Before Thunderbird, Eudora was fantastic. We ran it at a college I worked at for most of the staff and faculty, and it was a very sad day when Qualcomm shut it down.

Personally I do not use thunderbird, but one elderly relative requires thunderbird. So I am all in favour of thunderbird getting better. Not everyone is able to use emails in a much simpler way. I actually, back when I was using gmail still, had some +4000 unread messages. I simply can not keep up with regular mail.

Opera had an amazing built-in NNTP and email client. I think it was my first experience with views instead of folders, so my emails could appear in multiple "folders" (I think now we call them "smart folders").

Absolutely revelatory at the time.

> the world of desktop mail clients

We live in that world still.

> but basically during the height of MSFT dominance there was only one real mail client: Outlook.

On Windows, you had:

* Netscape Suite (later Seamonkey)

* Eudora

* Pegasus

and (edit:) two of those still exist. Plus, Outlook cost money (unless you used Outlook Express), while Netscape was gratis, and on Linux and most Unix variants, Outlook has never even existed. On Linux specifically there's Evolution and there's KMail.

And I'm sure I'm forgeting a few others.

> Then Thunderbird arrived on the scene

It was a development of the MailNews component of Netscape, to use the same XUL-based platform as Firefox. So, an evolution, not a revolution.

(edit:) Oh, look what I found!

https://missive.github.io/email-apps-timeline/

uncheck 'Web', iOS and Android.

I still use Thunderbird and I love it. Even though I absolutely hate email and it is a chaotic clusterfuck we act like is bulletproof.

I'm incredibly impressed at how feature deficit email is, but Thunderbird gives a lot of power back. It's just a lot of little things that add up. Like why is tagging and sorting so hard? But Thunderbird makes it easy, giving you as many as you want and let you label as you please. In Gmail, Outlook, or Apple Mail you can't implement filtering, but in Thunderbird you can. There's just so many junk emails being sent from accounts I can't outright block and my inbox is a nightmare of chaos without these. Sure, I wish I could do regex and it was more feature rich, but it is strong enough that I can already catch a lot of emails that Gmail's spam detection misses. Like what the fuck is with this spam detection, it is missing things where my email is not even in the To or {B,}CC fields![0]

  > And you could use it on any machine.

But on this note, we really do need to do something about email. We treat it so poorly. I use a lot of relay and proxy addresses now[1]. I'm also sending out a lot of resumes lately and it is surprising how we treat email. Like Microsoft only gives you SSO and then forces your email through that, not allowing you to add another email address. Not everything is "godelski@gmail.com", I use "linkedin@godelski.mozmail.com"[2] and "resume@godelski.com" (ditto [2]). In a world where we keep IDs for decades, where emails are constantly scraped and leaked, and where logins are tied to emails, these proxies are more important than ever. When I dump my gmail address I can also just redirect my two entry points (the mozmail and website domains) towards my new one. It is still not a great solution but at least it is easier to dump linkedin@godelski.com and move to new_linkedin@godelski.com than it is to go from godelski@gmail.com to godelski123@gmail.com.

If anyone has a better solution to this too, please let me know. I really fucking hate email and it seems like there's a ton of low hanging fruit

[0] The source of the email is a bit complicated and is clearly a LLM bypass by looking like generic emails like password resets or login alerts, but if my email was godelski@gmail.com it looks like it is sent to `godelski@gmail.com <bnchrch123@utahit.net>` CC `bnchrch1a2b@somehash.namprd04.prod.outlook.com`. It feels like we've gone backwards in spam detection. These are trivial to detect!

[0.1] And dear god, the least Apple Intelligence could do is run a god damn Naive Bayes filter on my text messages. You can surely do that on device! No Angela, I don't want to learn more about how I can make $500/wk and at no point in time have I ever wanted to accept a text message from a +63 country code... nor do I ever accept a call from my original area code as I haven't lived in the area for decades and it is a great filter to know who's spam.

