Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest: September 2024
Hello Thunderbird Community! I’m Toby Pilling, a new team member and I’ve spent the last couple of months getting up to speed, and have really enjoyed meeting the team and members of the community virtually, and some in person! September is now over (and so is the summer for many in our team), and we’re excited to share the latest adventures underway in the Thunderbird world. If you missed our previous update, go ahead and catch up! Here’s a quick summary of what’s been happening across the different teams:
Exchange
Progress continues on implementing move/copy operations, with the ongoing re-architecture aimed at making the protocol ecosystem more generic. Work has also started on error handling, protocol logging and a testing framework. A Rust starter pack has been provided to facilitate on-boarding of new team members with automated type generation as the first step in reducing the friction.
Account Hub
Development of a refreshed account hub is moving forward, with design work complete and a critical path broken down into sprints. Project milestones and tasks have been established with additional members joining the development team in October. Meta bug & progress tracking.
Global Database & Conversation View
The team is focused on breaking down the work into smaller tasks and setting feature deliverables. Initial work on integrating a unique IMAP ID is being rolled out, while the conversation view feature is being fast-tracked by a focused team, allowing core refactoring to continue in parallel.
In-App Notification
This initiative will provide a mechanism to notify users of important security updates and feature releases “in-app”, in a subtle and unobtrusive manner, and has advanced at break-neck speed with impressive collaboration across each discipline. Despite some last-minute scope creep, the team has moved swiftly into the testing phase with an October release in mind. Meta Bug & progress tracking.
Source Docs Clean-up
Work continues on source documentation clean-up, with support from the release management team who had to reshape some of our documentation toolset. The completion of this project will move much of the developer documentation closer to the actual code which will make things much easier to maintain moving forwards. Stay tuned for updates to this in the coming week and follow progress here.
Account Cross-Device Import
As the launch date for Thunderbird for Android gets closer, we’re preparing a feature in the desktop client which will provide a simple and secure account transfer mechanism, so that account settings don’t have to be re-entered for new users of the Android client. A functional prototype was delivered quickly. Now that design work is complete, the project entered the 2 final sprints this week. Keep track here.
Battling OAuth Changes
As both Microsoft and Google update their OAuth support and URLs, the team has been working hard to minimize the effect of these changes on our users. Extended logging in Daily will allow for better monitoring and issue resolution as these updates roll out.
New Features Landing Soon
Several requested features are expected to debut this month or very soon:
- Horizontal scrolling for emails in table view as a user preference.
- Calendar support for ICS import including a Comments field.
- Certificate viewer to support validation.
- Encrypted draft messages even when no recipients are specified.
- UI enhancements and bug fixes for the calendar, RSS, and mail modules.
As usual, if you want to see things as they land you can check the pushlog and try running daily. This would be immensely helpful for catching bugs early.
See ya next month.
Toby Pilling
Sr. Manager, Desktop Engineering
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