Thunderbird 136 Release Adds New Appearance Controls

Desktop email client Thunderbird announced a move to monthly releases by default earlier this year, allowing new users to benefit from new features, sooner – as the new Thunderbird 136.0 release makes evident!

Thunderbird 136.0 sees messages auto-adapt to dark mode (and adds a quick toggle to control this in the header) — no more searing-white e-mail shocks in dark rooms!

Also added is a new Appearance setting to control message threading and sorting order globally. This is great if you always want, say, new messages at the bottom in all your configured folders.

Some notable fixes include ensuring that addresses clicked in the header no longer appear off-screen for those using HiDPI displays, and ensuring that UI font sizes changes made in app do apply to all areas (as a few dialogs weren’t hooked in).

Other changes, tweaks, UI improvements, and performance buffs feature (some issues may related to the previous release channel release and might not have been presented in ESR builds) including:

• Criteria for closing idle message databases changed
• Fix for some messages being threaded incorrectly in unified folders
• Correct release channel is now displayed in “About Thunderbird” dialog
• Deleting or detaching attachments in a saved .eml file now works
• Assorted fixes for Unified folders, including incorrect threading
• Fix for IMAP new mail notifications not showing
• Sending to multiple SMTPs could fail silently due to missing address book
• “Save Link As” now working for RSS feed content
• A

Among many more!

Beyond that, there’s a fresh round of security patches to plug newly discovered and/or recently disclosed flaws (and some of those will make their way to Thunderbird ESR channel users too).

The Thunderbird snap in Ubuntu will, AIUI, stick with ESR so if you want to switch to the release channel version you’ll need to swap to the beta channel (you can do that in App Center) which carries v136 at the time I write this.

Alternatively, download Thunderbird from the official website where it comes as a standalone binary runtime for Linux, with relevant to links to Windows and macOS builds for those who need them.