Mozilla Thunderbird

A free email and calendar client.

Thunderbird is an email client with built-in support for multiple accounts, OpenPGP encryption, calendar (via the integrated calendar component), feeds, and chat. It uses Gecko, the same rendering engine that powers Firefox, which gives it robust HTML email handling and a familiar Mozilla-style extension model.

The project was spun out of the original Mozilla suite in 2003, adopted then divested by Mozilla Corporation in 2012, and is now developed by MZLA Technologies, a wholly-owned Mozilla Foundation subsidiary funded primarily by donations. After a slower period in the 2010s, development has accelerated substantially since around 2020 with substantial UI modernisation and Rust-based architectural improvements.

Thunderbird is one of relatively few free, full-featured email clients available across Linux, macOS, and Windows. It is widely used by individuals who self-host mail, by organisations standardising on free software, and as the default mail client on many GNOME-based distributions. The mobile Thunderbird apps (based on the K-9 Mail acquisition) are the project's expansion into mobile in recent years.

Mozilla Thunderbird screenshot — Screenshot: Timur I. Davletshin and Thunderbird developers, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

License: MPL-2.0

Category: Office

Website: https://www.thunderbird.net/

Install

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install thunderbird
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install thunderbird
Arch:          sudo pacman -S thunderbird
macOS:         brew install --cask thunderbird

Authors

MZLA Technologies and Thunderbird contributors

PreviousMozilla Firefox Nextmpv