improvements to email composer
Why is Thunderbird's email composer so BAD. Even, AOL has a better composer than Thunderbird. I've been using Thunderbird for years, but only a couple as my primary email interface. I've been doing more email communications than usual lately and have again gotten frustrated with Thunderbird's poor email composer.
In 2017 there is a similar user inquiry thread and every "help" response had an excuse for why it's so bad. But other email clients have much much improved composers.
Thunderbird's creators have done a great job with the backbone capabilities of Thunderbird from what I understand..... but why not the same level of excellence in Thunderbird's email composer,.... please! Shouldn't email be the core capability of Thunderbird that you'd want to offer an excellent user interface and capabilities suite?
All Replies (5)
BAD doesn't convey much detail. Which features do you find inadequate, and which ones would you like to see? You may find this list useful.
Thanks sfhowers for reaching out. You ask a fair question, here's a "bad" basic basic feature that immediately comes to mind.
For clarity. when I reference other popular and commonly used email systems, I'll refer to them as "email systems".
I've never seen an email system define font size with small, medium & large. I have no known reference to understand and find it meaningless to use small, medium & large to select a desired font size. Email systems utilize a font number size to set the desired font size and most everyone knows the font size they desire for given uses.
Email systems today allow making independent font size changes (bigger or smaller) no matter what the starting selected words font size are. Starting text size differences are maintained when larger or smaller is selected. Thunderbird does offer text size changes, larger or smaller, but ONLY if all the desired text that one wants to change are the same size to start with, or if you want the selected text (with different text sizes) to be all be changed to a small, medium or large font size.
I know there are other existing bad or wished for features that I thought of earlier in the week, but they have slipped my mind at the moment.
It's hard to believe you haven't gotten many complaints on the above and many others on missing features in the past. When inquires/complaints are received how are they handled? Does anyone do a comprehensive competitive analysis comparing the Thunderbird to other email systems?
Oh.... here's another Thunderbird quirk. If one wants to change the color of one word from black to red the first time, it takes 4 selective clicks. To repeat this on additional words, it takes 3 clicks. In "email systems" it takes 1 or 2 clicks for the first time and 1 click for subsequent changes. If one is changing many word colors then that's alot of extra user interface time that is wasted and could be eliminated.
It's a common misconception that one must be able to specify a specific font size that's embedded in a composed message, so that the recipient sees exactly what you intended. This idea ignores the fact that email recipients view messages on a variety of screen sizes, and are able to set fonts to whatever they like, independent of what is embedded in the message. See this article for further explanation.
The article also explains how you can set the display fonts, i.e. the ones that you see on your system, but not embedded in composed messages.
The process for changing text colors could be improved, but again, it's not guaranteed to be seen by the recipient. Compose a message with colored text and send it to yourself, then see how it looks if View/Message Body As is anything besides Original HTML.
No disrespect intended, but your response seems to justify the status quo mindset and disregards what other "email systems" have standardized in their user interface.
Your response seems oddly similar to the response received in the similar 2017 user complaint/inquiry that was mentioned earlier.
I'd love to see Thunderbird be a premier email system for the masses, but without an improved editor/composing user interface I doubt it will ever make it.