French military turns Thunderbird into Trustedbird

A while back we reported that certain branches of the French government were switching their desktop email clients to Thunderbird.

One of these branches who switched to Thunderbird was the French military. However, in order for Thunderbird to fit their particular requirements, quite a few modifications were required.

Thanks to the openness of Thunderbird, the French military were able to develop extensions to address some of their needs and modified the source code to address core changes. But they didn’t stop there. Instead of just keeping their changes to themselves, they open sourced them. Then, together with Mozilla they bundled the add-ons with a Thunderbird and created their own fork, named Trustedbird. Kudos to the French military!

So what add-ons are included in Trustedbird that makes it secure enough for the military? According to David Ascher, chief executive of Mozilla Messaging, “[t]he primary changes (the military) have made allow them to know for sure when messages have been read, which is critical in a command-and-control organization.” With these changes, Trustedbird even qualifies for NATO’s closed messaging system.

What differentiates Trustedbird from Thunderbird other than the bundled add-ons are the following changes:

• Enhanced Security Services for S/MIME (RFC 2634)

Triple Wrapping: sign, encrypt, and sign again a message. Signed Receipts. Security Labels.

• DSN (Delivery Status Notification)
• SMTP PRIORITY extension

Trustedbird also comes bundled with the following add-ons:

• Multi-LDAP

Address autocompletion with several LDAP directories.

• Check Recipients

Checks the existence of email addresses from local address books or LDAP.

• Card Viewer Extended

Displays the certificate of a contact in local address books or LDAP.

• Send Format LDAP

Gets supported email formats from LDAP.

• CRL over LDAP

Imports CRLs from LDAP directories.

• Notification Viewer

Identifies and displays DSN (delivery receipts) and MDN (return receipts) notifications.

• MDN Extended

Handles MDN deletion receipt.

• Out of Office

Vacation notifications and redirections using Sieve.

• Message Remote Services

Interaction with Trustedbird using a Java API.

• XSMTP

Adds headers for priority, confidentiality, …

• Mail XForms

XForms-based forms in compose and read interfaces in order to send information through email headers.

Again, kudos to the French military! This is really a good case study in the benefit of open source. If only more companies and institutes could understand this. Now, if another country were to ditch their existing email platform for Thunderbird, the investment would be minimal, as the French military have already done the heavy lifting. All they would need to do is to write some add-ons and few patches for their particular needs and they would be done (and probably save a fortune in licensing fees every year). It really is a win-win.

If you want to take a closer look at Trustedbird, you can download it here. Trustedbird it is available for Linux and Windows (no Mac support yet).

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