Thunderbird, the desktop email client from Mozilla, is finally testing support for Microsoft Exchange accounts in the Daily and Beta channels. You can try it out now to help find bugs before it rolls out to all Thunderbird users.
Exchange account support has been a long time coming, after years of requests from the Thunderbird community and “a little over 1 and a half years of development effort.” This is primarily useful for work and school accounts that don’t allow IMAP synchronization or other options that Thunderbird already supports. There aren’t many modern email clients that support Exchange accounts, especially local email clients, so it’s great to see the Thunderbird developers finally get it working.
Mozilla has an instructions page for how to try out Exchange support. At the moment, it requires the Daily or Beta versions of Thunderbird, and selecting Exchange as an option when adding a new email account. The developers strongly recommend using a Daily build, since changes might take 2-3 weeks to roll out to the Beta channel, so you could be stuck with the same bug for longer than necessary.
Thunderbird developer Brendan Abolivier said in a forum post, “We started the initial exploration around supporting Exchange accounts in Thunderbird in the summer of 2023, almost two years ago. Since then, the team has been hard at work on this project, which, as the very first email protocol to be implemented in Thunderbird since its first stable release over 20 years ago, has been a complex and tedious one. […] We still have a long road ahead, but this is the first public milestone of a project that took a lot of time and effort, which I think is something we can all celebrate.”
The Catches
As you might expect, this early version of Exchange account support is limited. There’s no support for OAuth Dynamic Client Registration yet, which mainly impacts accounts outside of Microsoft 365 and Exchange Online. You can still use regular password-based authentication, but many servers have that option disabled for improved security.
Mozilla is also focusing entirely on email support right now, with support for calendar and address book synchronization coming “at a later stage.” Some non-critical email features are also being pushed off to a later release, such as attachment removal/detachment, retention policies, and client-side message filters.
Annoyingly, this initial Exchange support might still be a stop-gap solution. Mozilla is using Exchange Web Services (EWS) to get accounts working, which is a deprecated technology that Microsoft will shut down on October 1, 2026 in favor of the newer Graph API. One comment on the main bug thread said, “At present, EWS is our best way to enable support for both Exchange Online and on-premise installations. Graph API has been considered and may be considered again in future, but it currently provides narrower support than EWS and lacks some functionality for desktop applications. Even with the announcement that EWS support will be removed for Exchange Online, it’s still valuable in the short term for enabling access for a wide userbase and in the long term for supporting users using on-premise installations.”
Even though the initial Exchange account support will be limited, it took a lot of work to get there, and even the core features will be a welcome addition to the email client. There’s no timeline yet for when it will be enabled in the stable version of Thunderbird.
Source: Thunderbird
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