If you have ever used Thunderbird in Bulgarian, the subject of this month’s office hours is one of the contributors who made that possible! Office Hours hosts Heather and Monica have been lucky enough to chat with long-time localizer Bogamil Shopov at conferences like FOSDEM. Now, they’re sitting down to talk to him about how his contributor story started, and to hear the advice he has for anyone curious about being part of Thunderbird.

We’ll be back next time, checking in on Thunderbird Pro! It’s been almost a year since we sat down with members of our team making this possible. As we’ve slowly started opening up the service to our Early Birds from the waitlist, it seemed a great opportunity to learn what users can expect, now and in the future!

A Contributor Origin Story

Bogomil has been a contributor to Thunderbird from the start! Even if he didn’t like the UI in the early days, he loved our commitment to software freedom. He wanted people to have the software in their own language, and so he started localizing Thunderbird into Bulgarian. This was in the days before Pontoon, Mozilla’s localization platform, and so this wasn’t easy work! Another hurdle, which still happens, is that small language locales tend to have smaller numbers of contributors doing localizing work.

From Mentee to Mentor

Thankfully, Bogomil had unofficial mentors to help them find their way. On the localization side, he had a Bulgarian mentor who he, in turn, introduced to Mozilla and other open source projects. More experienced Mozilla contributors answered his questions as he expressed his interest in getting more involved. Bogomil points out that this need for both good onboarding docs and genuine human connection is still something all open source projects needs – and something we can keep improving!

Now Bogomil is the experienced mentor, and he’s had some key steps to helping grow the Thunderbird localizer community. He sends thank you notes to new translators and sends resources for specific computer and email terminology to new Bulgarian volunteers. He gives his mentees specific tasks to help focus their energy and excitement, and maybe even more importantly, he gives them encouragement.

This Speaker goes to 11

While Bogomil had given several public talks in Bulgarian before COVID, after 2020 he decided to try giving conference talks in English. His first talk was at Halfstack, sponsored by Mozilla, in Vienna, on what made him happy as a developer and IT person in general. He even brought a violin player on stage with him! His talk got a warm reception, and it encouraged him to keep talking about what brought him joy, whether it was using heavy metal to help him focus or his involvement with Thunderbird and open source. If you’ve ever considered giving a talk, especially about one of your passions, and hesitated, Bogomil would tell you to do it! People are more welcoming than you might think.

Tools and Advice

Bogomil still uses Pontoon for Thunderbird desktop translations, in addition to Weblate, where Thunderbird for Android and many other open source projects live. In addition to this localization platforms, he uses CoEdIt along with web-based tools that allow him to see how certain words were previously translated. And of course, he has three release channels of Thunderbird on his computer at all times, something most of the Thunderbird team understands!

From newer contributors, Bogomil has learned how language is changing and how to keep terms, like the Bulgarian word for “browser,” up to date, in addition to other feedback. His advice to new and potential volunteers is to be open to critique. This is especially true joining a project with a long history like Thunderbird, especially before wanting to change something. And he says don’t be afraid to do things and experiment, even if things go wrong.

Watch the Talk (available on PeerTube)

Resources

Desktop Thunderbird Translation docs: https://source-docs.thunderbird.net/en/latest/l10n/index.html

Desktop Thunderbird Translation on Pontoon: https://pontoon.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/

Thunderbird for Android Translation docs: https://docs.weblate.org/en/latest/user/translating.html

Thunderbird for Android Translation on Weblate: https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/tb-android/

The post Community Office Hours: Contributor Spotlight on Bogomil Shopov appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Welcome to the first Community Office Hours of 2026! We’re all recovered from conferences in Brussels and California, and we’re talking to members of one of our newest teams: Support.

Wait, hasn’t Thunderbird always had a support team? Surprisingly, no! We’ve had individual staff members responsible for different parts of our support efforts, but never combined into one fantastic team. This includes new hires Lisa (Jill) Wess, Manager of Customer Support Operations, and MadHatter McGinnis, Support Knowledge and Enablement Lead, whose work is not only vital for Thundermail, but a better experience for donors, users, and contributors alike. We’re also joined by Roland Tanglao and Wayne Mery, two of our longstanding support and community staff who you might remember from our office hours on writing support articles and helping users on the support forums.

Community Office Hours are just getting started this year. Thank you so much for joining us for these sneak peeks into how we make, improve, and expand Thunderbird! As always, if you have any ideas for future office hours topics, let us know in the comments!

A New Model for Support

While Lisa and MadHatter have only been at Thunderbird for less than a year, the impact they’ve made since then is notable. When Thundermail launches later this year, users will experience their work when they read a user guide, ask for support, or make a suggestion on ideas.tb.pro. This renewed focus on support won’t only be for Thundermail users, however! In the video, the members of the support team discuss how the team wants to make it easier to get help AND easier to provide it, whether the person answering questions is a staff member or a volunteer contributor. No matter what technical improvements the team has planned, human beings will always be at the heart of the Thunderbird (and Thundermail) support experience.

This includes the existing Thunderbird support on the Mozilla Support forums. As always, there is so much our community can do to help out fellow Thunderbird users with questions or issues they might have. Roland and Wayne offer useful tips on where to get started on the support contributor journey. One path that might be new to readers is suggesting improvements or new knowledge base (KB) articles! If you have ideas on replacing outdated advice, updating screenshots, or ways to fill knowledge gaps with a new KB article, we’d love to hear from you, whether your advice is about the desktop or Android client.

VIDEO (Also on Peertube):

Resources:

Resources for Suggesting Features:
Thunderbird on Desktop and Mobile – https://connect.mozilla.org
Thundermail and Thunderbird Pro – https://ideas.tb.pro

Resources for Becoming a Community Support Contributor:
Join the Support Crew Matrix Channel – https://matrix.to/#/#tb-support-crew:mozilla.org
Learn How to Write Support Articles – https://blog.thunderbird.net/2024/07/video-learn-about-thunderbird-support-articles-and-how-to-contribute/
Learn How to Help Support Forum Users – https://blog.thunderbird.net/2024/08/video-how-to-answer-thunderbird-questions-on-mozilla-support/
Provide Feedback on Desktop Support Articles – https://github.com/thunderbird/knowledgebase-issues/issues
Provide Feedback on Android Support Articles – https://github.com/thunderbird/android-knowledgebase-issues/issues
Already a SUMO Contributor? Join the Contributor Discussion Forum – https://support.mozilla.org/forums/contributors/

Resources for Getting Help with Thunderbird:
Thunderbird for Android Support Channel (Matrix) – https://matrix.to/#/#tb-android:mozilla.org
Thunderbird Desktop Support Channel (Matrix) – https://matrix.to/#/#thunderbird:mozilla.org

The post VIDEO: Meet the New Support Team! appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Thunderbird’s mascot, Roc, is a bit of an unsung hero. If you’ve ever donated to the project, he’s the happy blue bird who thanks you for supporting our work. For the 2024 End of Year appeal, the Thunderbird team commissioned design artist Michaela Martin to broaden Roc’s world. Her whimsical illustration, which is also available as a wallpaper download, shows Roc soaring through a sunlit forest as he delivers the mail to its denizens.

Likewise, we’d like to shine the spotlight on Michaela Martin, who has brought our mascot to life in what is soon becoming the Roc Illustrated Universe! She not only answered our questions about her artistic background and creative process, but also provided us some visual peeks into how she turned Roc’s flight from a first draft to a finished product.

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What motivated you to become an illustrator? What was your training/education as an artist? What have been some of your favorite illustrations?

I have always had a passion for creating art; I find the process of bringing stories to life particularly fascinating and inspiring. Art can allow others to take a glimpse at what otherwise might exist only in someone’s mind. 

As far as training and education, I attended the College for Creative Studies in Detroit where I studied Animation, with a focus on Design (character/prop design, visual development, and color keys, for example). I learned a lot during my years in school, but I do not want to understate the value of learning from my fellow peers and colleagues, as well as resources available online (classes, software tutorials, etc).

Most of my favorite illustration works happen to be from the field of animation. The background illustrations, concept art, color keys, and character design are all elements that I find quite inspiring. The Prince of Egypt, The Iron Giant, The Road to El Dorado, and Spirited Away are a handful of films that I would say are particularly inspirational to me. Having worked on several animated projects myself now, I have a much greater sense of appreciation for these works of art than I did when I was much younger. 

Tell us about your work process! How do you go from idea to first drafts? About how long, on average, does an illustration take?

I don’t have a particularly exciting answer for this – I visualize and imagine various designs in my head, and I translate them onto canvas with my hand as best I can. I tend to start off with rough sketches that I can get out quickly, which allows me to explore a lot of concepts in a short amount of time.

The length of time it takes me to finish an illustration tends to vary, depending on various factors such as image size/detail, as well as client needs (revisions, adjustments, etc). Usually it takes around 1-3 months to fully complete an illustration, give or take a couple weeks. 

What’s in your toolkit? Do you work mostly digitally, or in more traditional mediums?

I primarily use Photoshop. I do enjoy sketching traditionally in sketchbooks (or printer paper, napkins, notepads, anything that is available). I tend to do more rough works on paper, and transfer them to Photoshop once I am ready to work on them with more detail. I enjoy the feel of working traditionally, but I also enjoy how forgiving digital mediums can be. 

Tell us about how you created the first illustration, aka Roc flying through the sunlit forest? Did you have a direction from the Thunderbird team on what to illustrate, or more free reign? Can you tell us how you imagined and then created Roc’s world?

I worked closely with Laurel (the team’s Design Manager) on both illustrations. She provided me with some details and the main idea; Roc flying over the forest, delivering the mail to the various inhabitants (hinted at through the appearance of houses amongst the foliage). I had a decent amount of free reign for exploration, though I wanted to add some elements that I thought would work with our previously established Roc design, since we had just finished establishing that. I wanted to keep the design elements soft and friendly, similar to Roc’s finalized design. There are not many sharp angles in the design of the houses or foliage, for example. I have included some very early concept art for the final illustration that shows the exploration phase and a couple of unused ideas.

In your illustration for this year’s appeal, you gave us an entire group of Rocs, working together!  Can you tell us more about this design and how you brought it to life?

These were initially just different pose options for Roc that I did very early in the sketch phase. I was exploring character placement, and only expected one to be picked! It was later discussed that all three poses could potentially be used together in the finished illustration – the different poses would have a very simple animation; turning visible and invisible. It would look as though Roc were jumping between different screens at his workstation.

What part of Roc’s world would you like to explore in your next piece? We’d love to have a sneak peak into the greater Roc’s illustrated universe!

I think that more characters would be fun to explore. Possibly Roc’s family, friends, neighbors, etc. Maybe some of them can have jobs alongside Roc, or Roc delivers their mail. More exploration on Roc’s little forest village would be quite fun to do as well (different styles of buildings for different species, different biomes of the forest, etc). Perhaps these explorations could reflect different features of the Thunderbird service!

Were you a Thunderbird user before you began illustrating for us? If not, have you tried us out since?

I poked around Thunderbird a bit, but I have not actually utilized it to the full capacity as of yet! I am not the best at consistently using new technology, even if it is quite helpful. I do use Firefox quite frequently, though!

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If you’d like to see more of Michaela’s work, be sure to visit her website at MichaelaM Art and/or follow her on Instagram. We’d like to thank her again for answering our questions, sharing her sketches and explorations, and designing Roc’s world for us and our community!

