[HN Gopher] Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email sup...
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Thunderbird adds native Microsoft Exchange email support
Author : babolivier
Score : 286 points
Date : 2025-11-19 11:45 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.thunderbird.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.thunderbird.net)
| ivanbakel wrote:
| 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.
| seethishat wrote:
| That would be Active Sync:
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/clients/exchange-...
|
| Not sure how Mozilla went about the implementation, but I do
| agree it would be a concern to verify before using.
|
| You can perform the following Exchange ActiveSync tasks:
| Enable and disable Exchange ActiveSync for users
| Set policies such as minimum password length, device locking,
| and maximum failed password attempts Initiate a
| remote wipe to clear all data from a lost or stolen mobile
| phone Run a variety of reports for viewing or
| exporting into a variety of formats Control which
| types of mobile devices can synchronize with your organization
| through device access rules
| rkagerer wrote:
| Some clients perform some of those operations in a sandbox.
| Eg. Nine for Android let's you choose when you set up an
| account whether a remote wipe command should just wipe that
| account's local mailbox, or your whole device.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| ActiveSync will forever be reserved for the technology I used
| to sync email and calendar on my HP Jornada 430 running
| Windows CE - just like James Bond did!
| graemep wrote:
| Do you mean recall? https://support.microsoft.com/en-
| us/office/recall-an-outlook...
|
| That only works within an organisation, right?
|
| Otherwise you just get an email. I got one recently.
| ivanbakel wrote:
| No, Exchange ActiveSync (as the other commenter correctly
| identified it) really allows an admin to wipe your device -
| ostensibly of mail, but often of all other data as well.[0]
|
| If your Outlook server disables IMAP & POP3, then the
| ActiveSync protocol is AFAIK the only way to get in-app
| emails on your phone. Admins do this so that they can
| forcibly wipe the device if they "need" to.
|
| 0: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/exchange/clients/exchange-...
| graemep wrote:
| I was not sure which you meant.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Historical note: There was also MAPI for a long time (and I
| believe MAPI over HTTP/S)
| trympet wrote:
| Still is
| bnchrch wrote:
| 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.
| briffle wrote:
| 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.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Eudora was nice, but it wasn't available for Linux/BSD, and
| it wasn't open source.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| 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)#Hi
| atus_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_(emai
| l_client)#Under_He...
| kstrauser wrote:
| Eventually, and I was glad to see it!, but way too late
| for it to matter much. I would've used Eudora when it was
| originally offered. Since I couldn't, I got comfortable
| with Thunderbird. And when my friends who used Eudora had
| to migrate off of it, I set them up with Thunderbird,
| too.
| asveikau wrote:
| The time period under discussion ("before Thunderbird",
| and the heyday of Outlook lock-in, and I would also add
| before gmail) is well before 2018.
|
| I used mutt at the time too, but I don't think it's in
| the same category as the graphical clients. For a while
| Gnome's evolution was also big in free OS circles.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Eudora was practically a CULT. I worked for one of their
| users who straight refused to use anything else, and one of
| my ongoing jobs as an admin was trying to get Exchange to
| play nice with it. It was maddening.
|
| I fired it up several times for testing purposes, I don't
| get the hype, but man, for some people it was just the best
| damn software ever made.
| bitwize wrote:
| It did its thing--internet email--really well. It was
| aimed squarely at the user with like a POP account, and
| it had a clean UI and plenty of features. For the time
| and use case, it was a fantastic client.
|
| Outhouse tried to be too many things at once. Email
| client with HTML/rich text features that made it leave
| Microsoft crufties including mso: tags and the infamous J
| smiley all over your emails, contact manager, calendar.
| It was heavyweight, slow, and not quite there in terms of
| UI. But if you're an MBA type and you're committed to
| MSFT, or you're looking for a turnkey solution and it's
| this or Lotus Notes, Outhouse and Exchange sound like a
| win.
| rzzzt wrote:
| I've seen "The Bat!" pop up frequently in computer
| magazine CDs as well, not sure how widely it was used
| though.
| yawniek wrote:
| The Bat! was absolutely the best email client. ever. way
| ahead of eudora. it was a massive step back when i
| switched to my first macbook in 2006 (the black one!) and
| started to use Thunderbird. That said Thunderbird is
| fantastic now and great to see it get native Exchange
| support!
| mmooss wrote:
| What is it like to use The Bat?
