I'm with you on this. I tried Thunderbird again just a few weeks back, to see if it could replace Outlook for me. Nope, but it's nothing to do with the UI, which seems... fine?
My issues were:
- no support for O365, unless you pay for a 3rd party plugin
- bizarrely high CPU usage, even when seemingly not doing anything
- *sometimes* memory usage grows really high
- a bunch of small niggling issues over missing features - for example, I can't paste in a formatted signature from Outlook
I'd much rather they focused on the above - the UI is just fine!
Hmm, I literally just double-checked before posting (with the beta version, too), and it still says it needs a plugin? Maybe I need to look a bit closer.
I definitely used Thunderbird for an O365 account that required 2FA and so had to use OAuth, back to.... 2021 at least, I think. Though I think you might have had to know to change the auth method to OAuth to get it working, at least at the time.
If you've constantly upgraded over the years, try creating a new account or even reseting your profile. Perhaps there are/were some 'stale' settings that are messing things up.
That hasn't been my experience at all. I used to use the Enigmail plug in which worked okay.
Since its deprecation and Thunderbird's integration of GPG, there were a few hiccups (mostly UI differences between Enigmail and native TB support), but none with key management.
Can achieve feature parity with plain IMAP + TbSync but that's another 3rd party addon.
So "doesn't work out of the box with o365" isn't that big of a stretch, plain TB will only get you IMAP working.
That's honestly more of MS being cancer and not using standards than anything else.
They also introduced required OAUTH2 authentication last year and in a way that you need essentially org admin rights to give any other client than TB access... because you need to create fucking app in MS panels that then gets used by mail client to authorize you. It is entirely aisine platform
My issues were:
I'd much rather they focused on the above - the UI is just fine!