MZLA Technologies Corporation has released Thunderbird 146, the latest monthly update for its famed open-source email client.
Changes this month may sound less flashy compared to last month, which saw Thunderbird 145 add Microsoft Exchange support (albeit with some caveats, carveouts and a couple of capabilities still be added).
Plus, work on readying Thunderbird Pro, the paid-for subscription-based webmail, appointment and file sending service excepted to cost upwards of $9/m, for a soft-launch continues. Those services are about to enter community testing.
What’s New in Thunderbird 146?
A new month, a new stable release
MZLA say logins are migrated to a more modern AES encryption standard in this update. Firefox went through the same transition a while back. As this is a backwards-incompatible change be aware that if your profile goes through migration it won’t work if you later downgrade.
Elsewhere, you can now set OpenPGP key servers via the UI through Thunderbird’s settings. This is part of the Thunderbird team’s ongoing effort to simplify keyserver handling, and answers a long-held request from users who wanted an easier way to do this.
Buttons to add new OpenPGP key servers in Thunderbird
Bug fixes and stability buffs see minor issues resolved in VCF file and vCard importing/opening; account column sometimes showing an incorrect account name; and ‘Tag’ section of the mail context menu listing non-relevant options.
The ‘recent destinations’ submenu was not sorting by time of modification, so now does; and ‘Delete’ is no longer missing from the right-click context menu when multiple IMAP folders are selected.
Thunderbird’s modern Account Hub sorts out an assortment of small snafus, such as (in)accuracy of e-mail sending success messages, failure when manually creating EWS accounts, and being able to create blank local address books.
Looping back to Exchange, the EWS folder properties “select this folder for offline use” option now does what it says it will do, namely making the folder and contents available to access when offline.
Finally, a fresh set of security vulnerabilities were patched.
Getting Thunderbird 146
Thunderbird is free, open-source software. You can download Thunderbird for Linux, Windows and macOS from the official website. These default to monthly stable releases, but ESR builds remain available for those who like less feature churn.
The Thunderbird snap available on Ubuntu tracks the ESR channel by default, not the stable monthly builds. Monthly builds are available in a separate channel, so if you want to switch to a faster stream, open then the terminal and run:
sudo snap refresh thunderbird --channel=monthly/stable
If you don’t have Thunderbird installed on Ubuntu, run:
sudo snap install thunderbird --channel=monthly/stable
You can also change channel using App Center, if using a GUI makes more sense for you. Just search for Thunderbird, view its store listing page and use the dropdown in the upper-right to select your preferred channel.
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