Summary
- Thundermail in production testing internally as Thunderbird Pro preps Early Bird onboarding.
- Data hosting moved to Germany/EU, and deliverability fixes aim to reduce spam flagging.
- Send merges into Thunderbird Pro add-on after third-party security audit; Appointment readied for Zoom/CalDAV.
Everyone knows Thunderbird as that desktop email client that has existed for years and just now started to not only improve, but branch out a lot. Now, Thunderbird Pro, which is Thunderbird’s jump into actually providing email services, just inched a lot closer to release.
The Thunderbird team has just released a comprehensive status update of Thunderbird Pro. Thundermail, the team’s proprietary email service, is at the center of this update, which is the part most people probably care about the most. Thunderbird reports that Thundermail accounts have now entered production testing. While currently limited to internal testing by team members, this phase is critical for finalizing support protocols and onboarding procedures for the upcoming “Early Bird” wave of users.
The Thundermail dashboard has undergone a redesign that’s supposed to streamline how users manage settings, specifically facilitating the addition of custom domains and aliases. Perhaps most significant for privacy-conscious users is the shift in data hosting. The team confirmed that they have migrated their hosting infrastructure from the Americas to Germany and the European Union where possible. This move aligns with stricter data protection standards often requested by the open-source community. Additionally, backend work has been prioritized to improve email deliverability, aiming to mitigate issues where messages from new services are inadvertently flagged as spam.
The file-sharing utility, Send, has also seen substantial structural changes. Previously functioning as a standalone add-on, Send is being migrated into a unified Thunderbird Pro add-on. Security remains a primary focus for it, too. The team announced the completion of a third-party security review by an external assessor. The audit validated various issues that are now scheduled for remediation. In a bid for transparency, the Thunderbird team plans to publish this security report to the community once the fixes are finalized. Further improvements to Send include enhanced reporting mechanisms to prevent illegal uploads, optimizations for mobile performance, and faster upload/download speeds.
Appointment, the suite’s scheduling tool, is undergoing a remodeling phase in preparation for its beta release. Recent development cycles have focused on interoperability, specifically tightening integrations with the Zoom platform and the CalDAV protocol.
And rounding things all up, there’s now an official website for Thunderbird Pro. Isn’t that nice?
It’s inching closer to release, though we still don’t have a specific timeline. We’ll know more soon, though.
Source: Mozilla