The post Illustrating Roc’s World: A Spotlight on Michaela Martin appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

2025 was an exciting year for Thunderbird. Many improvements were shipped throughout the year, from faster updates with a new release cadence, to a modernized codebase for the desktop app. We made big strides on our mobile apps and introduced the upcoming Thunderbird Pro to the world.

As we wrap up the year, a huge thank you to our community and volunteer contributors, and to our donors whose financial support keeps the lights on for the dedicated team working on Thunderbird. Here’s what we accomplished in 2025 and what’s to come in the new year.

A Stronger Core, Built to Last

This year marked the release of Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse”, our latest Extended Support Release. Eclipse was more than a visual refresh. It was a deep clean of Thunderbird’s core, removing long standing technical debt and modernizing large parts of the codebase.

The result is a healthier foundation that allows us to ship improvements more reliably and more often. Features like the new Account Hub, accessibility improvements, and cleaner visual controls are all part of this effort. They may look simple on the surface, but they represent significant behind the scenes progress that sets Thunderbird up for the long term.

Faster Updates, Delivered Monthly

Speaking of faster updates, in 2025 monthly releases became the default for Thunderbird desktop. This was a major shift from our focus on the annual cadence centered around the Extended Support Release.

Moving to monthly releases means new features land sooner, bug fixes arrive faster, and updates feel smoother instead of disruptive. Users no longer have to wait an entire year to benefit from improvements. Thunderbird now evolves continuously while maintaining the stability people expect.

Thunderbird Meets Exchange

One of the most requested features is finally here. Native Microsoft Exchange email support landed in Thunderbird’s monthly release channel with 145.0.

You can now connect Exchange accounts directly without relying on third party add-ons for email. Setup is simpler, syncing is more reliable, and Thunderbird works more naturally in Exchange based environments. Calendar and address book support are still in progress, but native email support marks an important milestone toward broader compatibility.

Mobile Moves Forward

Thunderbird’s mobile story continued to grow in 2025.

On Android, the team refined release processes, improved core experiences, and began breaking larger features into smaller, more frequently delivered updates. At the same time, Thunderbird for iOS took a major step forward with a basic developer testing app available via Apple TestFlight. This marked the first public signal that Thunderbird is officially expanding onto iOS, with active development well underway and headed toward iPhones in 2026.

Introducing Thunderbird Pro

In 2025, we announced Thundermail and Thunderbird Pro, the first ever email service from Thunderbird alongside new cloud based productivity features designed to work seamlessly with the app.

Thunderbird Pro will include:

• Thundermail, an open source email service from Thunderbird
• Appointment, a scheduling tool
• Send, an end to end encrypted file sharing service

These services are built to respect user privacy, remain open source, and offer additional functionality by subscription for those who need it, without compromising the forever free and powerful Thunderbird desktop and mobile apps. Throughout the year, we made significant progress across all three services and launched the Thunderbird Pro website, marking a major step toward early access and testing. The Early Bird beta is set to kick off in the first part of 2026. Catch up on the full details in our latest update and, if you’re not on the waitlist yet, join in.

Looking Ahead to 2026

The work in 2025 set the stage for an even more ambitious year ahead.

In 2026, our desktop plans include updating our decades-old database, expanding Exchange and protocol support, and refreshing the Calendar UI. For Thunderbird Pro, we aim to release the Early Bird beta in the first part of the year. Our plans for Android focus on rearchitecture of old code, quality of life improvements, and a new UI. For iOS, we’re moving closer to an initial beta release with expanded protocol support. Be sure to follow this blog for updates on the desktop and mobile apps and Thunderbird Pro.

Thunderbird is moving faster, reaching more platforms, and building a more complete ecosystem while staying true to our values. Thanks for being part of the journey, and wishing all of you a fantastic 2026.
Thunderbird is moving faster, reaching more platforms, and building a more complete ecosystem while staying true to our values.

Thanks for being part of the journey, and wishing all of you a fantastic 2026!

All of our work is funded solely by individual donations from our users and community.
Help support the future of Thunderbird!
For other ways to get involved with the Thunderbird project, visit our participate page.

The post Thunderbird 2025 Review: Building Stronger for the Future appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Hello again from the Thunderbird development team as we start to wind down for the holidays! Over the past several weeks, our sprints have been focused on delivery and consolidation to clear our plates for a fresh start in the New Year. 

Following our successful in-person work-week to discuss all things protocol, we’ve brought Exchange support (EWS) to our Monthly release channel, completed much of the final phases of the Account Hub experience, and laid the groundwork for what comes next. Alongside this feature work, the team has spent a significant amount of time adapting to upstream platform changes and supported our Services colleagues as we prepared for wider rollout. It’s been a period of steady progress, prioritization, and planning for the next major milestones.

Exchange Email Support

Since the last update, we’re so happy to finally announce that Exchange support for email has shipped to the Monthly release channel, accompanied by supporting blog posts, documentation and some fanfare. In the weeks leading up to and following that release, the team focused on closing out priority items, addressing stability issues, and ensuring the experience scales well as more users add their EWS-based Exchange accounts.

Work completed during this period includes:

• NTLM authentication support and related request queueing
• Fixes for crashes related to DNS resolution after in-depth investigation and collaboration with platform teams
• Improvements to folder operations such as Empty Trash via EmptyFolder
• Password-on-send prompting
• Continued hardening of account setup and message handling paths

In parallel, the team has begun work on Graph API support for email, which is now moving rapidly through its early stages, thanks in large part to the solid foundation laid for EWS. It’s so nice when a plan comes together

This work represents the next major milestone for Exchange support and will inform broader architectural refactoring planned for future phases.

The Exchange team also met in person to plan out upcoming milestones. These sessions allowed us to break down future work and begin early research and prototyping for:

• Graph API-based email support
• Architectural refactoring
• Copy and move operations
• Incoming and outgoing configuration improvements
• Longer-term work on Graph API Calendar and Address Book integration

Keep track of our Graph API implementation here. 

Account Hub

A major focus during this period was completing the Email Account Hub Phase 3 milestone, with the final bugs landing and remaining items either completed or moved into maintenance. This work was prioritized to improve the experience for users setting up new accounts, particularly Exchange accounts.

Notable improvements and fixes include:

• Increased robustness of the detection and setup flow
• Improvements to error handling and recovery during account setup
• Continued work on the manual configuration flow, developed in close collaboration with the Design team
• Uplifts to ensure key fixes reached Beta and Monthly releases
• Addition of telemetry to help us understand potential UX problems and improvements

With the primary Phase 3 goals now complete, the team has been able to shift attention back to other front-end initiatives while continuing to refine the Account Hub experience through targeted fixes and polish.

Follow progress in the meta bugs for phase 3 and telemetry

Calendar UI Rebuild

Calendar UI work progressed more slowly during this period due to competing priorities (hiring!), in-person meetups and planned time off, but planning and groundwork continued and development back underway. The team:

• Restarted sprint planning for upcoming milestones
• Assigned tasks and estimated work for the next phase
• Continued preparation for adopting Redux-based state management, recently vendored into the codebase
• With Account Hub milestones now largely wrapped up, Calendar UI work is ramping back up as we move into the next development cycle.

Stay tuned to our milestones here:

• Event Read Dialog
• Read Dialog inline editing
• Event Add/Edit Dialog
• Reminders UI
• Invitations Dialog
• Calendar Views

Maintenance, Upstream adaptations, Recent Features and Fixes

Throughout this period, the team also spent a considerable amount of time responding to upstream changes that affected build stability, tests, and CI. Sheriffing remained challenging, with frequent tree breakages requiring investigation to distinguish upstream regressions from local changes. In addition to these items, we’ve been blessed with help from the larger development community to deliver a variety of improvements over the past two months. 

A very special shout out to a new contributor who worked with our senior team to solve a 19-year old problem relating to unread folders. Interactions like this are fuel for our team and we’re incredibly grateful for the help.

• Icon cleanup
• High contrast mode theme changes
• 16-year old bug in virtual folder move
• Help with migrating strings to modern Fluent – searchWidget, news, nsMsgDBView
• and many more which are listed in release notes for beta.

If you would like to see new features as they land, and help us find some early bugs, you can try running daily and check the pushlog to see what has recently landed. This assistance is immensely helpful for catching problems early.

—

Toby Pilling

Senior Manager, Desktop Engineering

The post Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest: November/December 2025 appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Welcome to the last Community Office Hours of 2025! In this edition, Heather and Monica welcome Sr. Software Engineer Brendan Abolivier and Software Engineer Eleanor Dicharry from the Desktop Team. We’re discussing the recent Exchange Web Services Support for email that just landed in Thunderbird Monthly Release 145. Learn how the team landed this feature and discover future plans for Calendar and Contact support, as well as Graph API, in the blog, video, and podcast below.

Community Office Hours will be back in 2026. Thank you so much for joining us for these sneak peeks into how we make, improve, and expand Thunderbird! As always, if you have any ideas for future office hours topics, let us know in the comments!

What is Exchange and why did this take so long?

Exchange is the server-side product that hosts Microsoft’s e-mail, address book, and calendar services. Exchange powers both Microsoft services in the cloud on Microsoft 365 as well as on premises servers run by organizations. 

This is the first protocol we’ve added in over 20 years. We have an older code base that was in survival mode for a long time, and knowing the code well enough to improve on it is a challenge. So we had to understand how everything fit together first. The good news is this entire process will make adding future protocols, like JMAP and Graph, which will ultimately replace Exchange, go much faster.

Signing into Exchange in Thunderbird 145

Right now, only mail is supported. When users add an account, Thunderbird will try to detect if EWS (Exchange Web Services, the API we currently use to interact with Exchange servers) is available. Users can use this in the new Account Hub and in manual account configuration for Microsoft Exchange-hosted accounts. Like IMAP and other server types, users can set which folders are used for trash, spam, sent mail, and other special folders. However, the Exchange API doesn’t store this customization on the server. So these preferences will only apply actions like “move to trash
And “mark as junk” in Thunderbird. 

These limits, thankfully, only apply to folder settings themselves. The server synchronizes all folders and their messages so other clients have up-to-date views of mailboxes managed in Thunderbird.

We’re working on making EWS authentication as complete as possible, and are working with users who are helping us test less usual custom configurations. We have support for on-premises servers (aka ones your organization hosts instead of Microsoft hosting it) not using OAuth2, but this is a goal we’re working towards, along with supporting NTLM. If you have an unusual hosting or authentication option, please check out our Wiki article and get in touch to help us test.

Exchange features

Attachments: Downloading and displaying special and inline attachments should be supported. The team has especially made sure Thunderbird supports detaching and deleting attachments as well. If something doesn’t work, please report it on Bugzilla! 

Message storage: Messages come in two pieces: headers and bodies. It connects and goes through folders in order and pulls down headers, which are easy to download. There is a longer loading process to download message bodies. We’re working on adding folder subscriptions for more control of this process. We do have an option in folders to deselect individual folders from offline storage.

Sync: We made sure messages and folders are kept in sync with the server, so users can move between Thunderbird, other mail clients, and the webview. However, Thunderbird only syncs with the server on a configurable time interval after startup, which is set by default to 10 minutes. You can always use the ‘check new messages’ setting to force an instant sync.

Folder operations: Thunderbird supports all normal folder operations with EWS, except for sharing folders. This is difficult to replicate without a Microsoft-supported API we can use to do this at present. 

