I have seen things your way for some time; however, in my world it is difficult to get people to use GPG in their email so I gave up. I currently use Evolution which has support though.
I suppose it all depends on how one uses their email.
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I switched to Claws and back to T-Bird once before also. Seems I really needed the features and extensions.
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It is not Thunderbird’s features that make the transition so difficult for me but the fact that I have multiple accounts with loads of archived emails and a huge address book.
I also prefer to setup my email accounts with POP3 because I don’t want to and I never store/leave anything on my webmails. Thunderbird works just fine for me as long as it doesn’t violate my privacy. But that telemetry thing, or even the notion that exists as an option is the thing that makes me looking up for an alternative.
Mutt is an interesting alternative but it lacks an address book option ( and there is no chance to remember all those addresses) and it also has a load of commands that I have to learn in order to make it work.
Does anyone know what is the equivalent about:config of Thunderbird? Is there such a thing on Thunderbird. Because if there is such an option then it is easy to remove completely the telemetry thing by deleting the url of the server that ( might ) is used to make the call backs.
I had done this on firefox and worked. 
Ha… and now that I checked out … there is a config editor.
Ok… problem solved. It is on the bottom of the first page of the advanced options.
Edit -> Preferences-> Advanced-> Config Editor.
Get in there and delete the urls that hit on the telemetry servers of the application.
Then check from time to time particularly after updates if they are still there, because the update might put them back.
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Do you need more than the alias setting in mutt?
alias jd John Doe <john.doe@example.com>
The string “jd” is the alias name and can be anything you like.
I see. But it is still way too complicated to set it up. You have no idea what sort of mail box I already have for my work.
I’ve just found a working solution for Thunderbird. Please check my previous post. 
You 've got to have a look at Thunderbird’s Config Editor to see what sort of url’s this thing has.
I don’t want to preoccupy you.
Just get in there to see it with your own eyes! It is tragicomic ha ha ha…
That much of mozilla’s and thunderbird’s commitment to free software.
P.S Delete is now my favorite key! HA HA HA HAAAAAAA
PREAMBLE:
Perhaps I got lucky (finally!), but I still get away with using Version 68.1.1 because I hate being a sweatshop beta tester. I other’s do that. Too, my Tbird (Win 7) has so many tweaks, accounts, and emails, that I fear what would happen if I upgraded to do what - get mail? It does what I need it to. I will have to upgrade if I use it in Pure. I intend to try to cross-pollinate with Pure and Win 7 Tbird but I won’t count on it. The Profiles folder weighs in at 18.8 Gig!
THE MEAT:
I checked your tip and all I found was one line that telemetry is off by default. As for upgrade, 78.0 as I write, is most likely to accommodate the upgrade to Win 10.
THE QUESTION:
Did you find any URLs that point to telemetry? Is your Tbird running in Pure?
~s~
“free” means, without exchange of currency. Privacy, and our rights to it is what we pay with.
Who let the advertising marketeers take over the 'net and turn it into a brothel where they gave themselves the right to pimp out the contents of our privacy? Wasn’t you. Not me either. Hands up all those that gave those -things- the Internet.
~s~
My TB version is the 68.12.0.
I’m not running it on Pure because Pure couldn’t work on my system. I had it for about two weeks but I was unable to resolve some serious problems that I had with the firmware that wasn’t unfortunately supported by Pure so I had to uninstall it and install in its place the MXLinux ( which I’m using now).
I have another Linux installation on the same pc on an other disk that is Linux Mint 19. But I don’t know what version of Thunderbird is installed there. I’ll check and I’ll be back to tell you later on.
On regard of your question.
It has two url’s that link the app with the mozilla telemetry servers but it also has a load of urls that link to google. Google search, google crash reports, google mozilla something I can’t tell you exactly because I deleted them all!
And I deleted them because I don’t use firefox either way and I don’t use Thunderbird as a browser. My default browser a heavily modified Brave so I don’t really care if thunderbird will work properly with Brave.
If the browser and the mail client are on the preferred applications of the system then there is no need to have any extra settings on the application itself.
I deleted the upgrade urls too because I don’t want thunderbird to update itself. It will be updated by the repositories so the “update”, “update release stuff”, and “when you updated or upgraded the app reporsts” are not needed as they are probably mine information from the application about how I use it.
I assume that if I bother to search a bit I will be able to disable the calendar and whatever other stupid things are included.
Edit to add: You are looking for this button.
I have a huge T-Bird profile, too. I find it pretty easy to copy/move profiles from many flavors of Winbloze to Linux Mint and visa versa.
I don’t expect that PureOS will present any problems, except maybe scaling it (T-Bird) to a mobile screen. When fractional scaling becomes easier on Pinephone, or I motivate sufficiently to connect it to a monitor, I will try T-Bird there. I’m not happy with Geary and the others I’ve tried on the phone.
No. In the context of free software it is free as in freedom and not as in free beer. So anybody has the freedom to do anything with the software as long as its licence (or law) isn’t getting violated.
So I think it is possible that someone has to pay for free software. It’s just uncommon because when the source code is public anybody could build the software on its own and bypass a purchase.
I think that’s part of the reasons that free software is much more trustworthy that closed source software. When there is something not good in the software anybody can remove it. I have orders of magnitude more trust in free software and on open source software like it is maintained in Linux distribution repositories compared to closed source software.
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Here is some information on data collection by Thunderbird: https://mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/thunderbird/
There are some links to support pages explaining the settings, on on my linux system it looks different. I can’t find a sections on telemetry, only on crash reports. Now the question is: Is telemetry data being collected and only the settings are gone or has the telemetry collection been remover all together?
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Check in your home folder into the .thunderbird/default/datareporting and also on crush reporting and telemetry folders. You will probably find a lot of such reports in the folder datareporting . I found a good amount of them though I had disabled the telemetry option from the very beginning in a new clean installation.
That is the reason why I said previously that you can never know if the /any “disable” button does indeed what is supposed to do… lol
Perhaps its a situation like you disabled telemetry reporting, but not collecting. That way, if you ever change your mind, all that data won’t go to waste.
Except that you can know. You read the source.
Edit / Preferences / Privacy & Security
scroll down to
Thunderbird Data Collection and Use
look at state of the checkbox
“Allow Thunderbird to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla”
Interestingly, for me that checkbox is greyed out and there is a message below that saying:
Data reporting is disabled for this build configuration
So I would guess that the Thunderbird sources allow you to compile out the whole telemetry functionality. The only way to know for sure … see my previous comment.
Yes. Seen that before. Cute musical but it’s just a song. IMO - money doesn’t make the world go 'round - world will spin on it’s own, but I get the gist of what the saying means, however, I think in reality it’s people that make the money, that make the work go 'round - so to speak. Saying that “money makes the world go around” is the escape clause for the rich.
That said, how does Linux make the trip ‘around’ it if it’s not with money?
~s~
Hi,
What I can add is that there are tons of g$$gle server addresses listed under “safebrowsing”(what a wonderful euphemism). The terms “datareporting”, “healthreport”, and “geo” also bear quite interesting results. On top of that there are permanent dom storage options.
Its quite similar to Firefox. The (in)dependence of Mozilla is the topic of quite a lot of articles. I found one from cnet dating back to 2006 describing it as a dangerous conflict of interest - and the latest headline I saw is “Mozilla signs fresh Google search deal worth mega-millions” for 2021-2023…
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Sure. My approach is to donate to organisations like The Document Foundation that is behind libre office or to developers of extensions to open source apps that I use. I thought about doing that for Mozilla as well, but I just can’t get myself to indirectly sponsor G$$gle that way and am searching for alternatives to Mozilla products instead.
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