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.
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.
[citation needed]
You probably know this already, but people should have their own domain. Then they can change provider without changing the address.
Until they forget or unable to renew. And then their PII is in the hands of the person who gets the domain.
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.
The price should just be the present value of the annual fee cash flows.
Though the traditional way would just be finding a registrar which can direct debit (e.g. CSC Global or MarkMonitor) or setting up a trust account for someone to manage it for you. Or just power of attorney plus escrowed account.
Then the question is whether we want cryptocurrencies or not (I don't).
Turns out that sum of PV($X in 1 year) + PV($X in 2 years) + … converges even though the series is infinite. Look up “perpetual bonds”.
The value of $10 paid annually forever is probably $200-500 depending on [things].
Source: I work in a bank but I’m also shit at finance so take this with a large grain of salt.
You own/control the name, not the set of files on a hosting service somewhere.
I have a .app domain for my email, and have had it since like 2018. Now I'm wondering if that was a mistake.
UK will give sovereignty of Chagos Islands to Mauritius.
There is a mixed history of what happens to the ccTLD in such cases.
If the UK loses control of it, I'd put most of my betting money on Option 3: The new owners extort everyone with a .io domain for a rate proportional to the perceived value. In other words, $50K a year for a successful tech company, $1000 a year for the average joe who doesn't want to lose control of a domain tied to 1,000 accounts.
I would occasionally check it, and the price would vary by hundreds of dollars, but never a price I was willing to pay. Eventually I think it lapsed again and was picked up by some Chinese site that (I think) was trying to sell massages.
Finally, in 2021, I guess they got tired of paying for it, and it fully lapsed, and I was able to purchase it, so I bought it for ten years.
You think that that skill (maintaining own domain for email) is an indicator of intelligence?
My question is always: of those who are competent, why is the vast majority not having their own domain?
I have been using a personal domain for my email address for decades and when I have to give it out verbally to someone, it is about a 50% chance that the conversation is:
"My email is <name@myname.tld>"
"uuhhh... at gmail.com?"
"No it's just <@myname.tld>"
"Yeah, but is it gmail or yahoo?"
(*) Choose a personalized email address, like john@smith.com, for $9.99/year.
( ) Choose a GMail address, like john.smith@gmail.com, for free.
I've had my own domain for a good 20 years now, and while I've encountered some confusion when giving it out, it's never been as bad as you describe, and people get it without my having to go into a technical explanation. And regardless, the reason there is this problem is because easy, seamless personal-domain options don't really exist. If they did, this problem would go away. I don't really consider this to be an obstacle.
A bigger problem in my opinion is just how heavily people have associated "Google" with "the internet" and "Gmail" with all email in existence. They don't even think about outlook.com or even hotmail anymore. All email is Gmail to many people.
Similar here, though I haven't encountered any confusion at all. I got remarks like "How do you get your name as the email? That's fancy!"
That makes it very weird to me that someone would ever be confused by an email that is not @gmail.com...
Also, Gmail actually blocks true spam, whereas nothing I tried on my shared-hosting server with SpamAssassin ever worked.
I don't have any love for Google, but I'll never go back to giving out a personal domain email for any reason.
Fastmail's spam filtering isn't as good as Googles, but has fewer false-positives, and the spam it does let through is trivially manageable. I did host my own mail server for a year or so prior to using Google, but I agree dealing with spam filter configuration and tuning was a headache, and I gave up. Nowadays I can only assume it's even harder to run your own email server, so I'd never recommend anyone do that when there are options for other people to do it for you.
I occasionally get a confused customer support person on the phone when I need to give them my email address, but they understand in about 7 seconds and it's no big deal.
Genuinely interested: was it in the US? Feels like people in the US are more used to having one big service that everybody uses.
I have never seen confusion about my personal email...
It was almost embarrassing for me, I have to admit — especially times when I’d been clever about it and set up, say, searsaccount@myname.com as a forwarder, and the cashier at Sears needed my email address. They once asked me oh, do you work for Sears?
In most parts of the world, you don't almost exclusively chains of restaurants, and people don't expect that. Just like it's normal to have someone suggest a restaurant you have never heard about, it's normal to have someone use an email provider you've never heard about.
Or maybe that's completely unrelated, I don't know :-).
I don't know of any technical reason to delay emails to minor domains. My domain has valid MX records, uses SPF, has valid DKIM TXT records, etc.
I still run into that with my business address; after much mucking around with client's MS admin who did various pieces of magic on their online/azure/microsoft email platform until we finally got it down to around 2m for the delay.
The upside appears to be that now all clients who are using microsoft appear to have only a 2m delay when sending email to my business domain.
Speaking of that I do wish the post office had a mail service where they issued addresses to citizens or something.
