• Thunderbird

Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest: February 2024

Hello Thunderbird Community! I can’t believe it’s already the end of February. Time goes by very fast and it seems that there’s never enough time to do all the things that you set your mind to. Nonetheless, it’s that time of the month again for a juicy and hopefully interesting Thunderbird Development Digest.

If this is your first time reading our monthly Dev Digest, these are short posts to give our community visibility into features and updates being planned for Thunderbird, as well as progress reports on work that’s in the early stages of development.

Let’s jump right into it, because there’s a lot to get excited about!

Rust and Exchange

Things are moving steadily on this front. Maybe not as fast as we would like, but we’re handling a complicated implementation and we’re adding a new protocol for the first time in more than a decade, so some friction is to be expected.

Nonetheless, you can start following the progress in our Thundercell repository. We’re using this repo to temporarily “park” crates and other libraries we’re aiming to vendor inside Thunderbird.

We’re aiming at reaching an alpha state where we can land in Thunderbird later next month and start asking for user feedback on Daily.

Mozilla Account + Thunderbird Sync

Things are moving forward on this front as well. We’re currently in the process of setting up our own SyncServer and TokenStorage in order to allow users to log in with their Mozilla Account but sync the Thunderbird data in an independent location from the Firefox data. This gives us an extra layer of security as it will prevent an app from accessing the other app’s data and vice versa.

In case you didn’t know, you can already use a Mozilla account and Sync on Daily, but this only works with a staging server and you’ll need an alternate Mozilla account for testing. There are a couple of known bugs but overall things seem to be working properly. Once we switch to our storage server, we will expose this feature more and enable it on Beta for everyone to test.

Oh, Snap!

Our continuous efforts to own our packages and distribution methods is moving forward with the internal creation of a Snap package. (For background, last year we took ownership of the Thunderbird Flatpak.)

We’re currently internally testing the Beta and things seem to work accordingly. We will announce it publicly when it’s available from the Snap Store, with the objective of offering both Stable and Beta channels.

We’re exploring the possibility of also offering a Daily channel, but that’s a bit more complicated and we will need more time to make sure it’s doable and automated, so stay tuned.

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.

See ya next month,

Alessandro Castellani (he, him)
Director of Product Engineering