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| I used Pegasus Mail back when I was on windows. I then used
| elm and later pine for many years until moving to webmail
| entirely.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| Pegasus is still around, and still receiving updates.
|
| https://www.pmail.com/v49x.htm
| shevy-java wrote:
| Personally I do not use thunderbird, but one elderly relative
| requires thunderbird. So I am all in favour of thunderbird
| getting better. Not everyone is able to use emails in a much
| simpler way. I actually, back when I was using gmail still, had
| some +4000 unread messages. I simply can not keep up with
| regular mail.
| godelski wrote:
| 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
| <bnchrch123@utahit.net>` 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".
| KPGv2 wrote:
| > I'm incredibly impressed at how feature deficit email is .
| . . It's just a lot of little things that add up. Like why is
| tagging and sorting so hard?
|
| If you read the specifications for the various email
| protocols, you'll soon discover that email, at the protocol
| level, is at its most feature-rich akin to flat files stored
| in a hierarchy of folders.
|
| Tags, sorting, etc. are all the responsibility of clients.
| (Which is as it should be, since sorting is part of viewing
| data, not storing or sending it. Regarding tags, I suppose
| you could roll out a new email protocol, but SMTP is nothing
| more than a few text commands to send and receive bytes, and
| any tagging would be done by the client alone or the server
| alone as a value-add. The feature itself could not be
| implemented via, for example, the SMTP spec.
|
| When you send an email via SMTP, you send the server "MAIL
| FROM" plus sender's address, RCPT TO plus destination, DATA
| and the contents of the email, and then a dot to represent
| the end of the email.
|
| The email is then immutable. The receiver would be the one
| who wants to tag an email, and since the email is immutable,
| there's nothing you can do. And even if the sender wants to
| tag it, there's no command. I suppose in theory you could
| just add the tags to the email body, but every recipient not
| using your "improved" email format would just see that in the
| body of the email
| godelski wrote:
| Fair, but I think you missed the forest for the trees.
| You're right that I could be more clear but you also seem
| to understand that in context I'm discussing clients.
|
| Nothing I've discussed has to do with protocol and
| everything has to do with clients, which is also in the
| context of what Thunderbird is. So I'm not sure why you're
| bringing up protocols as no one was discussing it until you
| brought it up.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| In this context, the relevant protocol is IMAP, not SMTP.
| And IMAP very much has tagging and filtering, which is what
| Thunderbird exposes here. Heck, IMAP even has notes, you
| can attach to mails, so you could discuss mail drafts using
| plain IMAP, but no client I know exposes this.
| fpauser wrote:
| > I'm incredibly impressed at how feature deficit email is .
| . .
|
| It's getting better soon. Have a look at the jmap standard
| and stalwart, a high performant jmap server implementation in
| rust. This is the future!
| einpoklum wrote:
| > the world of desktop mail clients
|
| We live in that world still.
|
| > but basically during the height of MSFT dominance there was
| only one real mail client: Outlook.
|
| On Windows, you had:
|
| * Netscape Suite (later Seamonkey)
|
| * Eudora
|
| * Pegasus
|
| and (edit:) two of those still exist. Plus, Outlook cost money
| (unless you used Outlook Express), while Netscape was gratis,
| and on Linux and most Unix variants, Outlook has never even
| existed. On Linux specifically there's Evolution and there's
| KMail.
|
| And I'm sure I'm forgeting a few others.
|
| > Then Thunderbird arrived on the scene
|
| It was a development of the MailNews component of Netscape, to
| use the same XUL-based platform as Firefox. So, an evolution,
| not a revolution.
|
| (edit:) Oh, look what I found!
|
| https://missive.github.io/email-apps-timeline/
|
| uncheck 'Web', iOS and Android.
| drummojg wrote:
| I loved Pegasus. Specifically because to move it to another
| machine you just had to copy the PMAIL folder and make a
| shortcut. No registry awareness, no dependencies.
| timbit42 wrote:
| Thunderbird and Firefox are almost as easy. Just install
| the app on the new system and copy the data folder over.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| Opera had an amazing built-in NNTP and email client. I think it
| was my first experience with views instead of folders, so my
| emails could appear in multiple "folders" (I think now we call
| them "smart folders").
|
| Absolutely revelatory at the time.
| zipy124 wrote:
| Guess this means I can cancel all my OWL subscriptions.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Fantastic news! I've been hoping for Exchange support for a long
| while.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| 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.
| stackskipton wrote:
| 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.
| fsiefken wrote:
| I was responsible for third party e-mail clients able to
| connect to Exchange, it was decided Thunderbird was allowed and
| support was implemented. It can be done if people are aware of
| the needs, can implement it securely and can evaluate risks.
| jchw wrote:
| 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.
| sdk- wrote:
| _We implemented this in the Daily build of the desktop app last
| year, using a staging environment for Firefox Sync. But Firefox
| Sync is called Firefox Sync because it's built for Firefox.
| Thunderbird profiles, in comparison, have a lot more data
| points. This meant we had to build something completely
| different. As we started to spin up Thunderbird Pro, we decided
| it made more sense to have a Thunderbird account that would
| manage everything, including Sync. Unfortunately, this meant a
| lot of delays. So Sync is still on our radar, and we hope to
| have it next year, barring further complications._ Source:
| https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/09/state-of-the-thunder-mo...
|
| In other words, it was more work to adapt Firefox Sync than
| they thought at the beginning. It's still actively developed so
| finger crossed it's coming soon.
| shevy-java wrote:
| Is this good?
