Mozilla Thunderbird is one of the best desktop email clients, but the Thunderbird team isn’t stopping there. Mozilla has now released a new productivity tool under the Thunderbird umbrella, intended to help you plan calls and meetings.
Mozilla has announced ‘Appointment,’ a new service under the Thunderbird umbrella. The blog post explains, “Appointment makes it simple to schedule meetings with anyone, from friends and family to colleagues and strangers. Escape the endless email threads trying to find a suitable meeting time across multiple time zones and organizations.”
There are many scheduling tools, some of which integrate with Zoom, Google Meet, or other meeting platforms to automatically create video call links. Appointment is intended to be a simpler alternative that is free, open source, and private. The code is already available on GitHub with instructions for setting it up as a Docker container. Appointment is only available as a web app right now, not a desktop or mobile application like Thunderbird.
Mozilla made it clear that this is only the start of a larger productivity suite based around Thunderbird. The company said, “In the future, we intend for Appointment to be part of a wider suite of helpful products enhancing the core Thunderbird experience. Our ambition is to provide you with not only a first-rate email application but a hub of productivity tools to make your days more efficient and stress-free.”
It’s great to see Mozilla working on more useful productivity software, but it remains to be seen if the services will stick around, or even be completed. The Thunderbird team announced plans last year to revive Firefox Send, a file sharing service that Mozilla shut down in 2020 after a series of layoffs and malware problems. That hasn’t materialized yet, and improvements to the main Thunderbird client are still going at a relatively slow pace, as Mozilla is busy rewriting much of the application’s decades-old codebase. The promised mobile email apps also aren’t ready yet, though the in-progress K-9 Mail build is available for Android devices.
Thunderbird Appointment is currently a closed beta test, and there’s a waitlist signup for new users. You can also download the code from GitHub and spin it up on your own home server or VPS.
Source: Thunderbird Blog
