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FOSDEM PWA

A short story of supporting Microsoft Exchange in Thunderbird

K.4.201 | Day 1 | 12:00 - 12:15 | Speakers: Brendan Abolivier

A short story of supporting Microsoft Exchange in Thunderbird
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Notes

Abstract

In 2025, Thunderbird did something it hasn't done in over 20 years, since before even its first stable release in 2004: it grew built-in support for a new email platform. This new platform is Microsoft Exchange, the backbone of some of Microsoft's biggest communications and productivity tools.

This talk will briefly go over the step we took to try to define how to support new platforms and protocols in an old code base, and the challenges we encountered as we worked our way towards full email support for Exchange in Thunderbird.

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Speakers

Brendan Abolivier

I've been involved with open-source development for most of my career, starting at CozyCloud where I contributed TOTP 2FA and helped improve the SaaS infrastructure. I worked at Element for several years, where I helped grow the Matrix backend ecosystem with features such as message retention policies and the Synapse module API.

I've been working at Mozilla for a few years, as part of the team in charge of the desktop version of Thunderbird. In the past couple of years, I've lead the work to support Microsoft Exchange in Thunderbird, which is the first new protocol/platform to be supported in over 20 years, and paves the way for more to be added in the future.

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