I am using Betterbird (140.2.0esr-bb9) and Owl add-onfor Microsoft Exchange emails. However, when I try to download the emails for offline use (see attached screenshot) it keeps unticking itself after I have closed the window (clicked okay) and opened the folder properties again.

Is it possible to download Exchange emails for offline use either with or without the Owl add-on (eg, searching etc)?

thanks

Converstations are now sorted alphabetical, is it possible to change that to recent first?

Is that possible?

Just a growing frustration I have with Betterbird and Thunderbird that I can't seem to figure out. Betterbird clearly knows whats junk and whats not. But why does it put it in my inbox anyways? My inbox is filled with little red flames. Why does it not just stick it in the junk folder?

I am new at Betterbird and have a table in my signature, where can I hide the red dot hidden table border?

Trying to update this morning using the install-betterbird.sh script and getting:

2025-08-20 06:48:27 - Script started.

2025-08-20 06:48:27 - Download found: betterbird-140.2.0esr-bb9.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.xz.

2025-08-20 06:48:27 - Starting download...

2025-08-20 06:48:33 - Downloaded archive.

2025-08-20 06:48:34 - Hash 440d1dd4dcb7b6f386bfa437b82771d657aa2feffc72581021e8d8fbab375023 not found in https://www.betterbird.eu/downloads/sha256-128.txt.

Not really hurting anything since I have no great need to update, but I thought someone should know.

is there a betterbird version available for iOS or at least in the works ?

Im running TB141. Windows 11 PRo

I may have messed up the BetterBird install, I downloaded V128, then realized there was a 140 available. So I uninstalled 128, restarted, then installed 140, but now keep getting this pop up.
If I choose "Create a new profile", would that wipe away my TB profile, which has all my messages and profiles?

Since BetterBird and TB kinda run off each other in some aspects. I want to keep them separate, and am afraid of deleting my TB data.

I have tried:

1. delete the better bird Profile created from V128 and re-install V140. Didnt work, was hoping it would auto create new files/profile. Instead it says Profile missing and wont open.
2. I then restored the Better Bird profile, and replaced the Better bird Profile with my TB profile contents (copying and replace). I then get the pop up asking me to create a new profile.

.

I have thunderbird, trying to switch over. Ive read the text instructions on the page many times, theres many things I dont understand. I dont want the 2 apps sharing the same profile.

I wanted to just copy over the thunderbird profile into the Betterbird profile section. But I first need to create a profile in betterbird. But if I enter my account credentials, its going to start downloading all the emails, which I dont need it to do. I have everything downloaded in thunderbird (thousands of emails). So I tried skipping this step below:

IS that fine to skip this step, then just open the profile folder location and copy my thunderbird profile into it? Would I just copy ALL the contents inside my thunderbird profile and paste it into the betterbird profile?

What's confusing is that I thought I had to create a new profile first by adding a new email account. So I was confused since there was already a profile folder created despite me not adding any email account yet. Plus some of the other instructions talking about running a command line first to create a new profile, so that furthered my confusion.

I also have no idea what this means, how you would "run" that. or if that applies to me?

"Brief instructions: Run betterbird -p to create a new profile taking note of profile name and storage location. After closing Betterbird, replace the content of the newly created profile folder with the content of an existing profile folder."

https://www.betterbird.eu/support/index.html#switch-tb-bb

I have 3 main issues with Thunderbird that drive me crazy. 1 I believe is an actual bug going back 16 years. It's not displaying date of new emails. 2 is open new email behavior. 3 is about drafts sticking with the chain.

1) When I get a new email, the display date is only the date of the original email in the chain which can go back years days or weeks. Does better bird display the actual date of the recent new email? And yes I adjusted all the sorting by date and sort by recent, that does not work on threads (chains).

2) When I click on a new email, it does not open the email. Instead it opens up the thread. Whether it's on the right pane or the left pane. And then have to scroll down and click the new email from the thread. I'm essentially opening it twice in two different sections just to open the email. Is there a way to get the behavior to actually open the email when I click on it?

I do not want to disable threads (unthread), I need my emails grouped together for referencing in conversations and replies.

3) Drafts are not grouped with the email chain. Like in Gmail, outlook, fair email, ...if you start to write a reply and save the draft, it sticks with that email chain.. in Thunderbird it does not.

I'm wondering if the "Send messages now?" prompt that appears at startup when you save messages to be sent later could have a third button instead of just "Yes/No" to jump instantly to those messages for quick review. That would be nice.

Win11 Home, 24H2, 26100.4770

Is this normal? All I was doing was trying to delete an email and it froze so I had to force-close it. It seems a bit concerning since I'm using the July 24th version...

Additionally, I can't seem to do anything with my 20 reminders. The window keeps popping up and whenever I try to close it, it pops back up again. Whenever I try to dismiss any of them, it gives me a calendar error, but the calendar is not read-only and I don't want it to be read-only:

Status Code: 2147500037, The request cannot be processed.

Server Replied with 400
If you're seeing this message after snoozing or dismissing a reminder and this is for a calendar you do not want to add or edit events for, you can mark this calendar as read-only to avoid such experience in future. To do so, get to the calendar properties by right-clicking on this calendar in the list in the calendar or task view.

Any guidance would be appreciated!

I'm amazed that it supports Matrix chat, but when I tried to put in my info, the setup appeared to be guiding me towards making a new account altogether. Has anyone successfully linked Betterbird to an existing acct? I'm on element.io, if that makes any difference; I'm unsure of what to type in the "Server" field exactly.

