What you're looking for is Dove:
Dove is a suite of configurations & advanced modifications for Mozilla Thunderbird, designed to put the user first - with a focus on privacy, security, freedom, & usability.
this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2025
93 points (87.8% liked)
Privacy
34526 readers
747 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Thank you very much! Will definitely take a look. π
Librewolf is a privacy oriented fork of Firefox, it grabs some setting from arkenfox. Betterbird is not a privacy oriented fork of Thunderbird as far as I remember. When I tried it the only thing I was attracted to was its tray support, but as I use non DE compositors, so far wayfire, labwc and sway (tabbed layout), and as there's currently a Firefox bug, I didn't see any reason to keep trying it, and now on sway with tabbed layout I see no reason for a tray any ways...
fork and arkenfox
Thanks !
Interesting.
Did you read their website/faq? It very clearly tells me that Betterbird has a very different focus than LibreWolf. It's not about Privacy, it's about fixing bugs.
BetterBird is great. I got it running via Birdtray under Cinnamon with some minor tinkering in the birdtray-config.json file.
How did you get it working? I am using the latest Mint with Cinnamon, Betterbird flatpak with Birdtray flatpak. I setup the directory for my two email inboxes and it displays the joint counter on BT icon. However whenever I open BT it opens BB and gives an error and keeps BB open over anything else.
birdtray-config.json
Edit the following strings:
"advanced/tbcmdline": [
"/usr/bin/flatpak-spawn",
"--host",
"flatpak",
"run",
"--branch=stable",
"--arch=x86_64",
"--command=betterbird",
"--file-forwarding",
"eu.betterbird.Betterbird",
"@@u",
"%u",
"@@"
],
"advanced/tbprocessname": "betterbird",
"advanced/tbwindowmatch": "Betterbird",
In Birdtray under Advanced - Thunderbird command line - call Betterbird as follows:
/usr/bin/flatpak-spawn --host flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 --command=betterbird --file-forwarding eu.betterbird.Betterbird @@u %u @@
Thank you, I'll give it a try
Hopefully we can get a Betterbird mobile app one day.
I was looking into k-9 mail and it seemed decent
What stuff did you want to have in a mobile app?
K-9 mail is literally Thunderbird. Itβs been rebranded and taken over by Mozilla. Theyβre keeping the k-9 branding as its own (otherwise identical) app as a nostalgia token for the people that have used it for a long time.
Will it work with K-9/Thunderbird for Android?
What do you mean "work with", it's a different-ass client? Do you mean if it's possible to import settings?
The email servers themselves are separate (ex. Gmail, your school email server, work email server, etc.).
Thunderbird / K9 are clients that let you access the email on your device
So they should all be compatible with each other
Ok, duh, you're both right of course; late night/early morning brain fart here π§ π¨
No. Betterbird adds random features.
Are there the same problems with Thunderbird as with Firefox?
There are no "problems" with Firefox. The problems are with Mozilla and how they operate Firefox, so they could easily start affecting Thunderbird too.
The Thunderbird team spent a good chunk of time a few days ago replying everywhere they were mentioned on Mastodon, insisting that the problems did not apply to them:
The Firefox Terms of Use do not apply to Thunderbird or any other products we develop (e.g. Appointment, K-9 Mail)
You can check out their replies here: https://mastodon.online/@thunderbird/with_replies. Lots of the same, or similar, verbiage across replies.
I tried to use LibreWolf yesterday. The Flatpak version wasn't supported by KeePassXC, so that was a pass for me. The Fedora version did work with it, but it was also freezing my system and causing graphical glitches that were so terrible, I thought my hardware died. There were coloured blocks as well as weird pixelated warping. It's probably because I have Wayland, and I noticed that the Fedora version ran under X. I would have submitted a bug report, but I didn't even know where to start. Maybe I'll do that eventually.
E: I have narrowed this down with journalctl to be an issue with amdgpu. This happenes on Firefox as well, but not other applications somehow. It's something to do with a gfxhub page fault. I'll have to see whether an older kernel version might help.
Truly the year of the Linux desktop
Strange - I'm on Fedora Wayland using the flatpak version without any issues.
No issues with the flatpak version on OpenSUSE Leap with KDE Wayland either.
You used it with keepassxc?
Yes I use KeePassXC, also from flathub.