Filters: Filters should mostly work, though there are some limits. If you try filtering on a non-standard header isn’t supported, as we sync on a limited set of metadata. While Thunderbird 145 doesn’t support  message body filters, this is in very active development and will be improved in either 146 or 147. Another limit involves interactions between filters and notifications. You will still get notifications if a filter activates for a folder you have set not to notify you. Addressing these limitations is a current area of active development.

Search: Search for EWS accounts will function the same as it does for non-EWS accounts in Thunderbird with Message Search, Advanced Search or Quick Filters. You’ll want to start searches after your messages have downloaded, since search operates locally.

Report Bugs, Make Suggestions, and Help Test

As with everything else in Thunderbird, bug reports, suggestions, and user testing help make things even better. As stated above, if you have a non-standard hosting or authentication option, please join us on Matrix in either the Thunderbird Community Desktop Support or the Thunderbird Desktop Developers channel to learn how to join the testing effort. Test with Daily, if you feel comfortable about using it or Beta, though even testing in Release helps!

If you encounter a bug with an Exchange account, please report it on Bugzilla using the ‘Networking: Exchange’ component of the ‘MailNews: Core’ product. Have a feature you’d like to see? Suggest it at Mozilla Connect.

What about Mobile, Microsoft Graph, or Calendar and Contacts?

While the work the team has done to bring Exchange won’t directly transfer to the Android and iOS apps, it nonetheless gives us an increased familiarity with the protocol. This experience will help us bring Exchange and eventually Graph API to the mobile clients. Speaking of Microsoft Graph, this is our next priority for development. Microsoft is discontinuing support for EWS on Exchange Online accounts next October. Thankfully, work to add Microsoft Graph should go much faster, thanks to the foundational efforts with Exchange. 

This does mean that the team will need to delay their work on adding Calendar and Contacts to email support until Graph is done. Stay tuned to the Thunderbird blog for our monthly development updates and any special reports. 

VIDEO (Also on Peertube):

Resources:

Exchange Mozilla Support Article: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-and-exchange

Exchange Mozilla Wiki Post (with call for testing): https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird%3AExchange

Reach out on Matrix: https://matrix.to/#/#thunderbird:mozilla.org 

Bugzilla (use Exchange component for reporting): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=MailNews%20Core

The post VIDEO: Exchange Email Support appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

As we get ready for the Thunderbird Pro launch, we want every service we offer to be secure and worthy of the trust our community places in us. That means being honest about where we stand today and the work we are doing to meet the promises we are making.

Recently we partnered with OSTIF, the Open Source Technology Improvement Fund, and 7ASecurity to perform a full security audit of Thunderbird Send. As previously introduced, Send is an end-to-end encrypted large file sharing service that will be part of the overall Thunderbird Pro subscription suite coming in 2026. It is built on the foundation of the original Firefox Send project, although much has changed since those days.

While the audit focused on Send, the 7ASecurity team also reviewed parts of our shared infrastructure. That extra visibility resulted in meaningful hardening improvements across all of our products.

This was a whitebox audit, which means the auditors had full access to our systems and source code. They reviewed both the client and server sides of the service. They also carried out supply chain analysis, where they examined how our dependencies are managed, and threat modelling, which helps identify how attackers might approach a system even if there is no known exploit today.

The Thunderbird team has already addressed most of the items in the report, including all critical vulnerabilities. This also includes almost all non-critical hardening recommendations.  A few require more time because they relate to the organization of our broader infrastructure. For example, all Thunderbird Pro services currently run under a single AWS account. This is fairly normal in the early stages of building a platform. As the services mature and become more distinct, we will split them into separate accounts for stronger isolation.

The audit highlighted two vulnerabilities. One was critical and one was high. There were also twenty recommendations for further strengthening and improvement. One of the issues involved an API endpoint that had the potential to expose some user data without requiring authentication and another issue created the possibility of a denial of service attack. While neither issue actually happened,  the conditions that made it possible needed to be removed. Both of these were addressed and fixed in April.

The auditors also noted theoretical paths that could lead to privilege escalation, where attackers use one part of a system to gain more access than intended. This does not mean a privilege escalation exists today, but that some patterns could be tightened to prevent them in the future. These concerns apply only to older infrastructure, such as where we were running Appointment Beta. Once we migrate these users from appointment.day to the new appointment.tb.pro, we will retire the older systems entirely.

Another recommendation involves adding build attestations. These allow anyone to verify that a software build came from us and has not been tampered with. This is something we plan to implement in 2026.

Not everything in the report was a list of problems. In fact, the auditors highlighted several positive aspects of the collaboration. Their notes describe a team that was prepared and organized from the beginning, which allowed the audit work to begin without delays. Communication was smooth through email and a shared Element channel. The Send engineering team was consistently helpful and responsive, providing access and information whenever needed. The auditors also appreciated that we gave them full staging visibility, documentation, test accounts and source code. Their updates throughout the process were structured and consistent. The final report even comments on the clarity of the project as a whole, which helped them form a well informed view of our security posture.

The report closes with detailed guidance and commentary, but it also reflects confidence that Thunderbird is taking the right approach to security. That is exactly why we welcome third party audits. Open source only works when everyone can see the work, question it and verify it. Thunderbird Pro will follow those same values as it develops into a complete ecosystem of secure, privacy respecting services.

We will continue improving Send and the rest of our Pro services, and we look forward to sharing more as we get closer to launch. Thank you for being part of this journey and for pushing us to build something stronger.

The full report can be found here.

The post Thunderbird Send Security Audit with OSTIF and 7ASecurity appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Welcome back to the latest State of the Thunder. In the last Community Office Hours, Heather and Monica sat down with members of the mobile team in a retrospective to celebrate the first year of the Thunderbird for Android app. In this recording, however, Alessandro is leading viewers through the upcoming mobile roadmap, both for Android and iOS.

Looking ahead for Android

Key Priorities

Next year’s top priority is rearchitecture and core maintenance. The underlying code behind the Thunderbird for Android app, which was built on top of K-9 Mail, is 15 years old. That’s ancient in software terms. This work will make the app more stable and reduce the odds of developers breaking the app through their changes. This is a broad initiative with lots of elements. This includes bringing consistency across apps, including UI. For several reasons, we won’t be continuing with Material UI. Instead, we’ll be using our own homegrown Bolt UI.

Another feature the mobile team would like to prioritize is continuity with Thunderbird Pro. Since the exact delivery dates for these services have not yet been defined, setting priorities is difficult, but the team has confirmed the Thundermail integration will come first. Integrating Send, our end-to-end encryption file share, will be trickier when it comes to mobile. However, this may ultimately enable encrypted sync for user account settings as a future feature. 

The team also plans to modernize the Message List and Message View, in addition to ensuring they work well. As users probably spend most of their time on these screens, this is key to get right. We want to have an experience that compares to other mobile mail apps in a good way.

Additional Goals

Several features and feature explorations fill out the rest of the Android roadmap: This includes HTML Signatures that can be synced from the desktop app. The team will also explore providing JMAP support, Exchange support, and calendar support. It’s been a while since the Android app has added a new protocol, but Thundermail includes support for JMAP, and the desktop app monthly release now includes Exchange support. It’s important for users to have a similar experience across the apps. For calendar explorations, we’ll determine whether it’s better to integrate with the native Android calendar or build a calendar section for the app.

Prioritization

Our urgent priorities for next year are the Rearchitecture and Core Maintenance, and the Message View improvements. If we complete both of these goals with our growing yet still small team, we’ll consider that a realistic success!

Our plans for iOS

The mobile team also includes our iOS developers, and we have some broad goals for iOS development next year. iOS is, Alessandro notes, a locked-in, opinionated platform and we want to make future iOS app users comfortable using Thunderbird on their chosen platform. Any iOS roadmap also needs to balance developer and community satisfaction. Prioritizing IMAP as the first supported protocol reflects this as most users still rely on it. Once that’s completed, we can begin work on JMAP to help lead the way for other clients to adopt it. This is the same principle behind adding Exchange support to our apps. While it may be a proprietary protocol, adding it opens up Thunderbird for many people who want to use it but currently can’t.

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The post State of the Thunder 14: The 2026 Mobile Roadmap appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

If you can believe it, Thunderbird for Android has been out for just over a year! In this episode of our Community Office Hours, Heather and Monica check back in with the mobile team after our chat with them back in January. Sr. Software Engineer Wolf Montwé and our new Manager of Mobile Apps, Jon Bott look back at what the growing mobile team has been able to accomplish this last year, what we’re still working on, and what’s up ahead. 

We’ll be back next month, talking with members of the desktop team all about Exchange support landing in Thunderbird 145!

Thunderbird for Android: One Year Later

The biggest visual change to the app since last year is the new Account Drawer. The mobile team wants to help users easily tell their accounts apart and switch between them. While this is still a work in progress, we’ve started making these changes in Thunderbird 11.0. We know not everyone is excited about UI changes, but we hope most users like these initial changes! 

Another major but hidden change involves updating our very old code, which came from K-9 Mail. Much of the K-9 code goes back to 2009! Having to work with old code explains why some fixes or new features, which should be simple, turn out to be complex and time consuming. Changes end up affecting more components than we expect, which cause delivery timelines to change from a week to months. 

We are also still working to proactively eliminate tech debt, which will make the code more reliable and secure, plus allow future improvements and feature additions to be done more quickly. Even though the team didn’t eliminate as much tech debt as they planned, they feel the work they’ve done this year will help reduce even more next year.

Over this past year, the team has also realized Thunderbird for Android users have different needs from K-9 Mail users. Thunderbird desktop users want more features from the desktop app, and this is definitely a major goal we have for our future development. The current feature gap won’t always be here!

Recently, the mobile team has started moving to a monthly release cadence, similar to Firefox and the monthly Thunderbird channel. Changing from bi-monthly to monthly reduces the risks of changing huge amounts of code all at once. The team can make more incremental changes, like the account drawer, in a smaller window. Regular, “bite size” changes allow us to have more conversation with the community. The development team also benefits because they can make better timelines and can more accurately predict the amount of  work needed to ship future releases.

A Growing Team and Community

Since we released the Android app, the mobile team and contributor community has grown! One of the unexpected benefits of growing the team and community has been improved documentation. Documentation makes things visible for our talented engineers and existing volunteers, and makes it easier for newcomers to join the project!

Our volunteers have made some incredible contributions to the app! Translators have not only bolstered popular languages like German and French, but have enabled previously unsupported languages. In addition to localization, community members have helped develop the app. Shamin-emon has taken on complicated changes, and has been very patient when some of his proposed changes were delayed. Arnt, another community member, debugged and patched an issue with utf-8 strings in IMAP. And Platform34 triaged numerous issues to give developers insights into reported bugs.

Finally, we’re learning how to balance refactoring and improving an Android app, and at the same time building an iOS app from scratch! Both apps are important, but the team has had to think about what’s most important in each app. Android development is focusing on prioritizing top bugs and splitting the work to fix them into bite size pieces. With iOS, the team can develop in small increments from the start. Fortunately, the growing team and engaged community is making this balancing act easier than it would have been a year ago.

Looking Forward

In the next year, what can Android users look forward to? At the top of the priority list is better architecture leading to a better user experience, along with view and Message List improvements, HTML signatures, and JMAP support. For the iOS app, the team is focused on getting basic functionality like place, such as reading and writing mail, attachments, and work on the JMAP and IMAP protocols.

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The post VIDEO: An Android Retrospective appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

We’re back with our Monthly Release recap! Thunderbird 144.0 readies the way for Exchange Web Services support, makes reordering your folders easier, and adds a new UI for TLS certificate handling. Additionally, we’ve fixed a dark mode toggle bug for High Contrast Mode users.

