Thunderbird plans "Thundermail" email and other services [LWN.net]

Ryan Sipes has announced efforts to expand Thunderbird's offerings with web services to "enhance the experience of using Thunderbird".

The Why for offering these services is simple. Thunderbird loses users each day to rich ecosystems that are both clients and services, such as Gmail and Office365. These ecosystems have both hard vendor lock-ins (through interoperability issues with 3rd-pary clients) and soft lock-ins (through convenience and integration between their clients and services). It is our goal to eventually have a similar offering so that a 100% open source, freedom-respecting alternative ecosystem is available for those who want it.

The planned services include hosted email, appointment scheduling, a revival of Firefox Send, and (of course) an AI assistant based on a partnership with Flower AI. The AI features will "always be optional for use by people who want them". Sipes is managing director of product for Thunderbird's parent organization, MZLA Technologies Corporation. LWN covered his GUADEC 2024 keynote last July.

to post comments

Does Thunderbird really loose users to Gmail or Office365?

Posted Apr 2, 2025 22:29 UTC (Wed) by alx.manpages (subscriber, #145117) [Link] (5 responses)

I went from Thunderbird to mutt(1) a few years ago (and later to neomutt(1), due to <https://neomutt.org/feature/cli-crypto>).

I think the kind of user that uses (or these days, rather used) Mozilla software is the kind of user that wouldn't use Google or Microsoft services/software for mail or browsers. If Mozilla is loosing users, it seems obvious to me that it's precisely due to it following the trend of those services and software that Mozilla users don't want in the first place.

I'm still waiting for Debian to replace Firefox from the repository with some fork due to the DFSG violations.

Does Thunderbird really loose users to Gmail or Office365?

Posted Apr 4, 2025 1:43 UTC (Fri) by Forge (guest, #176831) [Link] (4 responses)

I think I'm probably the target market here. I never really dug the idea of running my own mail server, but I liked to have all my email available to all my devices, and in the early aughts, Google was the way to go, with "unlimited lifetime email storage" (that didn't last). Now that Google has slowly raised the temperature of the water until I'm paying >100$/year just to store my two decades of email, I'm willing to look for something less expensive that can do a similar job, with less tithing to the "new" 'be evil a little' version of Google.

If Mozilla wants to deliver on that, I'm willing to hear them out and test the waters.

I really don't like supporting Google anymore. I'm supporting Apple because they're the Least Worst neighbor, and my household is entirely Linux, Apple or not under my direct control. Come with me, Mozilla, and take my money. All I ask is what I already have, and without Google or MS involved.

Gmail mail server alternatives

Posted Apr 4, 2025 9:26 UTC (Fri) by alx.manpages (subscriber, #145117) [Link]

I used Gmail as the mail server for a very long time for similar reasons. I used Thunderbird for the MUA, but Gmail was a reasonable server.

However, I recently discovered a small company, Migadu, that provides a mail server, and the prices are quite reasonable: <https://migadu.com/>. Their customer support is excellent; I met a few bugs in their software, and they fixed them in hours of my report. And they also answered any doubts I had. Now I've been using Migadu for a year or so, and I can only say I'm very happy.

I learned from them because of <https://korg.docs.kernel.org/linuxdev.html>.

Does Thunderbird really loose users to Gmail or Office365?

Posted Apr 8, 2025 0:58 UTC (Tue) by tamasrepus (subscriber, #33205) [Link] (1 responses)

> Now that Google has slowly raised the temperature of the water until I'm paying >100$/year just to store my two decades of email, I'm willing to look for something less expensive that can do a similar job, with less tithing to the "new" 'be evil a little' version of Google.

I offer another way to think about how you spend your money — why would you pay more to Google over MZLA or another smaller company?

If you're looking best value for your dollar, you cannot beat the scale Google operates and the prices they offer, unless you are another company the size of Google. If you want alternatives from smaller companies more aligned with your interests, you should expect them to cost the same if not _more_. Someone has to pay for it!

Does Thunderbird really loose users to Gmail or Office365?

Posted Apr 8, 2025 2:05 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

The problem is that email and groupware are only a small part of the Google Workspace product. So you're also paying for Google Drive, Google Docs, Gemini, and tons of other stuff that you might not even need.

Does Thunderbird really loose users to Gmail or Office365?

Posted Apr 8, 2025 12:43 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

I know this is not an option for everyone, but I self-host my email. It costs me a bit more than $100/year, but that's OK because I use the same infrastructure for many other things.

