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VIDEO: The New Account Hub

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In this month’s Community Office Hours, we’re chatting with Vineet Deo, a Software Engineer on the Desktop team, who walks us through the new Account Hub on the Desktop app. If you want a sneak peak at this new streamlined experience, you can find it in the Daily channel now and the Beta channel towards the end of April.

Next month, we’ll be chatting with our director Ryan Sipes. We’ll be covering the new Thunderbird Pro and Thundermail announcement and the structure of MZLA compared to the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation. And we’ll talk about how Thunderbird put the fun in fundraising!

March Office Hours: The New Account Hub

Setting up a new email account in Thunderbird is already a solid experience, so why the update? Firstly, this is the first thing new users will see in the app. Thus, it’s important it has the same clean, cohesive look that is becoming the new Thunderbird design standard. It’s also helpful for users coming from other email clients to have a familiar, wizard-like experience. While the current account setup works well, it’s browser based. This makes it possible a user could exit out before finishing and get lost before they even started. This is the opposite of what we want for potential users!

Vineet and his team are also working to make the new Account Hub ready for Exchange. Likewise, they also have plans for a similar hub to set up new address books and calendars. We’re proud of the collaboration between back and frontend teams, and designers and engineers, to make the Account Hub.

Watch, Read, and Get Involved

But don’t take our word for it! Watch Vineet’s Account Hub talk and demo, along with a Q&A session. If you’re comfortable testing Daily, you can test this new feature now. (Go to File > New > Email Account to start the experience.) Otherwise, keep an eye on our Beta release channel at the end of April. And if you’re watching this after Account Hub is part of the regular release, now you know the feature’s story!

VIDEO (Also on Peertube):

Account-Hub-Community-Hours-1Download

Get Involved

Tags: Office Hours

10 responses

rotane wrote on

This looks great – except for one little detail: The big “deselect all” button (where you select address books and calendars). As a new user, i might be immediately confused or even thrown off by such a button. 1, it sits very uncomfortably on that line between the two fields; and 2, it really wants to be pressed (due to its bright blue colour).

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Thanks! I’ve passed this on along to Vineet who is passing it to the design team – and you are definitely welcome to help us test this once it lands in beta and offer feedback at https://thunderbird.topicbox.com/groups/beta in TopicBox if you’d like to! You definitely have provided good feedback here and we’d love to have more if you’re interested.

Markus Thielen wrote on

I don’t understand why you obviously spend so much time on improving something that has already been working for a long time. I have seen lots of incarnations of Thunderbird account setup, but stuff so many wait for is being announced years ago, only to never arrive. Yes, I am talking about real conversation view.

You announced this in a road map for Super Nova in 2023, it’s still not there and frustrating to see you fiddle around on stuff that’s already working. You don’t even communicate about your progress in that area. Because there ain’t none?

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Unfortunately, true conversation view depends on the global messaging database rewrites, and as someone described it, that is like trying to move an apartment building off a cliff while it’s full of people. There has been some great work done lately, and once this change is in place, then a real conversation view becomes possible. We do try to include updates on this database rewrite as it happens in the monthly Thunderbird Monthly Development Digests here on this blog.

Eugene wrote on

I thought the Account Hub should be like Firefox Sync: you log into your account and it offers to import settings for existing e-mails from cloud. No?

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

No, those are two separate services. Sorry for any confusion!

Filip wrote on

Looks amazing! Will definitely help with on-boarding normal people (i.e. not super tech savvy).

And give the designers a raise, not only is the usability improved, but it also looks stunning! Much better than Firefox’s flat borderless grayland…

Keep up with the great work

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Thanks not only for the compliments, but also, thanks so much for offering to help onboard less tech savvy users! That is one of the best ways to contribute. 🙂

Birklé wrote on

Je voulais savoir si le calendrier pour outlook si il serrait encore en lecture seul avec le URL ics ?

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Oui, il ne sera toujours accessible qu’en lecture seule

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