Thunderbird 147 released with two new features and several bug fixes

Thunderbird, the free and open source personal information manager (though most people probably know it as an email client), has gotten a version bump to 147, bringing several bug fixes and two new features.

Starting with the new features, users who prefer a compact view now have an option to "Show Full Path" in the folder pane. Mozilla also changed how special folders are localized, restricting the translation to a specific set of names. To go along with this, the company added a new preference, mail.useLocalizedFolderNames, which lets you toggle this localization on or off if you are not a fan of the change.

Moving on to the bug fixes, the action for compacting multiple folders, which previously failed, now works as intended. You might also notice that unified archive subfolders no longer show incorrect names or empty message lists.

There was a bug reported in Thunderbird 128 where the "Open and Show" button for an OpenPGP-signed message attached as a .eml file did not work. Thankfully, Thunderbird 147 fixes this.

Other fixes include:

• Selected status and priority was not displayed in search widgets.
• Japanese locale users could not create message filters.
• The search for "Attachment" in the Settings menu did not find the "Files and Attachments" section.
• The Account Hub did not show an error message on failure when creating an OAuth2 EWS account.
• SMTP sending could hang when multiple messages were queued for sending.
• Calendar did not alert the user for connection issues.
• It was not possible to create tasks with a Start or Due date.

Mozilla has been working on a suite of services called "Thunderbird Pro" to challenge ecosystems from Google and Microsoft. A central part of this project is a new email service called Thundermail.

When it is ready, you'd be able to get your own email account with something like a "@thundermail.com" domain. Thunderbird Pro will also launch with "Appointment", a scheduling tool that lets people book meetings directly on your calendar, and "Send", an end-to-end encrypted file sharing service.

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Posted Wednesday 14 January 2026 at 12:02 pm AEST (my time).

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