Feature and Add-on requests, my two cents

First, thank you very much to the Thunderbird developers team: I’ve been using this software for at least ten years, and although with some inefficiency, I think it’s the best existing mail client.
My needs mainly concern the use of calendars (most of them synchronized with Google Calendar): I have more than a dozen different calendars subscriptions and I make intensive use of todo tasks. Over time I have verified that the program tends to slow down (or even to stop for a few minutes), during events and tasks updating; also the calendar and tasks tabs are updated every time I view them, further slowing down the running.
Another thing that I think would be useful, is a better integration between events, tasks and emails: currently I can only create events or tasks by copying the object and the text in the emails, but in doing so, there is no longer any link between the email and the event / task. I think it would be useful to assign a deadline and a priority to the email itself, also displaying it in the calendar, among the upcoming events and tasks.
I also think that the address book should be improved, especially in the integration with Google Contacts and other online services.
Finally, this is the add-ons list I use and would like to keep in the future version of Thunderbird (maybe directly integrated in Thunderbird?):

  • identity chooser: I have many email accounts and I find it convenient to choose the one I want to use before starting to compose the email
  • lightningweather: I find it very useful to see the weather in the calendar background as I schedule my event and tasks
  • mail summaries: it provides a lot of stats data, and it is nice to see …
  • provider for Google Calendar: I make an extensive use of Google services and it would be essential, to me, to keep it that way.
  • SavedSearchThemAll: I created quick searches for unread or labeled messages, but since I have many subfolders, I find it annoying to have to select all of them every time I change or create a new search.

So, that’s all. Thank you for your attention and your work!

1 Like

This is good feedback. @mozkewisch - have you ever considered integrating Lightning Weather into Lightning proper? It’s an interesting idea.

@riccardogi_giuliani - we’re looking at undertaking a project to improve the address book.

I love the idea of linking Emails to tasks. This feature would make my life very wonderful.

A lot of good stuff here, thanks for sharing!

I’ve considered, adding weather data is an interesting feature. What I am worried about though is the maintenance burden. Integrating an add-on means extra code to keep working, which gets particularly tricky if it is an external service (like the weather service). Also, some users will not want this extra information, so there will be an option to disable the feature. With that on-off switch, I think it would be very similar to an add-on, and therefore I think we should continue to leverage the power of add-ons and keep it separate.

I agree that integrating task features into email would be a great win. We already have a feature to convert an email into a task, but I believe this is not a persistent link.

Yes, Thunderbird has a feature to convert an email into a task or
event (that was what I was referring to), but then there is no link
between them, they are separate objects, and if in looking the task
you want reach the email (let’s say to get some attachment), you
have to search for it.

About the weather service, I totally agree, it should be in add-on

(I only was worried it could be discontinued as some other addons I
loved).