• Community

VIDEO: Meet the New Support Team!

Welcome to the first Community Office Hours of 2026! We’re all recovered from conferences in Brussels and California, and we’re talking to members of one of our newest teams: Support.

Wait, hasn’t Thunderbird always had a support team? Surprisingly, no! We’ve had individual staff members responsible for different parts of our support efforts, but never combined into one fantastic team. This includes new hires Lisa (Jill) Wess, Manager of Customer Support Operations, and MadHatter McGinnis, Support Knowledge and Enablement Lead, whose work is not only vital for Thundermail, but a better experience for donors, users, and contributors alike. We’re also joined by Roland Tanglao and Wayne Mery, two of our longstanding support and community staff who you might remember from our office hours on writing support articles and helping users on the support forums.

Community Office Hours are just getting started this year. Thank you so much for joining us for these sneak peeks into how we make, improve, and expand Thunderbird! As always, if you have any ideas for future office hours topics, let us know in the comments!

A New Model for Support

While Lisa and MadHatter have only been at Thunderbird for less than a year, the impact they’ve made since then is notable. When Thundermail launches later this year, users will experience their work when they read a user guide, ask for support, or make a suggestion on ideas.tb.pro. This renewed focus on support won’t only be for Thundermail users, however! In the video, the members of the support team discuss how the team wants to make it easier to get help AND easier to provide it, whether the person answering questions is a staff member or a volunteer contributor. No matter what technical improvements the team has planned, human beings will always be at the heart of the Thunderbird (and Thundermail) support experience.

This includes the existing Thunderbird support on the Mozilla Support forums. As always, there is so much our community can do to help out fellow Thunderbird users with questions or issues they might have. Roland and Wayne offer useful tips on where to get started on the support contributor journey. One path that might be new to readers is suggesting improvements or new knowledge base (KB) articles! If you have ideas on replacing outdated advice, updating screenshots, or ways to fill knowledge gaps with a new KB article, we’d love to hear from you, whether your advice is about the desktop or Android client.

VIDEO (Also on Peertube):

Resources:

Resources for Suggesting Features:
Thunderbird on Desktop and Mobile – https://connect.mozilla.org
Thundermail and Thunderbird Pro – https://ideas.tb.pro

Resources for Becoming a Community Support Contributor:
Join the Support Crew Matrix Channel – https://matrix.to/#/#tb-support-crew:mozilla.org
Learn How to Write Support Articles – https://blog.thunderbird.net/2024/07/video-learn-about-thunderbird-support-articles-and-how-to-contribute/
Learn How to Help Support Forum Users – https://blog.thunderbird.net/2024/08/video-how-to-answer-thunderbird-questions-on-mozilla-support/
Provide Feedback on Desktop Support Articles – https://github.com/thunderbird/knowledgebase-issues/issues
Provide Feedback on Android Support Articles – https://github.com/thunderbird/android-knowledgebase-issues/issues
Already a SUMO Contributor? Join the Contributor Discussion Forum – https://support.mozilla.org/forums/contributors/

Resources for Getting Help with Thunderbird:
Thunderbird for Android Support Channel (Matrix) – https://matrix.to/#/#tb-android:mozilla.org
Thunderbird Desktop Support Channel (Matrix) – https://matrix.to/#/#thunderbird:mozilla.org