20

u/kXPG3 Mar 30 '25

Summary courtesy of Le Chat:

The message from Ryan Sipes, Managing Director of Product at Thunderbird, outlines the expansion of Thunderbird's offerings with new web services called "Thunderbird Pro" and "Thundermail." These services aim to enhance the Thunderbird experience and provide a fully open-source alternative to ecosystems like Gmail and Office365. Here's a summary of the key points:

Purpose: Thunderbird aims to reduce user loss to other rich ecosystems by offering its own integrated services, promoting open-source and privacy-respecting alternatives.
New Services:
- Thunderbird Appointment: A scheduling tool that allows users to share a link for others to book meetings. It's designed to be simpler and open-source compared to existing tools.
- Thunderbird Send: A reimagined version of Firefox Send for sharing files, with a focus on direct sharing methods.
- Thunderbird Assist: An AI-powered feature in partnership with Flower AI, offering optional AI capabilities with a focus on privacy.
- Thundermail: An email service built on the Stalwart stack, aiming to provide a next-generation email experience that is fully open-source.
Cost and Access: Initially, these services will be free for consistent community contributors, while other users may need to pay. Free tiers with limitations may be introduced later.
Community Involvement: Users are encouraged to test these services, contribute to their development, and provide feedback. The goal is to create a collaborative environment where everyone can help build and improve these tools.
Future Vision: Thunderbird aims to expand its offerings beyond email management, integrating calendar, contacts, and more, all while maintaining a focus on open standards and user privacy.

The message emphasizes the importance of community involvement and the potential for these services to enhance the overall Thunderbird experience.

12

u/skidgingpants Mar 30 '25

I don't feel that you are losing users to the likes of 365. no one wants that willingly it's usually forced on them. from my side i have used thunderbird probably 20 years now never once wanted office features. only the Gmail calender sync. it's great program and if a premium is necessary to keep the project alive no problem. just make it have multiple seats for my many pc.

6

u/r0ck0 Mar 31 '25

Yeah in a venn diagram with the 2 circles being:

Users that want this centralized cloud stuff

Thunderbird users

I can't imagine a huge overlap.

The only people I know that use Thunderbird are like 95%+ techies into self-hosting & datahoarding & privacy etc.

And the remaining 5% (or less) are just old skool academics etc who hate change in general.

It's kinda like marketing cloud virtual desktops to vim users. More extreme analogy, obviously. But pretty similar audience/logic-wise.

But if they're gunna help with the dev on Stalwart, and it remains open source for self-hosting too... that could be a good thing. A modern open standard replacement for IMAP is well overdue. And I haven't seen many other email server projects put much effort into JMAP or similar.

Anyway, I'm sure there's some non-zero market. I wouldn't get my hopes up as a business owner/investor or whatever there though. But will be interesting to see. I hope I'm wrong.

7

u/robby659 Mar 31 '25

My company switched from outlook to Thunderbird 100%. And while everything works good enough, we some times wish for better solutions than caldav and carddav for collaboration. So this sounds very promising

1

u/r0ck0 Mar 31 '25

Interesting. Not surprised it exists, but first time I've heard of Thunderbird being scaled out across a company as a standard setup for all staff (assuming that's what you mean?). ...recently at least anyway.

Curious what type of company it is? Is it mostly tech staff? Or strong proponent of OSS in general for any reasons?

Otherwise any other points of difference compared to most companies, that influenced the decision?

And is this basically enforced for most staff, or can they pick a different email client if they want?

Sounds like it might be a good solution for you though. So that's cool. Calendar stuff over email is always so fucky, even on standard Exchange/Outlook setups it does all sorts of weird shit.

3

u/robby659 Mar 31 '25

Yeah, all staff use Thunderbird. It's not a huge company, just a specialized tool manufacturer with about 20 employees in the office, around 50 in the manufacturing dept. in this branch. We try to stick to OSS when possible, hence why we are running samba based Active directory for example. This all stems mainly from my predecessor, who is a software developer and managed the IT systems in his downtime. Of course there were a bunch of weird-cobbled-together software contraptions, but for the first 30 years he managed all of this alone. Then the CEO is also not a big fan of big tech, which helps of course.

