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Thunderbird 153 “Meadow” is out now!

26 responses

As we head into the summer months, a new Extended Support Release (ESR) is in full bloom. Thunderbird 153 “Meadow” is out now, and from all of us at MZLA, the Thunderbird Council, and our global community of contributors, we can’t wait for you to try it out.

“Meadow” builds on Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse,” along with the steady stream of features and improvements that have landed in the Monthly Release channel over the past year. This release makes first-time setup smoother with a redesigned Account Hub, brings native Microsoft Exchange support out into the open, and lets Thunderbird take on the colors of your desktop. Add privacy-minded networking, friendlier notifications, and a healthy crop of refinements, and Meadow is ready to grow with you.

Easier Account Creation

The all-new Account Hub makes setting up accounts faster and more intuitive than ever, with improved autodiscover, automatic protocol detection, and automatic setup of connected calendars and address books.

Address Book Setup

The new Account Hub modal lets you set up all types of local and remote address books. Existing email accounts are automatically scanned to detect available address books that haven’t been configured yet. 

Microsoft Exchange Support

We’ve added full support for Exchange email servers via Exchange Web Services: set up Microsoft Exchange accounts natively to read, manage, and write emails, no add-ons required. Experimental Microsoft Graph support is already in core but temporarily disabled behind a preference while we finish it, with full support plus Calendar and Address Book integration aimed for later this year.

Accent Colors

Meadow now inherits your operating system’s accent color to match your preferred look. You can also customize your colors with the new accent color settings in the Appearance tab.

Do More From Your Notifications

Mark an email as read, delete it, flag it as spam, and more right from the native notifications on your operating system.

In addition to these headline features, there’s a whole host of other updates you’ll love, including:

OAuth in Browser

Thunderbird now supports OAuth authentication directly in your default browser.

Login With Thundermail

If you have a Thundermail account, you can sign in to Thunderbird with one-click authentication in the Account Hub.

Folder Sorting

An improved UI and better visual indicators make sorting your emails easier than ever.

Bug Fixes and Improvements

Thousands of bug fixes and performance improvements bring you the smooth, reliable Thunderbird experience you expect.

Looking Forward

Thunderbird 153 “Meadow” might seem soothing and calm, but we’re excited to get these features into your hands. And if you’d like updates like these more often, there’s no need to wait for the annual release: switching to Thunderbird Release gets you new updates on a monthly basis.

Thunderbird 153 Availability for Windows, Linux, and macOS

Even with QA and beta testing, any major software release may have issues that only surface after significant public use. That’s why we’re rolling out automatic updates gradually, enabling them more broadly as we confirm everything is stable. 

Manual upgrade to 153 is now enabled via Help > About — you can upgrade now or wait to receive automatic updates. Thunderbird 153.0 is also offered as a direct download from thunderbird.net. Be sure to select ‘Thunderbird Extended Support Release’ in the ‘Release Channel’ drop-down menu.

For Linux users running Thunderbird from the Snap or Flatpak, 153 will be available within the next few weeks. Likewise, Thunderbird 153 will arrive on the Microsoft Store by mid-July.

Full release notes can be found here.

If you have any issues, please reach out to support.

Have an idea? We want to hear it! Submit your ideas here.

Tags: Meadow 153

26 responses

Dom wrote on

Fab work! Thanks for a smashing email client 🙂

Typo: ‘Improvements An improved UI’

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Thanks for the excitement – and for catching the typo! I’ll go ahead and fix that 🙂

Andreas wrote on

“switching to Thunderbird Release gets you new updates on a monthly basis.”

Will you follow the new Firefox release schedule with updates every 2 weeks?

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

This is something our desktop team is discussing, and we may have more of an idea on our plans in September. If we do make any changes, we’ll definitely announce them here and elsewhere!

ogdjcl wrote on

Bonjour
J’attends paisiblement les mises à jour automatiques !

