The Thunderbird development team is pushing forward with a lot of new features and fixes. The team has a lot of progress to show for it with Exchange support and handling user feedback on the Account Hub. Most importantly, the team is laying the groundwork for a major overhaul of the message database.
According to the Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest, the team is close to completing its Exchange integration project. The testing process helped the developers find and fix many issues and edge cases in the current code, which should mean better and more reliable performance. The team has also added many features from the July roadmap, including automated test coverage, message filtering, marking messages as Junk or Not Junk, displaying and blocking remote content, modernizing and simplifying callbacks, handling certificate and connection errors, archiving, saving drafts, and managing back-off situations.
Thanks to all the progress the development team made, there are even more features from the project backlog being prioritized. This means even more features are likely coming in the next update. These include user experience improvements like undo and redo options for moving, copying, and deleting messages, as well as better status bar notifications to give users clearer and more helpful feedback.
The team is also working through the existing bug backlog to make a smoother transition when Exchange support is released to more users. Besides Exchange support, the team is also working on the recently introduced Account Hub feature. The team is working on the bugs that have been reported, but also on the feature itself.
The current focus is on fixing user-reported problems while also finalizing the Account Hub for Address Book items, particularly the often complicated setup of LDAP directories. The team plans to add telemetry to the Account Hub to see how users interact with it and find areas for improvement.
The Global Message Database (Panorama) project, which should change how Thunderbird manages and organizes email, is still a top priority. However, it sounds like recent work has mostly centered on Exchange support and larger code refactoring. The team is preparing for a dedicated work week focused on “Conversation View.” The upgrades to Conversation View should improve email threading and make performance with large conversations better.
While August has been set aside as a maintenance-focused month, half the team is still working on “inglorious yet important items” from the development roadmap. Not every change can be groundbreaking—those under-the-hood fixes are important, too.
Besides all the planned maintenance work to get ready for big updates, Thunderbird has made a lot of important fixes. That includes various fixes for newsgroup functionality, and port bugs to ensure Thunderbird stays compatible with updates to core libraries and operating system components. The team also worked on using standard colors throughout the application for a more consistent and visually appealing interface.
The next updates will be Thunderbird 142 and Thunderbird 140.2 ESR, which should arrive next week on June 15, 2025, according to theteam’s release calendar.
