Microsoft Exchange is a popular choice of email service for corporations and educational institutions, and so it’s no surprise that there’s demand among Thunderbird users to support Exchange. Until recently, this functionality was only available through an add-on. But, in the next ESR (Extended Support) release of Thunderbird in July 2024, we expect to provide this support natively within Thunderbird. Because of the size of this undertaking, the first roll-out of the Exchange support will initially cover only email, with calendar and address book support coming at a later date. This article w ..read more

We admit it. Thunderbird is getting a bit Rusty, but in a good way! In our monthly Development Digests, we’ve been updating the community about enabling Rust in Thunderbird to implement native support for Exchange. Now, we’d like to invite you for a chat with Team Thunderbird and the developers making this change possible. As always, send your questions in advance to officehours@thunderbird.net! This is a great way to get answers even if you can’t join live. Be sure to note the change in day of the week and the UTC time. (At least the time changes are done for now!) We had to shift our calend ..read more

If you’ve been wondering how the work to turn K-9 Mail into Thunderbird for Android is coming along, you’ve found the right place. This blog post contains a report of our development activities in March 2024.  We’ve published monthly progress reports for a while now. If you’re interested in what happened previously, check out February’s progress report. The report for the preceding month is usually linked in the first section of a post. But you can also browse the Android section of our blog to find progress reports and release announcements. Fixing bugs For K-9 Mail, new stable releases ..read more

Since the release of Thunderbird 115, a big focus has been on improving the state of our automated testing. Automated testing increases the software quality by minimizing the number of bugs accidentally introduced by changes to the code. For each change made to Thunderbird, our testing machines run a set of tests across Windows, macOS, and Linux to detect mistakes and unintended consequences. For a single change (or a group of changes that land at the same time), 60 to 80 hours of machine time is used running tests. Our code is going to be under more pressure than ever before – with a bigger ..read more

Auf Deutsch übersetzen Traduire en français 日本語に翻訳 Let’s step back into the Thunderbird Time Machine and teleport ourselves back to December 2009. If you were on the bleeding edge, maybe you were upgrading your computer to the newly released Windows 7 (or checking out Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala”.) Perhaps you were pouring all your free time into Valve’s ridiculously fun team-based survival shooter Left 4 Dead 2. And maybe, just maybe, you were eagerly anticipating installing Thunderbird 3.0 — especially since it had been a lengthy two years since Thunderbird 2.0 had launched. What happened d ..read more

We love our Linux users across all Linux distributions. That is why we’ve stepped up to help maintain the Thunderbird Snap available in the Snap Store. Last year we took ownership of the Thunderbird Flatpak, and it has been our officially recommended package for Linux users. However, we are expanding our horizons to make sure the Thunderbird Snap experience is officially supported too. We at Thunderbird are team “free software”, independent of the packaging technology. This will mostly affect our Ubuntu users but there are plenty of other Snap users out there as well.  Why support both t ..read more

Auf Deutsch übersetzen Traduire en français 日本語に翻訳 Hello Thunderbird Community! March is over, which means it’s time for another Development Digest to share the current progress and product direction of Thunderbird development. Is this your first time reading the Development Digest? Find them all using the Dev Digest tag! Rust and Exchange It seems that this section is part of every Development Digest! But that’s the reality of these large efforts, spanning across multiple months with slow but steady progress. This month we completed initial Exchange Autodiscovery and compatibility with OAu ..read more

This month’s topics for our Thunderbird Community Office Hours will be decided by you! We’d like to invite the community to bring their questions, comments, and general conversation to Team Thunderbird for an informal and informational chat. As always, send your questions in advance to officehours@thunderbird.net! Be sure to note the change in day of the week and time, especially if you’re in Europe and not on summer time yet! March Office Hours: Open Forum and FAQ While we love having community office hours with specific topics, from our design process to Add-ons, we want to make time for an ..read more

Welcome to a new report on the progress of transforming K-9 Mail into Thunderbird for Android. I hope you’ve enjoyed the extra day in February. We certainly did and used this opportunity to release a new stable version on February 29. If you’re new to this series or the unusually long February made you forget what happened the previous month, you might want to check out January’s progress report. New stable release We spent most of our time in February getting ready for a new stable release – K-9 Mail 6.800. That mostly meant fixing bugs and usability issues reported by beta testers. Thanks t ..read more

We’re happy to announce the release of K-9 Mail 6.800. The main goal of this version is to make it easier for you to add your email accounts to the app. With another item crossed off the list, this brings us one step closer towards Thunderbird for Android. New account setup Setting up an email account in K-9 Mail is something many new users have struggled with in the past. That’s mainly because automatic setup was only supported for a handful of large email providers. If you had an email account with another email provider, you had to manually enter the incoming and outgoing server settings ..read more