My email infrastructure consists of:

A KVM instance hosted in Montreal by OVH that acts as my MX host and email filter. I pay around $7.85/month or $94.20 per year for this.
A Raspberry Pi 4 with a couple of 6TB USB drives as my actual mail server where all the mail is stored. This was probably close to $400 in fixed costs plus about $15/year in electricity.
A similarly-configured Raspberry Pi 4 at my sister's place which is my offsite backup with similar electricity consumption.

My recurring costs are thus about $124/year but I have full control, full ownership of my data, and no realistic storage limits... I have email going back to 1989. My Pi 4 also runs other services such as Radicale for my calendar and contacts, Asterisk for my phone system, etc.

Another consideration for me, being located in Canada, is to minimize my dependency on US-based companies. Given the geopolitical situation, it's simply too great a risk for me to have my email stored or accessed by a US-based company.

Wow

Posted Apr 2, 2025 23:55 UTC (Wed) by kiko (guest, #69905) [Link] (1 responses)

This is a really bold move, and something I hadn't predicted Mozilla would take on this side of 2020. I'd love to subscribe to this service; it's absolutely necessary in a world where nearly everything has gone proprietary walled garden.

Wow

Posted Apr 3, 2025 9:35 UTC (Thu) by aragilar (subscriber, #122569) [Link]

I'm not sure it's that different in kind from e.g. Mozilla VPN or the various other projects listed on https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/ (or those listed on https://killedbymozilla.com/). I note that "Gmail and Office365" are called out, but they don't seem to be providing the rest of the ecosystem covering storage/document/photos etc.
This makes me wonder who's the target audience for this—there are lots of other webmail companies that provide a good service outside Google/Microsoft, but at least in my experience, the problem is less personal email and rather "professional" email (whether it's corporate, academic or otherwise "groupware"). There are existing open source providers for this as well (though usually self-hosted), so where does Mozilla think they can make an impact (and not add another item to https://killedbymozilla.com/)?

Honestly, the boldest move Mozilla could make would be to let people actually pay for Firefox (and you will likely see the same revival in Firefox as has happened with Thunderbird). They would have to think how this affects their structure and culture, and it would likely increase the respect that Mozilla has.

On the use of donations to MZLA Technologies Corporation

Posted Apr 3, 2025 4:27 UTC (Thu) by elboulangero (subscriber, #81193) [Link] (2 responses)

I've been donating to Thunderbird since they restarted development and added GPG support, 2 or 3 few years ago, knowing (hoping) that this donation would help develop Thunderbird, an email client that I've been using forever. It was great to see development restart and I wanted to support it.

Now I wonder if my donations are used to develop web services that I'm never going to use, questionable AI features, while Thunderbird development itself will, again, grind to a halt.

On the use of donations to MZLA Technologies Corporation

Posted Apr 3, 2025 8:14 UTC (Thu) by dvandeun (guest, #24273) [Link]

I used to be grumpy about the fact that I was partly paying for the advertising of products that I was going to buy anyway. Then I realized that this advertising allowed the company to attract more customers and work on a larger scale; so the cost of advertising should lead to lower costs in general, especially if the company was still small and relatively unknown. Maybe in the long run, if the extra services are successful, there will be more, not less, money to invest in Thunderbird. So the important question for a contributor is not whether you will be using the extra services yourself, but whether they will be good for the company. Of course if there are any signs that the company loses interest in the product that you are interested in, that would be another matter, but that remains to be seen.

On the use of donations to MZLA Technologies Corporation

Posted Apr 4, 2025 8:42 UTC (Fri) by jberkus (guest, #55561) [Link]

They're not halting. I was chatting with the TB team at SCALE, and there's a number of longstanding issues that are finally getting resolved. If anything, work on the client is accelerating.

At the same time, the client just isn't going to change that much, particularly if they have to be compatible with proprietary mail servers. Hence work on new services.

Thunderbird's Quality

Posted Apr 3, 2025 8:43 UTC (Thu) by PastyAndroid (guest, #168019) [Link] (6 responses)

I really hope they improve the quality of Thunderbird itself first, the last time I used it... it was... less than optimal for my tastes. There is a fork; Betterbird that aims to fix many of the issues; they've done a good job of fixing many of the long-standing issues. Here's hoping Mozilla take note and make the changes upstream.

That said, I personally am quite content with my neomutt for the time being. It's very easy to setup, very easy to use and just works. I really cannot complain. I just love the simplicity of it, it does its job and does it well. :-)

Thunderbird's Quality

Posted Apr 3, 2025 13:47 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (5 responses)

Yeah, I found Thunderbird was getting way too heavy for my liking. I tried mutt, but never really got comfortable with it. I do like a GUI email client, so I settled on Claws Mail which for me is just the right combo of graphical with nice features, yet lightweight enough that it doesn't feel sluggish.

