The build that comes with manjaro is up to date, and has been my goto email client for years. The current manjaro build disables statistic reporting. I have always enabled that. Realistically, is there ant advantages to building it on my own? Any insights would be appreciated.
What is: “statistic reporting” ?
Likely some kind of (pre set) user preference.
… which can be changed / adapted
No, none that I know of.
What disadvantages do you suspect by not building it yourself?
… you clearly do 
There is currently no Manjaro build. Most packages are inherited directly from Arch. We only rebuild it occasionally when required if there are different library versions between branches. This is only done to fast track security updates. Either way, we do nothing different than Arch does.
❯ pacman -Si thunderbird | grep Packager
Packager : Leonidas Spyropoulos <artafinde@archlinux.org>
…by doing what, exactly? I neither see anything in the PKGBUILD nor the mozconfig.cfg that would accomplish that. My guess is it’s disabled by default and needs to be manually enabled.
No.
Thanks.
Hi @johns276
I don’t recall any Statistics Reporting in Thunderbird.
However, there is a current Thunderbird Addon called ThirdStats that certainly looks promising.
I hope this is helpful. Cheers.
Thank you for the tip.
The data collection is under the “Privacy & Security” tab: Thunderbird Data Collection and Use.
The checkbox is disabled with: data reporting is disabled for this build configuration.
Would getting Thunderbird directly from Mozilla be an option? When I did that, it looks like this with data reporting disabled:
So, just the usual Data Collection permissions.
If it’s useful, this information shows how to completely disable telemetry and data collection. Despite being instructions for a Windows platform, the options should be much the same.
This results in the same display as noted by @jrichard326
To enable telemetry again would likely entail the reverse actions.
I hope this is helpful. Cheers.
The point is such configs are hard-disabled by the build.
If you were to go to thunderbird about:config and search for toolkit.telemetry.enabled
Not only would it already be false … but you could not edit it.
Just a small question here. Do you want to activate user statistics (such as how many emails you have opened/received, most frequent sender etc) or do you want to activate telemetry (send Thunderbird performance data & crash reports to Mozilla)?
The telemetry is probably disabled because it is not really needed where the binary is maintained by the distro - every Manjaro user that has Thunderbird installed from the official repos (in fact, that could probably be expanded to every Arch user using the official package) has Thunderbird built the same way using the same libraries etc (the only difference being the branch they are on), so usage & crash reports flooding in from every user are probably not needed at Mozilla. If something is wrong with Thunderbird on Manjaro/Arch, Mozilla will know about it quick enough if the Arch/Manjaro maintainers can’t fix the problem themselves.
As has been mentioned at least once in this thread, there are add-ons for Thunderbird that will (should?) provide individual usage statistics - I’m pretty sure they should work irrelevant of your telemetry settings. I haven’t used an email browser for at least 6 or 7 years (I don’t get many emails nowadays), but Thunderbird was my go-to app for a decade or so before I decided that Gmail’s web interface was enough for my minimal needs.
Perhaps, but perhaps not. Checking from time to time which features are used (and how heavily) can help in directing development, and in removing features. Who uses end-to-end encryption? And where? Anonymized stats collected periodically from a large number of users, which stats a limited in nature and parsed on the back-end, may provide a useful picture of both the breadth and depth of app usage. Even my DE allows for the collecting of limited system information. One never knows.
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