Betterbird presented the release of the postal client Underbird, which is based on Mozilla Thunderbird, developed by Mozilla Firefox technology. Betterbird 128.9 is built on the long-term support branch code base of Thunderbird 128.9. ESR, with updates being released throughout the year. Installation packages for Windows and MacOS, as well as binary assemblies for Linux, are available for download. The interface is supported for Russian and Ukrainian languages.
The Betterbird project was founded by Jörg Knobloch, a former Thunderbird Mainer who had been part of the project since 2016. In 2020, he was temporarily banned from participating in any Thunderbird-related projects for three months due to toxic behavior and aggressive attacks on other project participants. After violating the terms of the ban, he was permanently removed from the Mainers and banned from any involvement in projects under Mzla Technologies Corporation, overseeing Thunderbird development.
Betterbird is a set of patches addressing long-standing issues in Thunderbird and adding functionality that was previously rejected. Additional features included in Betterbird compared to Mozilla Thunderbird are:
- Multi-line viewing mode
- Vertical bookmarks
- Color accents in design
- Transfer of fields to the top of the letter window
- Resizable panel in the window heading
- Additional indicators during sorting
- Various layouts of the main window
- Editing headlines when sending messages
- Additional viewing modes
- Manual sorting mode for directories and folders
- Support for advanced search conditions including regular expressions
- Global search for encrypted PGP messages
- System tray icon support for Windows and Linux
- Minimize to tray feature in Linux
- Support for movemail
Key changes and improvements in Betterbird 128 compared to Thunderbird 128 include the removal of error messages for non-existent messages.