Heinz LORENZ wrote on

When will it be possible to connect the TB-Calender with Apples Calender?
I mean I make a notice in Apple’s Calender and this appointment appears directly in Thunderbird’s Calender.

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

This should already be possible! If you’re having issues, one of our Reddit community members made a guide to set up Apple calendars with Thunderbird, with two-way syncing: https://www.reddit.com/r/Thunderbird/comments/1dpop9d/icloud_calendar_sync_without_addon_get_icloud/

Axel Grude wrote on

Thanks for your great work.

It would have been nice to mention somewhere that legacy Add-ons likely will not supported by Release during the next ESR cycle a year from now (pushing back plans that were originally earmarked for Thunderbird 153), and the best point in time to switch your profile from Release to ESR is during the first month of the new cycle (Thunderbird 153.0). Instead we only see encouragement to go from release => ESR.

Apart from that I am looking forward integrating my Add-ons with the Thunderbird environment even better and also supporting the new color features of Meadow 153. Hopefully we will see much needed development on the Filters front (which no doubt also hinges on the new GLODA implementation) and maybe an attempt at an API.

Hopefully the planned weekly release cycle (with which the Firefox team currently experiments) is not something the Thunderbird team will be forced to take on as well; release cycles already sound hectic as it is now.

Keep up the great work.

Wayne Mery wrote on

Axel, thanks for the feedback. Regarding legacy add-ons, next year users will be able to make that same transition of release => ESr if needed, but based on newer information and better add-on compatibility. If you have recently seen a notification to switch, please let us know in the add-ons matrix channel.

Albin Vogel wrote on

Ich bin eigentlich ein Spendenmuffel, aber dieses E-mail-
System gefällt mir so gut, daß ich schon 2x gespendet habe.
Weiter so….

Tom Cluster wrote on

In my system the folders of messages are out of order. I was told that this is a known problem and that a fix would eventually come. Does this include that fix? When we get the fix will we have to run something to get them back in order?

Wayne Mery wrote on

Hi Tom. You are referring to https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1563882#answer-1800397. I suspect it is not solved in version 153. Please create a new support request and we can work through this issue.

Dave Brabants wrote on

This sounds great and I’m looking forward to trying it. I have 2 business accounts that won’t send in the current version so if exchange works I will be so pleased as thunderbird is my preferred Client but I currently have to use outlook to send

AUBERT Dominique wrote on

Madame, Monsieur bonjour,
est-il obligatoire de s’inscrire à “Thunderbird 153” ?

Avec le temps, j’ai remarqué que les changements tels que celui que vous proposez aujourd’hui, s’ils améliorent certaines fonctionalités en désorganisent d’autres.
Je préférerai ne pas être obligée d’y souscrire. Peut-être parce que j’ai 72 ans …
Chaleureusement. Dominique (femme)

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Merci de nous faire part de vos commentaires sur les aspects parfois difficiles des mises à jour logicielles! Nous encourageons tout le monde à effectuer les mises à jour pour des raisons de sécurité, car cela est important, en particulier pour la messagerie électronique. Mais nous aimerions également savoir quels changements sont les plus déroutants — cela serait très utile pour nos équipes de conception et de développement si vous pouviez ouvrir une nouvelle discussion ici : https://thunderbird.topicbox.com/groups/ux

Andreas wrote on

Summary: EWS authentication fails in Thunderbird 153 despite valid OAuth token, correct scope, and working mailbox — new profile does not resolve

Thunderbird version: 153.0.1esr (64-Bit – Meadow)

OS: Windows 11

Environment:

Microsoft 365 / Exchange Online mailbox, custom domain (verified domain on the tenant)
Account type: Exchange (EWS) via native Account Hub setup
EWS endpoint: https://outlook.office365.com/ews/exchange.asmx
Authentication method: OAuth2, external-browser flow (new in TB153)

Steps to reproduce:

Set up a new Exchange account in Thunderbird 153 via Account Hub, selecting Exchange/EWS with OAuth2.
Complete the Microsoft sign-in flow in the external default browser when prompted.
Browser confirms “Your account is securely connected to Thunderbird” and the window can be closed.
Return to Thunderbird — account setup / connection reports “Authentication failed. Login to the server failed. Possibly the configuration, username or password are incorrect.”

