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Introducing our Public Roadmaps

8 responses

At Thunderbird, we firmly believe in the strength of listening to our community’s needs and wants, and balancing it with our resources and capabilities. While this has always been part of our ethos, we want to start 2026 by making our goals easier to read and comprehend at roadmaps.thunderbird.net, where you will find our roadmaps for our Services and both the Thunderbird Desktop and Mobile products.

Go to the Roadmaps

To better serve our community, we are making several thoughtful updates to how we build and communicate our roadmap. These key changes include clearer estimation practices, stronger strategic framing, and more transparent updates when priorities evolve.

Intentional Descriptions

You may notice that the descriptions of each roadmap item is written in very common, non-technical, language as much as possible. This is done purposefully, so that someone from any technical level can understand what we are trying to achieve. We have also tried to not be too verbose so that you, the reader, can be informed without being bored.

Regular Reviews and Updates

At the end of each calendar quarter, we will hold internal roadmap review meetings with each of the Desktop, Mobile, and Services teams. We will review the estimated progress and priority of each item and adjust the roadmap as needed. 

Any changes to the roadmap will be clearly communicated to the tb-planning topicbox list.

What the Roadmap is and is not

We know that different companies and projects can approach the term “roadmap” differently so let’s be clear about what Thunderbird is providing.

This roadmap reflects our current priorities and the work we believe will have the greatest impact in 2026. While priorities can evolve as new information arises, we’re committed to reviewing progress quarterly and communicating any adjustments clearly and transparently.

Our public roadmap is focused on themes rather than individual tasks or bugs to fix. It is our directional plan that outlines the goals for this year. We view a roadmap as a plan to keep us on target, towards accomplishing broader goals, rather than a wishlist of bugs to fix.

Balancing Ideas with Capacity

Thunderbird thrives because of its community. Every year, we receive more great ideas than we have capacity to implement. Our responsibility is to focus on the initiatives that create the broadest impact while enduring the long-term health of the project.

That doesn’t mean individual ideas don’t matter. In fact, community input directly influences our roadmap over time. The updated roadmap process helps us be more clear about what we can take on right now, and how new ideas can shape what comes next.

If there’s something you’d love to see in Thunderbird, please share it. Momentum starts with voices like yours.

Share your ideas on Thunderbird Desktop or Mobile

Share your ideas on Thunderbird Pro

8 responses

Seven wrote on

“At Thunderbird, we firmly believe in the strength of listening to our community’s needs and wants, and balancing it with our resources and capabilities.”

If this is true then why has this simple “bug” been left unresolved for the last 22 years with almost 100 comments on it and many duplicate reports requesting the exact same thing?

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=218258

The bug report has a very simple, basic and integral request to the workflow of most business related users out there and that is to have standard/full reply headers when replying to an email. You already have this fully implemented when forwarding an email but intentionally left it out when replying even though it is an essential part of the “community’s needs and wants” and I believe it is well within your capability to enable this.

The only argument against implementing this is that “we don’t agree with the logic” when in fact this is a literal (and sometimes legal) requirement by most companies where there needs to be a proper trail of the conversation thread as people’s emails are added in cc or sometimes removed from the thread when they shouldn’t be. This is a standard part of everyday business communication.

It would take very little time and effort *relatively* for Thunderbird to implement this small request and it can be kept as a option in the settings menu for people who prefer the old behaviour.

You are doing amazing things with Thunderbird and have made massive improvements over the years with regards to the UI re-design, security, stability, ease of use, compatibility, code refactoring and countless other things. But you have left out an absolutely critical feature that so many people in a corporate setting rely on and depend on for work.

I ask you very kindly to please reconsider the bug report mentioned above. This is low hanging fruit for Thunderbird to implement and it is not merely a useful feature but a critical one to a vast majority of current and future potential users out there.

I hope that you don’t mind my honest feedback as part of the community for the things that “really matter” because I want Thunderbird to be the best possible email client that it can be.

Thank you for listening.

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Thanks for the really thoughtful comment. We know some of our bugs/feature requests are past the two decade mark, and we’re trying to tackle them, especially with community help, and tackle the priorities on our roadmap at the same time. For right now, speaking of community help, we have an add-on that can add Outlook-style headers, if you haven’t explored it already! https://smarttemplates.quickfolders.org/templates.html?jquery=on

Philipp wrote on

Thank your for the public roadmaps and the concise overview!

I noticed that “OpenPGP and S/MIME” is on the iOS roadmap but not on the Android roadmap.
S/MIME support is a very long requested feature for TfA https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-android/issues/1003

I this intentional? It would be great to see feature parity regarding encryption/signing support in the near future 😉

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Our Android team has a pretty packed roadmap for this year, so if something isn’t on there, it doesn’t mean we haven’t thought about it! In the case of S/MIME, this is much easier to implement on iOS, which is why it’s going there first.

David wrote on

Great idea! You have made thinks more transparent.

Phillip B Bruce wrote on

When will Thunderbird release its Storage Platform? I want to totally get off Google I thought at one time you guys were planning this.

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

This is something we’re still exploring! But we should have an update out soon about Thundermail, Send, and Appointment, and trust me, we understand the urge to want to move to something you’re in control of!

Don Reba wrote on

I love the openness and community outreach. Thunderbird is an example to follow. The design of the roadmap pages is very thoughtful.

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