Mozilla launching “Thundermail” email service to take on Gmail, Microsoft 365
(techradar.com)400 points by bentobean a day ago
400 points by bentobean a day ago
> I'm not sure about charging a fee at the start and providing a free tier later
I think this is a smart move. Email isn't a platform where you need to conquer the world to be successful. Hey has been doing great business with an only-paid model. Might as well serve the paying customers first and build up revenue.
Also, whenever you're launching something new, you generally need to limit onboarding. Google did it with Gmail, Bluesky did it with their service. You can't have a flood of 10 million new users all at once before you've had a chance to scale things. Seems reasonable to let paying users in first given that email doesn't have network lock-in effects.
I think there is reasonable skepticism around how committed Mozilla is to this. However, I think that starting with the paid tiers is a smart move given that they'd have to limit signups initially anyway.
> Hey has been doing great business with an only-paid model.
[citation needed]
Plus when I'm paying I know that I'm the customer, not the product.
> I don't think people want to change email addresses very often.
You probably know this already, but people should have their own domain. Then they can change provider without changing the address.
> You probably know this already, but people should have their own domain.
Until they forget or unable to renew. And then their PII is in the hands of the person who gets the domain.
That happened to me, but fortunately it didn't end up being a huge deal.
I had forgotten to renew my domain from Gandi, it expired, and I stopped getting emails. I also could not find my password for Gandi, and I couldn't get the password reset to work, so I panicked, but fortunately Gandi will let you renew someone else's domain. Not a transfer, just if account A wants to pay to renew account B's domain without any change of ownership, they allowed that, so I made a quick throwaway account, and renewed everything for eight years.
Taking over a domain is not particularly connected to access to PII.
You own/control the name, not the set of files on a hosting service somewhere.
If you're going to buy a domain for this, don't get fancy with the TLD. I made the mistake of choosing a .io domain for this purpose and with the future of the TLD uncertain, I have been moving away from it, so I'm not left in a bad spot if things go sideways.
People should, but is the existing process simple enough even any laymen can do is the question.
The average person is not intelligent enough to have their own domain.
Getting a domain is no more difficult than selecting some "easy web hosting and email" bundle on a site and paying for it with bank transfer, credit card or whatever. There's an entire industry around this. I've met plenty of people who are largely clueless about PCs, doctors, lawyers, artists, etc who have their own domain. It's actually extremely common, because conducting business from a Gmail account is a bit unprofessional and sketchy, particularly here in Germany.
> The average person is not intelligent enough to have their own domain.
You think that that skill (maintaining own domain for email) is an indicator of intelligence?
It is an indicator of knowledge, not necessarily intelligence.
I said "own your domain", not "self-host your email server".
Or they have better things to do vs fighting Route53 MX records errors.
I'm deeply skeptical as well.
If firefox doesn't have enough compelling ideas and features in its primary domain of the browser, then how are they going to develop a new mail competency in such a complete way that they can take on gmail?
Whether they succeed or fail, this will sap resources from the browser team. And it seems overwhelmingly likely to fail.
I don't think it's so much that they don't have ideas it's that they're competing with Alphabet's Chrome, who are coincidentally owners of Android, Gmail, YouTube and Google which are internet keystones. I think it's solely by coincidence that I use Firefox rather than Chrome and if I'd started using the Internet a few years later it would have been Chrome.
Also isn't a huge proportion of internet activity mobile users, and outside the US the majority of phones are Android, and most people leave things default, thus Firefox is condemned have a minor share essentially since Chrome is packaged natively with Android?
Anyways I hope they can dislodge some of the Google train. I abhor using Gmail. Better yet if they can compete with Outlook to some extent. Mozilla actually produces software I trust enough, which has enough utility that I'll install it.
At least in Germany, Firefox users are very vocal, and will tell other people all the time that they should switch to Firefox on their PC and laptop if they see them using in particular Chrome, but also Edge.
Indeed, Firefox' market share in Germany is larger than in many other countries.
Do people still use Thunderbird client? I would guess 99% of people use their browser.
> Do people still use Thunderbird client? I would guess 99% of people use their browser.
Count me as one. It's nice to have a single local application that is set up for around 5 different accounts on two different providers.
I also like the immediacy of search on the local data. When I search for something I don't want to see a spinning busy-beachball indicator.
> the primary computing device of the world right now.
Whether this is true or not depends a lot on which the bubble is that you live in.
I think it's definitely a minority.
I use it to follow three Gmail accounts in parallel, since the web version is a PITA to deal with that scenario. Getting access to my local archive is a bonus point.
I use it for my email. It does exactly what I need it to, works across several platforms. Is Open Source.
I used it at a previous job that didn't have a web option for email, but for me the killer feature was that it was the only mainstream newsgroup client (the job delivered error notifications via newsgroups).
