What’s New in Thunderbird 78

July 16, 2020 Ryan Sipes 62 responses

Thunderbird 78 is our newest ESR (extended-support release), which comes out yearly and is considered the latest stable release. Right now you can download the newest version from our website, and existing users will be automatically updated in the near future. We encourage those who rely on the popular add-on Enigmail to wait to update until the automatic update rolls out to them to ensure their encrypted email settings are properly imported into Thunderbird’s new built-in OpenPGP encrypted email feature.

Last year’s release focused on ensuring Thunderbird has a stable foundation on which to build. The new Thunderbird 78 aims to improve the experience of using Thunderbird, adding many quality-of-life features to the application and making it easier to use.

Compose Window Redesign

The compose window has been reworked to help users find features more easily and to make composing a message faster and more straightforward. The compose window now also takes up less space with recipients listed in “pills” instead of an entire line for every address.

Dark Mode

Thunderbird’s new Dark Mode is easier on the eyes for those working in the dark, and it has the added benefit of looking really cool! The Dark Mode even works when writing and reading emails – so you are not suddenly blinded while you work. Thunderbird will look at your operating system settings to see if you have enabled dark mode OS-wide and respect those settings. Here are the instructions for setting dark mode in Mac, and setting dark mode in Windows.

Calendar and Tasks Integrated

Thunderbird’s Lightning calendar and tasks add-on is now a part of the application itself, which means everyone now has access to these features the moment they install Thunderbird. This change also sets the stage for a number of future improvements the Thunderbird team will make in the calendar. Much of this will be focused on improved interoperability with the mail part of Thunderbird, as well as improving the user experience of the calendar.

Account Setup & Account Central Updated

The Account Setup window and the Account Central tab, which appears when you do not have an account setup or when you select an existing account in the folder tree, have both been updated. The layout and dialogues have been improved in order to make it easier to understand the information displayed and to find relevant settings. The Account Central tab also has new information about the Thunderbird project and displays the version you are using.

Folder Icons and Colors Update

Folder icons have been replaced and modernized with a new vector style. This will ensure better compatibility with HiDPI monitors and dark mode. Vector icons also means you will be able to customize their default colors to better distinguish and categorize your folders list.

Minimize to Tray

Windows users have reason to rejoice, as Thunderbird 78 can now be minimized to tray. This has been a repeatedly requested feature that has been available through many popular add-ons, but it is now part of Thunderbird core – no add-on needed! This feature has been a long time coming and we hope to bring more operating-system specific features for each platform to Thunderbird in the coming releases.

End-to-End Encrypted Email Support

Thunderbird 78.2.1, due out in the coming months, will offer a new feature that allows you to end-to-end encrypt your email messages via OpenPGP. In the past this feature was achieved in Thunderbird primarily with the Enigmail add-on, however, in this release we have brought this functionality into core Thunderbird. We’d like to offer a special thanks to Patrick Brunschwig for his years of work on Enigmail, which laid the groundwork for this integrated feature, and for his assistance throughout its development. The new feature is also enabled by the RNP library, and we’d like to thank the project’s developers for their close collaboration and hard work addressing our needs.

End-to-end encryption for email can be used to ensure that only the sender and the recipients of a message can read the contents. Without this protection it is easy for network administrators, email providers and government agencies to read your messages. If you would like to learn more about how end-to-end encryption in Thunderbird works, check out our article on Introduction to End-to-end encryption in Thunderbird. If you would like to learn more about the development of this feature or participate in testing, check out the OpenPGP Thunderbird wiki page.

About Add-ons

As with previous major releases, it may take time for authors of legacy extensions to update their add-ons to support the new release. So if you are using add-ons we recommend you not update manually to 78.0, and instead wait for Thunderbird to automatically update to 78. We encourage users to reach out to their add-on’s author to let them know that you are interested in using it in 78.

Learn More

If we listed all the improvements in Thunderbird 78 in this blog post, you’d be stuck reading this for the whole day. So we will save you from that, and let you know that if you want to see a longer list of changes for the new release – check the release notes on our website.

Great Release, Bright Future

The past year has been an amazing year for Thunderbird. We had an incredible release in version 68 that was popular with our users, and laid the groundwork for much of what we did in 78. On top of great improvements in the product, we moved into a new financial and legal home, and we grew our team to thirteen people (soon to be even more)!

We’re so grateful to all our users and contributors who have stuck with us all these years, and we hope to earn your dedication for the years to come. Thunderbird 78 is the beginning of a new era for the project, as we attempt to bring our users the features that they want and need to be productive in the 2020s – while also maintaining what has made Thunderbird so great all these years.

