Thunderbird, Mosila’s desktop email client, finally testing support for Microsoft Exchange accounts in daily and beta channels. You can try it now to help all thunderbird users find bugs before rolling it.
After years of requests from the Thunderbird community and “more than one and a half years of development efforts” has been a long time of exchange account support. This is mainly useful for work and school accounts that do not allow imap synchronization or other options that thunderbirds already support. There are many modern email customers who support exchange accounts, especially local email clients, so it is great to see thunderbird developers that it must finally work.
Mosila has a instruction page to try exchange support. Currently, this requires daily or beta versions of Thunderbird, and the exchange is selected as an alternative when adding a new email account. Developers recommend using a daily construction strongly, as changes may take 2-3 weeks to roll on the beta channel, so you may get stuck with the same bug for longer than necessary.
Thunderbird developer Brandon Abolivier said in a forum post, “We started initial exploration to support exchange accounts in Thunderbird in Summer, about two years ago. Since then, the team has worked hard to work on this project, which is already in a campus already in a campus. We can all celebrate.
The catch
As you can expect, this initial version of exchange account support is limited. There is no support for Oauth Dynamic client registration yet, which mainly affects accounts outside Microsoft 365 and exchanges online. You can still use regular password-based certification, but that option is disabled for better security in many servers.
Mosila is also fully focusing on email support, with support for the calendar and address book synchronization “in the latter”. Some non-matuable email features are also being pushed to release later, such as attachment removal/detection, retention policies and client-side messages filters.
Angry, this initial exchange support can still be a stop-gap solution. Mosila Exchange is using web services (EWS), which are a designation technology to work for accounts Microsoft will close on 1 October 2026 In favor of the new graph API. One Comment The main bug thread stated, “Currently, EWS is our best way to enable support for both online and on-reprimage installations. Graph API has been considered and can be considered again in the future, but it currently provides narrow support compared to EWS and there is some lack of efficiency for desktop applications. For, it is still valuable, it is still for value, it is still for value.
Even though the initial exchange account support would be limited, a lot of work was taken to reach there, and even the core features would be a welcome for the email client. There is no timeline yet when the stable version of the Thunderbird will be enabled.
Source: Thunderbird
