Right to Left languages support in Thunderbird

[YBLR]

Hello to Mozilla Community,

Current stable version (102.12.0) and NEW beta version (115.0b4) of Thunderbird, doesn't support Right to Left typing and alignment for Right to Left (RTL) languages. older versions had private extensions which mostly supported it.

Emails, words and characters written in RTL context are getting mixed up.

please consider to add this feature to Thunderbird.

Thanks

[Matnas]

It is pretty amazing that this is reported for such a long time, relevant for half a billion people around the world, fixed, supported and well documented in other Mozilla products like Firefox, patched in extensions like BiDi Mail UI (and breaks in every major update) and still nothing.
I hope it will be addressed soon. 

[MickeyCohen]

Situation is worse. 

I have been using the BIDI add on until Mozilla activated a policy of always in validating add ons not released for the latest Thunderbird release.

And since they release every 2-3 days the debeloper could not cope with this anymore.

So I switched to Betterbird that does not have this add-on killer poilicy.

I really have no explanation why a billion people with non left to right languges do not get builtin support!

Best,

Mickey

[Tsuri]

Praying to the God of Attention hoping that someone at Mozilla will notice this issue. And I shall do so aligning this text to the right, so you get the feeling of how all my emails look 🙂

[gilad-drori]

Bumping, this is still a much-needed feature supported by many email clients.

[gilad-drori]

Bumping. This is a still much-needed feature.

[Loqai]

I'm writing this out of genuine frustration. RTL (right-to-left) support isn't some fringe feature nobody needs — it's a basic requirement for hundreds of millions of people, and Thunderbird still can't get it right. Honestly, at this point, it's embarrassing. This request has been sitting open since 2023. Three years. Three. Years. And in all that time, it feels like nobody on the dev team has even glanced at it. How does something affecting this many users just sit there, ignored, for so long? It genuinely makes me wonder whether the people making decisions about Thunderbird's priorities have any awareness that RTL languages even exist.

Just to spell it out, because apparently it needs spelling out:

• Arabic
• Hebrew
• Persian (Farsi and Dari)
• Urdu
• Pashto
• Kurdish (especially Sorani)
• Sindhi
• Uyghur
• Punjabi (Shahmukhi script)
• Kashmiri
• Azerbaijani (Arabic script)
• Yiddish
• Syriac and modern Aramaic varieties
• Dhivehi (Maldivian)
• Rohingya
• N'Ko
• Mandaic

That's not a niche list. That's well over half a billion people who can't compose a properly formatted email without fighting the software. Every time I type a message, I'm stuck dealing with scrambled punctuation, numbers in the wrong place, and text direction that behaves like it was never tested with a single RTL sentence. It's not a small annoyance — it makes the product genuinely unpleasant to use for an enormous chunk of the world's population. And here's what really gets me: Microsoft Word and PowerPoint figured this out roughly 25 years ago. Twenty-five years. Software from the 1990s handles this better than Thunderbird does in 2026. That's not a dig, that's just a fact, and it's a pretty damning one for a project that's supposed to be a serious, modern alternative to proprietary email clients.

I get that Thunderbird runs on limited resources and volunteer effort, and I respect that. But "we're a small team" stops being a valid excuse after 3 years on a request this fundamental. At some point it stops looking like a resourcing issue and starts looking like a priorities issue — like RTL users simply aren't on the radar.

So I'm asking directly: what is actually going on with this request? Is it being worked on? Is it being ignored? Has anyone even discussed it internally? RTL users deserve an honest answer, not just a stale ticket collecting dust for years while the rest of the world moves on.

[Loqai]

No wonder Betterbird came into existence! The Thunderbird developers clearly don't listen to what people actually need and ask for. Even for the simplest things, like RTL writing capability, people have to wait for a decade!