[1] I use both Firefox relay and my personal website as Cloudflare gives you free email forwarding. Firefox relay integrates into Bitwarden (most of the time...) and it makes it really convenient for giving websites unique emails and unique passwords. Also helpful when you are given a piece of paper as you can create an email on the spot, block them as needed, and track how they're traded.

[2] I don't actually have the "godelski.mozmail.com" domain, so don't send me mail there. Though I wish relay would allow you to buy a second domain (and Signal would allow you at least 2 usernames!) At least give me one "clear" and one "handle".

The Thunderbird blog post also mentions they are looking to support the Microsoft Graph.

More limiting is that the current release doesn't support custom Office365 tenant IDs. So basically, unless you are using outlook.com this won't currently work yet. I'm lucky that my org hasn't disabled SMTP and IMAP, but it's been so slow lately...

> it's using EWS (Exchange Web Services) which is being removed in October 2026 for Office36

This is Microsoft we're talking about here, so if its slated for removal in Oct '26, it will be put into LTS, and finally 'retired' (but operational) _starting_ around 2031.

How do you know Thunderbird is using EWS, not MAPI? MAPI is not going away any time soon.

As you imply though, it remains for on-premise. They're working on msgraph as well luckily.

That would be Active Sync:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/clients/exchange-...

Not sure how Mozilla went about the implementation, but I do agree it would be a concern to verify before using.

You can perform the following Exchange ActiveSync tasks:

    Enable and disable Exchange ActiveSync for users

    Set policies such as minimum password length, device locking, and maximum failed password attempts

    Initiate a remote wipe to clear all data from a lost or stolen mobile phone

    Run a variety of reports for viewing or exporting into a variety of formats

    Control which types of mobile devices can synchronize with your organization through device access rules

Do you mean recall? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/recall-an-outlook...

That only works within an organisation, right?

Otherwise you just get an email. I got one recently.

Microsoft plays wack a mole with 3rd party clients trying to gain access when it's been disabled so it's thankless job for their developers. Not to mention, if I'm disabling your third party access, trying to circumvent is Employee policy violation and you get to talk to HR about why you don't want to play by the rules.

I was responsible for third party e-mail clients able to connect to Exchange, it was decided Thunderbird was allowed and support was implemented. It can be done if people are aware of the needs, can implement it securely and can evaluate risks.

We implemented this in the Daily build of the desktop app last year, using a staging environment for Firefox Sync. But Firefox Sync is called Firefox Sync because it’s built for Firefox. Thunderbird profiles, in comparison, have a lot more data points. This meant we had to build something completely different. As we started to spin up Thunderbird Pro, we decided it made more sense to have a Thunderbird account that would manage everything, including Sync. Unfortunately, this meant a lot of delays. So Sync is still on our radar, and we hope to have it next year, barring further complications. Source: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/09/state-of-the-thunder-mo...

In other words, it was more work to adapt Firefox Sync than they thought at the beginning. It's still actively developed so finger crossed it's coming soon.

I've never seen a piece of software that managed to implement all of the iCalendar specification, which to me seemed like a data model for a good productivity app that's just never manifested. iCalendar (RFC 2445 from 1998) outlined not only events but todo and a journal component for memorializing meetings. Outlook seems to ignore VTODO entries in iCalendar completely, and VJOURNAL support is deprecated.

Since last year, TB has native caldav/carddav support.

Try Thunderbird

This is awesome!

For one to have an open-source client to Exchange online and on-premise with broad support for more than plain email management. And also for other servers like Kerio Connect and grommunio.

Current limitations:

  Search & filtering
  Filter actions requiring full body content are not yet supported.
  
  Accounts hosted on Microsoft 365
  Domains requiring custom OAuth2 application and tenant IDs will be supported in the future.
  
  Accounts hosted on-premise
  Password-based NTLM authentication and OAuth2 for on-premise servers are on the roadmap.
  
  Calendar support
  Not yet implemented – calendar syncing is on the roadmap.
  
  Address book / contacts support
  Not yet implemented – address book support is on the roadmap.
  
  Microsoft Graph support
  Not yet implemented – Microsoft Graph integration will be added in the future.