> the job delivered error notifications via newsgroups
Well, now I've heard everything. This is either peak greybeard creativity, or that was a thing in like 1992 and a system has been left alone for 30+ years to just do its 90s thing. Either way I kind of love it.
Haha probably peak greybeard - the founder and his two friends had been doing Internet stuff since the mid 1990s but the code was much newer. I assume the system worked so they kept doing it. Everything was on-prem too so I guess was an easy option to make logs accessible to everyone without paying for a service.
Thunderbird lets the user change the UI and hide almost every single element of it. I don't like clutter.
With that feature I could also help an elderly friend after Microsoft abruptly replaced the easy to use Windows Mail with a mess that they didn't even bother to translate into other languages.
At my (small) workplace we all use Thunderbird, and I use it for my personal email as well.
A good desktop client, once configured, works a lot better than web-based email clients, especially (but not only) when you have different email accounts that you want to use in the same interface.
Yes, on desktop (macOS and Linux). It's not a speed demon but I trust it (on Linux I build from source).
On Android I use Fastmail's mobile client, but I'm thinking of trying the new mobile Thunderbird there too.
Make thunderbird supports a local database with 100k emails with proper search ! Make us pay for that optimization if needed. Email is a big tool of communication for all businesses, Pros who make money daily through emails need to handle tons of emails, we’re ready to pay for that
> Make thunderbird supports a local database with 100k emails with proper search
Currently working with a Thunderbird database which contains over 300,000 messages and search works quite reliably (once in a blue moon have to switch from "Search Messages..." to "Global Search"), though the emails are stored in Maildir format rather than the default mbox: https://tinyapps.org/blog/202207100700_thunderbird_mbox_to_m... .
I have ~100k mails in Thunderbird. The GUI always feels a bit sluggish:
Sometimes spinners don't spin, reactions to clicks take ~500 ms, when I switch from Inbox to Calendar for the first time, I can see how the buttons in the top row render one after the other in ~100ms. (I don't think a human should _ever_ see buttons render!)
Sliding around the size of panels renders at 10 FPS, not so cool.
Opening "Account settings" first produces a full white-flash, then a grey-flash (dark mode), and then renders the UI element.
Startup takes ~5 seconds till the GUI fully shows. Then it hangs at "Opening folder INBOX..." for 60 seconds. Not sure why that sync takes so long when there are no new emails.
So it works acceptably but doesn't feel great.
Searching for e.g. "horse" in the Ctrl+K global search and hitting ender takes 5 seconds for full-text search to produce results. I think that part is OK. I mostly use the "Quick Filter" == "Filter messages" == Shift+Ctrl+K instead to search only subjects and correspondents.
I have ~100 IMAP folders (from +suffix emails). Unfortunately Thunderbird doesn't notice when a new folder gets spawned by a new +suffix email, I have to restart it Thunderbird to ever get to see that email.
RAM usage is 900 MB RES on Linux. (I could not check if that's glibc's fault as so often, because Thunderbird crashes when jemalloc is preloaded.)
When I move the mouse cursor around anywhere in the GUI, that causes 90% CPU usage. For comparison, in Sublime Text, moving the mouse cursor around causes 10% CPU usage over the text buffer and 25% over tabs.
Woah, how? My global search indexer seems to poop out when the sqlite db gets too big or something.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Thunderbird/comments/1jjzb6b/global...
On another note, Thunderbird feels quite snappy for me. Fast and responsive, especially global search.
Even so I think I prefer Recoll now that I've got it working. That thing is amazing.
I have a (non-published) plugin that I'm using that is capable of using elasticsearch for indexing & search from within Thunderbird. I never bothered publishing it, since I never really wanted to maintain it/build a business out of it. Would this be something you are interested in, potentially for a small fee?
Elasticsearch is a pretty bad choice for what really needs to be an embedded database. There are other FTS engines out there of varying quality that would be better suited to this particular case. Off the top of my head, Meillisearch and sqlite3's FTS5 would both be highly embed-able but have other tradeoffs (such as storage overhead).
I mentioned the same problem in one other subthread as well. Current hardware is certainly performant enough not to become this sluggish at just 100 000 or so emails. There's actually no reason it shouldn't work well with say a million emails in one inbox.
> Outlook with multi-gigabye .pst files
What has been your experience? Mine in trying to use and support it is that Outlook is an Exchange client; PSTs are hacks to meet demand, though they work well enough in limited circumstances. Especially PSTs over a LAN connection are a disaster.
I'm primarily a Linux user, but Mail.app is probably the best graphical email client I've ever had the pleasure of using (you can pry mutt from my cold, dead hands).
