In search of a home for Thunderbird

By Nathan Willis
May 4, 2016

After nearly a decade of trying, Mozilla is finally making the move of formally spinning off ownership of the Thunderbird email client to a third party. The identity of the new owner is still up for debate; Simon Phipps prepared a report [PDF] analyzing several possible options. But Mozilla does seem intent on divesting itself of the project for real this time. Whoever does take over Thunderbird development, though, will likely face a considerable technical challenge, since much of the application is built on frameworks and components that Mozilla will soon stop developing.

Bird versus fox

To say that Mozilla has had a difficult relationship with Thunderbird would be putting things mildly. The first release was in 2003, with version 1.0 following in late 2004. As soon as 2007, though, Mozilla's Mitchell Baker announced that Mozilla wished to rid itself of Thunderbird and find a new home for the project. Instead, Mozilla ended up separating Thunderbird off into a distinct unit (Mozilla Messaging) under the Mozilla Foundation umbrella. It then reabsorbed that unit in 2011, with Baker noting:

The Thunderbird team has re-made Thunderbird into a modern email client. Thunderbird now has a more modular architecture, vastly modernized codebase, effective add-on mechanisms, a vastly improved user interface, and incremental innovations that continue to evolve and move the product forward. We intend to continue our work with the Thunderbird email product to meet this need.

But, in July 2012, Mozilla began pulling paid developers from Thunderbird and left its development primarily in the hands of community volunteers, with a few Mozilla employees performing QA and build duties to support the Extended Support Release (ESR) program. At the time, Baker offered this justification:

We’ve tried for years to build Thunderbird as a highly innovative offering, where it plays a role in moving modern Internet messaging to a more open, innovative space, and where there is a growing, more active contributor base. To date, we haven’t achieved this.

By 2014, Mozilla had ramped down its involvement to the point where the Thunderbird team lacked any clear leadership, so the developer community voted to establish a Thunderbird Council made up of volunteers.

Most recently, Baker announced in December 2015 that Thunderbird would be formally separated from Mozilla. Phipps was engaged to research the options that he later published in the aforementioned report. In April 2016, Gervase Markham announced that the search for a new home for the project was underway, with Phipps's recommendations serving as a guide.

Lizard tech

For fans of Thunderbird, the repeated back-and-forth from Mozilla leadership can be a source of frustration on its own, but it probably does not help that Mozilla has started multiple other non-browser projects (such as ChatZilla, Raindrop, Grendel, and Firefox Hello) over the years while insisting that Thunderbird was a distraction from Firefox. Although it might seem like Mozilla management displays an inconsistent attitude toward messaging and other non-web application projects, each call for Mozilla to rid itself of Thunderbird has also highlighted the difficulty of maintaining Thunderbird and Firefox in the same engineering and release infrastructure.

In recent years, due in no small part to pressure coming from the rapid release schedule of Google's Chrome, the Firefox development process has shifted considerably. There are new stable releases made approximately every six weeks, and development builds are provided for the next two releases in separate release channels.

In addition, the Firefox codebase itself is changing. The XUL and XPCOM frameworks are on their way out, to be replaced with components and add-ons written in JavaScript. The Gecko rendering engine is also marked for replacement by Servo, and the entire Firefox architecture may be replaced with the multi-process Electrolysis model.

While these changes are exciting news for Firefox, none of them have made their way into Thunderbird. In April, Mozilla's Mark Surman highlighted the divergence issue in a blog post, noting:

Many people who work on Firefox care about Thunderbird and do everything they can to accommodate Thunderbird as they evolve the code base, which slows down Firefox development when it needs to be speeding up. People in the Thunderbird community also remain committed to building on the Firefox codebase. This puts pressure on a small, dedicated group of volunteer coders who struggle to keep up.

Surman also pointed to a new job listing posted by Mozilla for a contractor who would oversee the transition. The posting describes two key responsibilities: to list all significant technical issues facing Thunderbird (including impact assessments) and to compile an outline of the options available to address those issues to move Thunderbird forward.

