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Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest: September 2025

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Hello again from the Thunderbird development team! This month’s sprints have been about focus and follow-through, as we’ve tightened up our new Account Hub experience and continued the deep work on Exchange Web Services (EWS) support. While those two areas have taken centre stage, we’ve also been busy adapting to a wave of upstream platform changes that demanded careful attention to keep everything stable and our continuous integration systems happy. Alongside this, our developers have been lending extra support to the Services team to ensure a smooth path for upcoming releases. It’s been a month of steady, detail-oriented progress – the kind that doesn’t always make headlines, but lays the groundwork for the next leaps forward.

Exchange Web Services support announcement for 145

While support for Microsoft Exchange via EWS landed in Thunderbird 144, the new “Account Hub” setup interface had a few outstanding priorities which required our attention. Considering that the announcement of EWS support will likely generate a large spike in secondary account additions, we felt it important enough to delay the announcement in order to polish the setup interface and make the experience better for the users taking advantage of the new features. The team working on the “back end” took the opportunity to deliver more features that had been in our backlog and address some bugs that were reported by users who are already using EWS on Beta and Daily:

Looking ahead, the team is already focused on our work week where we’ll have chance to put plans in place to tackle some architectural refactoring and the next major milestones in our EWS implementation for Calendar and Address Book.

We were also delighted to work with a community contributor who has been hard at work on adding support for the FindItem operation. We know some of our workflows are tricky so we very much appreciate the support and patience required!

Keep track of feature delivery here. 

Account Hub

We’ve now added the ability to manually edit any configuration from the first screen. This effectively bypasses the simpler detection methods which don’t work for every configuration. Upon detection failure, a user is now able to switch between protocols and choose EWS configuration.

Other notable items being rolled into 145 are:

The creation of address books through the Account Hub is now the experience by default on 145 which is coming to Beta release users this week and monthly Release users before I write next.

Follow progress in the Meta Bug

Calendar UI Rebuild

With the front end team mainly focused on Account Hub, the Calendar UI project has moved slowly this past month. We’ve concentrated the continued work in the following areas:

Maintenance, Upstream adaptations, Recent Features and Fixes

With our focused maintenance sprint over, the team kept the Fluent Migration and moz-src migration projects moving in the background. They also handled another surge of upstream changes requiring triage. In addition to these items, the development community has helped us deliver a variety of improvements over the past month:

If you would like to see new features as they land, and help us find 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

Tags: Development Digest Exchange

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