Yes, I know it's also an GNUStep application
Tell that to apple mail. Makes no sense how an app seemingly unchanged since the tiger days when I started using it could still be as performant as it always was on far better hardware. In fact I frequently find it to be the culprit when I wonder what the hell could be spinning my fans on this m3 pro just churning over the database.
Iphone version is arguably worse because it also has performance issues but doesn’t support inbox rules. Then again those inbox rules often fail to filter emails anyhow.
I just checked mine and I have about 250k emails sitting in my personal laptop's mailbox, no issues there. It might be dependent on the provider - I know at work where we use Exchange I get occasional slowdowns but I'm not sure whether that's due to Mail.app, due to Exchange, due to our dear endpoint security software taking its sweet time checking whatever I'm doing, or any combination of these. I probably have a couple million emails in my work laptop's mailbox though. Often the "Rebuild Mailbox" function fixes any problems for me, at least for a while.
The iPhone one regularly just doesn't search properly for me though. I'll search for the exact subject or contents of a message and just won't be able to find it, then when I go to my laptop and type in the exact same terms it finds it instantly.
I'd love it - email could use serious tools and refinement - but so many questions: Is it local or hosted? What is the story with privacy? Do you use an existing application (like a Thunderbird fork) or something you created?
Can you / will you integrate other messaging such as SMS, even WhatsApp, etc.? RSS?
Great questions.
1. It is _both_ local and hosted. The client itself is fully offline-capable, including proper full-text search (single digit ms), writing drafts – anything you would expect an email client to do. The "hosted" bit is to ensure rapid synchronisation across multiple clients (ie your desktop and mobile).
2. Some metadata is hosted in pg to facilitate cross-platform synchronisation, as mentioned. This is encrypted at rest on a provider with SOC 2 Type I certification. Further symmetric encryption (AES-256) of sensitive columns is also done. We're well aware that security is the most important aspect of this product and is our primary focus.
3. We've not forked Thunderbird. Marco has been built from the ground up, both on the FE and BE, and has been a monumental task.
4. We have no immediate plans to add SMS/WhatsApp/RSS. If those interest you, you might have a look at Missive.
We understand that storing email metadata is potentially a turn-off to some, but is actually the key driver to an entirely new email experience. It means that a Marco client itself is virtually stateless (save for some lightweight metadata) and syncs instantly across N number of clients – it runs on web/OSX/Windows/Android/etc, and changes propagate between them instantly. New client setup happens via Marco in a proprietary way on the order of seconds and doesn't take hours to sync via IMAP.
We're building this for ourselves. Thunderbird is "alright". Apple Mail is "alright". Superhuman is decent, but ridiculously expensive and Google/Microsoft only. Missive is fairly decent (and also stores metadata), but is built for team collaboration, not individual use.
Good luck with that, but as a first reaction I must say, what I see on that side is not that impressive. It's just the same feature-set & interface all over again. It's not selling me any reason why I should be more interested in this, than in all the other clients already available.
Granted there is very little on that side, but I hope if you really start from scratch, you will also look more outside the box of the established mail clients. Think about how RSS Feed readers are working and the interfaces they offer, think about task¬e-managment-tools are working and what they offer. For example, why is there no mail client with a kanban-board-view, allowing to organize mails by status or tags. Why is there no client with a social media feed-interface or even a tweetdeck-like view, allowing to observe multiple mail sources in parallel. This is the kind of innovation I'd like to see in a new mail client. Not just a bit better performance and new colors.
Yes, we've started from scratch. A detailed explanation for our reasoning can be found here:
https://marcoapp.io/blog/marco-an-introduction
TLDR: There are _no_ IMAP-primitive truly cross-platform email clients in existence, except for Missive, which is built for team collaboration. We are building something net new.
The content on the website is indeed a minimal representation and the actual alpha product has matured quite a bit beyond what you see there.
The kanban suggestion is brilliant, I have made a note of that.
Apple Mail was actually the straw that broke the camel's back for me.
I wrote a blog post about our reasoning here:
Why tackle problems like search when you can redesign the UI/UX half a dozen times instead?
I don't blame the developers; they do whatever they're paid to do.
Mozilla has terrible leadership and no vision. It's the worst aspects of directionless, corporate software masquerading as an open source project.
> using the open-source Stalwart stack
This is REALLY cool news. This will make them the second JMAP compatible vendor and the first that didn’t invent it (which is an ick)!
This makes it MUCH more interesting to build JMAP clients. I will most likely subscribe to this just to play around with JMAP because I‘ve been to lazy to set up Stalwart for myself.
I wonder whether they will build a new web front-end, since the existing FOSS ones I’m aware of aren’t all that great.
Site is here with waitlist signup. It's also titled "For Those Who Know" and says: >> status beta_signup.is_open=true so perhaps theres a CLI or hidden way to signup immediately?