|
| 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?
| cachius wrote:
| This is awesome!
|
| For one to have an open-source client to Exchange online and
| on-premise with broad support for more than plain email
| management. And also for other servers like Kerio Connect and
| grommunio.
|
| Current limitations: Search & filtering
| Filter actions requiring full body content are not yet
| supported. Accounts hosted on Microsoft 365
| Domains requiring custom OAuth2 application and tenant IDs will
| be supported in the future. Accounts hosted on-
| premise Password-based NTLM authentication and OAuth2 for
| on-premise servers are on the roadmap. Calendar
| support Not yet implemented - calendar syncing is on the
| roadmap. Address book / contacts support Not
| yet implemented - address book support is on the roadmap.
| Microsoft Graph support Not yet implemented - Microsoft
| Graph integration will be added in the future.
| MrZander wrote:
| Awesome news, can't wait until they implement calendar support
| and I can get rid of Outlook once and for all.
| jurakovic wrote:
| Yeah, me too
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| I have a few Exchange inboxes and once MS forces the "New
| Outlook" design, without allowing the legacy option anymore, im
| gone!
| stackskipton wrote:
| 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.
| trympet wrote:
| How do you know Thunderbird is using EWS, not MAPI? MAPI is not
| going away any time soon.
| sjoerger wrote:
| Read the docs?
| https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/11/thunderbird-adds-
| native...
| trympet wrote:
| Yikes, thanks. Enjoy this feature while it lasts, I guess.
| EWS is getting nuked.
| stackskipton wrote:
| Read the article?
| drannex wrote:
| > 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.
| stackskipton wrote:
| Microsoft swears it's happening: https://techcommunity.micros
| oft.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.
| godelski wrote:
| > Microsoft swears it's happening
|
| And when has that ever meant it comes without delay?
| stackskipton wrote:
| Up to you if you believe Microsoft or not. I don't really
| care, I haven't messed with 365 outside being end user in
| years.
| dijit wrote:
| to be fair with you, EWS has been deprecated since I
| _think_ 2014, so we 're already in the "pushed" window.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| As an on-prem admin, I am blown away that there's 30-40
| changes to 365 monthly, often including at least two or
| three feature deprecations. It seems like building a
| building on top of quicksand.
| amaccuish wrote:
| As you imply though, it remains for on-premise. They're working
| on msgraph as well luckily.
| stackskipton wrote:
| 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.
| aorth wrote:
| 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...
| bangaladore wrote:
| Someone might be wondering why someone might have different
| URLs. One example is anyone under sovereign clouds (eg. GCC,
| GCC-High) which use different URLs (and TLDs) across the
| board (eg outlook.office365.us)
| 5- wrote:
| great to see thunderbird joining evolution in supporting ews
| among free software email clients.
|
| evolution has been keeping me sane whenever i needed to use ews
| for years.
| Onavo wrote:
| Does it implement the famous "sweep" feature from Outlook?
| jrm4 wrote:
| 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?
| vorprokuror wrote:
| 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
| InMice wrote:
| Try Thunderbird
| benbucksch wrote:
| (OFFTOPIC!)
|
| I would not recommend that with any email clients. Most are
| built with the assumption that you have around 3 to 8 accounts.
| UI, speed, and configuration may become an issue. Esp. the
| unified inbox in Thunderbird was slow in my personal use.
|
| What are these mailboxes? Are they changing a lot? That's also
| a factor to decide in your setup.
|
| If you have hundreds of mailboxes, and you're posting on HN
| here, chances are you are technically competent. I would
| recommend a local IMAP server like Dovecot or Stalwart
| installed as Docker, and then fetchmail or similar to pull
| (copy) all the mail into a single inbox. And then your email
| client uses only that one account which has all emails.
| richx wrote:
| 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 :-)
| imp0cat wrote:
| Since last year, TB has native caldav/carddav support.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| I've never seen a piece of software that managed to implement
| all of the iCalendar specification, which to me seemed like a
| data model for a good productivity app that's just never
| manifested. iCalendar (RFC 2445 from 1998) outlined not only
| events but todo and a journal component for memorializing
| meetings. Outlook seems to ignore VTODO entries in iCalendar
| completely, and VJOURNAL support is deprecated.
| pr3dr49 wrote:
| Sweet memories of several email clients mentioned here.
|
| 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?
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| This is wonderful. Thank you Thunderbird!
| spacechild1 wrote:
| Nice! I have been paying for ExQuilla because my university's IT
| department disabled IMAP and only supports Exchange...
| mstngl wrote:
| 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.
|
| Owl for Thunderbird https://reviewers.addons.thunderbird.net/en-
| US/thunderbird/a...
| vzaliva wrote:
| 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.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I barely ever open outlook at work. In fact I only open it on
| the webmail when someone asks me on teams if I have read their
| email.
|
| Much quieter that way as you only get to hear about the
| important stuff and can ignore the rest of the noise.
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