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'm not sure about charging a fee at the start and providing a free tier later
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.
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.
Firefox is developed by the Mozilla Corporation, Thunderbird is developed by MZLA. They're both subsidiaries of the same non-profit, but they don't share funds or employees, so it's not clear to me how this could "sap resources".
I don't think it's so much that they don't have ideas it's that they're competing with Alphabet's Chrome, who are coincidentally owners of Android, Gmail, YouTube and Google which are internet keystones. I think it's solely by coincidence that I use Firefox rather than Chrome and if I'd started using the Internet a few years later it would have been Chrome.
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.
If you're going to buy a domain for this, don't get fancy with the TLD. I made the mistake of choosing a .io domain for this purpose and with the future of the TLD uncertain, I have been moving away from it, so I'm not left in a bad spot if things go sideways.
I do mostly for work (Alpine does not work out that nice if everyone is sending Exchange-blended tag soup), and a lot of my friends do, many of them (non-IT) engineers.
I use it and feel like it's...fine. A tad slow, and doesn't have some basic features I'd like. But I haven't found any other non-browser clients that I like better than Thunderbird.
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.
I used it at a previous job that didn't have a web option for email, but for me the killer feature was that it was the only mainstream newsgroup client (the job delivered error notifications via newsgroups).
Thunderbird lets the user change the UI and hide almost every single element of it. I don't like clutter.
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.
At my (small) workplace we all use Thunderbird, and I use it for my personal email as well.
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.
> I would guess 99% of people use their browser [for email]
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.
I like not looking at ads when reading my email, so I use it. If it added local AI based drafting assistance, I would check out that feature. I don't care about FF Send, but might use it a couple times a year.
Make thunderbird supports a local database with 100k emails with proper search ! Make us pay for that optimization if needed. Email is a big tool of communication for all businesses, Pros who make money daily through emails need to handle tons of emails, we’re ready to pay for that
> Make thunderbird supports a local database with 100k emails with proper search
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... .
I have ~100k mails in Thunderbird. The GUI always feels a bit sluggish:
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.
How decent is the maildir support? I looked into it a few years ago, and it seemed to still be experimental. My goal was to have other mail clients use the same maildir store, but I didn't feel like it would work at the time.
I have a (non-published) plugin that I'm using that is capable of using elasticsearch for indexing & search from within Thunderbird. I never bothered publishing it, since I never really wanted to maintain it/build a business out of it. Would this be something you are interested in, potentially for a small fee?
Elasticsearch is a pretty bad choice for what really needs to be an embedded database. There are other FTS engines out there of varying quality that would be better suited to this particular case. Off the top of my head, Meillisearch and sqlite3's FTS5 would both be highly embed-able but have other tradeoffs (such as storage overhead).
It might not work for me for various reasons, but pay a fee to release the source code in the wild for anyone (me or others) to pick it up, yes why not ! Safer if you put a way to contact you on your profile
I mentioned the same problem in one other subthread as well. Current hardware is certainly performant enough not to become this sluggish at just 100 000 or so emails. There's actually no reason it shouldn't work well with say a million emails in one inbox.
I haven't used Thunderbird in a long time, but regularly used Outlook with multi-gigabye .pst files. Surely sqlite on an SSD would be up to the task of handling at least million emails of average size.
Tell that to apple mail. Makes no sense how an app seemingly unchanged since the tiger days when I started using it could still be as performant as it always was on far better hardware. In fact I frequently find it to be the culprit when I wonder what the hell could be spinning my fans on this m3 pro just churning over the database.
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.
I'd love it - email could use serious tools and refinement - but so many questions: Is it local or hosted? What is the story with privacy? Do you use an existing application (like a Thunderbird fork) or something you created?
Can you / will you integrate other messaging such as SMS, even WhatsApp, etc.? RSS?
Good luck with that, but as a first reaction I must say, what I see on that side is not that impressive. It's just the same feature-set & interface all over again. It's not selling me any reason why I should be more interested in this, than in all the other clients already available.
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.
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?
Yep. You might need to disable Adblock to have it appear.
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
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.
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.
