Is support for Microsoft's Exchange protocol coming to the desktop version of Thunderbird? What about K-9 Mail and Thunderbird for Android? What's the timeline? Here's your answer in a short video clip from our recent Community Office Hours session. [Deutsche Untertitel verfügbar]

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TRANSCRIPT: TRANSCRIPT: Okay. So the first question will there be exchange support for Android with Thunderbird for Android? The answer is yes. And one of our well, our engineers that are working on the rust implementation of exchange support for Thunderbird desktop are writing it in such a way, um, using modular and reusable, um, architecting of the rust libraries for desktop such that we can probably use that in Thunderbird for Android. Um, that's exciting because lots of people need exchange support. Alex, do you have anything to add to that?

Uh, yes. Um, other than servicing our self, our goal is also to make this rust crates, which I think is that's the technical term of rust library, a crate, uh, completely open source, available in our GitHub repository, of course, which means that not just desktop or Android can use this, but anyone that needs. I need a rust crate that works with Microsoft Exchange office 365. They can use it in their own tools or their own competitor email client if they want to do it. So, uh, sharing is caring. That's why we're doing this.

One question we heard a lot was when when are we going to have native, uh, exchange support in Thunderbird for desktop? And the exciting answer is this will be available in the next ESR. Um, 128.0 Is the next ESR, and it is listed to be released on July 9th. So summertime. Yay. And then people won't need to use the paid add on to get that, um, functionality.

And they won't need to use outlook.

Right. Yeah. I mean, that's how I found out about Thunderbird, like 15 years ago. I joined a company and they said, here's your outlook. And I was like, ah, I don't want to. That's a. Give me something that works on Linux. And I found Thunderbird and never left.

Most likely what we're currently supporting, it's going to be just email. For ESR. We don't know if calendar and address book. Will be supported by default. They can already be supported with an add on, so you can use the default implementation, the default Thunderbird to use your emails, and then the add on to continue using calendars and address book. Um, we definitely want to support everything, uh, coming from Microsoft, but um, code complexity, Microsoft changing things under our feet. Just last week, Microsoft decided to disable normal authentication for all the Hotmail accounts, and they force us to use OAuth, their version of auth, not standard OAuth, which is obviously not documented. So a lot of reverse engineering there. Um, a lot of challenges.

But the first thing that we want to support is, uh, email. A complete email support. Solid and stable and good by default. So if for whatever holy intervention, we're able to do it quickly and and and finish it before ESR, we will definitely switch to address book and then calendar to support those by default.