Thunderbird’s next milestone release will support Firefox Sync | #firefox | #chrome | #microsoftedge | #hacking | #aihp

Thunderbird 114, the next major version of the open source email client, will support Firefox Sync. Thunderbird, which shares a codebase with Mozilla’s Firefox web browser, will get support for synchronizing data between different instances of the email program.

Syncing will focus on data that is not synced already; this may include syncing address books, filters, Thunderbird preferences, templates and other data.

Thunderbird 102, the last milestone release, is still only available as a direct download and not an in-client upgrade. The development team released three point releases so far, which address issues in the new release.

Thunderbird 114: syncing support

Thunderbird 114 will be released next year, but work has already begun on adding important, and much requested, features to the email client. A much requested feature is data synchronization, and that is what Thunderbird will be getting in the upcoming release.

The team noted on Twitter:

We are thrilled to share that we’ve already reached an important development milestone for Thunderbird 114:
@Firefox Sync is up and running! ?

Email, Calendar, and Contact syncing works without issue during internal testing.

You’ll never lose your Thunderbird profile again.

While emails may get synced already between clients, courtesy of how things are set up in Thunderbird and thanks to how email servers operate, other data may not be synced at this point.

The main idea behind introducing synchronization in Thunderbird is to improve setting up new Thunderbird installations and to make sure that cross-device Thunderbird installations use the same configuration and other data.

Imagine adding a user to a local address book in Thunderbird. Without Sync, you’d have to add the contact in every Thunderbird installation on the same device or other devices. Or take a newly created template, a new filtering rule, or modifications to Thunderbird settings. All of these are not synced at the moment, which means that users have to make the changes in every instance of Thunderbird they run.

With Sync in place, Thunderbird users have all changes synced across all their installations. New installs will pick up the settings automatically as well, provided that Sync is configured.

The team revealed already that some data will also be synced between desktop installations of the Thunderbird email client and Thunderbird for Android, which currently is still called K-9 Mail.

Closing words

Synchronization support is another milestone feature for Thunderbird. Users who install Thunderbird regularly on new devices or use it on more than one device will benefit from integrated data synchronization. Those users who don’t require sync can simply ignore it, similarly to how Firefox Sync can be ignored in Mozilla’s browser.

Now You: which features would you like to see in Thunderbird?

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