Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest: May 2024
Hello Thunderbird Community!
We’re tossing May behind our shoulders, which means we’re in the final sprint before the next ESR (Extended Support Release). During the next couple of weeks you can expect some official communication on all the things that are going in the next major release of Thunderbird. Until then, here are some appetizers on our most recent efforts.
Rust-enabled builds
Our build and release team is working hard to ship Rust enabled builds by default. The first beta version of 128 will ship with Rust enabled by default, which will allow all of you to test experimental features without needing to compile the code locally.
Microsoft Exchange support
We’re very very very close!
So far we have the main flow completed, and we’re able to set up an account, fetch folders, fetch messages, and display messages. We’re finalizing the outgoing flow in order to send messages, and after that we will start an audit to ensure that all the usual features you expect from interacting with your email are working.
Expect some future call to actions to test things and invites to switch the experimental pref ON.
Native Linux system tray support
Enabling Rust builds in Thunderbird also gives us the ability to implement some long awaited features much faster. We’re still testing and cleaning things up, but if you’re adventurous you can check out our GitHub repositories for Linux System Tray and DBus hooks and run them locally.
Folder multi-selection
Folder pane multi-selection is almost completed and it should land soon. There are still some rough edges we need to tackle, mostly due to some C++ code not liking multiple folders copy/move and undo actions, but we’re confident that we will have this done before the end of June.
You can check the code and follow the progress here.
Account color customization
Another requested feature we’re aiming to ship in 128 is the customization of account colors. This is the first patch of an upcoming stack that will add some nice visual cues in the message list and the compose window for users with multiple accounts.
Folder compaction
We shared this in our Daily mailing list, but in case you missed it, we rebuilt the Folder Compaction code from scratch. This should potentially solve all the issues of profiles bubbling up in size, or compact operations silently failing and piling up on each other.
These changes should be uplifted to Beta soon. Please test it as much as possible and report any bugs as soon as you encounter them.
Native Windows notifications
Another important achievement was the ability to completely support native Windows 10/11 notifications and make them fully functional.
You can already consume this feature on Daily, and moving forward Thunderbird will be using native OS notifications by default.
We plan to add some nice quick actions and improve the usefulness of native notifications in the future, 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, Desktop and Mobile Apps
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