For some individuals, offline electronic mail continues to be the best way to go. Be it as a consequence of behavior, distrust of cloud providers, or smart prudence about backups, downloading electronic mail to a consumer nonetheless components massive of their routine. Mozilla Thunderbird is a key a part of such setups because of its hefty set of options and zero-cost price ticket. But Thunderbird has lengthy been criticized for its outdated interface, and never with out trigger—it nonetheless appears to be like prefer it’s caught in 2003.

That will lastly change in July, with the upcoming launch of model 115. As detailed in a Thunderbird blog post, this 12 months’s replace of the consumer will sport a “simple and clean” person interface friendlier to new adopters. Customization choices can even be obtainable, permitting the consumer to retain a well-known vibe for long-time customers. (Though given the repeated references the crew makes within the weblog publish to the questions they’ve obtained in regards to the UI, most Thunderbird veterans will welcome the refreshed look.)

In addition to revamping the software program’s person interface and expertise, the Thunderbird crew additionally plans to overtake its code to make it leaner, rewrite previous code, and in any other case clear up and modernize the code base. And, like Firefox, Thunderbird will transfer to month-to-month launch schedules.

You can learn extra in regards to the builders’ causes for rebuilding Thunderbird (and why it’s taken so lengthy) in the blog post, which supplies a large overview of the e-mail consumer’s lengthy historical past—together with seminal moments that affected the software program’s route, just like the 2012 transfer to community-driven improvement. But the wanting it’s, long-time Thunderbird followers are lastly getting what they requested for.