• Development

Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest – January 2025

Hello again Thunderbird Community! As January drew to a close, the team was closing in on the completion of some important milestones. Additionally, we had scoped work for our main Q1 priorities. Those efforts are now underway and it feels great to cross things off the list and start tackling new challenges.

As always, you can catch up on all of our previous digests and updates.

FOSDEM – Inspiration, collaboration and education

A modest contingent from the Thunderbird team joined our Mozilla counterparts for an educational and inspiring weekend at Fosdem recently. We talked about standards, problems, solutions and everything in between. However, the most satisfying part of the weekend being standing at the Thunderbird booth and hearing the gratitude, suggestions and support from so many users.

With such important discussions among leading voices, we’re keen to help in finding or implementing solutions to some of the meatier topics such as:

• OAuth 2.0 Dynamic Client Registration Protocol
• Support for unicode email addresses
• Support for OpenPGP certification authorities and trust delegation

Exchange Web Services support in Rust

With a reduction in team capacity for part of January, the team was able to complete work on the following tasks that form some of the final stages in our 0.2 release:

• Folder compaction
• Saving attachments to disk
• Download EWS messages in an nsIChannel

Keep track of feature delivery here.

Account Hub

We completed the second and final milestone in the First Time User Experience for email configuration via the enhanced Account Hub over the course of January. Tasks included density and font awareness, refactoring of state management, OAuth prompts, enhanced error handling and more which can be followed via Meta bug & progress tracking. Watch out for this feature being unveiled in daily and beta in the coming weeks!

Global Message Database

With a significant number of the research and prototyping tasks now behind us, the project has taken shape over the course of January with milestones and tasks mapped out. Recent progress has been related to live view, sorting and support for Unicode server and folder names. 

Next up is to finally crack the problem of “non-unique unique IDs” mentioned previously, which is important preparatory groundwork required for a clean database migration. 

In-App Notifications

Phase 2 is now complete, and almost ready for uplift to ESR, pending underlying Firefox dependencies scheduled in early March. Features and user stories in the latest milestone include a cache-control mechanism, a thorough accessibility review, schema changes and the addition of guard rails to limit notification frequency. Meta Bug & progress tracking.

New Features Landing Soon

Several requested features and fixes have reached our Daily users and include…

• More folder compaction fixes and performance improvements!
• Messages now adapt to dark mode and include a simple toggle in the header.
• Introduction of a new “Appearance” Settings UI to globally control message threading/sorting order
• and many more which are listed in release notes for beta.

To see things as they land, and help squash early bugs, you can check the pushlog and try running daily. This would be immensely helpful for catching things early.

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Toby Pilling

Senior Manager, Desktop Engineering