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While its been a long time since Ive used Thunderbird, I just wanted to take the time to publicly say thank you.

Many HNers probably wont (or cant) remember the world of desktop mail clients but basically during the height of MSFT dominance there was only one real mail client: Outlook. Which Microsoft was starting to monetize heavily, ignore UX, and keep it windows only (cant blame them for that).

Then Thunderbird arrived on the scene, an OSS mail client that beat the pants off of Outlook in features, spam detection, IMAP support and a bunch of other things.

And it was free.

And you could use it on any machine.

This was a huge moment for OSS.

We owe a lot of credit to Mozilla and Thunderbird for rescuing us from a closed source world.

As former Exchange admin/Office365, it's using EWS (Exchange Web Services) which is being removed in October 2026 for Office365. So for most, this is extremely time limited.

EDIT: EWS continues to be supported for on premises Exchange and is not scheduled for deprecation.

What I'm most curious about, and what the docs are light on detail about: does this mean Thunderbird complies with remote deletion requests (which IIRC, the Exchange protocol suppports)? I have the impression that Microsoft makes this a requirement for Exchange implementations, which is why third-party devices and apps like Apple's Mail cooperate with those requests.

The lack of native Microsoft Outlook support was one of the reasons I've abandoned Thunderbird.

However, it is still not enough for me to come back. Sadly, corporate life is often organised around email and calendaring. All these endless meetings everyone complains about, which need to be scheduled, accepted, rejected, re-scheduled, etc. The native Exchange support does not yet support Calendar integration. Without it, it will be very awkward to use in a day-to-day corporate environment.

So far this extension was a solution for accessing Mail-Accounts hosted on Exchange and even O365 by using OWA in a miraculous manner. It‘s not easy to overlook how this compares for simple end-user.

Owl for Thunderbird https://reviewers.addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/a...

Nice to see, but unfortunately it's not uncommon for orgs using Outlook/Office to disable Exchange client support and require use of the official clients. It's highly unlikely and maybe not even possible, but I'd like to see desktop and mobile mail clients implement some kind of workaround.

I generally like Thunderbird... but something is weird. What ever happened to Sync? It was around the corner for next release like two years ago. And I'm not complaining about Exchange support, but I am a bit sad that JMAP is nowhere to be found yet.

great to see thunderbird joining evolution in supporting ews among free software email clients.

evolution has been keeping me sane whenever i needed to use ews for years.

All facts aside, Thunderbird is portable, you can install it on usb and carry your mailbox in pocket, connect to any pc and access without touching host filesystem, if pc has internet browse new mails and all

i always carry it on pendrive with encrypted partition, and encryption software is also natively installed on usb, so no use of host pc for anything, mail or decryption

Awesome news, can't wait until they implement calendar support and I can get rid of Outlook once and for all.

Guess this means I can cancel all my OWL subscriptions.

I like Thunderbird, it’s a great tool for private use. One killer feature I always missed (not sure if it exists today by default in Thunderbird), is the great calendar integration of outlook. I use the calendar a lot, during work but also to organize our family. It’s super important for me to able to send invites to co workers and my wife :-)

Thanks!

I have a few Exchange inboxes and once MS forces the “New Outlook” design, without allowing the legacy option anymore, im gone!

Sweet memories of several email clients mentioned here.

I also remember the mail client built into the old Norsk version of Opera. I loved that, a much as I loved that browser.

I take it mutt still does not have native Microsoft Exchange support?

I’d be more excited for thunderbird if it worked on an open source alternative to EXCHANGE SERVER. Firefox and thunderbird are clients. But it is time they launched servers as well. There might not be any advantage to another https server. But a new mail server with a new email client protocol would be exciting. And maybe a WebDAV server that Firefox could work with natively.

This is great news because the new version of Outlook is terrible. When the good old Win32 version goes away, everyone will be looking for an alternative.

Hi guys, what email client would be most suitable for managing 100++ mailboxes with the unified inbox option? Is there a local or self hosted options that you could recommend? Yes that’s for outreach

Fantastic news! I've been hoping for Exchange support for a long while.

Microsoft could have effortlessly made it easier for others to implement integrations with Microsoft Exchange but they won't. They needed to make sure as many people as possible get vendor locked.

Imagine going to work, and having a meeting about how you can make it harder for your software to interoperate with other software. Or waking up in the morning and spending your day designing a proprietary protocol designed to prevent interoperability. That's just another day at Microsoft.

Is this good?

This is a genuine question. I am not sure whether this is good or not.

It seems to only extend existing options? Or is there some trade-off?

This is wonderful. Thank you Thunderbird!

Nice! I have been paying for ExQuilla because my university's IT department disabled IMAP and only supports Exchange...

WONDERFUL. If it works, literally life improving for me. My browser slows to a crawl with the silliness like copilot on the side.

And at the risk of asking too much (because this was a thing we used to have as a plugin)...

...any possibility of color-coding separate accounts?

Does it implement the famous "sweep" feature from Outlook?

Interesting, but I wonder if the Oauth with Yubikeys is fixed yet?

My work email is behind Okta and I can get through the whole flow of Oauth up till it hits the WebAuthN..which works but it won't display a pin entry dialog.

What took so long?

Doesn't work for me, and the account creation window itself is buggy with poor UX, throws a general error and requires me to retype password each time I try to use a different set of settings.

I'm now aware of three protocols that Exchange has used: MAPI, EPW, and Microsoft Graph. Are all of these supported/commonly used in both on-premise and Office365 environments, are are some limited to one or the other?

To be honest, it's disappointing that this lacks calendar and address book integration (for now). There's plenty of prior art in terms of delivering full functionality via EWS, and I'm surprised their first release is this spartan. It's not like they're trying to support MAPI or something else that would need to be reverse-engineered.

My solution 15 years ago, when I needed to support Linux users, was Thunderbird plus a middleware tool called DavMail. Something like that is probably still the best option until Thunderbird is able to deliver more full functionality. Nice to see them working on the thing, at least.