A quick reminder – these updates are for users on our monthly Thunderbird Release channel. For our users still on the ESR (Extended Standard Release) channel, these updates won’t land until next July 2026. For more information on the differences between the channels and how to make the switch:

• Visit the Release download portal: Thunderbird Release Page.
• Explore detailed comparisons and migration guides.

Now let’s dive into what’s new in 144.0!

New Features:

Support for Exchange Web Service (EWS) Email in Account Hub

As part of our preparation for EWS support officially landing next month in Thunderbird 145.0, you’ll notice EWS accounts as an option in the Account Hub. We will have more detailed blog posts and support articles available next month describing what is and isn’t supported. 

Benefits:

• This gives us a chance to gradually ready the app and users for our newest protocol

Improve UX of folder reordering

Bug 1957486

We recently introduced drag and drop folder reordering, and in 144, we’re making it better. A new widget shows where your folder is going. We also fixed an issue that prevented the visual from showing. We removed the jitters when positioning between folders, and Improved consistency by using the same indicator used to reorder tabs and attachments.

Benefits:

• More control over drag-and- performance with fewer folders going to the wrong location
• More visual consistency

New UI for TLS Certificate Handling

While power users might be comfortable handling TLS certificates, average Thunderbird users might not know what to do when Thunderbird doesn’t trust a server’s certificate. This UI makes these issues, when they occur, harder to ignore and easier to diagnose and fix, even for less tech-savvy users. 

The new UI will mark the server red, with a clickable icon that takes users to an updated server settings. There, users can view certificates and add or remove certificate override exceptions.

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Benefits:

• Increased security for the average Thunderbird user
• Easier access, via the server settings, to certificate actions

Bug Fixes:

Dark mode won’t go away for messages in High Contrast Mode

Bug 1976900

Our High Contrast Mode users noticed the new toggle for messages in dark mode wasn’t appearing. Starting in Thunderbird 144, dark message mode will not be activated when in High Contrast mode, respecting the colors and priority of that accessibility setting.

Benefits:

• Consistent use of system colors when in High Contrast Mode
• More respectful of user settings

You can find a complete list of updates and bug fixes that went into Thunderbird 144.0 in our Release Notes.

Thank you for using Thunderbird and for supporting our mission to bring a truly independent, open‑source email experience. Your feedback and enthusiasm drive every improvement we make — and we can’t wait to share more with you in the next release.

The post Thunderbird Monthly Release 144 Recap appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Welcome back to our thirteenth episode of State of the Thunder! Nothing unlucky about this latest installment, as Managing Director Ryan Sipes walks us through how Thunderbird creates its roadmap. Unlike other companies where roadmaps are driven solely by business needs, Thunderbird is working with our community governance and feedback from the wider user community to keep us honest even as we move forward.

Want to find out how to join future State of the Thunders? Be sure to join our Thunderbird planning mailing list for all the details.

Open Source, Open Roadmaps

In other companies, product managers tend to draft roadmaps based on business needs. Publishing that roadmap might be an afterthought, or might not happen at all. Thunderbird, however, is open source, so that’s not our process.

A quick history lesson provides some needed context. Eight years ago, Thunderbird was solely a community project driven by a community council. We didn’t have a roadmap like we do today. With the earlier loss of funding and support, the project was in triage mode. Since then, thanks to a wonderful user community who has donated their skill, time, and money, we’ve changed our roadmap process.

The Supernova release (Thunderbird 115) was where we first really focused on making a roadmap with a coherent product vision: a modernized app in performance and appearance. We developed this roadmap with input from the community, even if there was pushback to a UI change.

The 2026 Roadmap Process

At this point, the project has bylaws for the roadmap process, which unites the Thunderbird Council, MZLA staff, and user feedback. Over the past year we’ve added two new roadmaps: one for the Android app and another for ThunderbirdPro. (Note, iOS doesn’t have a roadmap yet. Our current goal is: let’s be able to receive email!) But even with these changes and additions, the Mozilla Manifesto is still at the heart of everything we do. We firmly believe that making roadmaps with community governance and feedback from the larger community keeps us honest and helps us make products that genuinely improve people’s lives.

Want to see how our 2025-2026 Roadmaps are taking shape? Check out the Desktop Roadmap, as well the mobile roadmaps for Android and iOS.

Questions

Integrating Community Contributions

In the past, community contributors have picked up “nice to have” issues and developed them alongside us. Or people want to pursue problems or challenges that affect them the most. Sometimes, either of these scenarios coincide with our roadmap, and we get features like the new drag and drop folders!

Needless to say, we love when the community helps us get the product where we hope it will go. Sometimes, we have to pause development because of shifted priorities, and we’re trying to get better at updating contributors when these shifts happen on places like the tb-planning and mobile-planning mailing lists.

And these community contributions aren’t just code! Testing is a crucial way to help make Thunderbird shine on desktop and mobile. Community suggestions on Mozilla Connect help us dream big, as we discussed in the last two episodes. Reporting bugs, either on Bugzilla for the desktop app or GitHub for the Android app, help us know when things aren’t working. We encourage our community to learn more about the Council, and don’t be afraid to get in touch with them at council@thunderbird.net.

Telemetry and the Roadmap

While we know there are passionate debates on telemetry in the open source community, we want to mention how respectful telemetry can make Thunderbird better. Our telemetry helps us see what features are important, and which ones just clutter up the UI. We don’t collect Personally Identifying Information (PII), and our code is open so you can check us on this. Unlike Outlook, who shares their data with 801 partners, we don’t. You can read all about what we use and how we use it here.

So if you have telemetry turned off, please, we ask you to turn it on, and if it’s already on, to keep it on! Especially if you’re a Linux user, enabling telemetry helps us have a better gauge of our Linux user base and how to best support you.

Roadmap Categories and Organizing

Should we try to ‘bucket’ similar items on our roadmap and spread development evenly between them, or should we concentrate on the bucket that needs it most? The answer to this question depends on who you ask! Sometimes we’re focused on a particular area of focus, like UI work in Supernova and current UX work in Calendar. Sometimes we’re working to pay down tech debt across our code. That effort in reducing tech debt can pave the way for future work, like the current efforts to modernize our database so we can have a true Conversation View and other features. Sometimes roadmaps reveal obstacles you have to overcome, and Ryan thinks we’re getting faster at this.

Where to see the roadmaps

The current desktop roadmap is here, while the current Android roadmap is on our GitHub repo. In the future, we’re hoping to update where these roadmaps live, how they look, and how you can interact with them. (Ryan is particularly partial to Obsidian’s roadmap.) We ultimately want our roadmaps to be storytelling devices, and to keep them more updated to any recent changes.

Current Calls for Involvement

Join us for the last few days of testing EWS mail support! Also, we had a fantastic time with the Ask a Fox replython, and would love if you helped us answer support questions on SUMO.

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The post State of the Thunder 13: How We Make Our Roadmap appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Welcome back to another edition of the Community Office Hours! This month, we’re showing you our first steps towards a long awaited feature: a genuine Conversation View! Our guests are Alessandro Castellani, Director of Desktop and Mobile Apps and Geoff Lankow, Sr. Staff Software Engineer on the Desktop team. They recently attended a work week in Vancouver that brought together developers and designers to create our initial vision and plan to bring Conversation View from dream to reality. Before Geoff flew home, he joined Alessandro and us to discuss his backend database work that will make Conversation View possible. We also had a peek at the workweek itself, other features possible with our new database, and our tentative delivery timeline.

We’ll be back next month with an Office Hours all about Exchange Support for email, which is landing soon in our monthly Release channel.

September Office Hours: Conversation View

Some of you might be asking, “what IS Conversation View?” Basically, it’s a Gmail-like visualization of a message thread when reading emails. So, in contrast to the current threaded view, you have all the messages in a thread. This both includes your replies and any other messages that may have been moved to a different folder.

So, why hasn’t Thunderbird been able to do this already? The short answer is that our code is old. Netscape Navigator old. Our current ‘database,’ Mork, makes a mail folder summary (an .msf file) per folder. These files are text-based unicode and are NOT human readable. In Thunderbird 3, we introduced Gloda, our Global Search and Indexer, to try and work around Mork’s limitations. It indexes what’s in the .msf file and stores the data in a SQLite file. But as you might already know, Gloda itself is clunky and slow.

Modern Solutions for Modern Problems

If we want Conversation View (and other features users now expect), we need to bring Thunderbird further into the 21st century. Hence, our work on a new database, which we’re calling Panorama. It’s a single SQLite database with all your messages. Panorama indexes emails as soon as they’re received, and since it’s SQLite, it’s not only fast, but it can be read by so many tools.

Since all of your messages will be in a single SQLite database, we can do more than enable a true Conversation view. Panorama will improve global search, enable improved filters, and more. Needless to say, we’re excited about all the possibilities!

Conversation View Workweek

To get these possibilities started, we decided to bring developers and designers together for a Conversation View Workweek in Vancouver in early September. This brought people out of Zoom calls, emails, and Matrix messages, and across the Pacific Ocean in Geoff’s case, into one place to discuss technical and design challenges.

We’ve spoken previously about our design system and how we’ve collaborated between design and development on features like Account Hub. In-person collaboration, especially for something as complicated as a new database and message view, was invaluable. By the end of the week, developers and designers alike had plenty to show for their efforts.

Next Steps

Before you get too excited, the new database and Conversation view won’t land until after next year’s ESR release. There’s a lot of work to do, including testing Panorama in a standalone space until we’re ready to run Mork and Panorama alongside each other, along with the old and new code referencing each database. We need the migration to be seamless and easily reversible, and so we want to take the time to get this absolutely right.

Want to stay up to date on our progress? We recommend subscribing to our Planning and UX mailing lists, State of the Thunder videos and blog posts, and the meta bug on Bugzilla.

VIDEO (Also on Peertube):

Slides:

Resources:

The post VIDEO: Conversation View appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

We’re back with our twelfth episode of the State of the Thunder! In this episode, we’re talking about community initiatives, filling you in on Android development, and finishing our updates on popular Mozilla Connect requests.

Want to find out how to join future State of the Thunders? Be sure to join our Thunderbird planning mailing list for all the details.

Austin RiverHacks and Ask-A Fox

Thunderbird is a Silver sponsor for Austin RiverHacks NASA Space Apps Challenge 2025! If you’re in or around Austin, Texas from October 4th-5th, and want to join an in-person event where curious minds delve into NASA data to tackle real-life problems, we’d love to see you.

This week (as in right now! Check it out and get involved!), we’re joining forces with Firefox for the Ask-A-Fox event on Mozilla Support! Earn swag, join an incredible community, and help fellow Thunderbird users on desktop and Android! Want a great overview of how to contribute to SUMO? Watch our Community Office Hours with advice on getting started.

Android Plans for Q4 2025

It’s hard to believe we’re almost into the last three months of the year! We’ve just released our joint July/August Mobile Progress report. We also want to give you all an update on our overall progress on the roadmap we created at the beginning of the year.

The new Account Drawer, currently in Beta, isn’t finished yet. We’re still working on real, proper unified folders! We’ll have mockups of the account drawer progress before the end of the month and more info in the next beta’s release notes. We’ll also have updates soon on message list status notifications (similar to the desktop). In the single message view, we have improvements coming! This includes making attachments quicker to see and open.

The battle for proper IMAP fetch continues. Different server setups complicate this struggle, but we want to get this right, nonetheless. This will bring the Android app more on par with other emails apps.

