The “personal information manager” is an absolute must for juggling a busy personal and work life. It has been an incredibly important tool for me for the majority of my adult life and whenever I am unable to reliably juggle life’s demands, I drop a lot of balls and disappoint people. Recently, I made the shift from using the KDE PIM (Personal Information Manager) Kontact in favor of Thunderbird. I was forced to do so when the calendar integrations started breaking with much greater frequency and the Exchange integration would crash my system. I did file many bugs on this over a period of time through the automated tool built into Plasma and sadly, nothing has improved. I had been struggling and the juggling but it appears that Thunderbird, a PIM that I historically did not enjoy using, has been an incredible productivity multiplier. This application is doing everything I need a PIM to do and after getting deep into the settings, I finally have it in a place that I am quite satisfied.
You may ask yourself, why not just do everything on my phone, to which I will spend the next three minutes laughing and ask you if your serious.
Why I Moved: Lamenting
I started using KDE’s PIM, Kontact since 2004. It always looked great, the features were rich and the experience was largely consistent. The greatest feature that I enjoyed which was incredible for keeping my day’s tasks organized and well documented was the KOrganizer module. It would automatically generated notes based on what tasks I completed the absolute greatest feature in any PIM for the purposes of accountability and communication. Over the years as advancements came to Kontact, the core functionality continued to diminish. The Akonadi database was never all that reliable. I would have to manually intervene from time to time for which I got pretty good at it. I previously wrote about a fix for the Google Groupware Calendar for KOrganizer.
Google Groupware Calendar with KOrganizer Fix
I have been very committed to sticking with Kontact but I cannot continue to muscle my way through an email service that continually and randomly breaks, and calendar integrations that cannot remain online. I had to stop fighting my software. I lost the joy of using it as I spent almost an hour wrestling with it to get my cubiclenate.com email to aggregate in the client. I had enough. I played every trick (and I know a lot of tricks) with no success. Additionally, the Google Calendar stopped loading in and I missed some key appointments I had scheduled. I was rather frustrated. I decided, I would give Thunderbird another shot as it is the only other PIM out there that seems to have the features and some genuine momentum behind it.
Thunderbird’s Benefits and Setup
Thunderbird, while it doesn’t look as pretty on the eyes as Kontact, does do some things quite well. For starters, adding my CubicleNate.com email was quick and painless. The time it took for Thunderbird to make my email available was staggeringly fast. Adding my Google calendar with all the shared calendars was also fast and there were no fights involved in subscribing or unsubscribing from a particular calendar. Everything seems to work surprisingly well.
An issue with Thunderbird is that some of the defaults are less than ideal for me. I am rather picky about my digital work environment. Specifically, the short date format is displayed as mm/dd/yyyy. Sure it’s fine for most people but it just doesn’t work for me. It took some digging but I found the solution for that and now I can view my dates on my calendar the way I like to see it. I much prefer to see it DD MMM YYYY, for example today would be 5 Aug 2025.
Thankfully, the good folks of the Thunderbird project has made it easy to access this “Config Editor” that allows you to seemingly adjust every aspect of Thunderbird. Within the General Settings, at the bottom of that page there is a lone button with Config Editor…
Within the Config Editor search for intl.date_time.pattern_override.date_short, click on the pencil button and edit the entry to show the day month year like this “dd MMM yyyy”.
If this option doesn’t exist, create it as a string by selecting the “String” radio button and pressing the “+” button to right of it.
Another very necessary tweak I made was to enable native window borders so that I can take full advantage of the plasma configurations with Thunderbird. Essentially, without the native window, it would be a deal-breaker for me to use Thunderbird.
Note: Any major changes you make make will require restarting Thunderbird to apply changes.
Arguably, the single greatest feature of Thunderbird is how from a single view, from email, I can see all of my mailboxes, the mail within each folder, a pane for the email body itself and an agenda view of what’s to come just to the right of that. I essentially have a quick status board in a single glance. It’s not just novelty either, it is incredibly useful. The way everything is in tabs along the top of the Thunderbird window allows me rapid access to jump into another “space” to perform a task. I can create multiple tabs for specific email folders, keep a tab open for the calendar, one for teams and on the occasion, if I have to keep a PDF open I will use it as well. Additionally, if I need to bust out a tab so that I can look at information side by side, just a click and drag away will convert that tab to a new window. Simply brilliant!
For better PDF annotation or integration in the Plasma Desktop, you can Configuring an External PDF Viewer in Thunderbird. This has made interacting with PDFs a lot more convenient than the default, built-in behavior for my particular workflow.
I can’t say enough about how absolutely fantastic this workflow is. I am so incredibly pleased with the consistency and flexibility of this application.
Integrations That Work for Me
The base features of Thunderbird are great but it is the additional integrations that really make this application shine. Standard email is the baseline in all of this. Just being able to access my email is the key integration that has made my world great in keeping on top of my communication.
Google Calendar
The second great feature was the Google Calendar integration. It is an Add-on but once enabled, the calendar function just works. There was no hassle whatsoever.