Similarly, may need a cell phone to open a bank account to get a cell phone
If the bank wasn't at the birth, do they really know the customer? Pffft.
There's an input field for an email address below that block for me
Turns out, in Firefox mobile, the email submission block isn't present.
I had to open Chrome Mobile to see it.
I hope this, err, 'oversight' isn't indicative of the quality of using Mozilla products.
This is an announcement by MZLA Technologies, not the Mozilla Corporation. This thread is completely derailing because people do not understand the difference. Let's actually discuss the service, Thunderbird, or MZLA Technologies.
What else could it be but a bitwise AND. If they had used `open_source && privacy_focused && user_controlled`, it would just be `true`, which is hardly an interesting philosophy. This way, you'll be able to do tests like `if (!(philosophy & privacy_focused)) { track_user_activity(); serve_creepy_but_useless_ad_about_something_they_bought_yesterday(); }`. Alternatively, they could have used some kind of set datatype if the number of philosophy variables is large enough, but I think the code would have become unmaintainable if they want to implement every possible philosophical alternative; 64 bits should be enough for everyone.
A privacy-focused email service by Mozilla is a welcomed addition to the market! Given the ongoing concerns around data security, it's refreshing to see companies like Mozilla pushing for better privacy standards.
As far as I can glean, this is a "me" problem, but does anyone else find Thunderbird's search to be mostly-broken? I.e., will not find emails that should turn up in a query.
I agree, the search is quite bad.
The UI is bad and the results seem to be poor. I don't necessarily have the issue that emails are not in the results, but more that results are too numerous and the only way I can narrow down results is putting more constrains in the UI. What often happens for me is that I search using a several terms or some specific phrases and the search returns tons of results (does it just do an OR between words in the search) and I then end up clicking (why can't the time constraint be a slider?!) through different months (based on what I recall about the timeframe of the email) until I find the email.
When I was using notmuch I recall results being much better.
Another annoyance is that Thunderbird only seems to search locally, i.e. if I don't have some folders downloaded it will not do a server search as well as a local search (maybe there's a setting for it?)
I submitted a Thunderbird bug 13 years ago now, that Thunderbird doesn't let you just search for a word, and find all copies of that word: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=752844 . Their search instead tries to be clever, but it then finds stupid stuff like (in my case) "The base of Wedding is wed. The plural of wed is weds. Lets return every email ever from a Wednesday"
Still not fixed.
I have found that "Quick Filter Bar" is often much better at searching if you know which folder the email is in.
It helps to sort the results by date rather than relevance. Relevance is the default and the results are all over the place and it does indeed feel utterly broken :)
Even worse: the Swedish translation is lacking, so I use English. But my emails are often in Swedish. Making åäö and aao equal is never what I have ever wanted.
Not as bad as gnome which - in addition - has not let me reliably set things like date formats or first day of the week since several years despite using Swedish as my language.
> That's kind of the point of the Unix text stream philosophy? TB stores as text, and then you can use the best text search tool you have.
To some extent, yes. Though emails are structured text and a bare string search is far from an optimal search strategy.
> Do you use mbox or maildir, out of curiosity?
Whatever the Thunderbird default is.
The article is pretty light on details so I'm going to ask: why should I get this compared to something like fastmail or protonmail? Does it at least have end to end encryption? Is this just going to be a case of Mozilla partnering with another service provider (eg. mullvad for mozilla vpn), slapping their logo on it, and collecting a royalty?
I think a lot of that was just an out-of-control spiral of self-confirmation happening in comments sections that was at best loosely connected to actual facts.
I think that finally along last there's been some real push back against it and it's no longer acceptable to just say it as if it's going to be the presumed default narrative because it really depends on what you mean and a lot of the criticisms were kind of nonsensical and without any sense of proportion.
I still basically trust Mozilla, they're a force for good, and I'm happy to use their services and do what I can to contribute to them being profitable and a successful counterpoint to Google.
That's not my point of view at all, and I have little issue with what happened and have no concern about Mozilla and privacy.
The endless repetition of these comments is becoming spammy - they have nothing to say but the exact same thing again. We get it; you don't need to repeat it. It's like someone writing, at every opportunity, 'I don't trust Meta' and adding nothing more.
I probably say this too much too, but it feels like just a justification to keep using shiny Chrome. Even though the recent ToS fiasco basically had the same language as Chrome's ToS, and wasn't really as bad as everybody freaked out about. People still just find whatever excuse.
Like fine if you like Chrome, just admit you love Chrome because it's shiny.
Exactly. I just feel like a point that originally was reasonable (around 2016 or so) became the spiraling echo chamber that became increasingly nonsensical and increasingly divorced from rhyme, reason, causation, logic, or proportionality. Case in point, Google Chrome has pushed web standards to consolidate its control over the web, but Firefox hid a cheeky reference to a TV show in its code one time! Those are incredibly different scales of offense.