But mailing addresses are actually extremely complicated and most people probably don't understand the full scope even of US mailing addresses. The spec is 226 pages.[0]
[0]: https://pe.usps.com/cpim/ftp/pubs/Pub28/pub28.pdf
If you've ever had an address with any complexities beyond what is taught in elementary school (number, street, city, state, zip), you'll probably experience issues with getting others to correctly address your mail. The biggest reason this isn't a problem is because the postal service takes significant effort to deliver misaddressed mail.
But still, I have this feeling that many people who would be competent to own their domain just don't do it. And they could give an email to their family, too. And help friends setup theirs.
I'm not completely sure that the issue is "it's too hard". To me, it's like password managers. Sure, it's too hard for some people. But most people just can't be arsed to use a password manager, though they would be totally competent.
"It's too hard" is, in my experience, often an excuse to be lazy.
For most people, if they want or need to switch email providers they will simply sign up for a new service, give people their new address, and move on with their life.
This whole conversation is a lot to do about something that the average joe just doesn't give a shit about. It isn't laziness. It really isn't that important of a life task for most. It's an appropriate prioritization of tasks under a lifestyle different than yours.
I don't really see an actual problem here, unlike some others commenting, but it is a general shame to me that more people don't have their own email domain. It would make the world more... colorful... somehow, even if in just a small way.
I honestly think that most people don't know why it matters. 20 years ago I was happy (and proud) to have gmail, and didn't see a point in having my domain. Until I chose to move away from gmail, and then it all made sense.
I have an example: many (most?) universities give you an alumni email when you graduate. Some offer actual hosting, but others just ask you to redirect. It is free, and for many universities, graduates would trust their university more than gmail, right? And it wouldn't lock them into gmail. Still, none of my friends from university use it. Most use gmail instead.
Now tell them: "Look, if you use gmail, then Google can read all your emails. You didn't give a shit 4 months ago ("I have nothing to hide"), but now you've heard of random Canadians and Europeans getting deported or declined entry in the US for random reasons, including one who wrote stuff against Trump. How do you feel about the US reading you emails and deciding whether they should deport you or not based on that? If you controlled a domain, you could move away from gmail. Now you can't. Also know that if they can read your emails, it means that they know the flights/hotels/trips you booked, whatever you bought online, and they can just access all your accounts everywhere."
What will they think? "If I was to do it again, I would still use gmail" or "Would actually be nicer if I had been using my alumnus email all along"?
This doesn't happen because people are using gmail. It happens when people post things on social media or get searched at border crossings.
I'm not following.
That was my point, I'm happy to see that we agree :-).
The practical experience of having your own domain for your email is that you delegate your domain to Google / Fastmail / Proton / whatever, and it takes care of everything else. Some webmail providers will also let you buy a domain on their own website as a part of registration flow.
It really is not hard. Harder than not having a domain of your own, but not as hard as you make it sound.
It's just not something normal people do, but I don't like the snarkiness of implying that's an indicator of intelligence. Otherwise we go down the no true Scotsman rabbit hole, what do you mean you're using Proton. You didn't set up your own mail server ?
What do you mean you're using AWS, your not using a solar powered raspberry pi?
1. Most people will choose the free option, so it wouldn't be much of a useful revenue stream.
2. People having @gmail.com email addresses is a little bit of zero-cost marketing for them.
Plus all the good places to host your personal domain cost money, so now people who have gotten email for 'free' for 20+ years now have to start paying a monthly email hosting bill and annual domain registration fee because some 'nerd' told them they "should"? And if they ever forget to pay either one, suddenly their email is down and their email 'identity' is at risk of being resold.
This advice is exactly like changing your own oil: Anyone with enough interest in cars and dedication to learn the steps certainly can easily do it, yet nobody should try to convince their grandparents who aren't already highly self-motivated to start doing it.
If you don't trust Gmail, then you have to use Proton to host it, don't trust them then your on AWS, don't trust them you still need you ISP to play nice with a home server.
Unless you want to raise your own carrier pigeons...
Currently it's too hard for normal users, but it would be possible for e.g. Proton to add a feature where you can either import your domain name, or create a new one.
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.
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.
Indeed, Firefox' market share in Germany is larger than in many other countries.
They're likely not taking on Gmail, they're taking on Mailbox.org, Proton and Tuta.
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.
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.
Whether this is true or not depends a lot on which the bubble is that you live in.
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.
On Android I use Fastmail's mobile client, but I'm thinking of trying the new mobile Thunderbird there too.
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.
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.
Your comments reveal a major blind spot. 99% of people (or whatever) are using dedicated email clients instead of webmail. They do everything on their phone.
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... .
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.
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.