It was a total easy button and it the process just feels solid. The process is as simple as selecting “New Calendar…” then Google Calendar. Follow the steps subscribe to any additional calendars as you see fit and it auto populates.
Here is another great feature of this Google Calendar plugin. Whatever colors you assign to the calendar stays. There isn’t any issue with having to reassign colors once it is set. There are also no issues of the calendar randomly going offline either. It’s pretty great.
Microsoft Office 365
The third spectacular feature is the Exchange plugin. The one I went with is called Owl for Exchange. There are other options but this one seemed to hit all the high marks for me.
It seamlessly integrates Microsoft Office 365 Exchange email into Thunderbird as though it were just another email account. The folder management works like any other email account and it is glorious. Thunderbird does a much better job of sorting and filtering messages than Outlook so now, managing email for work has become incredibly more efficient and I greatly appreciate that. You also get your calendar integrated along side your other calendars. My only complaint about the calendar integration is that it only shows my personal O365 calendar. If I want to see other calendars of people on my team, or other calendars in my organization I have to use the teams plugin that Owl incorporates. From within Thunderbird, I am able to access Teams which is essentially just the web client embedded, so not really all that amazing but it is a fantastic feature. I generally keep this on the chat screen and use the Flatpak Teams application up for the actual meetings, but that may change, I don’t know yet. Time will tell. Bottom line, Owl Exchange is worth the $10 annually. Since I do support many projects out there, this one, which allows me to be more productive, is well worth it. I am anticipating a continued quality product in exchange for a small sum.
Obsidian Note Taking Application
Another integration that I’ve only just started to utilize is with obsidian, my note-taking application of choice. I can very quickly turn an email into an obsidian note if necessary.
I’m still exploring this feature and I have to tweak it out some more as it is showing the date in the wrong format but given enough time, I’m sure I can get that worked out too. What I like about this is that I can quickly clip an email and create a note out of it, add any additional details and link it to other notes as necessary.
Other Add-ons?
I currently have only three Add-ons and I am wondering what else is out there that I just may find useful? Are there additional tools that can make my work life even more efficient? I am very excited about this new Thunderbird chapter of my personal information management life!
Rough Edges
Thunderbird is not without its rough edges. One particular issue I seem to have, I believe, stems from variable scaling issues. When you open up an agenda item, there are some initial window behaviors that are distracting. Sometimes the contents of a window does not fit within the window frame. Sometimes moving it or resizing it will correct the issue.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but the GTK toolkit just looks dated. There’s something about it that I can’t quite put my finger on. It makes it look like it is missing something modern that I enjoy with the Qt framework. I realize some people like the GTK look, I get it, but I just don’t agree. The toolkit mismatch is not so bad that it’s completely out of place but it is a little bit distracting at times.
The date and time formats you set within Plasma System Settings do not carry over into Thunderbird. It is unfortunate but really a little thing. I consider it a nice to have and would encourage to Thunderbird developers to put it on the roadmap someplace.
These are mild nitpicks, overall I’m very happy with Thunderbird but if there were a couple areas I wish would be improved, these are it.
Final Thoughts
Today, Thunderbird seems to have the edge when it comes to reliability, flexibility and the momentum behind it. Thunderbird is also available on your mobile device which is quite handy. I’ve only just began to explore the various extensions and add-ons to Thunderbird and I’m very pleased with it. I can tell there is a lot of momentum behind this project.
It’s really too bad that I’ve had to move away from what I believe to be an incredibly great personal information manager from KDE. Kontact still looks like home for me but for the time being, I have to move on and be more focused on day-to-day productivity, not missing appointments and keeping on top of my emails. I really want to see Kontact be the great personal information management system that I’ve known for the last two decades. As I dig into Thunderbird, I often wonder if it would be possible to utilize the very solid foundation of Thunderbird, the way it manages resources and enhance it with the Qt-based Plasma window dressing with the additional features provided in its various apps like Kmail. Thunderbird mail is satisfactory. I happen to find Kmail to have a slightly better polish to it with features that are more to my liking. Specifically, I miss the keyboard navigation in Kmail that made navigating email incredibly efficient… when it worked.
For the time being, I’m going to happily be using Thunderbird and looking forward to continued updates and exploring the myriad of add-ons that I can use to enhance my workflow, be more organized and most of all, more efficient. I am so pleased, in fact, I have donated to the project. I want to be part of that 3% of Thunderbird users that make a financial investment to keep the project healthy and viable for the future.
I like to know what you think, what should I check out in the Thunderbird ecosystem? Is the momentum behind this project as strong as it appears to be? For long-time users, have you seen any hiccups? I am curious to know and I would be grateful for any feedback you are willing to provide.
References
Configuring an External PDF Viewer in Thunderbird on Linux
https://get.openSUSE.org
https://www.thunderbird.net/
https://www.beonex.com/owl/
https://cubiclenate.com/2024/05/01/google-groupware-calendar-with-korganizer-fix/
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