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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 :-)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 48.9 ms ] threadMany 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigmail
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?
I have a few Exchange inboxes and once MS forces the “New Outlook” design, without allowing the legacy option anymore, im gone!
EDIT: EWS continues to be supported for on premises Exchange and is not scheduled for deprecation.
evolution has been keeping me sane whenever i needed to use ews for years.
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?
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?
Owl for Thunderbird https://reviewers.addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/a...
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.