Thank you to our wonderful community, please enjoy Thunderbird 78.

Download the newest release from our website.

Tags: release Thunderbird 78

62 responses

Filipe Saraiva wrote on July 17, 2020 at 00:23

Thanks for this great improvement! The Thunderbird future is brilliant!

Now waiting for new features like minimize-to-tray in Linux 🙂 Cheers!

John T. wrote on July 17, 2020 at 12:06

> minimize-to-tray

What decade are you living in?

Dean wrote on July 17, 2020 at 00:41

Thank you! These new features look great.

Jeff wrote on July 17, 2020 at 03:42

Any chance we’ll be able to connect to Microsoft Exchange Server to get calendar access without adding an extension?

Anders wrote on July 17, 2020 at 08:48

> Thunderbird 78.2, due out in the coming months, will offer a new feature that allows you to end-to-end encrypt your email messages via OpenPGP.

Does this mean 78 does NOT have enigmail or OpenPGP support.

Can I safely upgrade to 78 without losing PGP/GPG support? Please add a warning

Terry Smith wrote on July 17, 2020 at 11:16

Awesome! I love Thunderbird!

Forza wrote on July 17, 2020 at 11:59

It’s great with the integrated calendar by default. What I am missing now is built-in CardDAV support. This has been a topic for the past decade afaik. I hope you find more resources now =)

Bob wrote on July 17, 2020 at 12:50

There is another change which has not been mentioned but I love:

if you have master-password set, it won’t open the program until you’ve entered it.
This wasn’t the case before.

Now the only thing I’m missing is the “send later” function.
(yes I’m aware of that pay-addon…but come on…)

Martin wrote on July 17, 2020 at 13:09

Thank you, these changes look great!

Jens Jedermann wrote on July 17, 2020 at 14:16

Thank you Mozilla, very cool!

eru wrote on July 17, 2020 at 14:49

we love you

Andreas wrote on July 17, 2020 at 15:20

Thanks for the huge load of new features. Will any front facing address book changes happen in the TB 78 release cycle or do I have to wait until the next ESR release? I know that CardDAV support is work in progress.

Special thanks to Aleca for the nice design improvements and finally consistent icons.

Hrafn wrote on July 17, 2020 at 15:21

Thank you for all the hard work! It’s fantastic seeing forward progress happening on Thunderbird!

Joscha wrote on July 17, 2020 at 15:35

This looks great! But what about the CardDAV feature for the address book? Now that Cardbook add-on is no longer compatible.

prometeo wrote on July 17, 2020 at 16:02

Finally someione has started to think about what users want in an email client.
Many thanks to who took over the direction of TB, right way to go.

Aaron Kelly wrote on July 17, 2020 at 17:01

I needed to import and work with some seriously large MBOX files, and this was the only email client that didn’t choke. Great to see more features coming – it’s convinced me to start monthly donations! Thanks to you and your team

Peter wrote on July 17, 2020 at 21:58

Thank you for the great new version. Especially, the new compose windows, which makes copying and pasting of mail addresses so much easier is great. The account setup became cool, too. And the PGP implementation looked quite promising to be a simple way of using encryption in the beta. As setup becomes much easier, than installing an gnuGpg and an Enigmail, I hope I can convince some folks to use it. Encryption will be just a few clicks away 🙂

Looking forward for the next improvements, like CardDav support or the possibility to order search results by date.

I hope that some features of addons which may not be supported after 78 anymore, will make it to thunderbird core.
There are definitly functionalities, I will miss if addons won’t be continued like temporarily allowing Html, IdentityChooser or simply adding attachment from clipboard via shortcut.

Joseph Neuhaus wrote on July 17, 2020 at 23:11

There is one issue that I’ve discovered. On macOS I have Dark Mode enabled; however, even if I choose Light theme in Thunderbird 78, I still get dark background when composing new email, and viewing some existing email (but not all.)

As for installing and running, everything was smooth and 78 hasn’t crashed yet (68 crashed a couple times each day…)

Thank you for still making the best cross-platform email client!

# wrote on July 18, 2020 at 01:25

fix tor onion services asap

JS wrote on July 18, 2020 at 02:20

Some of these features are very welcome. So this announcement rather revives my hope for Thunderbird.

However: ‘however’ is not a conjunction. (See you ‘End-to-End Encrypted Email Support’ section.)