Former Mozilla developer Daniel Glazman responded to Surman's post on his own blog, with a more blunt assessment of the technical challenges facing Thunderbird developers. He pointed to the job posting's mention of XUL and XPCOM deprecation and said:

In practice, the last line above means for Thunderbird:

rewrite the whole UI and the whole JS layer with it
most probably rewrite the whole SMTP/MIME/POP/IMAP/LDAP/... layer
most probably have a new Add-on layer or, far worse, no more Add-ons

Glazman concluded that it is too soon to select a new host for the Thunderbird project, given that a decision has yet to be made about how to rewrite the application. Furthermore, he pointed out, Mozilla has not yet begun the transition away from XUL and XPCOM in the Firefox codebase. Only when that process starts, he said, will it be possible to assess the complexity of such a move for Thunderbird.

As far as the build infrastructure goes, Markham sent a proposal to the Thunderbird Council in March suggesting a path forward for separating Thunderbird from the Firefox engineering infrastructure. It did not spawn much discussion, but there did not seem to be any objection either.

Out of the nest

For now, Mozilla seems set on finding a new fiscal and organizational sponsor for Thunderbird, with The Document Foundation and the Software Freedom Conservancy (both highlighted in Phipps's report) currently the leading candidates. But the discussion has only just begun on the technical aspects of maintaining and evolving Thunderbird as a standalone application.

Surman contended that the needs of Firefox and Thunderbird are simply too different today for them to be tied to the same codebase and release process. Essentially, the web changes rapidly, while email changes slowly. It is hard to argue with that assertion (setting aside discussions of how email should change), but Thunderbird fans might contend that Mozilla not contributing developer time to the Thunderbird codebase only exacerbates any inherent difference between the browser and email client.

Whether one thinks Mozilla has not adequately supported Thunderbird over the years or has done its level best, the Thunderbird and Firefox projects today are moving in different directions. Given their shared history, it may seem sad to watch them part ways, but perhaps the Thunderbird community can make the most of the opportunity and drive the application forward where Mozilla could (or would) not.

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 5, 2016 0:42 UTC (Thu) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link] (2 responses)

Pale Moon, I think, has no intention of moving off of XUL and XPCOM. Perhaps rebasing on Pale Moon could allow Thunderbird to retain its current architecture.

Also, I'm a former Thunderbird user, and I got frustrated with it and wrote this. Users and suggestions welcome.

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 5, 2016 0:51 UTC (Thu) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link] (1 responses)

Huh. I didn't know this when I posted earlier, but the Pale Moon project also maintains a fork of Thunderbird (Pale Moon is a fork of Firefox): https://www.fossamail.org/

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 5, 2016 1:19 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

With a grand total of three contributors, there is a substantial risk of being struck with another dead end project.

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 5, 2016 3:34 UTC (Thu) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (2 responses)

> Mozilla has started multiple other non-browser projects (such as ChatZilla, Raindrop, Grendel, and Firefox Hello)

Not very accurate:

AFAIK ChatZilla was never an official Mozilla project. Anyway it's very, very old.

Grendel was a leftover from the "rewrite Netscape in Java" days before Mozilla even existed. It has always been irrelevant to Mozilla.

Raindrop was an attempt to innovate in messaging in ways Thunderbird doesn't, and it failed and was duly canceled.

Firefox Hello, as the name implies, is a small extension to Firefox and is also an attempt to innovate in messaging. Arguably it's the only item that belongs in this list.

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 5, 2016 12:50 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

What about all the Mozilla service projects and products, though? I know that Mozilla has to have things that support various client-side features (albeit with some protests about some of those features, too), but I have the impression that there's a lot of focus on that these days. Of course, actually enumerating Mozilla's activities is frustrating if you try and find out about them by just clicking around on mozilla.org. Or as I noted in a not-yet-moderated comment on Mark Surman's blog:

I’ve made my opinions quite clear elsewhere about the way Thunderbird appears to have been managed, but I can easily add them here, too. As someone who has an interest in developing or improving Thunderbird, the whole “volunteer” experience is incoherent and frustrating. Just trying to find the canonical resources to get started is a challenge. Most Free Software projects these days lead you to the code very quickly, but Mozilla’s assets are just an unmaintained mess: not exactly what one would expect from such a well-resourced “Web company”; it’s probably easier to start from a GNU/Linux distribution package and follow the links to the upstream repository.

The Mozilla organisation seems to put vision ahead of the little things that, if done right, would go a long way to deal with the viability problems Thunderbird development is said to have. Should Mozilla be less well-resourced in future, its other products will suffer the same way unless the organisation learns how to focus on the basics.

If mozilla.org spent a tenth of the effort apparently directed towards advocacy on getting interested developers involved, maybe there would be more of a community around Thunderbird. Also, spending money on getting the difficult work done might help as well, rather than expecting people to do it around their day job and for nothing.