What else could it be but a bitwise AND. If they had used `open_source && privacy_focused && user_controlled`, it would just be `true`, which is hardly an interesting philosophy. This way, you'll be able to do tests like `if (!(philosophy & privacy_focused)) { track_user_activity(); serve_creepy_but_useless_ad_about_something_they_bought_yesterday(); }`. Alternatively, they could have used some kind of set datatype if the number of philosophy variables is large enough, but I think the code would have become unmaintainable if they want to implement every possible philosophical alternative; 64 bits should be enough for everyone.
This is an announcement by MZLA Technologies, not the Mozilla Corporation. This thread is completely derailing because people do not understand the difference. Let's actually discuss the service, Thunderbird, or MZLA Technologies.
To be fair, Mozilla's org naming has proven itself confusing. Half my HN karma must be pointing out the difference between the Foundation and the Corporation when people talk about "donating to Firefox".
As far as I can glean, this is a "me" problem, but does anyone else find Thunderbird's search to be mostly-broken? I.e., will not find emails that should turn up in a query.
Yes, Thunderbird search become unusable when they removed the option to run search on server. But apparently the "quick filter" works in a different way so if you can live with one folder only you can use it.
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?)
I submitted a Thunderbird bug 13 years ago now, that Thunderbird doesn't let you just search for a word, and find all copies of that word: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=752844 . Their search instead tries to be clever, but it then finds stupid stuff like (in my case) "The base of Wedding is wed. The plural of wed is weds. Lets return every email ever from a Wednesday"
I've been pretty happy with its search and have never had issues finding emails. The UI isn't great and theres a lot of cruft to filter through but it does work...
It helps to sort the results by date rather than relevance. Relevance is the default and the results are all over the place and it does indeed feel utterly broken :)
I run grep on Thunderbird's storage directory and it's significantly faster than anything Thunderbird itself attempts. (It also allows finding exact matches, fuzzy search without language "awareness" is disgusting to use.)
Even worse: the Swedish translation is lacking, so I use English. But my emails are often in Swedish. Making åäö and aao equal is never what I have ever wanted.
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.
The article is pretty light on details so I'm going to ask: why should I get this compared to something like fastmail or protonmail? Does it at least have end to end encryption? Is this just going to be a case of Mozilla partnering with another service provider (eg. mullvad for mozilla vpn), slapping their logo on it, and collecting a royalty?
A privacy-focused email service by Mozilla is a welcomed addition to the market! Given the ongoing concerns around data security, it's refreshing to see companies like Mozilla pushing for better privacy standards.
It looks like data is stored on US server, which defeats all and any real attempts on true data privacy. But since the company is a US company it doesn't really matter where the data is, the feds will always have enforceable access.
A few months ago I would have been excited and telling my friends. But no longer. I had long been an outspoken Firefox advocate in my city. Fix your trust issue.
I think a lot of that was just an out-of-control spiral of self-confirmation happening in comments sections that was at best loosely connected to actual facts.
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.
That's not my point of view at all, and I have little issue with what happened and have no concern about Mozilla and privacy.
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.
I probably say this too much too, but it feels like just a justification to keep using shiny Chrome. Even though the recent ToS fiasco basically had the same language as Chrome's ToS, and wasn't really as bad as everybody freaked out about. People still just find whatever excuse.
Like fine if you like Chrome, just admit you love Chrome because it's shiny.
But I do care about privacy, and other people do too. And I can read between the lines, and never take PR for fact. What remains is that Mozilla is looking for new cash, and sees selling user data as a solution for that. They want to call it differently, they want us to think it's all OK, but it's not. It's still better than other browsers though.
>I have little issue with what happened and have no concern about Mozilla and privacy.
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.
Rooting for mozilla and their privacy-focused services. Been using the email-masking feature (generate forward email addresses) for a while and really like it.
> Rooting for mozilla and their privacy-focused services. Been using the email-masking feature (generate forward email addresses) for a while and really like it.
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.
They're trying to square the circle with anonymized data, but I think even that is still about profiling, and group profiling is only one degree less concerning than individually user profiling.
So I don't love it, but I know how to differentiate it from the worst of the worst.
I'm cautiously optimistic. It's certainly the most realistic business plan their leadership has put forward in a long time.
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.
Mozilla's Thundermail could be a game-changer, especially if they nail the privacy and security aspects. The market needs more competition, but it won't be easy to convert Gmail/Outlook users. Curious to see how the UI and features stack up. Hopefully, it's a polished product at launch.