Over time I then added a non-JS, external index. Since I already had an ES cluster running elsewhere anyway and the querying of elasticlunr and ElasticSearch is forwards compatible, I decided to just opt for re-using my ES cluster.
In short, the decisionmaking was a mix of historical and compatibility/ease-of-maintenance reasons.
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.
OT but is that right? SSDs have many advantages but sequential read isn't necessarily one of them. SSDs seek is much faster, but this is ~one file. Throughput can be much faster due to the better interfaces, but is throughput the bottleneck for this kind of search?
Yes, I know it's also an GNUStep application
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.
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.
Can you / will you integrate other messaging such as SMS, even WhatsApp, etc.? RSS?
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.
Do you consider this your "ActiveSync" and if so what do you see as the differentiating features/capabilities?
From a quick look, it indeed looks similar. Although I imagine Microsoft's implementation is filled with cruft.
We use Replicache + Orama. _All_ data is fully offline on the client and synced to the BE when network is available. Orama handles indexing and full text search, filtering, sorting, etc, all in single-digit ms.
Let me know if you have any follow-up questions!
I wrote a blog post about our reasoning here:
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.
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.
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.
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?
I had to open Chrome Mobile to see it.
I hope this, err, 'oversight' isn't indicative of the quality of using Mozilla products.
I'm using Ad Nauseum which is just UBO but improved with added features and it appears just fine.
I was still hoping for something more than a simple email waitlist signup however. But I didn’t find anything obvious hidden in the page that would allow immediate signup
If the bank wasn't at the birth, do they really know the customer? Pffft.
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.
> open_source & privacy_focused & user_controlled
Is their philosophy a bit string? Or maybe this simple mistake of using a bitwise AND is what's gotten Mozilla's mission so corrupted these last many years.
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?)
Still not fixed.
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.
Do you use mbox or maildir, out of curiosity?
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.
I ask about mbox (one file system file per Thunderbird folder - e.g., one file named Inbox containing all its messages) or maildir (one folder per TB folder, containing one file per message) because it affects search using outside tools that don't understand that folder structure.
I'm wondering how efficient they are: When you search, does grep return an Inbox mbox file at a certain line number, or a maildir file?
Thunderbird itself seems to build some kind of an index next to mbox files. But finding the relevant email in TB's files makes it much easier to locate and open in TB itself (if it's needed). But I'd heavily prefer it to not be this way.
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.
So I don't love it, but I know how to differentiate it from the worst of the worst.
Trust once lost is not easily regained.
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.
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.
Like fine if you like Chrome, just admit you love Chrome because it's shiny.
I haven't used Chrome since whenever they started logging you into the browser when you logged into GMail, and I'm sure most complaints about negative changes in Firefox come from long-standing Firefox users.
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.
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?
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...
At least they aren't filtering out bad MS news on MSN I guess.
I wonder if this service can be segregated by region ?
For example, can people in Europe use a service that is fully based in Europe.
As long as it's still owned by Mozilla it's subject to the whims of the US government.
There are already many good European mail services (e.g. Proton Mail).
If the article is correct, Thundermail will be built using Stalwart[1], which appears to support JMAP
[1]: https://stalw.art/
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.
Previously:
It's not easy for me to believe that these domain names are chosen for email address by someone in the email business.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Mozilla has lost all trust from me, the recent privacy policy fiasco was the straw that broke the camel's back.
https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/about/
Guilty by association.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Trust once lost is not easily regained.
Fix your trust issue.
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).
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.
Many businesses are looking away from US based services.
If Mozilla moved headquarters to Switzerland, UK or Norway, then maybe it would make sense.
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.
Both the IMAP bridge and web interface should provide original unmodified emails upon request.
You're also wrong in the aspect that it would undermine something, you can absolutely export keys from Protonmail, you just can't use your own keys properly. You can't remove all the keys they have generated, you can't use your own client with your own keys, the bridge literally mucks it up. The defaults can be what they are, it's not mutually exclusive in any way.
In the end this restriction undermines the security and privacy for everyone that want to use secure hardware storage. Which is absolutely insane for a service that boasts about these things.
They shamefully don't care about security and privacy because you can't get anti privacy capabilities working to your satisfaction.
You apparently could have lead with a lot of valid complaints but your 'shame' isn't really consistent with what you actually want.
> 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...
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).
I agree Mozilla lost its way but I would still hope in them improving over time than trusting yet another for-profit to serve us in the long-term.
I can't pick my own domain when using Gmail, and still works just fine.
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.
Also... You can use Gmail with your own domain. I don't get the meme with 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Ah yes, let's see if it can last longer than 18 months this time..
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.
Update: OK, I'm trying it again.
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.
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.
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.