Thunderbird sync feature has been delayed and won’t be released until early 2024

Thunderbird Sync development is delayed. Mozilla says that there are technical problems that will mean that it will take at least until early next year before the tool to synchronize user data is available.

Thunderbird maker Mozilla initially wanted to release Thunderbird Sync along with the Supernova UI tweak that came with Thunderbird 115. That didn’t work and Sync will be delayed a lot, writes Mozilla now. The company says it was ‘too ambitious’ when it drew up its roadmap.

Thunderbird Sync had “some technical hurdles,” Mozilla said, without elaborating. The company says it now has a basic interface, but Mozilla does not have a site reliability engineer available to set up its own backend infrastructure. Moreover, Mozilla says, Sync must be extra secure and reliable. Finally, the feature would have to be tested by users for at least ‘months’ before it can be rolled out to users.

It will take a long time before that happens. The company no longer wants to give a concrete release date, but aims to include Sync in the next Extended Support Release for Thunderbird. That is not expected until early 2024. The company first needs ‘a server and good backend infrastructure’. As soon as this is available, a beta test will follow.

Thunderbird Sync is a synchronization tool that Mozilla announced in January. Sync allows users to synchronize their accounts, address books and settings between different devices. Thunderbird Sync is based on Firefox Sync in the browser of the same name. Although the tool uses the same code, Thunderbird Sync will have its own infrastructure and will be separate from Firefox, according to the developers. An experimental build was previously available, but it has now been removed from the beta build of the email client.