Unfortunately, work on things like message sync, notifications, and Android 15 might delay features like HTML signatures.

Mozilla Connect Updates, Continued

We’re tackling more of the most frequently requested changes and features on Mozilla Connect, and we’re answering questions about native operating system integration, conversation view, and Thunderbird Pro related features!

Native Operating System Integration

When your operating system is capable of something Thunderbird isn’t, we share your frustration. We want things like OS-native progress bars that show you how downloads are going. We’ve started work on OS-native notification actions, like deleting messages. We love how helpful and time-saving this is, and want to expand it to things like calendar reminders.

There’s possibility and limitation in this, thanks to both Firefox and the OS itself. Firefox enables us more than it restricts us. For example, our work on the progress bar comes straight from Firefox code. Though there are some limits, and Thunderbird’s different needs as a mail client sometimes mean we need to improve an aspect of Firefox to enable further development. But the beauty of open source means we can contribute our improvements upstream! The OS often constrains us more. For example, we’d love snoozeable native OS calendar notifications, but they just aren’t possible yet.

Conversation View

We just finished an entire in-person work week focused on this in Vancouver! Conversation view, if you’re not familiar with it, includes ALL messages in a conversation, including your replies and messages moved to different folders. This feature, along with others, depends on having a single database for all messages in Thunderbird. Our current database doesn’t do this; instead, each folder is its own database.

The new SQLite database, which we’re calling Panorama, will enable a true Conversation View. During the work week, we thought about (and visualized) what the UI will look like. Having developers and designers in the same room was incredibly helpful for a complicated change. (Having a gassy Boston Terrier in said room, less so.) The existing code expects the current database, so we’ll have to rebuild a lot and carefully consider our decisions. The switch to the new database will probably occur next year after the Extended Support Release, behind a preference.

This change will help Thunderbird behave like a modern email client! Moving to Panorama will not only move us into the future, but into the present.

Thunderbird Pro Related-Requests

Three Mozilla Connect requests (Expanding Firefox Relay, a paid Mozilla email domain, and a Thunderbird webmail) were all out of our control once. But now, with the upcoming Thunderbird Pro offerings, these all will be possible! We’re even experimenting with a webmail experience for Thundermail, in addition to using Thunderbird (or even another email client if you want.) We’ll have an upcoming State of the Thunder dedicated to Thunderbird Pro with more info and updates!

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The post State of the Thunder 12: Community, Android, and Mozilla Connect appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Welcome back to the latest season of State of the Thunder! After a short break, we’re back and ready to go. Michael Ellis, our Manager of Community Programs, is helping Alessandro with hosting duties. Along with members of the Thunderbird team and community, they’re answering your questions and keeping everyone updated on our roadmap progress for our projects.

In this episode, we’re talking about our initiatives for regular community feedback, tackling a variety of questions, and providing status updates on the top 20-ish Mozilla Connect Thunderbird suggestions.

Community Questions

Accidental Message Order Sorting

Question: Clearly the number one issue with Thunderbird that breaks for many of my clients is that if they accidentally click on a column header the sorting of the message is changed. “My messages are gone” is what I then hear all the time from my clients. It would be wonderful if the sorting of the message could be locked and not changed through such an easy operation, which often is invoked accidentally.

Answer: This is a great usability question and a complicated one. Alessandro recommends switching to CardsView, as it’s harder to accidentally change. This one one of the reasons we implemented it! However, we can definitely explore options to lock the message order in through enterprise policies. We would want to be mindful of users who wanted to change the order.

Michael discusses the option of a pop-up warning that could inform the user they’re about the change the message sorting order. Increased friction through a pop-up, though, as Alessandro and Jesse Miksic from the design team both point out, can cause its own issues. But this is certainly something we’ll look into more!

Move Focus Keyboard Shortcut

Question: Could there be consideration to add a keystroke to immediately move the focus to the list of messages in the currently open mailbox? Even better if keystrokes that would automatically do this for the inbox folder or the default account.

Answer: Alessandro notes Thunderbird already has this ability, but it’s not super noticeable. The F6 key allows you to switch focuses between the main areas of the application. So we’re approaching this problem from two directions: implementing tabular keyboard navigation and customizable shortcuts. We don’t have an expected delivery date on the latter, but we plan to have a searchable keyboard shortcut hub. We know our interface can be a little daunting, and we’re tackling it from multiple angles.

Option for Simplified Thunderbird?

Question: I work for a company which develops a Raspberry Pi-based computer made specific… specifically for blind consumers. Thunderbird is installed on this device by default. Many of our users are not tech-savvy. and just want a simple email client. I would love to have an easy method for removing some of the clutters with the goal of having a UI with fewer controls. Currently, users often have to press the tab key many times just to move to the list of messages in their inbox. For some users, all they really want is the message list and the list of folders, with the menu bar open, and that’s it. A bit like we once had with Outlook Express.

Answer: Alessandro and Ryan Sipes, our director, have talked about the need for a lighter version of Thunderbird a lot. This would help users who don’t need all the power of Thunderbird, and just want to focus on their messages (not even their folders). However, Ryan doesn’t want a separate version of Thunderbird we’d need to maintain, but to build a better usability curve into Thunderbird. Answering this question means having a Thunderbird that is simple by default, but more powerful and customizable if needed, without upsetting our current users.

Heather Ellsworth from the community team also supports the idea of a user preference for a lighter Thunderbird. At conferences and co-working spaces, she constantly hears the requests for a slightly simpler version of Thunderbird.

Thunderbird PPA

Question: I’m using Linux, one of the Ubuntu-derived flavors. And I have Thunderbird 128.14 ESR installed through the Mozilla Team PPA. I would love to know when the ESR version of 140 will be available in this PPA.

Answer: Heather, who works a lot with Linux packaging, takes this question. This PPA isn’t an official distribution channel for Thunderbird, which leads to some confusion. Our official Linux packages are the Snap and flatpak, and the tarball available on our website. A community member named Rico, whose handle is ricotz, maintains this PPA. In the PPA, you can click on his name to learn how to contact him for question like this.

Top 20-ish Mozilla Connect Posts

If you’ve ever posted an idea to make Thunderbird better in a blog comment, social media post, or a SUMO (Mozilla Support) thread, you’ve probably been prompted to share your suggestion on Mozilla Connect. This helps us keep our community feedback in one place, which helps our team prioritize features the community wants!

Where we’re falling short, however, is keeping the community updated on the progress of their suggestions. With a dedicated community team, this is something we can do better! Right now, we’d like to provide a quick status update on the top 20-ish Mozilla Connect posts related to Thunderbird.

Sync

We implemented this in the Daily build of the desktop app last year, using a staging environment for Firefox Sync. But Firefox Sync is called Firefox Sync because it’s built for Firefox. Thunderbird profiles, in comparison, have a lot more data points. This meant we had to build something completely different.

As we started to spin up Thunderbird Pro, we decided it made more sense to have a Thunderbird account that would manage everything, including Sync. Unfortunately, this meant a lot of delays. So Sync is still on our radar, and we hope to have it next year, barring further complications.

GNOME Desktop Integration

Yes, we’re working on this, starting with native desktop notifications. Ideally, we want to be integrated with more Linux desktop environments through expanded native APIs.

Color for Thunderbird Accounts

We already have it! You can access your account settings and customize the colors of each account.

Show full email address on mouse-over

Already have this too. If this doesn’t happen, it’s a bug, and we’d definitely appreciate a report at Bugzilla.

Don’t save passwords as plain text, but rather integrate with the OS storage system

We’re exploring this as both part of our increased native OS integrations and strengthening and security integrations with Thunderbird.

Thunderbird should, by default, have all telemetry as an opt-in option, or have zero telemetry

We’re already adopting opt-in telemetry for an upcoming release of Thunderbird for Android, and we want to make this the default for desktop in the future. While desktop is currently opt-out, Alessandro stresses we only have a few limited telemetry probes for desktop Thunderbird. And those probes can show how the majority of users are using the app and help us avoid bad UX choices.

Thunderbird for iPhone and iPad

In progress!

JMAP Support

Currently in the works for the upcoming iOS release, with plans for support on desktop and Android. Thundermail will also come with JMAP.

Firefox Translate

Exploring this is low on our list right now. This is both because of performance concerns and we want to be very cautious with anything concerning machine learning, which includes translation.

Watch the Video (Also on Peertube)

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Our Next State of the Thunder

Anxious to know the rest of the top 20 Mozilla Connect posts? Join us on Tuesday, September 16 at 3 PM Pacific (22:00 UTC)! Find out how to join on the TB Planning mailing list. We think this will be a great season and who knows, by the end of it, we may even have a jingle. See you next time!

The post State of the Thunder: Mozilla Connect Updates appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Welcome back to another edition of the Community Office Hours! This month, we’re taking a closer look at accessibility in the Thunderbird desktop and mobile apps. We’re chatting with Rebecca Taylor and Solange Valverde, members of our designer, about a recent accessibility (often shortened as a11y) study. We wanted to find out where Thunderbird was doing well, and where we could improve. Rebecca and Solange walk us through the study and answer our questions!

We’ll be back next month with the latest Community Office Hours! If you have a suggestion for a topic or team you’d love us to cover, please let us know in the comments!

August Office Hours: Thunderbird Accessibility Study

The Thunderbird Team wants to make desktop and mobile apps that maximizes everyone’s productivity and freedom. This means making Thunderbird accessible for all of our users, and the first step is finding where we can do better. Thanks to our relationship with Mozilla, our design team commissioned a study with Fable, who connects companies building inclusive products to experienced testers with disabilities. We asked participants to evaluate the Thunderbird desktop app using assistive tech, including screen readers, alternative navigation, and magnification. And we also asked a user on the cognitive spectrum to evaluate how our language, layouts, and reminders helped or hindered their use of the app.

Members of the design team then conducted 60 minute moderated interviews with study participants. In these talks, participants pointed out where they struggled with accessibility roadblocks, and what strategies they used to try and work through them.

Screen Reader Users

Screen readers convert on-screen text to either speech or Braille, and help blind or low-vision users navigate and access digital content. Our study participants, many of whom switch between multiple screen readers, let us know where Thunderbird falls short.

Some issues were common to all screen readers. Keyboard shortcuts didn’t follow common norms, and workflows in search and filter results made for a confusing experience. Thunderbird could benefit from a table view with ARIA, a W3C specification created to improve accessibility.

Other issues were specific to the individual screen reader programs. In Narrator, for example, expected confirmation for actions like moving messages was missing, and the screen reader didn’t recognize menu stage changes in submenus. In JAWS, meanwhile, message bodies were unreadable in email and compose windows with Braille display, and filter menus opened silently, not announcing the content or state to the user. Finally, with NVDA, users noted confusing structures and organization that lacked the structure and context they expected, as well as poor content prioritization.

Cognitive Usability

In a previous office hours, we talked about how we wanted to make Thunderbird more cognitively accessible with our work on the Message Context Menu. Cognition relates to how we think, learn, understand, remember, and pay attention, and clear language, regular layouts, and meaningful reminders all improve cognitive accessibility. Our cognitive accessibility tester expressed concerns about a lack of a quick, non-technical setup, imbalances in our whitespace, and unpredictable layout controls, among other issues.