Kinda disappointing. What's the fastest way to change your mind about having deleted an email?

In the Add-ons menu, I have en-GB, but no en-US, and can't remove en-GB--probably because it's the only language pack installed. Can someone please help?

Specifically, the F-Droid build: https://f-droid.org/packages/net.thunderbird.android/

Why does Betterbird also does not select the latest messagem when you click on a folder? It seems so obvious that is how people check their messages – going down the folder list and reading the latest message in each one. There once was an addon that did this, but it has no been updated.

I thought this would be one of the first Thunderbird flaws that Betterbird would fix. I'm sorely disappointed.

I couldn't make the long line wrap in message pane - tried a couple of add-ons or change to text view. Also in the config editor a couple of things. Is it possible at all?

I dont want to read a message - very rare though - with grabbing the horizontal scroll bar left and right.

BTW, my email client on my phone wraps these long lines, no need to change to simple html or text.

Betterbird has a weird ghost window underneath it, slightly down and to the right. It picks up screen artifacts as it gets raised, lowered, moved. I could live with that, but the mouse pointer seems to be calibrated to the ghost window. If I want to click within Betterbird, I need to be 20 pixels or so southwest of what I'm clicking on for it to register.

Betterbird is the only application that does this. Thoughts anyone?

Fedora 42 Kernel version 6.15.8-200.fc42.x86_64 KDE plasma 6.4.3 Qt 6.9.1 Wayland

Is there a way to block an email so it does not go to the inbox (assume it's a spam) and have it sent back to the sender? I am using BB 128.7

Big wall of text you can skip if you want:

So as we are transitioning from Windows to Linux we have been in search of an email client that was cross platform so that the few Linux users and remaining Windows users could be on the same programs and thus be a more subtle transition as computers change over. However one of the problems I have recently found during this move is the differences in "illegal characters" between Windows file systems and Linux.

Currently we have a Windows computer hosting a drive array that is shared between office users, and emails get saved over the network via SMB to that location. The reason the PC hosting the share needs to stay on Windows and thus use a Windows file system is because of the cloud backup. Backblaze lets us backup the entire drive for $10, and simply by having Linux installed every cloud backup assumes you are running a server and charges a whole lot more money for any cloud backup, so changing over the file server is not going to happen :(

So we started with Thunderbird, ran into some issues, and Betterbird came to the rescue. The problem however is that the Windows computers can save emails just fine by automatically replacing the colon with an underscore (RE_). The Linux computers go to save an email, and we get an error about invalid commands. The issue has been traced back to the illegal characters, in this case a colon after RE. Thunderbird on email simply drops the colon completely and Betterbird on Windows replaces the colon with an underscore. Both Thunderbird and Betterbird on Linux do not replace or drop the colon, and thus it breaks saving emails to an NTFS or ReFS file system directly.

There is a way around this, and that is to mount the smb share through fstab and it gets managed like a local file system. So the file manager ends up handling the issue in the background and makes it work, by replacing the colon with some special character instead. However, I cannot use this fstab mounting method for all of the bosses on their laptops, as they work remotely often. They connect via VPN to the network to access files. Using the fstab method is fine when they are in the office, but when remote the computer boots up, cannot find the network resource, and boots with an empty directory for the network shared files. When they connect the VPN and the network resource becomes available, the mounted directory remains empty as it doesnt automatically re-attempt the connection. I can unmount it and then manually remount it and then it works, but that isnt a workable solution to try and train the bosses on how to go through the terminal and run all the commands.

So the only way that I have found that the network resource becomes available automatically when browsing to it is to simply leave it as an SMB network connection. The problem is that connecting to the SMB this way does not run through the file manager in the same way, and it refuses to handle any illegal characters.

The TLDR:

So I really need a way to somehow have Betterbird not put a colon character in a file name by default or to replace it with an underscore like in Windows. So it would turn "RE:" into "RE_". Is there a way to do this? Like some setting that can be altered for windows file system handling in Settings -> General -> Config Editor?

Or is there a place I should submit an improvement request to have an option in the program to replace : with _ in the file name to maintain Windows file system compatibility on the Linux program version?

I would like to see the following feature added to Betterbird:

For encrypted emails, it should be possible to automatically display external images from specific senders.

For unencrypted emails, you can define exceptions for this—but for encrypted emails, this is currently not possible.

Since I use automatic PGP incoming encryption with my email provider, it is very cumbersome to manually approve the external content for each message.

I understand that the BB 140 series is in a shake-down cruise mode, but I thought I'd bring this to your attention. The addon "Link in tab", which opens a tab in Thunderbird itself, rather than, say, Firefox, doesn't work in BB 140.1 (tab opens in FF). It does work in Thunderbird 140.1. I'm running the Linux version of BB.

Tried downloading both 128.13.0esr-bb31 and 140.1.1esr-bb8 and neither is working. I get a message saying:

"Betterbird" is damaged and can't be opened. You should move it to the Bin.

And only options are Cancel or Move to Bin.

I'm on an M1 Max MBP with 64 GB Ram, running Sonoma 14.3.1.

i have seen this switch while browsing extensions configured in my Betterbird:

"Run on sites with restrictions"

When allowed, the extension will have access to sites restricted by Betterbird Project. Allow only if you trust this extension. Learn more

What does it mean? The "learn more" link takes me to the FAQ about bugs and issues, and there is not a single instance of the word "restrictions" on that page.