Comment by devwastaken 2 days ago
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.
> 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 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.
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?)
they do in fact need to be sustainable and profitable. thats how numbers work. no one gets paid they leave. this isnt a charity.
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.
I don't understand. You don't control any Mx records. You have an account with some company. You might lose it just like you might lose your Gmail account.
Also... You can use Gmail with your own domain. I don't get the meme with mx records.
> I don't understand. You don't control any Mx records.
Yes, you do (on your own domain).
> You have an account with some company. You might lose it just like you might lose your Gmail account.
Yes, but if you use your own domain, the same account username can exist on another provider. I can still write you an email to "firstname[at]firstnamelastname.com" and reach you.
As for the email messages, if you do email correctly (by downloading emails to a local email client, and then creating backups, or at the very least, using Google Takeout to export your mailbox regularly), you don't have to lose your email messages.
> Also... You can use Gmail with your own domain. I don't get the meme with mx records.
Exactly my point. By then, you use Google Workspace, which is an email provider to your own domain.
If you wanted to switch to Microsoft 365, or Fastmail like I do, I am the sovereign of my email address. Nobody noticed I switched email providers when I changed from Google Workspace to Fastmail, and that's the point.
To be able to dump the provider when you need to. Sovereignty.
> Also... You can use Gmail with your own domain. I don't get the meme with mx records.
Additional reply to this: To use that, you need to fiddle with MX records.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
https://stalw.art/blog/nlnet-grant-collaboration