Just to be brief: This is the help forum, intended to assist users who are having problems. On the start page of Thunderbird is a button with words "Get Help." When users click there, it brings them here. And, if users don't see that button and follow customary approach that is common with many software products and click the Help>about link, that also has the menu link for Help. Yes, this is the official forum for providing assistance.

To give recommendations for improvements, the start page has a button titled "Participate.' Clicking that brings up a page where users can click to the connect.mozilla.org page and the IDEAS section where recommendations can be posted. Developers do read these suggestions. I encourage you to follow that route to ensure your proposed restructuring of forums receives attention.

Thank you for your feedback. To my knowledge as a volunteer, I am not aware of any page designed for user/developer dialogue.

> I'm not sure if this is supposed to be the official place to get help if you have problems with your Thunderbird install.

Certainly, as you will note in Thunderbird, Help > Get Help takes you here.

> It's so difficult to even get to the point where I'm able to post a question,

What part specifically after "Get Help" is difficult?

While you are here look at top for "Ask a Question > Thunderbird" where you get introduced to the KB articles for desktop Thunderbird and if you still want to post a thread then look to right on that page to see the Ask a Question for the form to create a thread as you did. Also if you are viewing a thread in Thunderbird section there is a Ask a Question form link at top of the sidebar on right.

Mozilla has made this custom software for the community support forums and Knowledge Base to work together. They also have the https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/ which is for discussing things related to the support.mozilla.org site.

This https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/ has been around since oh 2007 for desktop Firefox before other products got added and it was about February 21, 2014 that this became the official place for Thunderbird users to get support since as it was previously on Getsatisfaction.

Oh and one nice thing about this custom forum software is it is not vulnerable to any automated forum software spam tools like phpBB forums can be for example. We do get spam attempts though it is manually posted and we have a SumoBot that catches almost all of the spam hence why spam is rarely seen in public now for both replies and threads.

Hello

To complement.

File a bug report or feature request for Mozilla products. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/file-bug-report-or-feature-request-mozilla If you wish, you can file a bug report.

Components product Thunderbird. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/describecomponents.cgi?product=Thunderbird