The reports of Thunderbird's death have been greatly exaggerated.

About Thunderbird Releases

Thunderbird Project version numbers generally match up to Mozilla Firefox ESR and beta versions. Thunderbird releases versions between ESRs only as betas (for example 79-89 are betas only). Future ESR releases of Thunderbird upcoming are (probably) 90, 102, etc.

Thunderbird roughly tracks the ESR release schedule of Firefox. This means that once a year in July or August, a new major release of Thunderbird is ready, and every 4 weeks a new beta version.

Release Drivers

The active team that is primarily responsible for Thunderbird releases is:

  • Corey Bryant (:coreycb, Release Manager)
  • Wayne Mery (:wsmwk, Release Manager Emeritus)
  • Rob Lemley (:rjl, Release Engineer)
  • Daniel Darnell (:dandarnell, Release Engineer)

The Thunderbird drivers list consists of the active team, those involved in producing Thunderbird releases, and appropriate advisers. At the team's discretion, it also contains third parties who are responsible for producing distributed builds of Thunderbird, primarily Linux distributions, so that they are advised as to build and release progress, timing and issues.

Notes about Monthly Releases

Some notes about monthly releases.