Thunderbird – creolened.com

Proton (who is not an entirely unbiased source–they provide email and other services) provides a take on how the new Outlook is another vector in Microsoft’s ever-growing data harvesting/advertising empire. I don’t live in Europe or the UK, so I get none of the opt-out options the people there do to help control how much of their info gets hoovered up by Microsoft and its 722 (!) partners.

I have email accounts from multiple sources:

My main outlook.com account
My vestigial gmail.com account
My account for creolened.com
My account for protonmail.com
Probably a few others I’ve forgotten about or haven’t used since 1887

This means any solution that can’t incorporate multiple accounts is a non-starter because I don’t want to log in to a bunch of different webmail interfaces. I’m trying to work smarter, not work…more.

Since Outlook works with everything but Proton (I am on Proton’s free plan since I don’t use it much, and you need a paid plan to get access to third party clients) I’ve been using it, and it works well enough. The UI is a bit different between Mac and Windows (I prefer the Mac version), and there is no Linux version at all, but it mostly works.

But reading stuff like the Proton article made me think I should try Thunderbird again, since it will work with everything (save Proton) and has clients for Windows, Mac and Linux. Great!

There’s only one problem: It has been hit with an ugly stick, repeatedly and at length.

I am willing to overlook aesthetics to a certain degree. My journaling app, Diarium (that name) is great, but it really is nothing to look at. But it’s plain, not ugly. Functional.

Thunderbird is functional, but ugly. So, so ugly. Everything about the way it looks rubs me the wrong way. The size of elements, the various layout options, the colours, the fonts, the use of (or lack of) white space. It looks like something designed in the 1990s and has never been touched since.

But this time I was determined to make an effort into fixing it up. I opened it alongside the “new” Outlook app (really, just a standalone version of the outlook.com web interface) as reference and went to work making Thunderbird less ugly.

The good news is, I succeeded enough that I have now switched to it as my email client. Go me! (And go away to Microsoft and its 722 partners.)

Here’s what it looks like now, with certain info redacted. I am still tweaking, and it’s still not 100% where I want it, but it is no longer ugly¹.

I have pixelated most of the info, but you get the idea.

I’m sure there are Mac users who would still sniff in disdain at this, but it’s good enough for now.

Here’s what I did:

Switched to the built-in light theme (dark is OK, but light looks better to me). Note: If you don’t enable any theme, it will use the theme/colours of your OS.
Under Layout, I enabled Vertical View, Folder Pane and Message List Header
Under Folders I enabled All Folders and Favorite Folders, then collapsed All Folders and selected the Inbox for each (plus Junk for my primary account) as a Favorite. This allows me to compact what would otherwise be a crazy-long list of subfolders.
Density is set to Relaxed
Under Message list display options I chose Table View
Font size in the main view is 15 point, and the font is set to Aptos (this is the new default font Microsoft uses in Office and I like it!)
I have replaced the default set of gray icons with Phoenity icons, which is installed as a Thunderbird extension. This not only adds a splash of colour, I feel the icons are easier to scan.

I’ll continue to tweak, but I already find Thunderbird much more readable for when new mail comes in, both in the taskbar (there is a badge for new mail) and in the folder view, so I’m already benefitting from the move. As a bonus, this also seems to have fixed an issue where images were very slow to load into Outlook (maybe the hundreds of trackers get priority now), as images are working normally again.

Next up: Seeing how easy it is to replicate this on macOS and Linux Mint.