentality that mandates no stone be left without a custom style. It's one reason that I'm not particularly fond of it.
Thunderbird for Android is based on the 15+ year old K-9 Mail app while Thunderbird for iOS is a greenfield project.
But can it do IRC?
It's been 14 years since I reported you can't search for "wedding" in Bugzilla, have they ever fixed it, they hadn't last time I checked:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=752844
(The bug is they do 'clever matching', so wedding matches weds, and too many emails you weds for wednesday, you can't say 'just show the word I ask you for')
Yeah, the search in Thunderbird never worked for me, so I use the quick filter. Apparently it does not use the index (and is slower), but it works.
If you sort by relevance it seems to prioritise the word you asked for? I searched "wedding" and the first few hundred results were all emails about actual weddings. It was only when I sorted by date I saw the "Wed" results.
That thread is both hilarious and sad. Incredible that nobody has forked the project simply to implement a working search.
Betterbird exists actually and they fix bugs like that, which Mozilla just refuses to address for whatever reason
https://www.betterbird.eu/
Well, they are funded by Google after all -- infamous for replacing or ignoring search terms entirely.