• Thunderbird

Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest: January 2024

Hello Thunderbird Community! I’m very happy to kick off a new monthly Thunderbird development recap in order to bring a deeper look and understanding of what we’re working on, and the status of these efforts. (We also publish monthly progress reports on Thunderbird for Android.)

These monthly digests will be in a very short format, focusing primarily on the work that is currently being planned or initiated that is not yet fully captured in BugZilla. Nonetheless, we’re putting it out there to cherish and fully embrace the open nature of Thunderbird.

Without further ado, let’s get into it!

2024 Thunderbird Development Roadmaps Published

Over at DTN, we’ve published initial 2024 roadmaps for the work we have planned on Thunderbird for desktop, and Thunderbird for Android. These will be updated periodically as we continue to scope out each project.

Global Message Database

Our database is currently based on Mork, which is a very old paradigm that creates a lot of limitations, blocking us from doing anything remotely modern or expected (a real threaded conversation view is a classic example). Removing and reworking this implementation, which is at the very core of every message and folder interaction, is not an easy lift and requires a lot of careful planning and exploration, but the work is underway.

You can follow the general effort in Bug 1572000.

The first clean up effort is targeted at removing the old and bad paradigm of the “non-unique unique ID” (kudos to our very own Ben Campbell for coining this term), which causes all sorts of problems. You can follow the work in Bug 1806770.

Cards view final sprint

If you’re using Daily or Beta you might have already seen a lot of drastic differences from 115 for Cards View.

Currently, we’re shaping up the final sprint to polish what we’ve implemented and add extra needed features. We’re in the process of opening all the needed bugs and assigning resources for this final sprint. You can follow the progress by tracking this meta bug and all its child bugs.

As usual, we will continue sharing plans and mock-ups in the UX mailing list, so make sure to follow that if you’re interested in seeing early visual prototypes before any code is touched.

Rust Implementation and Exchange Support

This is a very large topic and exploration that requires dedicated posts (which are coming) and extensive recaps. The short story is that we were able to enable the usage of Rust in Thunderbird, therefore opening the doors for us to start implementing native support for the Exchange protocol by building and vendoring a Rust crate.

Once we have a stable and safe implementation, we will share that crate publicly on a GitHub repo so everyone will be able to vendor it and improve it.

Make sure to follow tb-planning and tb-developers mailing lists to soon get more detailed and very in depth info on Rust and Exchange in Thunderbird.

As usual, if you want to see things as they land you can always check the pushlog and try running daily, which would be immensely helpful for catching bugs early.

Alessandro Castellani (he, him)
Director of Product Engineering