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The Mozilla Thunderbird 91 open-source, free, and cross-platform email, news, calendar, and chat client is now available for download as a major update that brings numerous new features and improvements.
Thunderbird 91 comes a little over a year after the Thunderbird 78 series and brings a revamped account setup wizard with support for setting up signatures, encryption and CalDAV calendars, a new user interface for adding attachments, the ability to change the order of accounts in the UI, and the ability to redirect emails.
This new Thunderbird release also allow you to encrypt your emails to BCC recipients, though these will be exposed in the list of keys. New keyboard shortcuts are now available to access the To, CC and BCC fields of the compose window, and Thunderbird now allows showing of empty CC and BCC rows in the compose window.
The PDF.js viewer is now included by default and Thunderbird now operates in multi-process (e10s) mode by default. Moreover, there’s initial support for Matrix servers in the Chat component, and the Tasks component now supports undo and redo for event and task creation or deletion.
A new context menu has been implemented in the compose window to allow you to expand email list pills to the list of recipients, and two warning pop-ups were added to inform users when the public recipients of an email exceeds threshold, as well as when sending a reply to a non-existant email address.
The Calendar component received a lot of improvements, such as per-calendar and global notification settings, support for opening .ics calendar files with a double mouse click, auto-detection of remote calendars, the ability to filter and sort imported items in the Import dialog, and a new “Edit” action in the event context menu.
Furthermore, the Calendar now defaults to CalDAV calendars if they’re supported by the server, automatically opens the summary dialog when opening an existing event, automatically informs the host operating system that it knows how to handle webcal: URLs, and displays calendar and category colors in selection drop-downs.
Among other noteworthy changes, Thunderbird 91 adds support for the Latvian language, native support for Apple M1 devices, support for non-ASCII characters in recipient addresses, Quick Find support to the multi-message (thread summary) view, as well as support for pinning folder views to the Folder Pane.
It’s also now possible to open a saved email in the compose window for editing, and Thunderbird now automatically detects CardDAV address books on provided user information. Access to Outlook Contacts is supported as well in this release, but it’s not enabled by default because it may cause startup delays.
Thunderbird 91 also adds suggestions for replacements for discontinued or incompatible add-ons, improves support for GMail accounts by adding permissions to access calendars and address books without having to re-authorize, and overhauls the folder pane color scheme for better readability.
Last but not least, the Mozilla Thunderbird 91 release updates the enterprise policies and the printing dialog, defaults the IRC server for new chat accounts to Libera Chat, removes Movemail support and the WeTransfer FileLink provider, and moves the UI customization controls to the View menu.
It’s also worth noting the fact that the “Master Password” was renamed to “Primary Password,” the “Options” to “Preferences,” and the “Add-ons” to “Add-ons and Themes.” Of course, there are many other smaller changes and numerous bug fixes that you can study in the full release notes.
Thunderbird 91 is available as a direct download from here and NOT as an upgrade from the Thunderbird 78 series, a feature that will be implemented in future updates. However, Thunderbird 91 should land in the stable repositories of many popular GNU/Linux distributions in the coming weeks.
Last updated 3 years ago
