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Thunderbird April News Update: GSoC, 60 Beta 4, New Thunderbird Council

9 responses

Due to lots of news coming out of the Thunderbird project, I’ve decided to combine three different blog posts I was working on into one news update that gives people an idea of what has been happening in the Thunderbird community this month. Enjoy and comment to let me know if you like or dislike this kind of post!

Enigmail GSoC Student Selected

Great news! A student has been selected for the Enigmail/Thunderbird Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project. Enigmail, the OpenPGP privacy extension for Thunderbird, submitted its project to GSoC seeking a student to help update user interface elements and assist with other design work.

Thunderbird 60, Beta 4 Released

A new version of the Thunderbird 60 Beta is out, with version four beginning to roll out. Users of the Beta are testing what will ultimately be the next Extended Support Release (ESR), which acts as our stable release and is what most of our users see. There are a lot of changes between Thunderbird 52, that last ESR, and this release. Some of these changes include: An updated “Photon” UI (like that seen in Firefox), various updates to Thunder’s “Lightning” calendar, a new “Message from Template” command, and various others. You can find a full list here.

As with every Beta, but especially this one given it will become the new stable release, we hope that you will download it and give us feedback on your experience.

A New Thunderbird Council

A new Thunderbird Council was elected this month. This new council of seven members will serve for a year. The members of the new council are as follows:

This blog will try to lay out the new council’s visions and priorities in future posts.

9 responses

Aunty Edna wrote on

This is all very exciting stuff, but as a 70-year old Luddite, I am cautious. I have 15 years of emails which I interrogate and add to daily with Thunderbird 2.0.0.0.24. I have been warned off updating Thunderbird for fear of incompatibility problems and losing everything, but just recently I have found 2.0.0.0.24 will only run in Safe Mode (for some reason it won’t open a Write window) and I am thinking I might have to update.
So my question, in your exciting new regime, is this: how compatible is your shiny new product with my ancient email folders?

Ian Thomas (thelem) wrote on

Did you mean to link to release notes on www-stage, rather than www?

Ryan Sipes wrote on

Yes, as the release notes with all the changes between 52 and 60 stable releases aren’t detailed anywhere else until the true stable release is out.

Govannon Thunorwulf wrote on

Thank you for the update. Due to the new features being still in Beta, I will refrain from using it. This is my primary email server and I don’t need to loose anything like I did a few years ago when switching Linux distros. I will be looking forward to these changes. Are there any screen shots of the new UI?

Óvári wrote on

With the release of Thunderbird 60, is there a plan to add Thunderbird screenshots to the official Thunderbird website at:
https://www.thunderbird.net/
?

For an example, LibreOffice has screenshots at:
https://www.libreoffice.org/ → Discover → Screenshots
https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/screenshots/

This may be helpful for marketing Thunderbird 60 as journals can write articles which display current screenshots.

Another benefit is that the screenshots could be used in software repositories. For example:
https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.mozilla.Thunderbird

The Thunderbird user interface will have been updated with the release of Thunderbird 60 with changes shown at:
https://www-stage.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/60.0/releasenotes/

What do you think?

Thank you

Thanos wrote on

Thunderbird 60, Beta 4 working like a charm (at least for me). Also happy to see many addon developers working actively for making them compatible with the new version.
Congratulations to all the team for undertaking the hard work of development and maintenance of the much appreciated email client.

Jason Fossen wrote on

I’ve been running the betas on Windows 10 and it’s going great. Thanks for all the hard work! Hopefully there will be articles about it on sites like Ars Technica, The Verge, ZDNet, etc. Best Wishes, J.

Quentin wrote on

I am really looking forward to seeing the future developments of Thunderbird. It is technically up-to-date, but it would clearly need UI/UX improvements. I am using it because Outlook does not support OAuth2 and the other clients have all major limitations.

chad28 wrote on

Can’t wait for Thunderbird 60 with Photon UI. I’ll wait for standard release though.

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