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Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support

blog.thunderbird.net

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Re: Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support

#31

Post by canucker2016 »

kstrauser wrote: post #8
briffle wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before Thunderbird, Eudora was fantastic. We ran it at a college I worked at for most of the staff and faculty, and it was a very sad day when Qualcomm shut it down.

Eudora was nice, but it wasn't available for Linux/BSD, and it wasn't open source.

Eudora was open-sourced in 2018.

see https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-eudora-email-client-sou...

and from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudora_(email_client)

  The last 'mainline' (pre-OSE) versions of Eudora for Mac and Windows were open-sourced and preserved as an artefact by the Computer History Museum[2] in 2018; as part of the preservation, the CHM assumed ownership of the Eudora trademark.

  The only actively maintained fork of the software, known as Eudoramail as of June 2024, originates from 'mainline' Eudora for Windows as preserved by the CHM. Hermes, its current maintainers, describe Eudoramail 8.0 as currently being in alpha; Wellington publisher Jack Yan, meanwhile, points out its stability, a number of well-characterised and reproducible display bugs notwithstanding.
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudora_(email_client)#Hiatus_a...

  On May 22, 2018, after five years of discussion with Qualcomm, the Computer History Museum acquired full ownership of the source code, the Eudora trademarks, copyrights, and domain names. The transfer agreement from Qualcomm also allowed the Computer History Museum to publish the source code under the BSD open source license. The Eudora source code distributed by the Computer History Museum is the same except for the addition of the new license, code sanitization of profanity within its comments, and the removal of third-party software whose distribution rights had long expired.
recent news, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudora_(email_client)#Under_He...

Re: Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support

#33

Post by amaccuish »

stackskipton wrote: post #23

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.

As you imply though, it remains for on-premise. They're working on msgraph as well luckily.

Re: Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support

#34

Post by jrm4 »

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?

Re: Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support

#35

Post by stackskipton »

drannex wrote: post #28
stackskipton wrote: post #23

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.

> it's using EWS (Exchange Web Services) which is being removed in October 2026 for Office36 This is Microsoft we're talking about here, so if its slated for removal in Oct '26, it will be put into LTS, and finally 'retired' (but operational) _starting_ around 2031.

Microsoft swears it's happening: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/exchange/retirement...

Take the blog article for what you will. I have noticed in Office365, they tend to be less backward compatible than you would expect from Microsoft.

Re: Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support

#36

Post by stackskipton »

amaccuish wrote: post #33
stackskipton wrote: post #23

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.

As you imply though, it remains for on-premise. They're working on msgraph as well luckily.

I updated my post to reflect yes, this is Office365 only. On premise will continue to support EWS. Depending on where you are, Exchange on premise is becoming extinct.

Re: Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support

#37

Post by stackskipton »

trympet wrote: post #26
stackskipton wrote: post #23

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.

How do you know Thunderbird is using EWS, not MAPI? MAPI is not going away any time soon.

Read the article?

Re: Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support

#38

Post by stackskipton »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #14

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.

Microsoft plays wack a mole with 3rd party clients trying to gain access when it's been disabled so it's thankless job for their developers. Not to mention, if I'm disabling your third party access, trying to circumvent is Employee policy violation and you get to talk to HR about why you don't want to play by the rules.

Re: Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support

#39

Post by aorth »

stackskipton wrote: post #23

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.

The Thunderbird blog post also mentions they are looking to support the Microsoft Graph.

More limiting is that the current release doesn't support custom Office365 tenant IDs. So basically, unless you are using outlook.com this won't currently work yet. I'm lucky that my org hasn't disabled SMTP and IMAP, but it's been so slow lately...

Re: Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support

#40

Post by godelski »

bnchrch wrote: post #3

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 ar…

I still use Thunderbird and I love it. Even though I absolutely hate email and it is a chaotic clusterfuck we act like is bulletproof.

I'm incredibly impressed at how feature deficit email is, but Thunderbird gives a lot of power back. It's just a lot of little things that add up. Like why is tagging and sorting so hard? But Thunderbird makes it easy, giving you as many as you want and let you label as you please. In Gmail, Outlook, or Apple Mail you can't implement filtering, but in Thunderbird you can. There's just so many junk emails being sent from accounts I can't outright block and my inbox is a nightmare of chaos without these. Sure, I wish I could do regex and it was more feature rich, but it is strong enough that I can already catch a lot of emails that Gmail's spam detection misses. Like what the fuck is with this spam detection, it is missing things where my email is not even in the To or {B,}CC fields![0]

  > And you could use it on any machine.
The only thing I'm missing is on iOS. Email on my phone is a literal joke. Apple Mail[0.1] is the only one (compared to Gmail, Outlook, and Thunderbird) that previews a PDF. It seems like they're just helping scammers. I routinely get PayPal crypto scams and they look reasonably legitimate on Apple Mail but nowhere else. I could see how someone could be fooled, but I don't even have a PayPal account lol.

But on this note, we really do need to do something about email. We treat it so poorly. I use a lot of relay and proxy addresses now[1]. I'm also sending out a lot of resumes lately and it is surprising how we treat email. Like Microsoft only gives you SSO and then forces your email through that, not allowing you to add another email address. Not everything is "godelski@gmail.com", I use "linkedin@godelski.mozmail.com"[2] and "resume@godelski.com" (ditto [2]). In a world where we keep IDs for decades, where emails are constantly scraped and leaked, and where logins are tied to emails, these proxies are more important than ever. When I dump my gmail address I can also just redirect my two entry points (the mozmail and website domains) towards my new one. It is still not a great solution but at least it is easier to dump linkedin@godelski.com and move to new_linkedin@godelski.com than it is to go from godelski@gmail.com to godelski123@gmail.com.

If anyone has a better solution to this too, please let me know. I really fucking hate email and it seems like there's a ton of low hanging fruit

[0] The source of the email is a bit complicated and is clearly a LLM bypass by looking like generic emails like password resets or login alerts, but if my email was godelski@gmail.com it looks like it is sent to `godelski@gmail.com ` CC `bnchrch1a2b@somehash.namprd04.prod.outlook.com`. It feels like we've gone backwards in spam detection. These are trivial to detect!

[0.1] And dear god, the least Apple Intelligence could do is run a god damn Naive Bayes filter on my text messages. You can surely do that on device! No Angela, I don't want to learn more about how I can make $500/wk and at no point in time have I ever wanted to accept a text message from a +63 country code... nor do I ever accept a call from my original area code as I haven't lived in the area for decades and it is a great filter to know who's spam.

[1] I use both Firefox relay and my personal website as Cloudflare gives you free email forwarding. Firefox relay integrates into Bitwarden (most of the time...) and it makes it really convenient for giving websites unique emails and unique passwords. Also helpful when you are given a piece of paper as you can create an email on the spot, block them as needed, and track how they're traded.

[2] I don't actually have the "godelski.mozmail.com" domain, so don't send me mail there. Though I wish relay would allow you to buy a second domain (and Signal would allow you at least 2 usernames!) At least give me one "clear" and one "handle".

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