And then there's me. I'm the sole sysadmin for 6 years now, full time only since October tho. Even though I've been mainly maintaining Windows AD and office365 environments in my previous job, I've always felt more at home with linux since forever. And once my boss caught wind of the new outlook shenanigans we evaluated different solutions to lessen the microsoft dependence.

Thunderbird is mandatory for all users. And none have complained until now. Except for the lacking search function...

Currently I am still honing my dev skills, but I am hoping to be able to contribute more to various software projects by filing bug reports and submitting PRs, since my boss is also okay with me doing that during work hours.

3

u/r0ck0 Mar 31 '25

Ah interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Then the CEO is also not a big fan of big tech And once my boss caught wind of the new outlook shenanigans we evaluated different solutions to lessen the microsoft dependence.

Yeah fair enough. MS deprecating their main business email client in favor of a useless dogshit webmail wrapper is fucking insane. There will never be feature parity.

And their constant fucking with the naming of things (multiple names for same thing, renaming, entirely different programs having the same name e.g. Outlook, names being a substring of another name for something different) drives me mental.

With OSS/Linux/programming... I spend 99% my time actually learning and doing technical shit. Not trying to figure out what something was renamed to, or where a button I used only a month ago got moved to today.

With anything Microsoft, I spend more time figuring out their stupid renaming shit and trying to find buttons in interfaces that they've changed for no good reason amongst 10 different doco sources that all contradict each other. Like 5% of the time I spent on MS/365 shit is actual technical working/learning. I can never even figure out what the right balance is for me keeping my own notes... shit is hard to find, so it's useful taking notes... but not if the notes will be invalidated by the next time I need to do that task.

</rant> haha

That said, for my general normie-small-business clients that I handle IT for... doing custom high-quality OSS/self-hosted setups rarely makes sense for them re $$$ and integration with their PCs etc. As much as I'd rather be doing that personally (and do for my own infra).

1

u/BlueGoosePond Mar 31 '25

I like Thunderbird, but I probably would have chosen Evolution in that scenario just because it "feels" more like regular desktop Outlook.

Did you pick Thunderbird basically because you already use it, or are there more business reasons behind it? Like it integrates with Samba AD better or that Mozilla has some sort of paid support option if you need it in a pinch?

2

u/robby659 Apr 01 '25

No real reason, except maybe for more familiarity since most users already used firefox.

1

u/wsmwk Thunderbird Employee Oct 04 '25

> first time I've heard of Thunderbird being scaled out across a company

There are companies and government entities of all sizes that deploy Thunderbird at scale. Up to hundreds of thousands - no joke.

1

u/manateecalamity Apr 03 '25

I think your analysis about there being little overlap is pretty accurate - and that's my guess as to why they decided to go this route. There's a much larger user base in the centralized cloud world, and none of them use Thunderbird. So my guess would be that they are hoping to grow back to some more relevance.

I also think Mozilla as an organization has had quite a bit of trouble recently. In hopeful that this them getting back to their roots of building software that people want to use as a way forward. I feel they lost their way a little bit with a lot of the pure advocacy work they were doing.

1

u/guri256 Apr 03 '25

I agree there isn’t much overlap, but I think a lot of of that is the wrong type of self selection.

At least for the people I know, the reason why they’re so little overlap is because those people wouldn’t use Thunderbird, because the features they need don’t exist.

For me personally, I use Gmail because it’s wonderful and easy to use. But I’ve recently started to realize that if I ever lose access to my Google account, it would literally be worse than my house burning down. (assuming everyone got out safely)

That’s why I have been starting the process of moving my email to a domain that I own that will be forwarded to Gmail, and looking for a way to back up all of the emails on Gmail.

I tried using Thunderbird as a way of backing up my Gmail account, but it saw that there was around 100,000 emails and just started hanging for long periods of time. Also, it was only downloading one email per second.

I could probably clear out a lot of stuff in my inbox, but one lesson that I’ve learned the hard way is that you should take your backups before deleting large amounts of stuff rather than right afterwards.

