The project’s last hire in December 2017 has been Ryan Sipes (the guy posting this) as Community Manager. Most recently Tom has been migrating the Thunderbird build system from Buildbot to TaskCluster to future-proof this aspect of the project. He also helps out when diagnosing test and other miscellaneous failures. He makes sure that we can always build Daily, beta and ESR in en-US English and all localisations. In June 2017 Tom Prince joined the project as a build and release engineer. Soon Thunderbird add-ons will transition to Thunderbird’s own add-ons site. There are many: *), the ISPDB, websites for telemetry, updates and release notes. He administers all the websites used by the project. He’s been working on transitioning the project from using Mozilla infrastructure to procuring its own. Andrei is the project’s infrastructure engineer. In March 2017 Andrei Hajdukewycz joined the project. As a Thunderbird and Mailnews peer he reviews the work of others and is part of the Engineering Steering Committee which is in charge of the code base. Jörg manages all code for releases (beta and ESR) and monitors regressions as reported at BMO.

As the continuous integration engineer, he guarantees that Thunderbird Daily is always in sync with Mozilla core changes to keep Daily in a working order. Since Jörg moved from being a volunteer to being a contractor, his focus has changed from chasing his favourite pet-hate bugs to taking on responsibility for the product. Since November 2016 the Thunderbird project has contracted the services of long-time Thunderbird volunteer contributor Jörg Knobloch. You can download the current Thunderbird beta here. Thunderbird 57 is now following Mozilla’s Photon design, and there is also a new theme available based on the design by the Monterail team. There has been some discussion about the modernisation of Thunderbird’s user interface. explains what needs to be done, and Thunderbird developers are happy to lend a hand to add-on authors. With a few usually simple changes most add-ons can be made to work in Thunderbird 58 beta. The Thunderbird technical leadership is working closely with add-on authors who face the challenge of updating their add-ons to work with the Mozilla interface changes.

While Thunderbird 58 is equally stable and offers further cutting-edge improvements to Thunderbird users, the user community is starting to feel the impact of Mozilla platform changes which are phasing out so-called legacy add-ons. Thunderbird 57 beta was also very successful.

Mozilla firefox esr 52.5.0