Total mail UI/UX overhaul, total backend overhaul allowing implementation of new protocols (first new protocol was Exchange), an Android app and monthly release cadence vs yearly. And that's just to name the ones that immediately come to mind. Have plenty of users yelling at us for changing too much.
What percentage of their money do they spend on developers? If it is more than 50% on "non-charitable activities" (of which software development is not considered) - they may be on the wrong side of the IRS.
Thunderbird lives in an entity called MZLA, created by Mozilla and the Thunderbird Council (the elected open source community leadership) to be the legal and financial home to Thunderbird.
MZLA, which I lead, receives only money via donations from donors. We are a for-profit because the IRS is very skeptical of nonprofits who develop FOSS software (someone down below linked to a bunch of great links on this topic). We, do, however publish tons of information on what we are doing on our blog, and we are open source and a community run project, so if you really want to go deep on this - come join us in making Thunderbird.
CEO of MZLA (the Mozilla entity that develops Thunderbird). One point of clarification, we don't get money from any source but our donors. After years of funding issues, MZLA was created by the Mozilla Foundation and the Thunderbird Council (our community governance body), to provide a legal/financial home for Thunderbird.
Launching Thundermail this year (an email service) which we hope to help provide even more funds for development, beyond just donations. Also serving a user need (lots of our users ask us to help them get off Gmail).
Lots of interest in how the money is spent - answer: mostly on devs, landed Exchange support recently (big for a lot of MS users), working on Graph support as well, JMAP after that. Updating the calendar (primarily UX/UI there), continuing to improve our Android app, working on a native iOS app and the aforementioned Thundermail service.
We publish yearly reports and will publish one again this year detailing all this.
Happy to answer questions and we are an open source project so feel free to reach out to us and engage if you really want to see how the sausage is made!
*Edit: More context on what Thunderbird Council is*
Since most of the people here who seem wary about how their donation is getting spent, I have a feeling that "mostly on devs" probably won't cut it for them, though I assume it's true. Have you considered doing any sort of year end cost reporting where you show percentages of what money went where? If it's going where you say it is I think making that information transparent would be a free win. (I know there would be some level of effort constructing the report but I also have to assume you already have reports like this internally)
Ryan Sipes, if you can read this, everybody online remembers the 2020 Servo team lay-offs, and the juxtaposition of the C level compensation.
If you are serious about winning back donors and trust:
- Allow for a transparent breakdown of expenses on things like external consultancy and also C level compensation
- Allow financial ring-fencing of donations. Such that my donation can only finance Firefox devs or Thunderbird devs.
(Not teams, not products, not managers/VPs/Directors just developers. Everyone else's compensation should come from corporate donations or other means)
I love Firefox and Thunderbird, use both everyday, was also a yearly donor up to 2020 (now I just donate to Archive.org and KDE).
You have great products that people love but if you are serious about gaining back trust you need to show judicious spending on the top side of the org. Justifying it with we need to spend money to get fundraisers doesn't pass the community test.
You cannot simultaneously increase the percentage of donations going to directly paying "just developers" while decreasing the percentage going to admin costs. Who will be responsible for implementing this ring-fencing of donations, if not precisely the non-developers you'd like them to spend less on?
As a user from Germany, it would help a lot if you could provide an IBAN to send you money in EUR directly. These payment providers all take a cut and what ends up being used for recurring donations is SEPA direct debit, which costs me about 10€ if my account ever happens do be too low to take the charge. Please make a way around supporting this ecosystem of banking with every donation!
Thundermail is a great idea! I'd be more than happy to switch over assuming the migration path from say Gmail, Fastmail, etc was easy enough, and it supported custom domains.
I think the synergy part is what is great here. Imagine thundermail is a FOSS server app. Imagine they implement things like proof-of-work for senders, and no PoW means the mail goes into a quarantine instead of directly in the user's inbox. That could fight spam, without the centralization and loss of privacy we've had in email. That hasn't happened now, because of the chicken-egg problem. There's no client that supports it because there's no server that supports it because there's no client that supports it.
Thunderbird is a very big client. It could push email forward like nothing before. I may give Thundermail a try. I'd much rather self-host a Thundermail server... one that works around the port 25 block on every residential IP. Maybe my self hosted instance could receive messages relayed from the "real" thundermail server on something other than port 25.