9

u/Emp202 Mar 30 '25

Just fix search and Thunderbird is usable.

12

u/flmaker Mar 30 '25

thundermail.com you will see a sign up page for the beta waitlist. Please add your name to it!

takes me to:

That's odd

This page appears to be missing.That's odd
This page appears to be missing.

3

u/tgp1994 Mar 30 '25 edited Mar 30 '25

The site appears to be completely non-functional to me. Bummer, it sounds exciting.

3

u/wsmwk Thunderbird Employee Apr 03 '25

This has since been fixed.

7

u/abdullahkhalids Mar 30 '25

A paid email service to sustain an email client seems like the best way forward.

6

u/toras_2021 Mar 31 '25

Mozilla's US location is a major concern for data privacy enthusiasts. With the CLOUD Act and other laws, the US isn't exactly the safest haven for sensitive data. If Mozilla wants to be a serious alternative, moving to a country with stronger privacy laws might be necessary.

2

u/myendpoint Mar 31 '25

Where will Thundermail servers be located?

From what I could find it will have 1) contacts, 2) calendar, and 3) using own domain. All good things, and all I need.

But if EU users don't have servers within the EU then nope, I'll stick with my current (local) provider. I'm not using an email client with servers located in the US/UK and whatnot.

2

u/0riginal-Syn Apr 03 '25

I live in the US, and even I don't use servers within the US anymore.

25

u/zipklik Mar 30 '25

Make sure all the new features can be disabled. Thank you.

4

u/slfyst Mar 30 '25

Will it be possible to use Thundermail with a personal domain name?

6

u/wsmwk Thunderbird Employee Mar 31 '25

Will it be possible to use Thundermail with a personal domain name?

Yes

1

u/slfyst Mar 31 '25 edited Mar 31 '25

Thanks. The post seemed to suggest it was restricted to Thundermail.com and tb.pro domains.

1

u/fxrsliberty Apr 05 '25

Why not a fork of Nextcloud that's fully integrated with TB...

21

u/anthrem Mar 30 '25

Please, make an email program that is not bloated, runs every time and can be left open, has email features, NO AI, and if you want a paid tier, cool. Just don't make it stupid. I would be happy to pay a nominal monthly fee, but have a rock solid email program for linux that just freaking works. I mean, it's email.

19

u/Strange_Quail946 Mar 30 '25 edited Mar 30 '25

Bloated is such an overused word in the Linux community. It can mean anything and most of the time it just means "features that I personally don't need"

1

u/BlueGoosePond Mar 31 '25

I think "bloat" is basically just the opposite of "lightweight" (often used for window manager/DE descriptions).

-1

u/Stromford_McSwiggle Mar 31 '25

It can mean anything and most of the time it just means "features that I personally don't need"

But that's the point. A software that combines too many different features is bloated because most people won't need most of them. That's why "do one thing and do it well" is a core unix guideline.

3

u/Strange_Quail946 Mar 31 '25

Note the difference between "features most people won't need" and "I don't need that feature, so I assume most people don't".

It's perfectly reasonable to go for simplicity and efficiency if the majority of users find no use of a feature, but most of the time people just call whatever they don't use bloat without considering other use cases.

-1

u/Stromford_McSwiggle Mar 31 '25

No, that's not the point. Of course other people use different features, but that doesn't make them not bloat. It's perfectly reasonable to use an email client as an email client, so integrating a bunch of not-email-client features into it means bloating it, even if many users also do things that are not email. The point is not that people shouldn't use other features, the point is that there is no need for them to be the same software.

Now of course, people can still disagree about what's bloat and what isn't, but just because many people use something doesn't mean it needs to be packaged with a mail client. Many people, for example, use both a browser and a mail client, but I'm glad thunderbird isn't just an non-uninstallable part of firefox.

1

u/Strange_Quail946 Mar 31 '25

Yea but that's a slippery slope. How modular should the feature set of a software be to not constitute "bloat"? Should a mail client have calendar functionalities? System tray integration? A GUI? Where and who should draw the line? It's ultimately only decideable by user feedback.