Thunderbird's Quality

Posted Apr 3, 2025 14:46 UTC (Thu) by audric (guest, #86999) [Link] (3 responses)

It's been a while since I've used Claws Mail. Is it still single-threaded which makes the UI irresponsive when there are large synchronization operations going on?

Thunderbird's Quality

Posted Apr 3, 2025 14:48 UTC (Thu) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

It is. I really like Claws for the most part, but it being single-threaded and not allowing, say, users to open multiple folders in different windows is a non-starter for me.

Thunderbird's Quality

Posted Apr 3, 2025 16:25 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, Claws does suffer from occasional UI freezes. Most of the time, for me, it's not too bad because my IMAP server is on my LAN, so I have a 1GB connection to the server and sync operations happen fairly quickly.

But I've used it long enough that all the keyboard shortcuts are in my muscle memory, so I live with that.

Thunderbird's Quality

Posted Apr 3, 2025 16:25 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Ugh, 1Gb/s Ethernet connection, I meant to say.

Thunderbird's Quality

Posted Apr 4, 2025 23:49 UTC (Fri) by PastyAndroid (guest, #168019) [Link]

I've bounced between most of the 'big' email clients available for GNU/Linux. I used seamonkey/thunderbird for a number of years on GNOME 2, they were good but even then had odd bugs. After GNOME 3 hit and I had to migrate to XFCE, I also used the time to switch to claws and in fairness, claws was good and worked very well. I do wonder how much it has changed since then, but I do remember it "just works" (or did at that time.).

I also used gnome's evolution for a while (on XFCE), it was actually a really good solution for when you want all the features built in, such as contact sync, calender sync, etc. I continued to use that after claws right up until I switched to KDE around 2022 or so, since I didn't really encounter any significant bugs.

I didn't want the gnome dependencies within my KDE setup so I switched over to Kmail which seemed like the natural replacement. It worked mostly, but it also had peculiar issues where it would lose the synced contacts / events and sometimes even emails themselves if you use filters or move mail between folders (the emails were simply gone, no longer on the server nor stored locally.).

I tried out thunderbird again... and.. I basically noped out of that.

I eventually got fed up of dealing with all the GUI clients and their oddities along with all the other syncing. I decided to try out mutt/neomutt. Granted, it has nowhere near as many fancy features but it does "just work" and as yet it hasn't failed to do anything I told it to do or lost anything.

It just brings peace of mind and a lot less frustration. :-)

Or maybe I'm just getting too old for that software, lol.

Seem like a reasonable move

Posted Apr 4, 2025 8:38 UTC (Fri) by jberkus (guest, #55561) [Link] (2 responses)

I can totally see why MZLA is doing this -- it's the natural direction of growth, and doesn't require making deals with any advertisers. Plus, with both Procmail and Fastmail creating their own bad press, folks are looking for non-gmail alternatives.

I don't know that I'll use it, but I'll at least try it.

Seem like a reasonable move

Posted Apr 4, 2025 11:38 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> with both Procmail and Fastmail creating their own bad press

Do you have links?

Seem like a reasonable move

Posted Apr 4, 2025 23:01 UTC (Fri) by PastyAndroid (guest, #168019) [Link]

For personal usage, mailbox does well for me. It costs money but it's a decent service. For business we run our own servers.

Like most people; for my personal emails I also run a local dovecot/postfix server for mail archives/backups, ensuring only the most recent mails are left on the servers.

The advantage here is that historic mails (over 6 months old) are no longer stored online and are only available locally. :-)

Calendar and Contacts otherwise known as caldav and carddav

Posted Apr 5, 2025 5:52 UTC (Sat) by johnjones (guest, #5462) [Link]

what is lacking is how they plan to version and sync the calendar and contacts

yeah a calendar for invites is very sexy and all but not he same as a caldav server

they need to at least offer a calendar and contacts web interface and server

Is it self-hostable?

Posted Apr 6, 2025 7:45 UTC (Sun) by tilt12345678 (subscriber, #126336) [Link] (1 responses)

If not, what are the advantages over existing, established offerings?

Is it self-hostable?

Posted Apr 6, 2025 17:13 UTC (Sun) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

Ryan's post says that they are building the service using the Stalwart mail server. The core of that is open source, though it has non-open features.