Thunderbird Monthly Developer Digest – April 2025
Hello from the Thunderbird development team! With some of our time spent onboarding new team members and interviewing for open positions, April was a fun and productive month. Our team grew and we were amazed at how smooth the onboarding process has been, with many contributions already boosting the team’s output.
Gearing up for our annual Extended Support Release
We have now officially entered the release cycle which will become our annual “ESR” at the end of June. The code we’re writing, the features we’re adding, the bugs we’re fixing at the moment should all make their way into the next major update, to be enjoyed by millions of users. This most stable release is used by enterprises, governments and institutions who have specific requirements around consistency, long-term support, and minimized change over time.
If waiting a whole year doesn’t sound appealing to you, our Monthly release may be better suited. It offers access to the latest features, improvements, and fixes as soon as they’re ready. Watch out for an in-app invitation to upgrade or install over ESR to retain your profile settings.
Calendar UI Rebuild
The implementation of the new event dialog hit some challenges in April with the dialog positioning and associated tests causing more than a few headaches when our CI started reporting test failures that were not easy to debug. Not surprising given the 60,000 tests which run for this one patch alone!!
The focus on loading data into the various containers continues, so that we can enable this feature and begin the QA process.
Keep track of feature delivery via the [meta] bug
Exchange Web Services support in Rust
Our 0.2 release will make it into the hands of Daily and QA testers this month, with only a handful of smaller items left in our current milestone, before the “polish” milestone begins. The following items were completed in April:
- Connectivity check for EWS accounts
- Threading support
- Folder updates & deletions in sync
- Folder cache cleanup
- Folder copy/move
- Bug fixes!
Our hope is to include this feature set to users on beta and monthly release in 140 or 141.
Keep track of feature delivery here.
Account Hub
The new email account feature was “preffed on” as the default experience for the Daily build but recent changes to our Oauth process have required some rework to this user experience. We’re currently working on designing a UX and associated functionality that can detect whether account autodiscovery requires a password, and react accordingly.
The redesigned UI for Address Book account additions is also underway and planned for release to users on 25th May.
Global Message Database
We welcomed a new team member in April so technical onboarding has been a priority. In addition, a long list of patches landed, with the team focused on refactoring core code responsible for the management of common folders such as Drafts or Sent Mail, and significant changes to nsIMsgPluggableStore.
Time was spent to research and plan a path to tackle dangling folders in May.
To follow their progress, the team maintains documentation in Sourcedocs which are visible here.
New Features Landing Soon
A number of requested features and important fixes have reached our Daily users this month. We want to give special thanks to the contributors who made the following possible…
- Improvements to notifications
- Manual folder sorting improvements
- Several port bugs to correct bustage introduced by upstream changes
- and many more in the release notes for beta.
If you would like to see new features as they land, and help us squash some early bugs, you can try running daily and check the pushlog to see what has recently landed. This assistance is immensely helpful for catching problems early.
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Toby Pilling
Senior Manager, Desktop Engineering
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