After a long wait, Debian developer Christoph Goehre was proud to announce a couple of days ago that the Mozilla Thunderbird email and news client officially landed in the repositories of Debian GNU/Linux, de-branding Icedove.

A year ago, we told you that, after ten long years, the Debian Project finally found a way to switch their rebranded Iceweasel web browser back to Mozilla Firefox, both the ESR (Extended Support Release) and normal versions, but one question remained: what about the Mozilla Thunderbird email, news, and calendar client?

Well, that question has an official answer today, as the Mozilla Thunderbird packages appear to have landed in the Debian repositories as a replacement for Icedove, the rebranded version that Debian Project was forced to use for more than ten years due to trademark issues.

"Thunderbird is back in Debian! We also renamed other related packages to use official names, e.g. iceowl-extension -> lightning. For now, we need testers to catch existing issues and things we haven't seen until now," said Christoph Goehre in the mailing list announcement.

Here's how to migrate your Icedove profiles to Thunderbird

With the exception of the logos, Icedove is identical to Thunderbird. Icedove is storing your user profile and other configuration files in your Home directory under the hidden .icedove folder. If you don't want to use the application and migrate to Mozilla Thunderbird, you should know that there's an automated script to help you with the transition.

Once you install the Thunderbird packages, you need to fire up the application so it can create its own hidden folder, which will also be located on your Home directory, but named .thunderbird. A wrapper script called /usr/bin/thunderbird should automatically copy your Icedove profile to Thunderbird, fix all Icedove-related entries to Thunderbird, and move Icedove's configuration files from /etc/icedove/pref to /etc/thunderbird/pref.

However, some things might not go as well for all users, so the Debian developers are asking the community to test if the mime type associations are correct after the migration from Icedove to Mozilla Thunderbird, if the migration works as expected in all desktop environments, as well as if there's any other issue that you might encounter after upgrading your email client to Thunderbird.

If you've been waiting to use Mozilla Thunderbird on Debian GNU/Linux, legally speaking, now you can. However, before installing the application, please make sure you have a recent backup of your ~/.icedove folder and the ~/.config/mimeapps.list configuration file. Don't forget to spread the word to your friends and report any bugs you discover with the migration to the Debian developers. Have fun using Thunderbird!