How-To Geek: Mozilla Thunderbird’s Next Big Update Is Now in Beta. “Mozilla has ramped up development on the Thunderbird email client over the past two years. The Thunderbird 102 update arrived last year with many improvements, and now the next major release is available for beta testing.”
How-To Geek: Mozilla Is Rebuilding Thunderbird “From the Ground Up”. “Mozilla released Thunderbird 102 back in June 2022, marking the first phase of a multi-year revamp of the popular mail client. It had a few much-needed setup improvements and bug fixes, as well as some design tweaks. There’s also a more significant update planned for later in 2023, named ‘Supernova,’ which was already teased as a major redesign. However, it’s not just a redesign — the app is being rebuilt ‘from the ground up.’”
How-To Geek: Thunderbird Shares First Peek at “Supernova” Update. “Thunderbird, the long-running email and calendar application from Mozilla, has spent this year reorganizing and working on major updates. Now the development team is starting to show off the next big upgrade, codenamed ‘Thunderbird Supernova.’”
How-To Geek: What’s New in Mozilla Thunderbird 102. “Thunderbird 102 isn’t the complete overhaul that some fans might be waiting for — the ‘completely modernized UI’ is scheduled for Thunderbird 114 next year. However, this update is a step in the right direction, with a few design tweaks and new features.”
Thunderbird Blog: Welcome To The Thunderbird 102 Beta! Resources, Links, And Guides. “The wait for this year’s major new Thunderbird release is almost over! But you can test-drive many of the new features like the brand new Address Book, Matrix Chat support, import/export wizard, and refreshed visuals right now with the Thunderbird 102 Beta. Better still, you might be directly responsible for improving the final product via your feedback and bug reports.”
Thunderbird Blog: Thunderbird + RSS: How To Bring Your Favorite Content To The Inbox. “I first discovered RSS feeds in 2004 when I fell in love with podcasting. That’s when I learned I could utilize RSS to bring my favorite web content to me, on my schedule. Whether it was weekly music podcasts, tech blogs, newspaper articles, or a local weather forecast, RSS became a way to more easily digest and disseminate the growing onslaught of content on the web. Back then, I used Google Reader (RIP). But now I use Thunderbird to manage and read all my news feeds, and I love it!”
How-To Geek: Here’s How Mozilla Thunderbird Is Making a Comeback in 2022. “Thunderbird has been around since 2003, but it has stalled in recent years due to dwindling interest from Mozilla and limited funds. However, the project is now making a resurgence, and it might be worth your time to try Thunderbird.”
The Register: Thunderbird 91 lands: Now native on Apple Silicon, swaps ‘master’ for ‘primary’ password, and more. “Mozilla’s Thunderbird is a cross-platform, open-source email client. Its future looked uncertain in 2015 when Moz CEO Mitchell Baker said ‘sooner or later paying a tax to support Thunderbird will not make sense as a policy for Mozilla.’ Early last year, though, matters improved, with the formation of a wholly-owned subsidiary, MZLA Technologies Corporation, to manage the project.”
ZDNet: Thunderbird e-mail client survives Mozilla layoffs. “Recently, Mozilla laid off almost a quarter of its staff. That meant bad news for its flagship Firefox web browser. And some people wondered if this also meant that Thunderbird, Mozilla’s e-mail client with 25 million users, was on its way out. It’s not. Thunderbird is safe.”
BetaNews: Thunderbird 78 unveils major UI changes, restricts add-ons to MailExtension API only. “Mozilla has released Thunderbird 78.0 for Windows, Mac and Linux. It’s the first major update of the popular open-source email client since August 2019, and is only available as a direct download — existing users of the Thunderbird 68.x series are advised to wait for a future release that will provide an upgrade path.”
BetaNews: Open source email client Thunderbird finds a new home. “If you prefer to access your email through a desktop client, then Thunderbird is one of the better choices. However, the future of the open source tool has been a little rocky in recent years after the Mozilla Corporation decided to stop supporting it. However, there’s a lot of love for Thunderbird out there, and it’s managed to survive, and even grow thanks to user donations. And now the email client has found a new home.” I still miss Eudora.
Neowin: Mozilla Thunderbird to get prettier and faster this year. “Mozilla’s Thunderbird is not as well known of a project as the Firefox browser, so much so that the organization decided to separate the development of the two a few years back, and then moved Thunderbird to a new home in 2017. Nonetheless, the e-mail client still gets major annual updates, such as Thunderbird 60 released in 2018, which introduced a new icon, support for light and dark themes, and much more.”
BetaNews: Thunderbird 60.0 unveils new look, major improvements. “Mozilla has released Thunderbird 60.0 for Windows, Mac and Linux. Also released in portable form for Windows users, Thunderbird is Mozilla’s free and open-source email client. Version 60 unveils a new look — named ‘Photon’, along with newly designed light and dark themes. Elsewhere it now adds support for WebExtension themes, plus makes substantial improvements to various elements including the calendar and attachment management.”
GHacks: New extensions portal for Thunderbird and SeaMonkey launches. “Up until now, Firefox, Thunderbird, and SeaMonkey users, used a single portal for extensions for their products. Even users of Firefox-based browsers could point their browsers to https://addons.mozilla.org/ to search for, download, and install browser extensions. Today’s launch … changes that.”
The Next Web: Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client isn’t dead yet . “Fans of Mozilla’s Thunderbird desktop email client will be happy to know that the nonprofit hasn’t yet killed the app off. Instead, it’s giving it a new lease of life. The organization noted that Thunderbird’s stable release, version 52, recently got a bunch of fixes and improvements. It also added four new staff members dedicated to the project over the past year, and recently launched pushed the second beta of version 58, which has a revamped visual design, better error handling, importing from Outlook, and improved performance. The bigger change that’s coming is the end of support for legacy add-ons.”
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