But I do care about privacy, and other people do too. And I can read between the lines, and never take PR for fact. What remains is that Mozilla is looking for new cash, and sees selling user data as a solution for that. They want to call it differently, they want us to think it's all OK, but it's not. It's still better than other browsers though.
>I have little issue with what happened and have no concern about Mozilla and privacy.
Others clearly do, so your dismissing also ironically adds nothing like the comments you referred to. Those who continue to ignore Mozilla's enshittification over the years are part of the problem; as are normies who fall for their marketing about privacy. Spreading awareness about this is important, whether here or other online fora.
> Spreading awareness
It's not spreading awareness, it's just spam at this point.
> is important
How is it important to take down Mozilla? How is it valuable - maybe do something constructive if you are concerned. Even if you don't like them, aren't there many far more important things to do? Can you think of bigger problems?
Rooting for mozilla and their privacy-focused services. Been using the email-masking feature (generate forward email addresses) for a while and really like it.
> Rooting for mozilla and their privacy-focused services. Been using the email-masking feature (generate forward email addresses) for a while and really like it.
I don't know how the privacy of this one will shake out, but the privacy focus on the browser includes allowing them to share your data, so that makes me way less enthusiastic about continuing my investment in their ecosystem.
They're trying to square the circle with anonymized data, but I think even that is still about profiling, and group profiling is only one degree less concerning than individually user profiling.
So I don't love it, but I know how to differentiate it from the worst of the worst.
This is the best news I've heard of Mozilla in a long time.
I'm cautiously optimistic. It's certainly the most realistic business plan their leadership has put forward in a long time.
And a Mozilla/Thunderbird based email service is well timed. Microsoft's upgrade (read: downgrade) of the newest version of Outlook, making it a glorified web app, has pissed of a lot of users who aren't the sort to browse hacker spaces but do have to use serious email and calendaring every day for their work.
Even if those folks don't see Thunderbird as an alternative to what Outlook/Exchange was, it'll absolutely be an alternative to what Microsoft is turning Outlook into... [1][2][3]
And there's something devilishly funny about the fact that, because DDG uses Bing on the backend, when I search for articles to cite... Everything that comes up trashing the new Outlook is from MSN.
[1]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-new-outlook-fo...
[2]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/windows-11-takes-small-...
[3]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/even-microsoft-s-a...
> Usrs will be able to pick between thundermail.com and tb.pro domains.
That "Usrs" is not my typo. And what strange choices for domain names.
Anyway I hope they launch a custom domain supporting paid email service (and not go skimpy on details and features like, e.g., Apple's iCloud).
Mozilla's Thundermail could be a game-changer, especially if they nail the privacy and security aspects. The market needs more competition, but it won't be easy to convert Gmail/Outlook users. Curious to see how the UI and features stack up. Hopefully, it's a polished product at launch.
Game-changer... how? There are at least two players in email space that provide encrypted email and various auxiliary suites (Protonmail and Tuta), plus at least one well-trusted well-respected email service (Fastmail), and of course people can always self-host if they dare. What revolutionary they could possibly realistically bring in areas privacy and security to be an actual "game-changer"?
Not saying it cannot possibly be - just that I cannot think of any novel way how it would deserve a title like this in such a particularly tricky niche as email suite service.
> The final launch will be Thundermail, an email hosting service using the open-source Stalwart stack. Users will be able to pick between thundermail.com and tb.pro domains.
If the article is correct, Thundermail will be built using Stalwart[1], which appears to support JMAP
[1]: https://stalw.art/
Yes! I'm a fastmail user and every couple of months I do a survey of JMAP support and come back disappointed.
Speaking about thunderbird, I liked their UI redesign, but it seems they are taking away quite a bit of plugin capabilities, e.g. there used to be the possibility to run firenvim (a plugin to run neovim in the compose window), but that's not possible anymore.
Because most working web developers actually have no idea how to write JS; they follow what is presented (perpetuated) as industry standard practice, but in a React-and-NPM world, "industry standard practice" means bad practices.
Previously:
also competing with square and apple...
I don't see how it's an effective product, if they released this 20 years ago at the advant of hotmail going downhill and the release of unlimited storage (lol) gmail it would've been a game changer since they had a client this whole time.
But now, vendor lock in is strong w/ Microsoft and Outlook that I question do people even use Thunderbird? It was a great competitor to Outlook Express and 2003... but now.. I really don't know, but I guess their product managers think so.
"The Thunderbird database says its number of active monthly installs has dropped from 17.7 million in late December 2020 to 16.2 million in late March 2025, with the mail app struggling to keep up with the industry’s main players like Gmail.
