Thunderbird:Exchange

Warning: Exchange support in Thunderbird is still under development i.e. pre-beta! For thrill seekers only i.e. folks who can backup and restore their Thunderbird data (email, contacts, etc) should there be issues with early support of Exchange. We strongly recommend using a test email account and not a production account.

Our initial implementation of Exchange is currently limited to mail - account setup, and writing, receiving and reading email.

For advanced users who want to help test you will want to use Daily or Beta builds.

How to enable Exchange on Daily builds (preferred)

• No action required! Exchange mail support is enabled by default starting with the July 11, 2024 build of version 130.
• Add an Exchange account using the usual Thunderbird process, and selecting the "Exchange Web Services" option in account autoconfig. (manual configuration is not yet supported)

Download from https://www.thunderbird.net/download/daily/

How to enable Exchange on Beta builds

We prefer you test on Daily, because it gets patches daily. Patches on Beta may be delayed 2-3 weeks.

To enable it, please follow these instructions:

• Click ≡ > Settings > General
• Scroll down to the bottom and click Config Editor....
• The Advanced Preferences tab will open. Search for the string *experimental.mail.ews.enabled*
• Click the Toggle icon, , on the right until True is displayed.
• Restart Thunderbird.
• Add an Exchange account using the usual Thunderbird process, and selecting the "Exchange Web Services" option in account autoconfig. (manual configuration is not yet supported)

Download from https://www.thunderbird.net/download/beta/

How to stay informed

As mentioned, Exchange is in early stages and is evolving. To stay informed about progress you might watch

• The Exchange meta bug 1847846
• The exchange tag https://blog.thunderbird.net/exchange/ of the Thunderbird Blog. You can also read in Thunderbird by subscribing to the RSS feed https://blog.thunderbird.net/feed/.
• The issues venues mentioned below

How to report and discuss issues

While we definitely welcome your testing and feedback, please keep in mind this feature is currently experimental, and you may run into unexpected behaviour or errors.

Only email for exchange is available and being discussed at this time. To report a problem, please see and comment in the beta topic, see and comment in the Daily topicbox, or file a bug report.

Supported features

Support for Exchange in Thunderbird is still under active development, as such not all email-related features are available yet.

The following features are currently available for testing on both Beta and Daily builds:

• Creating an account using account autoconfig (manual configuration is not yet supported)
• Displaying the list of folders for an account
• Displaying the list of messages in a selected folder
• Displaying the content of messages
  • Note: showing remote content in messages is not supported yet.
• Sending messages
  • Note: Some features from the message composer, such as saving as draft, or saving a message to the Sent folder after sending, are not supported yet, and will result in errors while performing these operations.
    • This does not impact the ability to send messages, although it does mean sent messages will not be saved to the Sent folder.

In addition, the following features are currently available for testing on Daily builds only:

• Copying messages from an EWS-backed folder to a non-EWS-backed folder
• Saving as draft
  • Note: De-duplicating multiple drafts of the same message is not supported yet. As a result, this will create multiple messages in the Drafts folder.
• Saving to the Sent folder after sending