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 12, 2016 2:47 UTC (Thu) by Mook (subscriber, #71173) [Link]

> AFAIK ChatZilla was never an official Mozilla project. Anyway it's very, very old.

ChatZilla shipped in Mozilla 1.0 (it's in the FAQ: http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.0/faq/ ) and Netscape 6 (according to Wikipedia), so I'm pretty sure that was an official Mozilla project at some point. It definitely is very old though; more so than Firefox, at least. Also no arguments about the other things not being nearly to the same scale. I don't think Mozilla has had anything significant non-Firefox in the last decade; basically everything had their roots during the Netscape era. (Significant Firefox-branded things would be stuff like the Android browser and I suppose B2G.)

I find that all terribly sad; XULRunner could have been where Electron is today, and SpiderMonkey could have been embedded in lots more places. I guess having all the core developers getting paid to work on Firefox snuffed out the chance for other things to grow.

Too bad the fate of Thunderbird was basically decided over nine years ago, when comm-central was split off from mozilla-central. Fennec felt it acutely enough that it was eventually merged in, but c-c never got the chance.

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 5, 2016 13:02 UTC (Thu) by eduard.munteanu (guest, #66641) [Link] (14 responses)

Firefox is a much more ambitious and farther-reaching project, considering a browser is a platform for applications in itself. And considering Mozilla Foundation's vision, why isn't Thunderbird a web application?

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 5, 2016 13:10 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link] (13 responses)

Some people, me included, think web mail is a bad idea. I have a very large list of reasons to believe that.

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 12, 2016 9:37 UTC (Thu) by ssokolow (guest, #94568) [Link] (12 responses)

I'd be interested in seeing that list.

I'm of the opinion that, given that "HTML doesn't belong in mail" is effectively a lost battle, the question becomes how best to mitigate the threat... and, given the mess of out-of-date/vulnerable embeddable WebKit components out there and the increasing reliance on extensions for things like ad-blocking, neither current webmail nor standalone apps are acceptable, but it's probably more viable in the long run to build your mail client in the browser than as a native app.

(Especially now that we're starting to see things like the iframe sandbox attribute, Content Security Policy, and the like.)

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 12, 2016 10:48 UTC (Thu) by hitmark (guest, #34609) [Link] (11 responses)

Its likely more about how the emails never leave the server, thus being accessible at whim by third parties.

Back in the day you used POP, and that defaulted to downloading and then erasing on the server.

Then came IMAP, where things were left on server by default, but could be erased if one wanted to.

Now you have webmail, where there are no local copies unless you go out of your way.

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 12, 2016 15:56 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (5 responses)

And "no local copies" == "no mail if the internet is down".

Yes I know the internet is supposed to be "always on", but I'm often away from home where I don't have access to an open internet access point - most public ones I know of are censored.

Also, "doing email" is an inherently OFF-line activity, so it's nice to be able to read and write emails in comfort, at which point I can then go search for an access point to send/receive. Oh - and UPload speeds are generally horrendous - I sometimes disconnect from the net before writing emails precisely because the act of uploading the first email cripples my attempts to write the next ...

Companies (Google, Yahoo, MS) may want you to do everything "in the cloud", but surely that's because it's to *their* benefit, not necessarily yours.

Cheers,
Wol

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 12, 2016 16:01 UTC (Thu) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (4 responses)

>Also, "doing email" is an inherently OFF-line activity

Such an interesting opinion.

>I sometimes disconnect from the net before writing emails precisely because the act of uploading the first email cripples my attempts to write the next

This at least deserves some explanation...

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 17, 2016 15:52 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

I use Windows a fair bit :-(

Windows networking can cripple the rest of the machine ...

So if I've created an email with a large attachment (my camera is a 24MP jobbie), and I attach such a picture to an email, hitting "send" can bring the machine to a crawl, especially if I'm trying to access further large pictures to attach to emails.

By going off-line, everything happens at local-bus speeds. I can create say ten emails nice and quick. Then I go back online, and while Thunderbird may crawl uploading, chances are I'm no longer doing loads of i/o and I can get on with something else on the laptop without being hampered by what's going on in the background.

Cheers,
Wol

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 18, 2016 22:22 UTC (Wed) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link] (1 responses)

Wow.