Ajko wrote on July 18, 2020 at 12:53

hello.

Nice improwement on dark theme. Thnx.
Prety please build signature switch into the core.

Mystic wrote on July 18, 2020 at 15:23

When is the expected release of 78.2?

Ryan Sipes wrote on August 25, 2020 at 14:34

78.2 today, the but the encryption stuff has been pushed back slightly, should be out in 78.2.1 – very soon.

Ravindra Melkote wrote on July 18, 2020 at 15:41

Truely awesome. I have been using thunderbird for almost 7 years now. Kudos to the team thunderbird.

steven avanti wrote on July 18, 2020 at 17:45

Thunderbird rocks, used it forever, never any issues, easy to migrate and tweak. Looking forward to new look and functionality.
Thanks Thunderbird!

Oli wrote on July 18, 2020 at 22:16

With this release, Thunderbird might very well be in a position to start competing again with Evolution on Linux. Of course, this improves its existing strong position on macOS.

Wojtek wrote on July 19, 2020 at 21:00

Great job, your work is important to thousands of users.
I have 200k emails in my TB accounts and it works! Take that online gmail account…

zezinho wrote on July 20, 2020 at 15:46

Thunderbird is just the best opensource mailer I’ve found. In 20 years, I’ve tried Claws, Kmail, but still came back to the good old Thunderbird. So big thanks to make it up for the new 20 years 😉

Simon V.A wrote on July 21, 2020 at 13:47

Wow that looks stunning ! Thank you for these features, the future is bright for this awesome project !

Sylvain wrote on July 21, 2020 at 14:30

When will we see support for google calendar? The provider add-on is broken with Tb 78.

Ryan Sipes wrote on July 29, 2020 at 14:23

Yes, this is one of those add-ons that is still being updated. Expect it in the near future.

Grompf wrote on July 21, 2020 at 20:50

Ans what about CalDAV ans CardDAV ?

Ryan Sipes wrote on July 29, 2020 at 14:23

You can add a calendar via CalDAV now. But we are going to try and improve how these accounts are added and managed in the UI.

Spyop3 wrote on July 22, 2020 at 08:27

That’s so great to see big modernization for TB ! Using it since 15 years and never wanted something else !

Roney Ngala wrote on July 22, 2020 at 21:09

Great improvements and awesome redesign. Asking, can this [download] be integrated on a VPS hosting to be used in Webmail?

greg wrote on July 22, 2020 at 21:26

Great!
Any chance we could have dark mode in Windows and not in Thunderbird, or the other way around?

Ed wrote on July 23, 2020 at 13:09

“Calendar and Tasks Integrated” — Is there a way to disable those anyway, or to remove their UI elements at least? I use Thunderbird only as a usenet newsgroup reader and have no need for them.

Ryan Sipes wrote on July 29, 2020 at 19:57

There are a couple of workarounds detailed in this bug: https://bugzil.la/1614402 – but also mentioned there is that a patch is being developed to allow for disabling the calendar to be done easier.

Walter Rizotto wrote on July 23, 2020 at 19:04

Hello,

In the new version you can only send an email to ONE recipient and CC the others, which in many cases will be kinda rude.

This is definitely no improvement and I do hope it xill be corrected pronto.

Best regards,
Walter.

Ryan Sipes wrote on July 29, 2020 at 12:01

Walter, you can add more by simply hitting “Enter” after you have typed the email address and then enter another one the same line. This was done to save space and reduce the need to have to scroll for many recipients.

Larry Stoter wrote on July 24, 2020 at 05:40

Ever since Apple released Catalina and de-featured Mail, I’ve been looking for a replacement email client.

The reviews of the latest Thunderbird release are looking very positive, so I’m giving it a go.

What puts me off somewhat is the lack of a mobile version. This isn’t too much of an issue for email as all my email accounts are IMAP so will synchronise at the servers. However, I see problems with Calendar and Address Book. With Apple these are synchronised across all my MacOS and iOS devices – that isn’t going to happen with Thunderbird 🙁

JJ Vastiau wrote on July 24, 2020 at 08:26

Lightning is integratred but how to sync with google calendar and tasks?

Richard Boltuck wrote on July 24, 2020 at 14:04

When you say it will auto-update from 68 to 78 “in the near future”, do you have any more precise estimate as to when that will be? When it does happen, is it likely that major popular add-ons will be compatible (for instance, Remove Duplicates alternative and Provider for Google Calendar)? I think people are likely to feel the devil is in the details, and unfortunately a lot of details seem a bit vague with respect to both schedule and the reliability of valuable add-ons. Thanks!

