
New and Poorer Thunderbird Email and Address Book Format Suddenly Appeared
Thunderbird updated itself, and suddenly a new and much less helpful format appeared both for email (inbox, sent, etc.) and for Address Books. The current version is listed in "Help," under "About Thunderbird," as being 128.9.0esr (32-bit).
Now email listings are on two lines---name/email address and subject---each enclosed in a box and separated from the email before and afterward by a space. Previously, each email was on one line with no separation one from the other, which made it much easier to run a visual search when looking for a specific email. Whatever advantages this new format are supposed to have are lost on me. They are not convenient for my purposes.
Address books are even more unhelpful in this new format. They, too, are two-line listings in boxes with space between. All that space is unnecessary and unhelpful, but the big negative here is that it no longer is possible to see listings in the categories that used to be selectable off to the right, such as (in my case) phone number(s), email address(es), and---critically---Organization and organization Title. These are absolutely vital for finding a listing when the name of the person can't be recalled and organization or title need to be scanned, but now only name and email address appear, crippling such an effort.
I appreciate the work many do to sustain Thunderbird, but it would be very handy if those designing formats would take into account how information actually is used.
The big question: May I please get the old format back, or, failing that, is there some way to customize this new format to at least show organization and organization title in address books without having to click each individual listing? And if even this is not possible, how does a user use organization and organization title to search with?
All Replies (1)
You are looking at card view format. You are wanting table view.
You want the message list to look like https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/getting-started-thunderbird-main-window-supernova. You need to do the reverse of https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/getting-started-thunderbird-main-window-supernova#w_vertical-view-layout-with-card-view
Address book also has "list display options" icon, to switch between card view and table view