The few times I've needed support, Fastmail has responded nearly immediately with the exact info I needed. So Moz would need to demonstrate excellence in customer service before I would consider any migration.
(I know that doesn't directly answer your question, but it does articulate a necessary pre-condition, and one that is hard for businesses entering a new line of service to deliver--although not impossible, of course.)
JMAP is a bonus (other fastmail user here) bjt if I can do custom sieve rules and or unlimited aliases created on demand at (somestring)@customdomainiown.com thst I can then use the sieve rules to put into a folder of the same name as that email address, I would rather give my money to support Thunderbird. Fastmail is fine and all but they are in australia so they live on spyware island and they dont have good native clients in the works like thunderbird does.
Unlimited aliases at custom domains are a part of the offering. Technically, Thundermail supports sieve rules, we do need to come up with UX to expose it to users for management.
Thanks for posting here. This information is helpful.
I strongly encourage you to provide that information on the page asking for donations. Even if it's just one sentence with a link and even if it doesn't fit with Mozilla's corporate policies.
I've been using Thunderbird exclusively for as long as I can remember (Internet user since '92).
I don't understand why they make it so hard to donate anonymously. I actually found their IBAN (DE05 5123 0500 0500 2158) on the Google results page, not on the page it linked to.
I've been trying to use Exchange support at work but there's an ongoing problem that the OAuth login screen can't display PIN prompts for things like Yubikeys.
So I'd love to use the feature, but modern corporate auth defeats it currently.
That's right. We've long had Microsoft account users across Exchange, Office365 and Outlook.com complain about having issues using Thunderbird. So we're trying to account for all protocols from MS.
Protonmail = privacy at all costs.
Thundermail = freedom at all costs (open standards, use w/ whatever client you want, upload your own encryption key and "go dark")
I assume if I upload my own key, the receiver of the emails needs to also have my key? I'm not necessarily trying to send encrypted emails to people. I would want zero-access encryption which means not even Thundermail knows what my emails are.
No, we rely on PGP encrypted email. What I'm talking about is the latter. Emails are encrypted with your public key before being stored in the database. (Our stack is based on Stalwart, you can read about how it works here: https://stalw.art/docs/encryption/overview )
Product Manager here. The answer is because we are tied to the ESR release cycle we have to release at a certain time (we are working on changing this). So we're shipping all the work that is done and stable. There is still work to be done to the front-end and as much as people want to trivialize it, it's not so simple. To make the changes we did, we had to rewrite a very complicated front-end with some code that has been there for 20 years and had entire systems built upon it. We are going to get to what the mockup showed. But we're going to build it right, and that means rewriting large pieces of our codebase. We'll ship the remaining stuff when they are ready.
Thunderbird Product Manager here. We have no intention to replace the backend or most of the components. It will not be a different app. It's still run by the K-9 project maintainer. The difference? We didn't want to see K-9 die because of a lack of funding, and our visions were aligned - so it made sense to work together. That's it. Thunderbird is community run (unlike Firefox, our community representatives approve our team's budget and goals), so our aims are just to provide for our users and community what they want. And they want to use email on their phones as well as desktop.
The way you present it sounds devious. But we're just truly trying to work together in the open source ecosystem the best we can and put our resources to their best use.
This is great. I am glad K9 will live on. I didn't think it wouldn't anyway because frankly K9 is established software and Thunderbird doesn't seem to have anything in that space. It wouldn't make sense to kill it and redo it. This is not Microsoft after all, which would take the product and cripple it so much that it has one third the features and the Microsoft name.
However this particular deal sounds a lot like white labeling, don't you think ? :)
Hi Ryan, nice seeing you here. If you don't mind, would love to hear your thoughts:
I’m missing a story about mobile Linux. Has this been discussed; is this something on the roadmap?
There are already excellent e-mail options for iOS. Right now there is almost nothing outside of the cli that’s usable on mobile Linux. Thunderbird would have a chance of being the main choice while helping adoption of mobile Linux in the medium-to long-term.
I understand it’s not realistic to expect anything anytime soon, but I do hope this is being discussed and that we will see a strategy for it.