Expected result: Account connects successfully, since the OAuth flow completed and the token was issued correctly.

Actual result: Authentication failure reported in Thunderbird client, despite server-side confirmation of a successful, correctly-scoped sign-in.

Troubleshooting already performed (ruling out account/tenant/profile causes):

Cleared all stored credentials in Thunderbird’s Password Manager for this account and retried — same failure.
Confirmed via Entra ID sign-in logs that the OAuth sign-in for this account against the “Office 365 Exchange Online” resource shows Success at the time of the failed Thunderbird attempt.
Confirmed in Entra ID → Enterprise Applications → Thunderbird → Permissions that EWS.AccessAsUser.All (delegated) is consented and granted for this user, alongside the standard IMAP.AccessAsUser.All, POP.AccessAsUser.All, SMTP.Send, offline_access scopes.
Confirmed via Exchange Online PowerShell that Get-CASMailbox | fl EwsEnabled returns True.
Created a completely fresh Thunderbird profile and repeated the setup from scratch with only this account configured — same failure.
Confirmed no Conditional Access policies exist on this tenant (tenant lacks CA licensing entirely), ruling out device-compliance/PRT-related blocking.
Confirmed the same mailbox connects without issue from Apple Mail on iOS (via ActiveSync), ruling out any account, mailbox, or credential problem.

Any idea Monica Ayhens-Madon?

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

I asked one of our Exchange developers, Eleanor, for help! If you didn’t get prompted to grant mail access permissions for Thunderbird, her guess is that your tenant doesn’t allow Thunderbird to access mail with user consent. The default Entra security settings allow Thunderbird users to grant consent, but tenant admins can override their tenant default settings to require admin consent. That’s her best guess with the information above. If you file an issue in Bugzilla using this link to put it directly in Exchange triage and Eleanor can work with you further to try and identify the issue. You can also look at the network logs in the developer tools to see if you are getting any failed requests with reasons attached.

Carol B wrote on

Is Thunderbird 153 “Meadow” going to be a “MUST” change or an “optional” change to the email system?

Wayne Mery wrote on

Carol, thanks for asking.

If your question is will the prior version become unsupported, the answer is yes in a few months version 140 will be unsupported. You should find version 153 is superior to version 140.

Andreas wrote on

Hey Monica,

thanks for getting back, the issue is created (Bug 2059332). Maybe you can send a note to Eleanor.

Have a nice day.

Andreas wrote on

native office 365 calendar in Thunderbird has been my dream feature for so many years. As an Arch user whatever TB-plugin is currently recommended for office 365 calendar sync often becomes outdated for my Thunderbird version.

Can hardly wait native calendar to ship <3. No need to run Outlook as a web app anymore or Windows native clients like Em Client in Wine just to get calendar

Wayne Mery wrote on

Thanks for the feedback.

Claudio wrote on

Hi, on my Mac, after upgrading to Meadows, the send button doesn’t appear. The only way to send is to open the “Files” panel in the status bar and select “Send Now.” This is really inconvenient. Furthermore, the email window you’re composing can’t be moved around the screen and stays stuck on the right side of the screen. This is really inconvenient and unproductive. Thanks in advance for fixing this.

Wayne Mery wrote on

Hi Claudio. Support questions are best posted at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/new/thunderbird. But some starting question to include in your support posting might be
* Is the Send button missing? Or is it just greyed out?
* Does the issue reproduce with Help > Troubleshoot Mode?

claudio wrote on

yes the send button does not appear at all and the troubleshoot mode does not solve it

Wayne Mery wrote on

> yes the send button does not appear at all and the troubleshoot mode does not solve it

Please included this information in your support posting.

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