Game-changer... how? There are at least two players in email space that provide encrypted email and various auxiliary suites (Protonmail and Tuta), plus at least one well-trusted well-respected email service (Fastmail), and of course people can always self-host if they dare. What revolutionary they could possibly realistically bring in areas privacy and security to be an actual "game-changer"?
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.
> The final launch will be Thundermail, an email hosting service using the open-source Stalwart stack. Users will be able to pick between thundermail.com and tb.pro domains.
If the article is correct, Thundermail will be built using Stalwart[1], which appears to support JMAP
Yes! I'm a fastmail user and every couple of months I do a survey of JMAP support and come back disappointed.
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.
Is it just JMAP, or why does Fastmail's web app feel so fast? I have moved away from all locally running mail apps to Fastmail and even fetch/alias all my other mail accounts to them because of the much better experience.
Because most working web developers actually have no idea how to write JS; they follow what is presented (perpetuated) as industry standard practice, but in a React-and-NPM world, "industry standard practice" means bad practices.
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.
Unless they pull out something really cool and revolutionary this is probably just a fax machine.
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.
OpenID certainly hasn't replaced email. Young people still all need email to sign up for ~anything online - not to mention things like job/school applications or plenty of other real-world things.
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!
Yes we agree, email has become an identity used to sign up for things (usually through OpenID) and a notification center. But few are keeping in touch with their friends through email, this is not 1998 "You got mail" with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan anymore.
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.
Email is used everywhere from account management, subscription services, school, and generally every single employer or client I've ever worked with. Sometimes I work with clients through SMS, Signal or Discord but we still fall back to email for certain things.
I love Thunderbird the platform, but I'm gonna pass on a paid service, I am extremely happy with Migadu as a personal email provider. https://migadu.com/
Mozilla has lost all trust from me, the recent privacy policy fiasco was the straw that broke the camel's back.
If Mozilla didnt waste money on dumb things I would sign up, but they could have done this long ago, and they definitely waste their income on dumb things. Like what happened to making Firefox fully oxidized? That would have made Rust drastically more mature and proven.
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.
> That would have made Rust drastically more mature and proven.
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.
The Mozilla Corporation is not the organization behind this. It's MZLA Technologies, which is underneath the Mozilla Foundation.
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.
It’s so seamless for chat to become the medium that we mostly communicate with this AI industry that it’s a shame email, which may have come about first, a little hazy on the history, email didn’t become the means of which we communicate with AI tools
How would email be able to express anything the chat interface cannot? Attachments, tools, and long-form content are all well-supported. Email allows for asynchronous communication but that is usually not seen as a benefit - when I talk to AI I want a ~instant response, not wait for someone to check their mailbox.
I don't think the definition of success here has to be overtaking Gmail. In fact, I think that would be doomed to fail. Instead, you want to appeal to people willing to pay for an alternative, which I think is probably a real population of users and honestly one of Mozilla's best strategic moves in years.
I'd love for that to be true, but Google through me out of their free tier a decade ago, and I've been paying various amounts for my wife and my accounts ever since.
Services that take on Google can not just win over some user base but even become profitable (see Kagi's example), so it's not strictly about $0 price tag. But they gotta be really good (for some target audience), and the hard part is beating the already established offerings, of which there are plenty and covering for every kind of crowd I can think of. I wish MZLA luck, but given all the Mozilla Foundation history (which started amazing but is less than stellar in terms of recent PR) I'm quite skeptical.
Outlook allows several key productivity features that Thunderbird currently lacks. These include unified categories and tags across emails, events, contacts, and tasks; customizable views that consolidate all item types by category; the ability to drag emails or contacts directly into the calendar or task list to create new associated items; and precise control over reminder times for every item type. Without these integrated capabilities, Thunderbird cannot fully replicate Outlook’s seamless and interconnected workflow.
This is a step in the right direction. I worry it’s about 12 years too late.
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.
When I helped people migrate to Thunderbird, the number one missing feature is simply the focused inbox provided by Gmail. Unfortunately it ends up being a deal breaker.
Where will this data be hosted? There's no way I'm leaking even more data into the USA with the way US politics is going.
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.
