Thunderbird 78 will be ported to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS has been released for a while, and the developers of Ubuntu found that they were in a tricky position to deal with the popular open-source email client: Thunderbird 68 is no longer supported by upstream.

One aspect of Ubuntu most valued by users is stability, especially the LTS version. For this reason, Ubuntu LTS usually does not come with the latest version of the software. Initially, Ubuntu 20.04 was shipped with Thunderbird 68. However, because Mozilla no longer supports this version earlier, Thunderbird 68 will no longer be able to receive any security updates. And this thing became the source of the problem.

In the end, Ubuntu developers chose to port Thunderbird 78 to Ubuntu 20.04. This will bring users more features, better security, and better stability.

But at the same time, this will also cause confusion for some users, because not all Thunderbird extensions are available in the latest version. For example, if the new version of Thunderbird has native encryption, the Enigmail extension is not only redundant, but it will not be installed on the client at all. This means that users who are accustomed to Enigmail must now switch to Thunderbird’s built-in encryption technology. In addition, tinyjsd and jsunit packages will also stop working on Thunderbird 78.