[g105b]

Whenever Thunderbird makes its way to the front page of Hacker News, I always re-download it and hope that I can use it.

Every time I've ever tried it (spanning around 30 installs over the last 15 years), I've uninstalled within a week to a month, due to sluggish UI, phantom unread emails, crashes, and text formatting issues.

I do it because I believe that one day Thunderbird could be good. Today could be the day - I've installed it, added my accounts, and it looks like the developers have made some significant improvements. I'm not talking about fancy new features, instead I'm talking about the small nitpicky problems I've had whenever I've tried to use it.

For example, this time I installed, I didn't have to go into a hidden settings menu (here be dragons) to make new emails default to the top of lists. My replies are now made above the original message. Fastmail doesn't throw a wobbly when trying to add email, calendar and contacts with the same password.

Maybe today is the last time I install Thunderbird?

[Aachen]

I don't have any of those issues, besides perhaps crashes but the last one must be two years ago (I remember because we're always watching for exploits coming in). Maybe nobody else has these issues you mention either. If you want them to be fixed by the next time you install, have you considered reporting the issue and seeing if there is a volunteer is willing to fix it for you?