Thunderbird just gave an update about the company’s previously announced new services, including Thundermail, Appointment, and Send. These new services are supposed to offer scheduling, file sharing, and email hosting, but they still need more time in the oven.
The company is stillmaking progress on Thundermail, their new email service. It’s going to support IMAP, SMTP, and JMAP right out of the box, which should make it compatible with the Thunderbird app and other email clients. If you have your own domain, you’ll be able to host it with the service, or you may just get a new email with a @thundermail.com or @tb.pro domain.
The servers for Thundermail will be located in Germany, to begin with, and then more countries will follow later. Thunderbird said this new email service is part of its bigger goal to let users keep their entire email experience within one app.
On the other hand, the company is also working on a scheduling tool called Appointment, which will be integrated into the Thunderbird app through the compose window. This will let users insert scheduling links without ever leaving the email workflow. It is supposed to be easy for both organizations and individuals to self-host and adapt the tool to their own needs.
The company also said that it plans to make the tool support multiple meeting types, such as Zoom calls, phone meetings, or in-person coffee chats, with each having its own settings and scheduling rules. One of the most requested features for this tool is group scheduling, which would let multiple team members offer shared availability through one link. Thunderbird is working on this with the community and is participating in discussions about open standards like VPOLL to help move things forward.
Another part of the Thunderbird Pro ecosystem is Send, a secure, end-to-end encrypted file-sharing tool. This tool will let users send large files without needing to use other platforms like Google Drive or OneDrive. Pro users will get 500 GB of storage to start, with no individual file size limit, only limited by their total quota. The company plans to add support for chunked uploads and encryption to ensure reliability and data protection.
Send will be delivered as a system add-on, which will let the team push updates faster and avoid locking new capabilities behind major Thunderbird release cycles. As always, all the new Thunderbird Pro tools are open source and self-hostable.
A cool part of the update is that Thunderbird also mentioned it is looking into other Pro features, like markdown-based Notes functionality. The company also said that a fourth, previously announced service called Assist, which would add AI features, is still in the research and development phase and will not be part of the initial lineup. The company is preparing a public roadmap for desktop, mobile, and Pro services to improve transparency and invite community collaboration.
Don’t worry, though, the company made it clear that adding these new subscription services will not change the features, stability, or functionality that users are used to in the free Thunderbird desktop and mobile applications. Thunderbird needs to charge a fee because these new services come with real costs, such as storage and bandwidth, which cost money for the company, so this will offset their cost.
