I tested the new Thunderbird Appointment tool, and it’s thoroughly impressive – and free

Do you have a small business that requires appointment booking? If so, you might be interested in knowing that the team behind the Thunderbird email client has created an appointment service aptly named Thunderbird Appointment, and it’s already looking to be something special.

I was invited to test the beta version and I’m thoroughly impressed. Thunderbird Appointment is a stand-alone web service that offers the ability to deploy the service on your own LAN via a Docker container. If deploying a service on your own LAN isn’t your cup of tea, the available service will do just fine.

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With Thunderbird Appointment, you can plan an event, set your availability, and share with others. You can even connect your Google Calander (selecting a specific calendar to be used for the appointments), book one-off appointments or recurring events, add details to meetings, enable booking confirmation, and confirm each booking that is sent to you via email. Once you’ve accepted an appointment, it is automatically added to your Thunderbird Appointment calendar and the calendar you’ve linked to the service (if applicable).

I even tested Thunderbird Appointment by deploying it on a test server within my LAN (using docker-compose) and was impressed with how easy it was to get up and running. Within less than 2 minutes I had my booking service running on my LAN. 

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I’ve tested other appointment software (even Google’s take on the service) and found Thunderbird Appointment to stand up with the best of them.

As far as settings are concerned, you can configure the following:

• Language
• Theme
• Time format
• Time Zone
• Available calendars
• Account information
• Connected accounts (on the beta you can connect Mozilla, Google, and Zoom accounts)

Once you’ve created your Thunderbird Appointment account (currently, the service is free), you can then set your availability (time and days of the week), add scheduling details — such as calendar, earliest booking, farthest booking, and booking duration), meeting details (video link and notes), and booking settings (quick link and booking confirmation enable/disable).

The first step is to configure your availability, which is really the only necessity for using the service. By default, the availability is set for Monday through Friday, 9 am until 5 pm. After customizing your availability, you can then copy your quick link and share it with anyone who needs to make appointments with you. Those who have the link are sent to the booking calendar, where they can select a time/date, click “Confirm selection,” and then fill in their name and email address. After they click Book, you’ll receive an email to confirm the appointment.

It’s that easy to use. And because you can set the furthest out availability, you can control how far out someone can book (the default being 14 days).

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The only caveat to Thunderbird Appointment (other than it being early in development) is that there isn’t a dedicated app you can use. This is strictly web-based. To get around that, you can always use your web browser and create a web app. As well, there is (surprisingly) no integration with the Thunderbird email client and no indication that there ever will be.

Even with those small issues, I found Thunderbird Appointment to be an outstanding service that is absolutely capable of serving individuals, non-profits, or small businesses looking to offer clients the ability to self-book appointments. 

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Do remember, however, that Thunderbird Appointment is very much in beta, so there will be bumps along the road until it is officially released. If you’d like to sign up for the beta, make sure to head to the official Thunderbird Appointment site and register.

Note: There is no indication as to whether this service will always be free or if there will eventually be an associated cost. If I had to guess, it will remain free during the beta period but eventually be offered as a paid service. We’ll see how that plays out.