Alternative Navigation and Magnification

Our alternative navigation users tested how well they could use Thunderbird with voice controls and eye tracking software. Our voice control testers found room for improvement with menu action labels, better autofocus shift when scrolling through emails, and a larger font size for more comfortable voice-driven use. Likewise, our eye tracking software tester found issues with font sizes. They also noted concerns with composition workflow and focus, too-small controls, and a drag-and-drop bug.

Our magnification tester found where we could improve visual contrast and pane layouts. They also found off-screen elements could steal focus from new messages, and that folder paths and hierarchies could use more clarification.

Conclusions and Next Steps

We’re incredibly grateful for the insights we learned from this study on the many aspects of accessibility we want to improve in all of our apps. We want to thank Mozilla for their helping us take the next step in accessibility research, and Fable for providing a fantastic platform for accessibility testing. We’re also so grateful to our study participants for all their time and sharing their perspectives, concerns, and insights.

This is far from the end of our accessibility journey. We’re looking forward to working what we learned in this study into deeper research and ultimately our desktop roadmap. We can’t wait to start accessibility research on our mobile apps. And we hope this study can help other open source projects start their own accessibility research to improve their projects.

One way you can get involved is to report accessibility bugs on the desktop app. Go to the Thunderbird section on Bugzilla, and under ‘Component’ select ‘Disability Access.’ Additionally, click ‘Show Advanced Fields’ and enter ‘access’ into the ‘Details > Keywords’ section. Add screenshots when possible. Be sure to describe the bug so others can try and reproduce the it for better troubleshooting.

If you want to learn more about our accessibility efforts, please join our User Experience mailing list! If you think you’re ready to get involved, please join our dedicated Matrix channel. We hope you help us make Thunderbird available, and accessible, everywhere!

VIDEO (Also on Peertube):

Slides:

Resources:

• Bugzilla Disability Access bugs and enhancement requests: https://mzl.la/41jrnuv
• Fable: https://makeitfable.com/
• Thunderbird A11y Matrix channel: https://matrix.to/#/%23tb-a11y:mozilla.org
• Thunderbird User Experience Mailing List: https://thunderbird.topicbox.com/groups/ux
• Thunderbird suggested tools and resources for Accessibility: https://bolt.thunderbird.net/8b179dbfd/p/33ddcb-accessibility
• Config 2024: Pitching accessible design like a pro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoHIDWF0d6I

The post VIDEO: Thunderbird Accessibility Study appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

David Allen’s “Getting Thing Done” (GTD) system has been around for longer than Thunderbird! First published in a book of the same name in 2001, this approach to productivity is focused on freeing your brain from chaos, giving it “focus, clarity, and confidence” for creativity and new ideas. As I’m also a fan of freedom from chaos, I decided to dive back into our productivity blogs and highlight how to use tags and keyboard shortcuts to use GTD in Thunderbird.

Five Steps to Get Things Done

To start, let’s summarize the GTD system, for anyone who might not be familiar. GTD uses five key steps to go from unorganized to unstoppable, whether in your inbox or elsewhere: Capture, Clarify, Organize, Reflect, and Engage.

Let’s think about these steps in terms of managing your inbox! First, Capturing involves collecting the things that have your attention. In other instances, this could mean brainstorming a to-do list. For email, this means your inbox. Clarifying entails taking those items and figuring out what they mean. For the Getting Things Done system, you need to figure out if you can act on something (for example, an email) or not. If it’s not actionable, where does it needs to go Is this reference? Is this on hold for some reason? Or can it just go in the trash?

Once this clarifying is done, it’s time to Organize, aka putting the things that have your attention or reminders of them in a place you can act on, whether that’s now or later. Reflecting isn’t a one-time step, but something you do consistently to fine-tune your system and make sure it’s still working for you.

All of these steps make the last step, Engaging, possible. You have a system you can trust, honed through reflection. Your inbox management system is like a starship where everything and everyone is working together, efficiently and effectively. This frees up your brain so your brain can soar through a cosmos of deep, interesting, meaningful work. Maybe while drinking a cup of tea, Earl Grey, hot.

Using Tags and Keyboard Shortcuts to Clarify and Organize Your Inbox

Adapting the GTD system to your Thunderbird inbox takes advantages of two features I am coming to love: labels and keyboard shortcuts.

I’m going to suggest three initial labels, and a few possibilities for labels for non-actionable emails, and walk you through how to set up the labels and use the keyboard shortcuts to apply them – with screenshots!

First, go into Settings > General > Tags to create/adjust your tags. The four example tags we set are “Do Now,” “Do,” “Waiting For,” and “Later.”

Wait, why have a “Do Now” and “Do” tag? This tip came from Henk Postma’s blog, who gave me a lot of inspiration. “Do Now” is urgent, and it needs doing without delay. “Do” doesn’t have this urgency, but the email is actionable.

The “Waiting For” label means there’s something you need to act on this email. Maybe it’s more information, or permission. This label can keep hold those emails until you’re ready. The “Later” tag is a bit of a catch-all. Like reference information, or things you’re interested in but can’t pursue yet. Maybe you want to break down your “Later” labels. The choice is yours!

Now that we have our labels set up, and associated with a number, we’re ready to start organizing. Once a message comes in, click the number for the tag you want. If you accidentally press the wrong number, don’t worry! Just press ‘0’ to clear whatever label you applied.

And that’s it! Well, except putting your system into practice, and David Allen has some further advice on using GTD in your inbox. If you have any tips on how you make your email organization a habit and not an afterthought, I’d love to hear them! As always, if there’s a productivity topic you’d like me to explore, let me know in the comments!

The post Engage Your Inbox with ‘Getting Things Done’ appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

We’re launching a brand new series that will highlight features and improvements with Thunderbird 141.0 – your front row ticket to Thunderbird’s monthly enhancements! (No more waiting in the wings so to speak). Learn what’s new, why it matters, and how it’ll transform your inbox experience.

In March, we introduced a new monthly Release channel and swapped it as the default option on the Thunderbird.net downloads page.

As a quick refresher, Thunderbird now offers two core release channel options:

1. Release Channel: Updated monthly with new features, performance boosts, and bug fixes as they land.
2. ESR (Extended Support Release): Receives all of the above in one major annual update, focusing on stability, with point security and stability patches in between.

While both versions are equally stable, the Release channel provides faster access to cutting-edge tools and optimizations, while the ESR channel may provide more stability when using add-ons with Thunderbird.

Feedback on the Release channel has been overwhelmingly positive, with many users transitioning from ESR. To join them:

• Visit the Release download portal: Thunderbird Release Page.
• Explore detailed comparisons and migration guides.

Now that we’ve gotten the formalities out of the way, let’s jump in to what’s new in 141.0!

New Features

Warning for Expiring PGP Keys

Thunderbird loves PGP like cats adore cardboard boxes! We prioritize user trust by making end-to-end encrypted email simple for everyone, from newcomers to experienced users. To help you get started or refresh your knowledge, our team and volunteers have written an excellent introduction to the topic, as well as a How-to and FAQ.

Key expiration serves as a security safeguard, requiring proactive renewal procedures that reinforce operational encryption competencies.

What changed:

• Your warning light is lit: If your public key expires in 31 days, Thunderbird now flashes a red alert in the compose window. No post-expiry panic!

Why it matters:

• Safety net: A key that auto-expires nudges you to refresh it.
• Piece of mind: Before Thunderbird told you after-the-fact your key died. Now? Your inbox is proactive.

Archive from OS Notifications

The improvements to native notifications keep coming. Now, in addition to deleting a message, marking it as spam, or starring it, you can archive a message directly from your operating system’s notifications. 

By default, the notifications you see include “Mark as Read” and “Delete”, however they can be customized further by going to Thunderbird Settings → General→ Incoming Mails and clicking on Customize.

Here you can select the information you want to see in your notification, as well as the actions you’d like to perform with it.

What changed:

• New mail notifications have added the ‘Archive’ action.

Why it matters:

• No need to go into the Thunderbird app to archive an incoming email now. More actions in notifications give you time to do the things you want, instead of managing your inbox.

Bug Fixes

Prioritize Link Hover URL in Status Bar

Thunderbird includes numerous features to protect you from suspicious mail and bad actors. One of these tools involves checking the URL of a link by hovering your mouse over the link text. The status bar would display the link URL, but it could be overwritten in fractions of a second by “Downloading message” and “Opening folder” messages. We’ve fixed this, and now the URL you’re hovering over will get priority in the status bar.

What changed:

• Hovering over a link in an email will display it in the status bar without being immediately overwritten by other messages.

Why it matters:

• Knowing where an email wants to send you is a major security boost, especially with the widespread threat of phishing emails.

Dots, Dashes, and Advanced Address Book Search

Three months ago, a community member noted that while the CardBook add-on could find phone numbers that used dots for separators, the Advanced Address Book Search in Thunderbird could not. Since we want users to be able to find contacts, and use the phone number formatting they want as well, we’ve built this ability into Thunderbird.

What changed:

• The advanced address book in Thunderbird now recognizes phone numbers that use dots for separators.

Why it matters:

• Saves time: Finds contacts faster and more accurately, no matter their format or storage location, eliminating need for manual cleanup or repeat searches.

Performance Improvements

Message List Scroll

To address message list scrolling performance, we adjusted how new rows are rendered but inadvertently introduced display delays. We’re reverting to the original row-handling method to properly assess performance impact before considering this change for Extended Support Release adoption. This allows precise measurement of optimizations against potential trade-offs, ensuring reliable performance in production environments.

What changed:

• Reverting back to the previous method for how rows are updated.

Why it matters:

• To accurately measure how the update affects scrolling performance before considering inclusion in an ESR.

The post Monthly Release 141 Recap appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

For the past few months, we’ve been talking about our roadmaps and development and answering community questions in a video and podcast series we call “State of the Thunder.” We’ve decided, after your feedback, to also cover them in a blog, for those who don’t have time to watch or listen to the entire session.

This session is focused on answering inquiries from the community, and we’ve got the questions and summaries of the answers (with helpful links to resources we mentioned)! This series runs every two weeks, and we’ll be creating blogs from here on in. If you have any questions you’d like answered, please feel free to include them in the comments!

Supporting and Sustaining FOSS Projects We Use

Question: As we move toward having more traditionally commercial offerings with services that are built on top of other projects, what is our plan in helping those projects’ maintenance (and financial) sustainability? If we find a good model, can we imagine extending it to our apps, too?

Answer: Right now, the only project we’re using to help build Thunderbird Pro is Stalwart, and we’ll have more details on how we’re using it soon. But we absolutely want to make sure the project gets financial support from us to support its sustainability and well-being. We want to play nice!

Appointment and Assist are from scratch, and Send is from old Firefox code, and so there isn’t another project to support with those. But to go back to a point Ryan Sipes has frequently made, while people can use all of these tools for free by self-hosting, they can subscribe as a way of both simplifying their usage and making sure these projects are supported for regular maintenance and a long life.

Future UI Settings Plans

Question: The interface is difficult to customize but more importantly is difficult to discover all the options available because they’re scattered around settings, account settings, top menu bar, context menus, etc. 140 Introduced the Appearance section in the settings, any plans to continue this effort with some more drastic restructuring of the UI?

Answer: Yes, we do have plans! We know the existing UI isn’t the most welcoming, since it is so powerful and we don’t want to overwhelm users with every option they can configure. We have a roadmap that’s almost ready to share that involves restructuring Account Settings. Right now, individual settings are very scattered, and we want to group things together into related sections that can all be changed at the same time. We want to simplify discoverability to make it easier to customize Thunderbird without digging into the config panel.

