Textual words from them:
It’s our first step towards a more modern, more beautiful, and more customizable Thunderbird experience. We think you’re going to love it, and we are endlessly grateful for all of your support throughout the years 💙
Can it connect to Exchange without a paid plugin?
My work has IMAP shut off and we can only use MAPI. There’s a paid thunderbird plugin that adds MAPI support, which is likely what this person is hoping for natively 👍
Ahhhh fair enough, I didn’t realize MAPI was a paid plugin, that suuuuucks
EDIT: Reading up on this, it sounds like it doesn’t work because Microsoft doesn’t want it to work. MAPI is not an open standard like POP and IMAP. And they’re actually in the process of moving to EWS, which is also not an open standard. That fucking sucks!