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Betterbird

Community-enhanced fork of the Thunderbird email client

Mail Servers ★ 991 stars Easy setup MPL-2.0

Betterbird is a fine-tuned fork of Mozilla Thunderbird that ships additional features and fixes ahead of upstream. It is a desktop email, calendar, and contacts client that connects to your own mail servers.

Official siteSource code

Key features

  • Thunderbird-based client
  • Extra features and fixes
  • Email, calendar, and contacts
  • Cross-platform

Strengths

  • Released under the MPL-2.0 license
  • Easy to set up — beginner-friendly
  • Written in Shell
  • Tiny footprint — runs in 256 MB RAM

Is Betterbird secure?

OSV.dev has no published security advisories for Betterbird's repository. No known vulnerabilities is not proof of security: it means none have been publicly catalogued.

Source: OSV.dev, checked 2026-10-14. How this is measured.

Betterbird replaces

Self-hosted Microsoft Outlook alternatives

Health badge

Maintain Betterbird? Add its health score to your README. The badge links back to this page.

SelfHostIndex: 78 · good

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   :alt: SelfHostIndex health score for Betterbird
   :target: https://selfhostindex.com/app/thunderbird-note-betterbird/

The score is recomputed on every nightly rebuild from public repository data — see how it is calculated.

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