• Development

Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest: August 2024

Hello Thunderbird Community! It’s August, where did our summer go? (or winter for the folks on the other hemisphere).

Our August has been packed with ESR fixes, team conferences, and some personal time off, so this is gonna be a bit of a shorter update, tackling more upcoming efforts than what recently landed on daily. Miss our last update? Find it here.

More Rust

If you’ve been looking at our monthly metrics you might have noticed that the % of Rust code in our code base is slowly increasing.

We’re planning to push forward this effort in the near future with more protocol reworks and clean up of low level code.

Stay tuned for more updates on this matter and some dedicated posts from the engineers that are driving this effort.

Pushing forward with Exchange

Nothing new to report here, other than that we’re continuing with this implementation and we hope to be able to enable this feature by default in a not so far off Beta.

The general objective before next ESR is to have complete email support and start tapping into Calendar and Address Book integration to offer the full experience out of the box. 

Global database

This is also one of the most important pieces of work that we’ve been planning for a while. Bringing this to completion will drastically reduce our most common data loss problems as well as drastically speeding up the performance of Thunderbird when it comes to internal message search and archiving.

Calendar rebuild

Another very large initiative we’re kicking off during this new ESR cycle is a complete rebuild of our Calendar.

Not only are we  going to clean up and improve our back-end code handling protocols and synchronization, but we’re also taking a hard look at our UI and UX, in order to provide a more flexible and intuitive experience, reducing the amount of dialogs, and implementing those features that users have come to expect from any calendaring application.

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