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Thunderbird email support won't be extended for older Windows and Mac systems

Users of the open source email client Thunderbird who still run it on old versions of Windows or Mac will no longer get updates for the program from next month onward.

The team behind the email client announced that support will end as scheduled. This means that this month's Thunderbird 115.15.0 release was the last major release for those platforms.

Here are the details:

  • This affects Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and macOS 10.14 or earlier.
  • Thunderbird 115.15 is the last major release for the listed operating systems.
  • Thunderbird ESR 128 won't run on the systems anymore.

Thunderbird 128, the latest version of the client, is only compatible with Windows 10 and 11, macOS 10.15 and higher, and Linux.

Mozilla extends Firefox support, Thunderbird does not

Mozilla faced the very same issue for its Firefox web browser, but it decided to extend support. Thunderbird uses Firefox code, which explains why the makers of both products had to find an answer for the same question.

Mozilla decided to extend support. Firefox users who still use one of the listed operating systems will receive support for another six months at the very least.

The Thunderbird team offers three reasons for its decision to end support:

  1. Usage is lower. About 11 percent of Firefox users use Windows 7 or Windows 8 / 8.1. For Thunderbird, the number is 6 percent.
  2. The Thunderbird team has fewer resources available and extending support would take away resources needed elsewhere.
  3. Microsoft ended support for these operating systems.

Clearly, Thunderbird's project team is much smaller than the Firefox development team. That is a valid argument. Six percent seems like a large number nevertheless. While there are no public usage numbers for Thunderbird, even a low figure such as 10 million users would mean that 600,000 are affected by the decision.

Thunderbird will continue to run after support ends, but the email client won't receive updates anymore. This includes security updates. There is also the chance that issues and bugs may cause certain features of the client to stop working.

This may not happen overnight, but since technology moves on, it seems likely that some features will stop working in the future.

Thunderbird users who cannot switch systems at the time may be able to access the email accounts on the Web. As far as email clients are concerned that support Windows 7 or 8, there are few. Postbox supports Windows 8 only, while MailSpring appears compatible with Windows 7.

Do you know of other email clients? Let us know in the comments down below. (via)

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