Thunderbird: big plans for 2019
The Thunderbird team provided us with an outlook of things to come for the desktop email client in a new post on the official Thunderbird blog.
Mozilla revealed in 2015 that it wanted to hand over responsibility for the Thunderbird project even though usage was on the rise.
Thunderbird was moved under the umbrella of the Mozilla Foundation in 2017, and the first major release, Thunderbird 60, was released in 2018.
The then-independent Thunderbird team grew to eight full-time employees in 2018 working on the browser.
Plans are underway to increase the number of full-time employees to 14 in early 2019; the Thunderbird team is made up of engineers for the most part that work on "making Thunderbird more stable, faster, and easier to use".
Thunderbird in 2019
The near-doubling of the team of engineers that works on Thunderbird full-time gives the team flexibility in regards to development priorities. New features and improvements are planned for 2019: from improvement performance and user interface slowness to improving compatibility with Gmail and integrating native desktop notifications.
The Thunderbird project team plans to introduce support for Gmail labels in Thunderbird in 2019. Other, unmentioned, Gmail-specific features may also be introduced or better supported in upcoming versions of the email client.
Desktop notifications, native support for them, is another item that is on the to-do list for 2019. Support for desktop notifications makes Thunderbird "feel more native" and improve notification management as well.
The team plans to make the use of encryption easier in Thunderbird, and work on user interface improvements. The out-of-the-box experience of the encryption functionality will be improved and it should just work without confusing the user with tech jargon or maintenance tasks.
A detailed roadmap for 2019 was published on the official Thunderbird Mailing list. Key improvements not mentioned already include:
- Improve the handling of.ics (system integration, invite improvements).
- Improve mail filters (make them asynchronous, contextual filtering, e.g. globablly or per-folder, pre-filter MIME processing and more).
- Rewrite certain protocols using JavaScript
- Improve the add-ons experience.
- Exchange support (at least for Calendar).
- Improve support for open formats and structured data such as CardDAV, WebDAV, and vCard.
- Improve Thunderbird setup experience (e.g. complete package for organizations).
- Calendar improvements.
Closing Words
The parting ways with Mozilla appears to have been positive for the development of the Thunderbird email client. 2019 could be the year of a turnaround in development; more engineers working on Thunderbird, fixing long-standing issues, improving support for popular features, and introducing new features to the email client.
The future looks bright; the Thunderbird team relies on donations for the most part to fund development and maintenance. Interested users may also get involved in various areas including development, documentation or translation.
Now You: Which email client do you use primarily, and why?
You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?
I think its thunderbird
It is Mozilla Thunderbird.
Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.
If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.
THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!
Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…
Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.
This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)
Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.
You are a god – thank you!
thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)
Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers
Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
Thank you
Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)
Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.
I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!
Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007
Great tip! Thanks!
Worked for me, too – thank you!!!
It’s Worked for me, too
thank you very much!
I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!
Thank you so much. Solved!
Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
Thank you again. M
This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.
Thanks.
Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.
Thank you, this worked !!!!
Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!
Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!