Account Setup and Manual Configuration

Question: Using manual configuration during email setup has become more difficult with time with the prioritization of email autoconfiguration.

Answer: Unfortunately, manual setup has confused a lot of casual users, which is why we’ve prioritized autodiscovery and autosetup. We’ve done a lot of exploration and testing with our Design team, and in turn they’ve done a lot of discussion and testing with our community. You can see some of these conversations in our UX mailing list. And even if you have to start the process, there is a link in it to edit the configuration manually. Ultimately, we have to have a balance between less technical and more technical users, and to be as usable and approachable as we can to the former.

Balancing Complexity and Simplicity

Question: Thunderbird is powerful with a lot of options but it should have more. Any plans to integrate ImportExportTools  (and other add-ons) and add more functionalities?

Answer: Thunderbird’s Add-ons are often meant for users who like more complexity! When we tackle this question, there’s two issues that come to mind. First, several developers get financial support from their users, and we want to be mindful of that. Second is the eternal question of how many features are too many features? We already have this issue in feedback between “Thunderbird doesn’t have enough features” and “Thunderbird is too complicated!” Every feature we add gives us more technical debt. If we bring an add-on into core, we can support it for the long term.

We think this question may also come from the fact that Add-ons often “break” with each ESR release. But we’re trying to find ways to support developers to use the API to increase compatibility. We’re also considering how we can financially support Add-on developers to help them maintain their apps. Our core developers are pressed for time, and so we’re beyond grateful to the Add-on developers who can make Thunderbird stronger and more specialized than we could on our own!

Benefits of the New Monthly Release Channel

Question: Is the new Release channel with monthly versions working properly and bringing any benefits?

Answer: Yes, on both counts! Right now, we have 10 to 20 percent of Thunderbird desktop users on the Release channel. While we don’t have hard numbers for the benefits YET, we’d love to get some numbers on improvements in bug reactivity and other indicators. We noticed this year’s ESR had far fewer bugs, which probably owed to Release users testing new features. While we’ve always had Beta users, we have so many more people on Release. So if something went wrong, we could fix it, let it “ride the train,” and have the fix in the next version.

And our developers have stopped wondering when our features will make it to users! Things will be in users’ hands in a month, versus nearly a year for some features.

JMAP Support in Thunderbird

Question: Any plans on supporting JMAP?

Answer: 100% yes. Though JMAP is still something of a niche protocol, with doesn’t yet have widespread support from major providers. But now, with Thundermail we’ll be our own provider, and it will come with JMAP. Also, with the upcoming iOS app, it will be easy to add support for JMAP. First, we’re making the app from scratch so we have no technical debt. Second, we can do things properly from the start and be protocol agnostic.

Also, we’ve taken several lessons from our Exchange implementation, namely how to implement a new protocol properly. This will help us add support for JMAP faster.

Maintaining Backups in Thunderbird

Question: I have used Thunderbird since its first release and I always wondered how to properly and safely maintain backups of local emails. No matter how much I hate Outlook it offers built-in backup archives of .pst files that can be moved to other installations. The closest thing in Thunderbird is to copy the entire profile folder, but that comes with many more unpredictable outcomes.

I might be asking for something uncommon but I manage many projects with a very heavy communication flow between multiple clients, and  when the project is completed I like to export the project folder with all the messages into a single PST file and create a couple of back-ups for safety, so no matter if my email server has problems, or the emails on my server and computer are accidentally deleted, I have that folder back-up as a single file which I can import into a new installation.

Answer: We’d love for anyone with this question to come talk to us about how to improve our Import/Export tools. Unfortunately, there’s no universal email archive format, and a major issue is that Outlook’s backup files are in a proprietary format. We’ve rebuilt the Import/Export UI and done a bit on the backend. Alas, this is all we’ve had time for.

So, if you’d like to help us tackle this problem, come chat with us! You can find us on Matrix and in the Developers and Planning mailing lists. We think there’s definitely room for a standard around email backups.

Watch the Video (also available on TILvids)

Listen to the Podcast

The post State of the Thunder: Answering Community Questions! appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

Welcome back to another edition of the Community Office Hours! This month, we’re taking a closer look at Thunderbird 140.0 ESR “Eclipse,” our latest Extended Support Release! Sr. Manager of Desktop Engineering Toby Pilling (who so helpfully provides the Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest) is walking us through the latest Thunderbird. He’ll let us know what’s in, what’s out, and why you should give the new monthly Release channel a try. We’re also introducing a new member of the Thunderbird Team, Manager of Community Programs Michael Ellis.

Michael (and the Thunderbird team!) are here to listen, collaborate, and help you succeed. You can expect to see more initiatives, experiments, and outreach from us soon, but you don’t have to wait till then to weigh in. Have thoughts or suggestions on how to improve the community? Drop a comment below to share them directly, or visit our Connect thread to see what others are saying and add your own ideas there. Together, we can help shape the future of the Thunderbird community and product.

Next month, we’ll be talking with Product Design Rebecca Taylor and Associate Designer Solange Valverde to talk about our team’s recent efforts to make Thunderbird more accessible. This not only involves seeing where we’re doing well, but finding where we’re falling short. It’s been a while since we’ve talked about Accessibility here, and we’re excited to continue the conversation. If you have questions about Accessibility in either the desktop or Android app you’d like us to ask our guests, please leave them as a comment below!

July Office Hours: Thunderbird 140.0 ESR “Eclipse”

As Toby shows us in his introduction, the major theme of Thunderbird 140.0 ESR “Eclipse” is stability. We took lessons from last year’s ESR, when we introduced code to 128.0 that was a little harder to test than expected given when it landed. We’re also waiting on some major changes in the works, namely the refreshed Calendar UI and the database backend rewrite. This was, every feature that made it to this year’s ESR was fully baked.

What’s In

And there’s a lot of features to discuss! Toby walks through what’s new in 140.0, starting with a trio of visual improvements. Thunderbird now adapts the message window to dark mode, and provides a toggle to switch dark mode off in case of styling issues. In the new Appearance Settings, users can globally take control of their message list, toggling between Cards and Table View, Threaded and Unthreaded, and Grouped by Sort across all their accounts. This feature also allows switching Cards View between a 2 and 3 row preview, and to propagate default sorting orders to all folders. Finally, a community-powered and staff-supported feature allows users to reorder user-created folders by manually dragging and dropping them.

140.0 ESR Also introduces the Account Hub, which we covered in a previous Office Hours! You’ll see this when you add a second account, and it will seamlessly walk you through setting up not only your email, but connected address books and calendars.

To help maximize your time and minimize your clicks, Thunderbird now uses Native Notifications for Linux, Mac, and Windows. While for now you can delete messages and mark them as read directly from notifications, we have more actions up our sleeve, coming soon to the monthly Release channel!

Finally, we close out our new features. Experimental Exchange Support, which can be enabled via preference, introduces native Exchange email support to desktop Thunderbird. Though for a fully supported experience, we encourage you to switch to the monthly Release channel, where more Exchange improvements are coming. Export for Mobile allows you to generate a QR code to import your account configurations and credentials into the Thunderbird Android app. And Horizontal Scroll for Table View allows you to scroll the message list horizontally and read complex tabular data more like a spreadsheet.

What’s Out

But for everything we put in to 140.0 ESR, we had to leave some things out. Experimental Exchange Support only includes email, not calendar or address books. We also don’t yet support Graph API. Additionally, 140.0 ESR doesn’t include a new UI for Tasks, Chat, or Settings. Account Hub won’t be enabled for first-time user experiences in ESR, though this will be coming to monthly Release, as will the new Account Hub for Address Books.

Try the Monthly Release Channel

While we’re excited and proud to introduce Thunderbird 140.0 ESR “Eclipse,” we also hope you’ll try out new monthly Release channel. Read more about it and learn how you can get new features faster in our announcement.

Watch, Read, and Get Involved

Thanks for reading, and as always, you can learn more by watching the video (with handy chapter markers, if you just want to hear about your favorite new feature) and reading the presentation slides. If you’re looking to get involved with the community, from QA to support to helping develop new features, check out our “Get Involved” page on our website. You can also check out the specific resources below! See you all next month.

VIDEO (Also on Peertube):

Slides:

Resources:

• Thunderbird UX Mailing List: https://thunderbird.topicbox.com/groups/ux
• Interested in the Thunderbird Accessibility Committee? Email laurel@thunderbird.net
• Suggest new features: https://connect.mozilla.org
• Account Hub Office Hours blog: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/04/video-the-new-account-hub/
• Manual Folder Sort Bug (and Community Development): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1846550
• Exchange Support Wiki: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Exchange
• Get Involved With Exchange: email heather@thunderbird.net
• Thunderbird + Rust Office Hours Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMY3ZzVsXXyqN6yL9Snm6W19WhBPntj1Z
• QR Code Import Knowledge Base Article: https://support.mozilla.org/kb/thunderbird-android-import
• Release Channel Blog: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/03/thunderbird-release-channel-update/

The post VIDEO: Thunderbird 140.0 ESR “Eclipse” appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

The wait is over! Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse” has reached totality. From all of us at the Thunderbird project, from MZLA staff and the Thunderbird Council to our global community of contributors, we’re excited to announce the latest Extended Support Release has arrived.

Eclipse not only builds on Thunderbird 128 “Nebula,” but also the recent features and improvements from the Monthly Release channel. This latest release transforms your email experience with adaptive dark messaging and improved visual controls. Enhanced features keep everyday email tasks light and effortless, while the streamlined new Account Hub ensures adding new accounts is a snap.

Don’t like the order for your custom folders? Just click and drag to arrange them exactly how you want.

More Refinements & Updates

Experimental Exchange Support Natively set up a Microsoft Exchange account in Thunderbird by enabling a preference.

Export for Mobile Generate a QR code to quickly transfer your account settings and credentials to your Thunderbird for Android app.

Horizontal Scroll for Table View Lots of tabular data? Let the message list scroll horizontally, like a spreadsheet or file manager.

Bug Fixes and Improvements

Thousands of bug fixes and performance improvements to bring you the smooth, reliable Thunderbird experience you expect.

Looking Forward

Whether you’re waiting for the next Thunderbird ESR or total solar eclipse, we understand that sometimes you want new features, or that cosmic awe, sooner. While we can’t change the universe, you can now get the latest Thunderbird features as they land, instead of once a year. Switch to Thunderbird Release and enjoy monthly updates with the same dependable stability.

Thunderbird 140 Availability For Windows, Linux, and MacOS

Even with QA and beta testing, any major software release may have issues exposed after significant public testing. That’s why we are slowly enabling automatic updates until we’re confident no such issues exist. We do have a known issue where users sending mail through 32bit MAPI will be prompted for a password, unless they use the compose window.

We have enabled manual upgrade to 140 via Help > About, and you can upgrade now or wait to receive automatic updates. Thunderbird version 140.0 is also offered as direct download from thunderbird.net. Be sure to select ‘Thunderbird Extended Support Release’ in the ‘Release Channel’ drop-down menu.

For Linux users running Thunderbird from the snap or flatpak, 140 will be available within the next few weeks. Likewise, Thunderbird 140 will also arrive on the Windows store by mid-July.

The post Welcome to Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse” appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

It’s been just over two months (!) since we first announced our upcoming Thunderbird Pro suite and Thundermail email service. We thought it would be a great idea to bring in Chris Aquino, a Software Engineer on our Services team, to chat about these upcoming products. We want our community to get to know the newest members of the Thunderbird family even before they hatch!