With the launch of Thunderbird Pro, Mozilla is adding Thunderbird Appointment, a new scheduling tool for sharing calendar links; Thunderbird Send, a rebuild of the discontinued Firefox Send; and Thunderbird Assist, a new AI-powered writing tool enabled via a partnership with Flower AI that is intended to do the processing locally to eliminate privacy concerns.
The final launch will be Thundermail, an email hosting service using the open-source Stalwart stack. Usrs will be able to pick between thundermail.com and tb.pro domains."
I really don't see how this is a market changer, the market is stuffed with competitors and every domain registrar offers some form of email service too.
Unless they pull out something really cool and revolutionary this is probably just a fax machine.
Outside of the corporate world email is almost a legacy protocol. Like phone numbers we have one because we need to but do not really use it that much anymore.
I believe email was de facto replaced by WhatsApp, iMessage, Social media and OpenID almost 20 years ago.
Just ask a gen Z or Alpha when was the last time he sent an email.
Now they are gonna try to ride the wave of the Big bad tech escape but Proton has a 10 years lead here.
OpenID certainly hasn't replaced email. Young people still all need email to sign up for ~anything online - not to mention things like job/school applications or plenty of other real-world things.
What email has become is an identifier and a receptacle for notices. It's not a social platform for young people. But it's very much a thing!
Yes we agree, email has become an identity used to sign up for things (usually through OpenID) and a notification center. But few are keeping in touch with their friends through email, this is not 1998 "You got mail" with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan anymore.
Notice that as an ID and in the last 10 years it had the compete again with the phone number that has become mandatory to sign up to a lot of services like WhatsApp, Twitter, Clubhouse, Tinder, etc. to limit fake accounts.
Also digital government ID are now being rolled out so email will become less and less central for work, school applications and "real world" services.
So yes I am curious why Mozilla believe email will save them, but I keep an open mind they might have an idea.
Email is used everywhere from account management, subscription services, school, and generally every single employer or client I've ever worked with. Sometimes I work with clients through SMS, Signal or Discord but we still fall back to email for certain things.
I love Thunderbird the platform, but I'm gonna pass on a paid service, I am extremely happy with Migadu as a personal email provider. https://migadu.com/
Mozilla has lost all trust from me, the recent privacy policy fiasco was the straw that broke the camel's back.
The Mozilla Corporation does not develop Thunderbird, so why even mention them in this thread. This is MZLA Technologies.
"Thunderbird operates in a separate, for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation."
https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/about/
Guilty by association.
If Mozilla didnt waste money on dumb things I would sign up, but they could have done this long ago, and they definitely waste their income on dumb things. Like what happened to making Firefox fully oxidized? That would have made Rust drastically more mature and proven.
>If Mozilla didnt waste money on dumb things
This has been repeated so many times that people seem to have forgotten they're supposed to actually make arguments to support it. There's no such thing as a missing browser feature that could have returned all the Firefox's market share that they were unable to make on account of spending on the VPN or acquiring Pocket or starting the VC fund or whatever. I don't know where this idea came from, but it seems to have been a mass collective hallucination.
I have problems with dabbling in ad tech. I have problems with strategic vision. But I have more problems with people being confidently wrong in the backwaters of internet comment sections not even pretending to attach these claims to any factual basis whatsoever. I mean if you really want to go look at a recent 990 form from Mozilla, look at the amount spent on browser development, make your best guess as to what it costs to administer the VPN, then make the case that the money used on it represents money that could have been invested in the browser development, but wasn't, make the case for the missing feature that would have otherwise been there, and then make the case that that would have boosted Mozilla's market share back to 33%. Those are all the missing steps of actual logic and reasoning and causation that would be necessary to substantiate this argument. But bafflingly, everyone just repeats this while skipping all the steps.
> That would have made Rust drastically more mature and proven.
Rust's successes in a variety of codebases and in a variety of organizations does far more for maturing and proving Rust's value proposition than a single codebase would be.
The Mozilla Corporation is not the organization behind this. It's MZLA Technologies, which is underneath the Mozilla Foundation.
Firefox was never going to be fully ported to Rust, at least not in any short timespan.
The amount of lies that get spread about the Mozilla Corporation and Firefox is insane. The fact that we continue to see it here in a thread about Thunderbird and MZLA Technologies is even crazier.
How would email be able to express anything the chat interface cannot? Attachments, tools, and long-form content are all well-supported. Email allows for asynchronous communication but that is usually not seen as a benefit - when I talk to AI I want a ~instant response, not wait for someone to check their mailbox.
"Sipes confirmed Mozilla would ultimately end up charging for the features"
I totally understand why and it's fair, but if you want to take on gmail, you just lost. Google is dominant because most of its services are free.