I won't say you're wrong. For me, I have literally never experienced this, from Windows XP to Vista, 7, 8.1 or 10. I use Thunderbird too since it works on Linux and on Windows.

Windows networking might not be the greatest but it was never that bad in my experience.

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 23, 2016 14:23 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

We had a case where streaming data from Linux over the wire was fine, but running the server locally on Windows 7 would chug along slowly. Ended up being that IPv6 on the wireless stack was confusing things. Not sure what in the server bit was tickling slow code paths, but turning off wireless and IPv6 support made things go smoothly (I don't remember if only one solved the problem, but we turned off both anyways).

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 19, 2016 14:36 UTC (Thu) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

Needless to say, this is not remotely normal. I feel like you'd be better off figuring out what exactly is so desperately and uniquely wrong with your machine than just trying to work around the symptoms.

Best guess, some kind of seriously shonky third-party NIC driver, possibly one designed for a different OS than the one you're actually using (and thus with bugs that didn't get triggered when it was written in 2001, or whatever, but do now) or even different hardware.

I would definitely try the latest version of the relevant driver from the chip manufacturer (as opposed to the board manufacturer, so if it's a DodgyCorp NIC or MB with a Realtek chip for example, I'd go to Realtek), and I might also try a slightly older but not prehistoric version. Unless it's Broadcom of course, in which case I'd use a hammer.

Of course it could actually be hardware.

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 12, 2016 16:27 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (3 responses)

> POP

This already represents a failure as you should be able to receive email sent to you directly via SMTP, username@workstation.domain.tld, maybe it's only the problems with dynamic DNS updates that prevent email from being strictly peer-to-peer.

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 12, 2016 19:53 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

not just dynamic DNS, but also NAT, firewalls, etc

But I disagree that e-mail should go directly to the machine you are on. That may have been viable when people had only one machine that they used, but in the modern era where people use many different computers, which one should the e-mail go to?

People want to access the _same_ e-mail on their desktop/laptop/phone/tablet/tv/watch/etc

This requires keeping the mail on the server (offline copies are good in some cases, but it all needs to sync back to the server)

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 17, 2016 15:56 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

Do what I do. Run a home server. All emails are available on all devices on the local lan. Unfortunately, we don't have IPv6, so we can't access our emails while we're "out and about" :-( although I hope that's going to change.

Which is why if I have to, I copy emails to my gmail account for external access. But I don't normally use my cloud email providers for email ... :-)

Cheers,
Wol

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 17, 2016 18:18 UTC (Tue) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

IPv6 isn't a hard requirement, all you need is to poke one hole in a NAT for Dovecot, have strict TLS on both ends, and a decent dynamic DNS setup (probably already the case, you're running a home mail server after all :)

As much as I'd like to have IPv6 too, my ISP's of the sort that refuses to acknowledge it even exists...

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 16, 2016 5:10 UTC (Mon) by ssokolow (guest, #94568) [Link]

Well, if that's the case, then a distinction must be drawn between SaaS webmail and a hypothetical combination of an open-source, IMAP-aware tool like RoundCube and an XAMPP-like installer to make it "as easy to set up as Thunderbird".

The latter is firmly what I had in mind.

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 5, 2016 13:53 UTC (Thu) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link]

> rewrite the whole UI and the whole JS layer with it
> most probably rewrite the whole SMTP/MIME/POP/IMAP/LDAP/... layer
> most probably have a new Add-on layer or, far worse, no more Add-ons

Or fork the abandoned layers below in the short term, replace (or not) at leisure.

FLOSS web-based email client that can be run locally?

Posted May 5, 2016 14:04 UTC (Thu) by david.a.wheeler (subscriber, #72896) [Link] (2 responses)

I've been a happy Thunderbird user, but its maintenance problems are concerning.

Perhaps it's time to move towards web-based email client that *can* be installed locally on a client. Then many of the framework issues disappear (it's just Javascript). I know of mailpile, there are probably others.

Is there a reason that couldn't be done? Are many people already doing it?

FLOSS web-based email client that can be run locally?

Posted May 5, 2016 14:51 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (1 responses)

In effect, something like Thunderbird might be possible as a Firefox extension, which is what it may have been originally. The thinking goes that you can re-use the rendering engine for navigational elements as well as for formatted mail (like the HTML mail we all know and love), plus re-use the various facilities for different media types, and JavaScript can perform the logic to glue it all together.

