Thunderbird 38 goes to beta!

April 3, 2015 kent@caspia.com 15 responses

The next major release of Thunderbird, version 38, is now in beta and available for testing. You may download Thunderbird 38.0b1 here.

This version of Thunderbird is the first that is mostly managed by volunteer community members rather than by Mozilla staff. We have many new features, including:

Message filtering when a message is sent or archived
File-per-message local storage available for new accounts (maildir)
Contact search over multiple address books
Internationalized domain names for RSS feeds
Allow expanded columns to the folder pane for folder size and counts

Release notes are available here.

There are still a couple of features missing from this beta that we hope to ship in the final version of Thunderbird 38. Those are:

Ship Lightning calendar addon with Thunderbird with an opt-out dialog
Use OAUTH authentication with Gmail IMAP accounts

15 responses

Mikeyy wrote on April 3, 2015 at 14:06

How stable is maildir? Is it possible to transfer existing accounts to maildir?
I have work account with arround 60.000+ messages in around 20 folders. Would test beta on it, but I’m afraid it will break something. 🙂

kent wrote on April 3, 2015 at 21:29

The nature of betas is that there is an increased risk of it breaking something.

As for maildir, there were a number of serious issues in maildir in Thunderbird 31 that should be resolved in Thunderbird 38, including this beta. I personally use all maildir on my Thunderbird profile, but that is dogfooding. There has not been extensive testing of this, so if is good to be cautious. There are no known serious issues that would preclude its use, and mbox has its own issues. But we would not make it the default for most users because of lack of testing.

There is no method to update existing accounts. To switch to all maildir, I created a new profile and reinstalled all of my accounts.

Charles wrote on April 3, 2015 at 14:31

I would beg you guys to please, please consider implementing ‘Option to use same credentials for outgoing as incoming’:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=543827

And since it is by far the most common case, I would make it the default.

Thanks, looking forward to testing TB38, as it looks to be a really fantastic release!

kent wrote on April 3, 2015 at 21:31

Note: I approved this comment, but in general this is not a good place to advocate for particular bugs, so in the future I will probably not approve similar comments.

Richard H. wrote on April 3, 2015 at 23:08

So, they are jumping to v38 to match up with Firefox? The current version is 31.6.0, correct?

kent wrote on April 3, 2015 at 23:16

Thunderbird only does major releases following the Firefox ESR schedule, so the last was 31, the upcoming is 38, and the next after that will be 45. Yes 31.6.0 is the current release.

I am on record as saying I don’t like this number jump, and I have proposed that we start naming our major releases after bird species. Under this proposal, 38 would be “Avocet” and 45 would be “Bunting”. This is still in discussion however.

Richard H. wrote on April 3, 2015 at 23:19

OH, OK…..gotcha…….Thanks!

Raymii wrote on April 4, 2015 at 17:56

Finally Maildir support! No more +100GB mbox files corrupting… Easier backups, mutt integration! Yay, makes me happy!

kent wrote on April 5, 2015 at 00:27

The easier backups are certainly real, but Mutt integration was never a goal, and is not likely to work with our implementation of maildir.

GDR! wrote on April 7, 2015 at 08:30

Why wouldn’t it work? Is there something specific to your format, or do you just mean that it won’t work when both TB and Mutt are started at the same time?

kent wrote on April 7, 2015 at 15:43

First, Thunderbird relies on an index of messages, so any changes to messages that occurs outside of Thunderbird would not be picked up by Thunderbird.

Second, since compatibility with other applications has not been a goal, no attempt has been made to insure that our file-per-message format is compatible with other programs, so things like how folders are represented probably does not match other programs. That said, testing with other programs has not been done, so the compatibility is unknown.

Croydon wrote on April 4, 2015 at 23:09

I’m not really sure where I read this. However, is it true that Thunderbird 38 has support for WebRTC? Will Thunderbird integrate Firefox Hello? I am really looking forward to this 🙂

kent wrote on April 5, 2015 at 00:26

In our plans for this release, we were hoping that chat would have WebRTC ready for this release. But that did not work out, so it is not included.

As for Firefox Hello, the Hello team says that Hello is pretty dependent on Firefox, so they did not think it would make sense to merge it into Thunderbird. That sounded like a good idea to me as well (particularly using the address book in Thunderbird) but it has not been investigated any further, and there are no current plans to pursue this.

Aldioooo wrote on April 12, 2015 at 08:45

Integration of WebRTC would be superbe. With regards to the inclusion of Firefox Hello, this would be really a great addition!

For any reason, people are using Skype and reluctant to use something else. However, the acceptance of using Firefox HELLO has been great over the past weeks/months. I was absolutely surprised. Hence, the integration into Thunderbird and its address book would be just fabolous.

This would also be great for the reason that many people do not use Firefox as their browser, but they use Thunderbird everday. Hence, this also increases outreach of HELLO, particularly in academic and business environments.

Mohd Sohail wrote on April 16, 2015 at 19:51

I heard somewhere on Internet that Thunderbird was freezed in 2012 and new features were not being developed. But this version has new features which means it’s unfreezed now!

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