I don't think the definition of success here has to be overtaking Gmail. In fact, I think that would be doomed to fail. Instead, you want to appeal to people willing to pay for an alternative, which I think is probably a real population of users and honestly one of Mozilla's best strategic moves in years.
I'd love for that to be true, but Google through me out of their free tier a decade ago, and I've been paying various amounts for my wife and my accounts ever since.
Services that take on Google can not just win over some user base but even become profitable (see Kagi's example), so it's not strictly about $0 price tag. But they gotta be really good (for some target audience), and the hard part is beating the already established offerings, of which there are plenty and covering for every kind of crowd I can think of. I wish MZLA luck, but given all the Mozilla Foundation history (which started amazing but is less than stellar in terms of recent PR) I'm quite skeptical.
What trust issues do you have with MZLA Technologies, the organization that currently develops Thunderbird?
This is a step in the right direction. I worry it’s about 12 years too late.
The decision to reduce focus on Thunderbird was remarkably mistimed with the email client market just shooting through the roof with a bunch of orivate players being acquired for tens and hundreds of millions right after.
For me the two big things to assess will be how it handles aliases / catch all aliases and search.
Outlook allows several key productivity features that Thunderbird currently lacks. These include unified categories and tags across emails, events, contacts, and tasks; customizable views that consolidate all item types by category; the ability to drag emails or contacts directly into the calendar or task list to create new associated items; and precise control over reminder times for every item type. Without these integrated capabilities, Thunderbird cannot fully replicate Outlook’s seamless and interconnected workflow.
When I helped people migrate to Thunderbird, the number one missing feature is simply the focused inbox provided by Gmail. Unfortunately it ends up being a deal breaker.
Where will this data be hosted? There's no way I'm leaking even more data into the USA with the way US politics is going.
From a different article:
>Thundermail isn’t going to use your messages to train AI, it’s not going to invade your inbox with ads, and it’s not going to harvest and sell your data.
And? We've seen with DOGE that they can just walk into any place and take your data, anyway. It's only safe if it's outside the US.
Mozilla should've been what Proton is. A company that sells privacy focused services. They went off chasing too many geese and now they are panicking. I don't think I would trust this service at this point.
A bit late to the party, but it's one of the best mail clients available.
I feel reasonably confident at this point, declaring this a myth. Mozilla absolutely made missteps and lost browser market share, but it had almost nothing to do with spending on side bets, if you look at the budget and you look at the numbers of these things. Most of the sidebets already happened after they lost the market share and did not happen at such prohibitive costs that they prevented them from investing in browser development. And there's no such thing as a missing browser feature they could have developed that would have recovered all of the market share, which they failed to develop because of a side bet.
Nobody who repeats this has even looked at Mozilla's budget, or checked to see whether the side bets overlap with the time where Mozilla lost market share. The one exception to this is Firefox OS, which does appear to have used significant resources and happened during a critical time where they lost market share. And while that one at least would be a fair criticism where there's real data behind it, I actually respect it as a bold strategic move and personally deeply wished it worked out. But for whatever reason, a complete disconnection from factual reality has never stopped people from claiming that the VPN or the Mozilla Foundation or whatever was the problem.
MZLA Technologies is separate from the Mozilla Corporation.
is there a future where Mozilla buys Kagi and becomes the privacy Google?
I certainly hope not. I like Kagi and I don't want Mozilla messing with it.
I haven't tried myself but is this insufficiently proper? https://proton.me/support/proton-mail-export-tool
Last I checked that tool reordered all the headers (which destroys a lot of forensic value amongst other issues) and neither should such a tool be the only way to get (supposedly) good exports.
Both the IMAP bridge and web interface should provide original unmodified emails upon request.
That's not a good argument. The easiest way to undermine security of everyone is to allow portability of keys features. Look for example at where Signal fails and for no benefit to a normal user.
i would not get an email for a domain that will be up for sale in 10 years. mozilla is not a sustainable org and has lost its core principles. Mozilla best serves people by shutting down and letting younger and better orgs replace it.
They are using stalwart, another open source product, for the backend stack. So you should be able to host your own server instance with custom domain when it gets built out. Stalwart itself just received a European funding grant to build out the features needed. From Thunderbird announcement:
> Thundermail is an email service. We want to provide email accounts to those that love Thunderbird, and we believe that we are capable of providing a better service than the other providers out there, that aligns with our values. We have been experimenting with this for a while now and are using Stalwart as the software stack we are building upon. We have been working with the Stalwart maintainer to improve its capabilities (for instance, we have pushed hard on calendar and contacts being a core piece of the stack).
https://thunderbird.topicbox.com/groups/planning/T437cd854af...
> we have pushed hard on calendar and contacts being a core piece of the stack
Imagine maintaining a useful piece of FOSS and then Mozilla shows up and "pushes hard" for some feature they want for a service that's missed the boat by a decade and doesn't even elicit much hope from loyal users (including myself).
