Due to lots of news coming out of the Thunderbird project, I’ve decided to combine three different blog posts I was working on into one news update that gives people an idea of what has been happening in the Thunderbird community this month. Enjoy and comment to let me know if you like or dislike this kind of post!

Enigmail GSoC Student Selected

Great news! A student has been selected for the Enigmail/Thunderbird Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project. Enigmail, the OpenPGP privacy extension for Thunderbird, submitted its project to GSoC seeking a student to help update user interface elements and assist with other design work.

Thunderbird 60, Beta 4 Released

A new version of the Thunderbird 60 Beta is out, with version four beginning to roll out. Users of the Beta are testing what will ultimately be the next Extended Support Release (ESR), which acts as our stable release and is what most of our users see. There are a lot of changes between Thunderbird 52, that last ESR, and this release. Some of these changes include: An updated “Photon” UI (like that seen in Firefox), various updates to Thunder’s “Lightning” calendar, a new “Message from Template” command, and various others. You can find a full list here.

As with every Beta, but especially this one given it will become the new stable release, we hope that you will download it and give us feedback on your experience.

A New Thunderbird Council

A new Thunderbird Council was elected this month. This new council of seven members will serve for a year. The members of the new council are as follows:

Philipp Kewisch

Magnus Melin

Patrick Cloke

Wayne Mery

Philippe Lieser

Jorg Knobloch

Ryan Sipes

This blog will try to lay out the new council’s visions and priorities in future posts.