I guess that the integration needed to happen at the framework level (XUL and XPCOM) several years ago, but perhaps the more recent extensions work makes it possible as a kind of local Web application.

FLOSS web-based email client that can be run locally?

Posted May 5, 2016 18:03 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

In effect, something like Thunderbird might be possible as a Firefox extension, which is what it may have been originally.

I thought it was the lineal descendant of the original Mozilla browser mail client, which now also lives on as the Seamonkey "all in one" web tool. By the way, what is going to happen to that?

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 5, 2016 15:09 UTC (Thu) by njd27 (subscriber, #5770) [Link] (1 responses)

I think we might need a bigger law:

"Every software program expands until it can no longer read mail"

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 6, 2016 19:52 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

That might be a special case of a more general unifying theory:

“Programs that outpace Moore's Law inevitably have to shed functionality until they are left with none”

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 9, 2016 9:27 UTC (Mon) by mina86 (guest, #68442) [Link] (1 responses)

> most probably rewrite the whole SMTP/MIME/POP/IMAP/LDAP/... layer

Or get rid of NIH syndrome and use offlineimap.
Also notmuch mail for indexing.

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 11, 2016 12:59 UTC (Wed) by KAMiKAZOW (guest, #107958) [Link]

Another option: Mozilla develops a whole, more modern PIM stack for Firefox OS. For reasons unknown to me the TB devs didn't even want to adopt that stack for TB, even though both were developed under the Mozilla umbrella.

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 12, 2016 10:42 UTC (Thu) by hitmark (guest, #34609) [Link] (2 responses)

In essence Thunderbird is a reminder at Mozilla that the internet is about more than the web.

Thing about email is that the web monkeys, most of them is their 20s or younger, see it as a stale and boring technology.

Just watch how they are all hot and bothered about Slack, basically a reimplementation of IRC using JSON and HTTP(?!).

Hell, Mozilla can't even agree on what Hello is about. When introduced it seemed to be about WebRTC, but recently they switched the focus on "collaborative" browsing (originally sharing the url you were reading was opt in, now it is opt out).

The browser has changed from a hyperlinked document reader to a virtual machine. HTML has been boiled down to div tags while most of the "action" happens via JS and CSS, acting as a terminal for the heavy lifting happening in the "clouds".

Thunderbird and similar is a reminder that the thing on our desk or lap used to be more than a terminal, it used to be and actual participant. Thunderbird is not just some interface to the server (though that may well be true using IMAP), but actively sort and prioritize email locally.

In the end Thunderbird puts the control at the hands of the user, as downloaded email is no longer on the server. This unlike with gmail and like where everything is up for grabs by the service provider.

Frankly if Mozilla was serious about internet freedoms, they would double down on Thunderbird. Set up a email server that anyone that use Thunderbird can get an account on, and have Thunderbird set up and make use of encryption from the start.

And thats just email. We should perhaps not ignore usenet/newsgroups, the grandfather of Reddit and similar.

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 12, 2016 15:47 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (1 responses)

> The browser has changed from a hyperlinked document reader to a virtual machine. HTML has been boiled down to div tags while most of the "action" happens via JS and CSS, acting as a terminal for the heavy lifting happening in the "clouds".

I just need to point out that the seeds of this change were planted and cultivated since 1995 and Netscape 2.0. MS saw this vision of the future we are living in today and it's very much the reason why they freaked out at the end of the '90s and pushed so hard on IE and ActiveX to slow down progress.

> Thunderbird is not just some interface to the server (though that may well be true using IMAP), but actively sort and prioritize email locally.

The reason why this is no longer the primary model for the vast majority of people to use Internet services is that they want to be able to access the full data from multiple devices which is technically very difficult
without a central server

> Slack, basically a reimplementation of IRC using JSON
> usenet/newsgroups, the grandfather of Reddit

I will note as you do that most of the new communication tools we use today have clear antecedents and that the base functionality was there from early days. SMTP, NNTP, IRC, Telnet, FTP cover a vast number of use cases such that most things you can do today, you could have done 30 years ago, only slightly differently.

In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 17, 2016 15:59 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> I will note as you do that most of the new communication tools we use today have clear antecedents and that the base functionality was there from early days. SMTP, NNTP, IRC, Telnet, FTP cover a vast number of use cases such that most things you can do today, you could have done 30 years ago, only slightly differently.

And Gopher - the predecessor of what most people think of as "the internet" :-)

Cheers,
Wol