BelFox wrote on July 24, 2020 at 14:32

A big thank you to the Thunderbird team for yet another great release! The ‘pills’ in the Compose Window are a big step forward IMO.

I hope support for add-ons like CardBook will be maintained in the future. Please talk to add-on developers to see which APIs should be offered (also APIs that offer some UI customization).

Thank you!

R. Glenn Looney wrote on July 24, 2020 at 18:15

Thunderbird 78 is a disaster as far as I am concerned. Dark mode is the biggest issue as it renders many emails unreadable. The account/folder bar is pretty underwhelming as well without some icons and color.

If the dark mode isn’t fixed soon I will be moving on to another mail client although I have been with Tbird since back in the Netscape days.

Vallabh wrote on July 24, 2020 at 19:48

This is a major design improvement and now looks more up to date and more user friendly. The only problem I can see is that it is not validating SMTP server’s SSL certificates automatically as it does with IMAP. Otherwise Great. Thanks to the team.

Vallabh wrote on July 24, 2020 at 21:02

This is a major design improvement and now looks more up to date and more user friendly. Thanks to the team who worked on it.

Mire wrote on July 26, 2020 at 01:45

I really really really dislike the Folder Icons updates. I like everything else.

Randee wrote on July 26, 2020 at 15:08

Nice update, but expecting more add-on developers to flee the ever-changing constraints. This is tough on users, as we’ve come to cherish our add-ons.

Carolyn Boyles wrote on July 27, 2020 at 01:26

I don’t like the new revisions. It was so much easier to send mail to multiple recipients in the old version and I find this version harder on the eyes.

MrMgr wrote on July 27, 2020 at 10:25

In old version i can just pres tab to add recipients, now i cant, i only can add copy to or hiden copy. i cant add multipe recipients.

Abir H wrote on July 27, 2020 at 16:18

Hi,
the thunderbird 78 looks amazing. I am using Thunderbird 68.10.0.
Once I download the 78, will it replace the 68.10.0 automatically?

John Webster wrote on July 27, 2020 at 18:26

Thunderbird upgraded automatically from 68 to 78, which disabled all the extensions I was using. This proved very serious, and I was forced to uninstall, and reinstall 68. There is no mention in the list of installed extensions of any being incompatible as there was upgrading from 63 to 68. What is going on?

Ryan Sipes wrote on July 29, 2020 at 12:00

We didn’t push automatic updates and we have said a number of times that people shouldn’t update until later if they rely heavily on add-ons or Enigmail. Are you on Linux? Some distro maintainers have included 78 in their repos despite our warnings.

Igor wrote on July 28, 2020 at 16:40

Good afternoon. Please add the launch of Thunderbird with the system. Thanks.

Anna wrote on July 28, 2020 at 23:13

What is the easiet way to see a list of v78 compatible addons. I want to now how I can transition from 68.
Thajk you.

Gad Feldan wrote on July 29, 2020 at 10:39

It’s time for add-ons like BiDi Mail UI [https://addons.thunderbird.net/…/addon/bidi-mail-ui/…
] and EasyRight2Left [https://addons.thunderbird.net/…/addon/easyright2left/…
] and ComposeRTF [https://addons.thunderbird.net/…/addon/composertf/…
] , to be an integral part of the official Thunderbird updates and not as add-ons. Writers from right to left also have the right to use Thunderbird and not be dependent on the kindness and desire of the add-ons developers. Without these add-ons, we right-to-left writers, could not use Thunderbird.

Jan-Peter Rühmann wrote on July 29, 2020 at 13:47

How can I get my Icons for enabling/disabling encryption/signing back?
Thanks,

Ryan Sipes wrote on August 24, 2020 at 21:14

We’ve recommended users wait to upgrade until the automatic upgrade to ensure that encryption is still possible. Enigmail is only available in the coming 78.2.1 release.

Raz Ghul wrote on July 30, 2020 at 06:08

When should we expect automatic upgrade from 68 to 78 in Linux mint cinnamon please?

Ryan Sipes wrote on August 24, 2020 at 21:13

Very soon, in the next few weeks likely.

Lars Weber wrote on July 30, 2020 at 12:59

Quick question: are there any plans to implement birthday reminders as part of the “improved interoperability … as well as improving the user experience of the calendar”? With address book and calendar now both part of the application, this seems like a logical improvement to me and it would remove the need for (badly maintained) add-ons to provide this functionality.

Comments are closed.