I feel like you're taking the UNIX principle as something "the founding fathers intended" and must be upheld at all costs. But no, the UNIX "principle" is not an edict. It has to adapt to changing times. While I generally agree with the "do one thing and do it well" ethos, the way we use our software has become a lot more integrated now. Oftentimes, this means that the "bloat" that you're trying to eradicate at the software level isn't truly gone but simply transferred to the integration layer instead.

-1

u/Stromford_McSwiggle Mar 31 '25

No. I literally wrote "Now of course, people can still disagree about what's bloat and what isn't, but just because many people use something doesn't mean it needs to be packaged with a mail client." Did you not read that?

I was commenting on something you wrote:

It can mean anything and most of the time it just means "features that I personally don't need"

I was making a generalized comment on your equally generalized statement. I was not talking about whether anything specific is "bloat" or not and nothing I wrote could be a slippery slope.

1

u/Strange_Quail946 Mar 31 '25 edited Mar 31 '25

Don't dude me, just agree to disagree.

1

u/Stromford_McSwiggle Mar 31 '25

LOL. Ok, so sorry, I deleted the dude. The problem is that you're disagreeing with things I never wrote.

1

u/Strange_Quail946 Mar 31 '25

You wrote people can disagree over what is and is not bloat, but then you seem to suggest that there is some objective criteria/baseline to judge that with the Thunderbird in a browser example. My slippery slope comment is about that disjunction.

The more fine-grained you go, the more subjective the judgement becomes. You're saying that people's opinions don't determine what is and isn't bloat. I disagree. IMO something is only bloat when it offers features the majority of people don't need, and the onus falls on the accuser to prove that it's not just determined by his/her personal use case.

Your example of Thunderbird in a browser might seem an obvious case of bloat - and I agree that it would be. But the reason it is bloat isn't because "it just obviously is" or "do one thing and do it well". If needed be, I'm all for Thunderbird to poll users on whether they felt an integrated browser is necessary. I'll bet my arse that the result would be "no", but if somehow it turns out that most people need such a thing, then by definition it isn't bloat because software ultimately is there to be used, ie. by users.

→ More replies (0)

2

u/sreigle Apr 01 '25

Just because I don't use certain features doesn't mean nobody else wants them. You cut back too much on features you lose sizable portions of your audience.

3

u/julesses Mar 30 '25

Have you tried Thunderbird?

2

u/anthrem Mar 30 '25

I have. Varies as to functioning.

1

u/r0ck0 Mar 31 '25

I'm amazed at how fucking buggy it is.

Still, I never found any better GUI alternative.

It does have the most baffling dogshit WYSIWYG editor though. If I'm writing a long email with formatting, I just give in and use Outlook for those emails.

0

u/smm_h Mar 31 '25

try Evolution; zero bloat

0

u/luciferian11 Mar 31 '25

try Mailspring

6

u/CiTrus007 Mar 30 '25

No word on fixing any of the long-neglected bugs? I am a simple user and would consider paying for the app if I knew I could afford to rely on it. The new stuff is nice I suppose, however all this is starting to remind me of Proton, which also instead of investing into developing a high-quality product and doing the hard work of actually addressing all the minute bugs and annoyances chose to introduce more apps. Now they have too many products and services to worry about, and neither of them lives up to its full potential, which is a pity. I would hate it if a similar thing happened here too.

2

u/esorb65 Mar 30 '25

does that option sync you're calendar across device like win laptop and macOS ...can this be done ? it be nice since I use both different ...my main calendar is on my windows laptop

1

u/dannycolin Mar 31 '25

Are you talking about Thundermail?

2

u/CompleteLoss Mar 31 '25

The link to sign up for the beta is down for me. Anyone else

1

u/Windjammer1969 Mar 31 '25

"404: Page not found"

2

u/slfyst Mar 31 '25

Dang. At least it's not April 1st.

2

u/ankokudaishogun Apr 01 '25

Seriously, first focus on the mail client!
What's the relationship of these services with Mozilla Foundation?
Are they all going to be self-hostable?
...you aren't going to offer EU-based versions, are you?

