I Want to Start Hacking

This page has some information on where to get information and how to get plugged into the Community. If you are ready to start hacking, head over to one of the following sections.

Contributing to Thunderbird

Get all the information you need to set up your development environment and get ready to hack on Thunderbird.

Add-on Development

If you'd like to learn to develop add-ons for Thunderbird, check out our add-on documentation with examples, tips and links to relevant resources.

Report Bugs and Request Features

​Bugzilla​

Thunderbird uses Mozilla's Bugzilla platform to report and track bugs. The site can also be used to generate enhancement bugs, which can be used for feature requests. If you want to become a contributor to Thunderbird, you will need an account on Bugzilla as you will submit patches through this platform.

​Profiling Thunderbird Performance​

Creating a performance profile can be useful for developers to find the causes of high CPU load or slowness in Thunderbird.

​Thundernest on GitHub​

If you want to contribute to the Thunderbird website, this documentation, or addons.thunderbird.net - you can find those repositories and their issue trackers on the Thundernest GitHub page. You'll need a GitHub account to contribute there.

Getting Plugged into the Community

We have a complete listing of the ways in which you can get involved with Thunderbird on our website. Below are some quick references from that page that you can use if you are looking to contribute to Thunderbird core right away.

Mailing Lists

If you want to participate in discussions about Thunderbird development, there are two main mailing lists you want to join.

1. ​TB-Planning: This mailing list is higher level topics like: the future of Thunderbird, potential features, and changes that you would like to see happen. It is also used to discuss a variety of broader issues around community and governance of the project.

2. ​Maildev: A moderated mailing list for discussing engineering plans for Thunderbird. It is a place where you can raise questions and ideas for core Thunderbird development.

3. ​Add-on Developers: A list for Thunderbird add-on developers and aspiring add-on developers to ask questions and share knowledge.

Chat

If you want to ask questions in real-time about how to hack on Thunderbird, you can join our development chat channel at https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#maildev:mozilla.org​