We’ll be back later this summer after our upcoming Extended Support Release, Thunderbird 140.0, is out! Members of our desktop team will be here to talk about the newest features. Of course, if you’d like to try the newest features a little sooner, we encourage you to try the monthly Release channel. Just be sure to check if your Add-ons are compatible first!

May Office Hours: Thunderbird Pro and Thundermail

Chris has been a part of the Thunderbird Pro products since we first started developing them. So not only is he a great colleague, he’s an ideal guest to help tell the story about this upcoming chapter in the Thunderbird story. Chris starts with an overview for each product that covers the features we have planned for each of our Thunderbird Pro products and Thundermail. We know how curious our community is about these products, and so our hosts have lots of questions for each product, and Chris is more than up to the challenge in answering them. We also make sure to point out how to get involved with trying, testing, and helping us improve these products by linking you to our repositories.

Watch, Read, and Get Involved

The entire interview with Chris is below, on YouTube and Peertube. There’s a lot of references in the interview, which we’ve handily provided below. We hope you’re enjoying these looks into what we’re doing at Thunderbird as much as we’re enjoying making them, and we’ll see you soon!

We also know some of you might only be interested in a single product, and so we’ve also made separate videos for each product!

COMPLETE VIDEO (Also on Peertube):

Slides:

Individual Videos:

Appointment

YouTube: https://youtu.be/7EOQL750wy8

TILVids: https://tilvids.com/w/sQBce3zn3gAQopCg9EMeBE

Thundermail

YouTube: https://youtu.be/WaycMTC94SA

TILVids: https://tilvids.com/w/hBR4gN5RvmzVv5ugsUx9Cy

Send

YouTube: https://youtu.be/DJWn84loerE

TILVids: https://tilvids.com/w/wm6xW6gzJ5BTRj7AoePaZW

Assist

YouTube: https://youtu.be/hcfERyCnfy8

TILVids: https://tilvids.com/w/27wUtpY4bWkNhLMbC8JnBs

Resources:

• ZDNet review of Appointment: https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/work-life/the-new-thunderbird-appointment-tool-is-thoroughly-impressive-and-free/
• TB Pro Announcement: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/04/thundermail-and-thunderbird-pro-services/
• TB Appointment Repo: https://github.com/thunderbird/appointment
• TB Send Repo: https://github.com/thunderbird/send-suite
• Beta Mailing List Sign Up: https://thundermail.com/ and https://tb.pro
• Stalwart: https://stalw.art
• Flower Intelligence: https://flower.ai/intelligence/
• Thunderbird Services Matrix Room: https://matrix.to/#/#tb-services:mozilla.org
• Thunderbird Merch Store (alas, no adult footie pajamas yet) North America: https://mozilla-na.myspreadshop.com/thunderbird?collection=irQGRGIyKo
• Thunderbird Merch Store Europe and Rest of World: https://mozilla-europe.myspreadshop.ie/thunderbird?collection=PMnUuLrvYM

The post VIDEO: Thunderbird Pro and Thundermail! appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

In this month’s Community Office Hours, we’re chatting with our director Ryan Sipes. This talk opens with a brief history of Thunderbird and ends on our plans for its future. In between, we explain more about MZLA and its structure, and how this compares to the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation. We’ll also cover the new Thunderbird Pro and Thundermail announcement And we talk about how Thunderbird put the fun in fundraising!

And if you’d like to know even more about Pro, next month we’ll be chatting with Services Software Engineer Chris Aquino about our upcoming products. Chris, who most recently has been working on Assist, is both incredibly knowledgeable and a great person to chat with. We think you’ll enjoythe upcoming Community Office Hours as much as we do.

April Office Hours: Thunderbird and MZLA

The beginning is always a very good place to start. We always love hearing Ryan recount Thunderbird’s history, and we hope you do as well. As one of the key figures in bringing Thunderbird back from the ashes, Ryan is ideal to discuss how Thunderbird landed at MZLA, its new home since 2020. We also appreciate his perspective on our relationship to (and how we differ from) the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation. And as Thunderbird’s community governance model is both one of its biggest strengths and a significant part of its comeback, Ryan has some valuable insights on our working relationship.

Thunderbird’s future, however, is just as exciting a story as how we got here. Ryan gives us a unique look into some of our recent moves, from the decision to develop mobile apps to the recent move into our own email service, Thundermail, and the Thunderbird Pro suite of productivity apps. From barely surviving, we’re glad to see all the ways in which Thunderbird and its community are thriving.

Watch, Read, and Get Involved

The entire interview with Ryan is below, on YouTube and Peertube. There’s a lot of references in the interview, which we’ve handily provided below. We hope you’re enjoying these looks into what we’re doing at Thunderbird as much as we’re enjoying making them, and we’ll see you next month!

VIDEO (Also on Peertube):

Resources

• The untold history of Thunderbird: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/11/the-untold-history-of-thunderbird/
• The Mozilla Foundation: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Foundation
• Thunderbird’s New Home at MZLA: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/
• Community Office Hours with the Thunderbird Council: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2024/09/video-learn-about-the-thunderbird-council/
• The Mozilla Manifesto: https://www.mozilla.org/about/manifesto/
• Thundermail and Thunderbird Pro Announcement: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/04/thundermail-and-thunderbird-pro-services/
• Get Involved: https://www.thunderbird.net/participate/

The post VIDEO: Talking MZLA with Ryan Sipes appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

In this month’s Community Office Hours, we’re chatting with Vineet Deo, a Software Engineer on the Desktop team, who walks us through the new Account Hub on the Desktop app. If you want a sneak peak at this new streamlined experience, you can find it in the Daily channel now and the Beta channel towards the end of April.

Next month, we’ll be chatting with our director Ryan Sipes. We’ll be covering the new Thunderbird Pro and Thundermail announcement and the structure of MZLA compared to the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation. And we’ll talk about how Thunderbird put the fun in fundraising!

March Office Hours: The New Account Hub

Setting up a new email account in Thunderbird is already a solid experience, so why the update? Firstly, this is the first thing new users will see in the app. Thus, it’s important it has the same clean, cohesive look that is becoming the new Thunderbird design standard. It’s also helpful for users coming from other email clients to have a familiar, wizard-like experience. While the current account setup works well, it’s browser based. This makes it possible a user could exit out before finishing and get lost before they even started. This is the opposite of what we want for potential users!

Vineet and his team are also working to make the new Account Hub ready for Exchange. Likewise, they also have plans for a similar hub to set up new address books and calendars. We’re proud of the collaboration between back and frontend teams, and designers and engineers, to make the Account Hub.

Watch, Read, and Get Involved

But don’t take our word for it! Watch Vineet’s Account Hub talk and demo, along with a Q&A session. If you’re comfortable testing Daily, you can test this new feature now. (Go to File > New > Email Account to start the experience.) Otherwise, keep an eye on our Beta release channel at the end of April. And if you’re watching this after Account Hub is part of the regular release, now you know the feature’s story!

VIDEO (Also on Peertube):

Get Involved

• TB Beta Mailing List (to provide feedback on Account Hub once it lands): https://thunderbird.topicbox.com/groups/beta

The post VIDEO: The New Account Hub appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

In this month’s Community Office Hours, Laurel Terlesky, Design Manager, is talking about the new Thunderbird Design System. In her talk from FOSDEM, “Building a Cross-Platform, Scalable, Open-Source Design System,” Laurel describes the Thunderbird design journey. If you are interested in how the desktop and mobile apps have gotten their new look, or in the open source design process (and how to take part), this talk is for you!

Next month, we’ll be chatting with Vineet Deo, a Software Engineer on the Desktop team who will walk us through the new Account Hub on the Desktop app. If you want a sneak peak at this new streamlined experience, you can find it in the Daily channel now and the Beta channel starting March 25.

February Office Hours: The Thunderbird Design System

As Thunderbird has grown over the past few years, so has its design needs. The most recent 115 and 128 releases, Supernova and Nebula, have introduced a more modern, streamlined look to the Thunderbird desktop application. Likewise, the Thunderbird for Android app has incorporated Material 3 in its development from the K-9 Mail app. When we begin working on the iOS app, we’ll need to work with Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. Thus, Laurel and her team have built a design system that provides consistency across our existing and future products. This system’s underlying principles also embrace user choice and privacy while emphasizing human collaboration and high design standards.

Watch, Read, and Get Involved

We’re so grateful to Laurel for joining us! We hope this video helps explain more about how we design our Thunderbird products. Want to know more about this new Thunderbird design system? Want to find out how to contribute to the design process? Watch the video and check out our resources below!

VIDEO (Also on Peertube):

Thunderbird Design Resources:

• Open Source Design
• Thunderbird UX Mailing List
• Thunderbird/Mozilla Careers

The post VIDEO: The Thunderbird Design System appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

The monthly Release channel is ready to help you move from annual to monthly updates in Thunderbird. This update lets you know how to switch from the annual update (ESR) to monthly updates (Release), why you might have to wait, and what features you’ll get first!

How do I switch from annual to monthly updates (ESR to Release)?

Right now, you can switch to the Release channel through manual installs only from the Thunderbird website Downloads page.  Other installation sources will have the Release version in the future such as Windows Store,  3rd-party sites and various Linux packages such as Snap and Flatpak.  

However, if you use add-ons, we strongly suggest staying on the ESR for now.

First, back up your profile data, as you should always do before making major changes. And check that your computer meets the System Requirements for version 136.  Then go to the Downloads page of the website. If Release Channel does not show “Thunderbird Release” then correct it. Click the ‘Download’ button. For Windows and macOS, run the downloaded file to install the monthly release into the same directory where the ESR is currently installed. (If you have installed Thunderbird ESR into a directory that is different from the default location, then you must do a custom installation to that directory.)  For Linux, consult the Linux installation knowledge base (KB) article.  

I switched to Release but I want to switch back to ESR. How do I do this?

If you switched to Release but want to switch back, for example, because of Add-ons, follow the steps below. Please note, this is valid for the current Release and ESR channels, and we will update here in the event of an underlying database change in ESR that would not make this possible:

• Backup the Thunderbird profile
• Download ESR and install ESR version into “Mozilla Thunderbird” directory where the release version is installed, but …
• You must use command line for the first start up, to override downgrade protection, per https://support.mozilla.org/kb/dedicated-profile-thunderbird-installation#w_what-happens-to-my-profile-if-i-downgrade-to-a-previous-version-of-thunderbird. Otherwise you will see a “you are using an old version” check
• If you have trouble, ask for help at https://support.mozilla.org/questions/thunderbird

What’s new in 136.0?

Now that you know how to make the switch, here’s some reasons to make the change. Here are some of the key features you’ll get as soon as you upgrade to the Release channel:

Improved Dark Reader

Enable dark reader for the message pane with `mail.dark-reader.enabled` preference

• Bug: 1715361

Improved Dark Mode

Messages are automatically adapted to dark mode with a quick toggle in the header

• Bug: 1942206

A Global Switch for Threading

New “Appearance” Settings UI to globally control message threading/sorting order

• Bugs: 1829737, 1943724

Filters in the Folder Pane

Message filters are now available in the Folder Pane context menu

• Bug: 1845206

Horizontal Threadpane Scrolling

Enable horizontal threadpane scrolling with `mail.threadpane.table.horizontal_scroll` preference

• Bug: 381821

Improved Calendar Setup Wizard

Added checkbox to select/unselect all calendars in the calendar setup wizard

• Bug: 1733959

See all the changes in our Release Notes.

The post Thunderbird Release Channel Update appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.