Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest – July 2025
Hello again from the Thunderbird development team! As the northern hemisphere rolls into late summer and the last of the vacation photos trickle into our chat channels, the team is balancing maintenance sprints with ongoing feature-related projects. Whether you’re basking in the sun or bundled up for a southern winter, we’ve got plenty to share about what’s been happening behind the scenes, and what’s coming next.
Exchange support
It’s been a whirlwind of progress since our last update and with the expanded team collaborating regularly. It has felt like we’ve hit our stride and the finish line is in sight. Driven by a dramatic increase in automated test coverage, the team has been able to detect gaps and edge cases to help improve many areas of the existing code, and close out a good number of bugs.
As we ready the feature set for wider release, we’ve taken the opportunity to revisit the backlog and feel confident enough with our pace to prioritize a few features and address them sooner than originally planned.
The July roadmap worked out very well, with our planned features landing and a number of bonus items also complete:
- Automated test coverage
- Message filtering
- Setting as Junk/Not Junk
- Remote content display/blocking
- Callback modernization/simplification
- Propagation of certificate and connection errors
- Archiving
- Saving Drafts
- Back-off handling
Items we’ve prioritized for the next few weeks are:
- Undo/Redo operations for move/copy/delete
- Status Bar feedback messaging
- Bug backlog
Keep track of feature delivery here.
Account Hub
A few users have reported issues following end user adoption of this feature, so we’re addressing these while finalizing Account Hub for Address Book items, such as LDAP configuration. The team is also planning the implementation of telemetry which will help us determine areas for improvement in this important part of the application.
Global Message Database [Panorama]
The team has been focused on Exchange implementation and larger scale refactoring which isn’t directly tied to this project, so no updates to note here. The next time I write will be during a work week that has been dedicated to “Conversation View”, which is one of the key drivers for our database overhaul. Stay tuned for updates and decisions coming out of that collaboration.
To follow their progress, take a look at the meta bug dependency tree. The team also maintains documentation in Sourcedocs which are visible here.
Maintenance, Recent Features and Fixes
August is set aside as a focus for maintenance, with half our team dedicated to inglorious yet important items from our roadmap. In addition to these items, we’ve had help from the development community to deliver a variety of improvements over the past month:
- Various newsgroup fixes
- Another pile of port bugs to adapt Thunderbird to upstream changes
- Implementation of standard colours throughout the application. [meta bug]
- Modernization of module inclusion. [meta bug]
- and many more which are listed in 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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