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Comment by flomo | Hacker News Reader

> Multi-line view like in Outlook, Lotus Notes and Postbox

> Betterbird: Yes!

> Thunderbird: No, requested since 2003

Wonderful! Back in the mid-2000s, this annoyed me enough to switch from Thunderbird to Outlook for work mail. Great to hear they had to fork the project to match the delicious UI of Lotus Notes.

Honestly since then I haven't thought much about local PC mail clients to even consider any alternatives. Apple Mail and web mail work fine.

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Finally coming to thunderbird too: https://www.askvg.com/thunderbird-to-get-multi-line-message-...

> Multi-line view like in Outlook, Lotus Notes and Postbox > Betterbird: Yes! > Thunderbird: No, requested since 2003

What kind of obligation do opensource projects have when someone makes a feature request? Honest question, because i see this mentioned as an argument. I presume no one is stopping anyone from developing it and proposing a PR, if the "main dev team" or whoever is running the project is not seeing that feature request as a priority.

What kind of obligation does anyone have to use Thunderbird if it doesn't have features that they want?

Precisely! No obligation on either side.

I mean but did I miss something or Thunderbird is open source? Like the author lists a bunch of functionalities that were requested for Thunderbird but weren't implemented, but they implemented in Betterbird, was it a bad thing to maybe create a pull request for Thunderbird to keep a single product? Or spotlight was the main objective?

Their point is that patches for these things have existed for years and/or were fixed and then un-fixed later.

Open source doesn't mean that the upstream project wants to / is obligated to merge any and all changes that appear in the wild.

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