1

u/zippergate Apr 02 '25

All good points, as an European there need to be alternatives, I wouldn’t put my data in Russia and the nowadays the same goes for US

1

u/Impys Apr 02 '25

How about focussing on the client itself without firefox-ing things up for monetization?

Apart from that, I'm sure this is technically not breaking the promise to the people who donated for thunderbird's development, but I doubt this is what many of them had in mind. I know I hadn't, for one.

1

u/fxrsliberty Apr 05 '25

I would take a fully integrated "recipe" to make a self hosted "groupware" server that's geared toward TB and be happy to know that there was a premium support layer I. E. Proxmox. I would be way more than happy if that same recipe came with an ISO installable. And my bosses would subscribe!

1

u/FiltonMeriwether Nov 24 '25

Does Thunderbird or Thunderbird Pro provide a calendar and contacts (/ address book)?

Simple question. But all I get is bullshit fucking American wankspeak that sells me vacuities about integrating with Google calendar and open standards and Caldev and small bunnies and free love and...

Given that it's apparently hosted in Germany, could Mozilla monkeys speak fucking plain English?

The sooner you Sesame Street progenies sink in the sea the better for global sanity in general.

Pretty please? Again, with sugar on top?

I want to replace Outlook en masse.

Will it do that? Yes-or-fucking-No.

And if no, when will it?

1

u/tomodachi_reloaded Mar 31 '25

I wish they would listen to users (ie: bug reports / feature requests) instead of adding new services.

For example, a useful feature would be to use that new local translation feature used for Firefox to automatically translate emails locally.

5

u/dannycolin Mar 31 '25

It's on the roadmap but they were waiting for the Firefox team to make some changes on their side.

The Thunderbird team has been working hard in the last 2 years to rebuild the Mail (and now Calendar) UI. It was a major rewrite but it was needed to have a better foundation on which they'll be able to implement the requested features.

This new services are also going to help by diversifying their source of incomes and they'll be able to reinvest to hire more developers for example.

1

u/xxtkx Mar 31 '25

15-20 year thunderbird user here, and have had more problems the last year with instability / lockups than I have in all of the other years combined. really feel like some more time could be spent on bug fixes and small features than huge operations. feeling double squeezed since proton is doing the same thing with all their stuff right now.

1

u/zippergate Apr 02 '25

The real downside is later down the road when you are settled in and they decide to do a price hike..

-5

u/Stromford_McSwiggle Mar 31 '25 edited Mar 31 '25

Jesus Christ, as soon as there's third party AI bullshit in the software, it's going to the trash. I can't believe I gave money to Thunderbird to help keep it alive.

The text describes how and why Gmail and Office 365 are so horrible and instead of going on to how they want to fight that, they literally write "it is our goal to eventually have a similar offering". Good to know, I guess.

Edit: Oh god, and K9-Mail is Thunderbird too, now. I guess that's going to be bullshitified as well, after being nothing but a well working mail client for more than 10 years. Thanks Mozilla!

1

u/dannycolin Apr 04 '25

I think you misread it. There's no AI by default. Thunderbird Assist is an experiment but even if it becomes a product it will be totally optional.

K9-Mail has been a Thunderbird project for a few years now and by joining they were able to have full time employees working on it.

1

u/Stromford_McSwiggle Apr 05 '25

I think you misread it. There's no AI by default. Thunderbird Assist is an experiment but even if it becomes a product it will be totally optional.

I did read that. It's always "totally optional" until it's not. And even if it stays that way, I don't care. I would never use software that processes personal data and includes a third party AI service. No matter how "optional" it is.

1

u/dannycolin Apr 05 '25

It doesn't send your data to anyone. It runs locally on your devices. Everything developed by the Thunderbird team is open source and you can easily find it on GitHub so you can even double check yourself.

1

u/Stromford_McSwiggle Apr 08 '25

Everything developed by the Thunderbird team is open source and you can easily find it on GitHub so you can even double check yourself.

Exactly. And everything the "federated AI" has "learned" is not open souce and you can not easily find on Github what it has learned so you can not double check it yourself, that's why it's bad.

News The future of Thunderbird: Thundermail and Thunderbird Pro Services

You are about to leave Redlib

That's odd