Stalwart is unique I think. The whole thing was built by essentially one developer in rust, and it's quite amazing how he has done it in just a few years. He's expressed interest in expanding the software beyond email in the past, and contacts/calendar/files shouldn't be too hard of a challenge for him.
I might be misunderstanding the org chart but Thunderbird is operated by MZLA Technologies Corporation, which is for-profit (although I guess it's owned by the non profit Mozilla, similar to how openai was?)
I think you and GP are saying the same(-ish) thing. A non-profit which has no money cannot continue, and so if it spends more than it takes in then eventually it will have to stop. This may be ok if it's part of the mission, or if they're hoping that a big donation randomly shows up. A normal business whose mission is to make money hasn't got those options.
Sure, but this sort of thing (email, plus likely mostly shitty calendaring and contacts) is a very ok business. The fastmail people make a fine living at it (their product is as good as anything outside gmail. If you haven't, you should try it! I'm a happy decade-long customer). But it's not the sort of business that supports the massive employee count that Mozilla has.
Once I can bring my own domain, I'll be more interested.
Why does this matter?
I can't pick my own domain when using Gmail, and still works just fine.
It matters because on your own domain you control the MX records (Mail eXchange) servers.
So, if Mozilla Thundermail were to disappear, you can switch servers on the MX record to another email provider with little downtime if done correctly.
You also become the sovereign of your email. Should your Google account get banned (a news like these hit HN once a month), you are left to start over changing email address in every service you use.
Not to mention dead accesses to SSO, because the Google account would be inaccesible by then.
Can't speak for op, but for me it's a question of control. If this service ends up closing or otherwise loses me as a customer, I have to update every single contact and account before I can stop using it. That's not practical. If I bring my own domain, I can switch providers much more easily.
Some people might be ok with losing contact with the long tail after an email provider migration, but I'm not one of those people.
Owning the domain your email address uses gives you a greater degree of ownership over that email address and makes you service provider agnostic.
Using an @gmail.com address for example, if you decide to move to another service provider at some point or especially if your Google account gets banned, you’re stuck manually migrating over however many things you have attached to your address (some of which may not be easy or possible without access to the original address).
In contrast, if your address is on a domain you own, the provider becomes moot. It doesn’t matter if you migrate or get banned, you still have your email address, and after a small blip between providers all is as it was.
> I can't pick my own domain when using Gmail, and still works just fine.
I do. I've used my own domain with GMail for many years. I moved it there from another provider when Google were giving such things away for free to beta users.
Perhaps I should move on again and avoid the big data kleptomania.
Never forget Mozilla’s stance on deplatforming & censorship (since scrubbed from Mozilla’s blog): https://web.archive.org/web/20210108215449/https://blog.mozi...
Jesus Christ. Maybe I will give in and switch to Chrome.
I've tried to use Thunderbird multiple times over the years, but I always end up with a corrupted mailbox after a week or two, so I go back to Outlook. Is TB finally reliable enough to try again? I'd love to ditch Outlook, but I don't want to be a sucker.
Update: OK, I'm trying it again.
The only issue with "large" mailboxes is that Thunderbird tends to become really slow. But this issue plagues other desktop clients as well.
I would love to find an actually performant email client. It shouldn't take like seconds to sort like 100 000 emails. It's a puny number. The time it takes one can read all the emails from disk a thousand times, it's sad.
On Mac I’ve found MailMate to be excellent in this regard.
I have used Thunderbird for over a decade.
I have never seen any corruption, but if I have threading on, emails get attached to the wrong thread quite often. It's quite annoying.
Thunderbird is my daily driver email client for all my business email for over a decade.
I've never had a single corruption problem in that time, with probably hundreds of thousands of emails. Take that for what its worth.
The only complaint I've ever had is when they redid their UI a year or two ago it got unbearably slow - which improved over the next few iterations until its now fine again.
I have been using Thunderbird myself for years and never had any such problems.
I hope for the best but plan for the worst:
I don't think people want to change email addresses very often. How do I know Mozilla will still be doing this in 5-10 years? (Edit: Others have pointed out that, if we can bring our own domains, technical users can retain their address. However, for non-technical users that's not an option.)
Also, I'm not sure about charging a fee at the start (except for TB contributors) and providing a free tier later - reverse of the usual way of launching a product. Maybe this is a soft launch to shake out the bugs and build a little momentum, and you can pay if you want to take part?
Mozilla could do something awesome here. I hate to say it, but here is a chance to start fresh and make big, legacy-breaking changes to Thunderbird. The new audience - which should become the vast majority if they are successful - won't care if it's not like the old Thunderbird (possibly unlike many on HN). Here is a chance to do something special and the mail client is all most users see or understand.