Have you tried Geary on mobile Linux? I haven't (no pinephone or similar), so I'm sincerely asking. It works well in a very narrow window on desktop Linux, so that seems hopeful? I wonder if it's excessively memory hungry or syncs mail inefficiently, though.
If anyone wants a free pinephone + will use it for something useful (and is prepared to pay the postage from Melbourne, Australia), then they're welcome to mine.
I bought one a few months ago to support the project but never ended up using it. It's still sitting in a drawer.
Realistically, there's no hope I'll ever do anything with it myself. ;)
Sounds great, if no takers yet! I’ve been meaning to do some PostMarketOS dev and it’s one of the primary supported devices. I’m at the other end of the world though, so if someone closer is interested that’d make more sense! Mail is in profile.
It's the most viable and promising so far I think. I have too many directories for it to be usable without some new features, though (namely highlight dirs with new mail and more filtering capabilities). It's practically unusable, but granted I may have an unusual setup. If you just have a handful of active folders it might be great.
Didn't notice any surprising syncing issues so far.
If anyone is getting a sense of deja vu, it's because this is was Outlook mobile strategy. Microsoft acquired a popular third-party Exchange mail client for iOS/Android, named Acompli, and rebranded it to Outlook.
>We have no intention to replace the backend or most of the components.
So sayeth every acquiring company about the acquired. I can think of very few that it held true. Maybe this can be added to the list, but only time will tell. I wouldn't suggest people holding their breath though
>These aren't companies. It's a communty project and a FOSS project merging resources.
Exactly how other situations historically have started. Lot's of FOSS projects "brought into the fold" to "shepard" along only to not get the resources promised.
Just take care that K-9 development doesn't get bogged down in well meant feature ports/unifications that end up being negative value for anyone who isn't fully committed to running their entire life through Thunderbird and K-9, in the most synchronized way. For example the not really in scope but also not really out of scope nature of calendar in Thunderbird should better not spread to K-9 I think (as someone who has never used K-9, but is on Thunderbird since Communicator 4). But if you succeed avoiding that pitfall, if it's really just "we would love to do something on mobile, but we would hate to steal attention from K-9", then it's certainly just applaudable lack of NIH, nice!
Thanks to both you and KMail team. This merger makes tons of sense as both clients made it through some dark years and have both come out on top with amazing improvements. I'm really excited to see what the combined team delivers!
So if it won't change, what is the point of this? I get that Thunderbird (Mozilla corp) wants a mobile client, but if its just the same horrible app with a rebrand, what does it actually offer (since desktop thunderbird is still pretty awful and recently has got to the point where gmail is preferable)?
> It will not be a different app. It's still run by the K-9 project maintainer. The difference? We didn't want to see K-9 die because of a lack of funding, and our visions were aligned
Nothing in this world is purely altruistic. If it didn't make business sense, this wouldn't be happening. Please surprise me and stay true to your word on this.
> The way you present it sounds devious. But we're just truly trying to work together in the open source ecosystem the best we can and put our resources to their best use.
We are all from the internet here, you know exactly why we are this way. Even if true, please understand why your words are perceived this way.
What business sense do you have in mind? Thunderbird is funded by donations and governed by volunteers. Even if this were some kind of money grab, who's grabbing what money?
Isn't the business reason that they would rather acquire an existing mail app that is similar to what they had in mind rather than building a brand new one themselves?
Longtime Hackernews lurker, first time posting a project of my own here. I'm big into privacy, I am the Community Manager for Mozilla Thunderbird and before that I made the open source personal assistant Mycroft AI and worked at Linux computer seller System76.
When I went to use a personal finance app to aggregate my financial data (bank accounts, investment accounts, loans, etc) into one place - I just didn't feel comfortable with my data just sitting on someones server, especially when many of the apps I tried were startups with which I had little trust.
So I made Glance Money, it end-to-end encrypts your financial data on your device with a key generated there. It's also just awesome and allows you to quickly manage your finances "at a Glance". You can see balances, a transaction list, you can edit transactions, and even swipe through them via cards (Tinder style) via what I call the "Review Screen".
Yes, it uses Plaid to get your data, which means they have access to your data. Currently I don't have a way around that. Fortunately, they don't sell your data - but I have yet to solve for this piece of the equation.
What do you think HN? It's still very early days but would love for folks to try it and share what they think.
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