Mozilla should've been what Proton is. A company that sells privacy focused services. They went off chasing too many geese and now they are panicking. I don't think I would trust this service at this point.
I feel reasonably confident at this point, declaring this a myth. Mozilla absolutely made missteps and lost browser market share, but it had almost nothing to do with spending on side bets, if you look at the budget and you look at the numbers of these things. Most of the sidebets already happened after they lost the market share and did not happen at such prohibitive costs that they prevented them from investing in browser development. And there's no such thing as a missing browser feature they could have developed that would have recovered all of the market share, which they failed to develop because of a side bet.
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.
Too little, too late. Already happy with Proton since 5+ years and it keeps getting better. Enterprise mail was a mess back then, now it's doable. In 5 years it should be good.
Proton says they care about security and privacy but at the same time makes it impossible to use your own keys or properly export the original emails from your inbox. I really can't take this suggestion seriously.
i would not get an email for a domain that will be up for sale in 10 years. mozilla is not a sustainable org and has lost its core principles. Mozilla best serves people by shutting down and letting younger and better orgs replace it.
They are using stalwart, another open source product, for the backend stack. So you should be able to host your own server instance with custom domain when it gets built out. Stalwart itself just received a European funding grant to build out the features needed. From Thunderbird announcement:
> Thundermail is an email service. We want to provide email accounts to those that love Thunderbird, and we believe that we are capable of providing a better service than the other providers out there, that aligns with our values. We have been experimenting with this for a while now and are using Stalwart as the software stack we are building upon. We have been working with the Stalwart maintainer to improve its capabilities (for instance, we have pushed hard on calendar and contacts being a core piece of the stack).
> we have pushed hard on calendar and contacts being a core piece of the stack
Imagine maintaining a useful piece of FOSS and then Mozilla shows up and "pushes hard" for some feature they want for a service that's missed the boat by a decade and doesn't even elicit much hope from loyal users (including myself).
I might be misunderstanding the org chart but Thunderbird is operated by MZLA Technologies Corporation, which is for-profit (although I guess it's owned by the non profit Mozilla, similar to how openai was?)
Sure, but this sort of thing (email, plus likely mostly shitty calendaring and contacts) is a very ok business. The fastmail people make a fine living at it (their product is as good as anything outside gmail. If you haven't, you should try it! I'm a happy decade-long customer). But it's not the sort of business that supports the massive employee count that Mozilla has.
Wow, I'm sorry to hear they took that down. It's a perfectly normal and rational request for accountability on January 6th, which actually I would say makes me feel more favorably about the company.
I've tried to use Thunderbird multiple times over the years, but I always end up with a corrupted mailbox after a week or two, so I go back to Outlook. Is TB finally reliable enough to try again? I'd love to ditch Outlook, but I don't want to be a sucker.
I've used Thunderbird for years and know half a dozen other people using it, including one who has folders with tens of thousands of emails, and have never heard of any data corruption.
The only issue with "large" mailboxes is that Thunderbird tends to become really slow. But this issue plagues other desktop clients as well.
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.
Thunderbird is my daily driver email client for all my business email for over a decade.
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.
I hope for the best but plan for the worst:
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'm not sure about charging a fee at the start and providing a free tier later
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.
> Hey has been doing great business with an only-paid model.
[citation needed]
I think it shows real maturity to take this approach and makes me feel more comfortable that they'll be sustainable.
Plus when I'm paying I know that I'm the customer, not the product.
I'm deeply skeptical as well.
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.
Firefox is developed by the Mozilla Corporation, Thunderbird is developed by MZLA. They're both subsidiaries of the same non-profit, but they don't share funds or employees, so it's not clear to me how this could "sap resources".
I don't think it's so much that they don't have ideas it's that they're competing with Alphabet's Chrome, who are coincidentally owners of Android, Gmail, YouTube and Google which are internet keystones. I think it's solely by coincidence that I use Firefox rather than Chrome and if I'd started using the Internet a few years later it would have been Chrome.
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.
1 reply →
> how are they going to develop a new mail competency in such a complete way that they can take on gmail?
They're likely not taking on Gmail, they're taking on Mailbox.org, Proton and Tuta.
GP here: I'm not deeply skeptical; I'm just wondering about these issues.
> I don't think people want to change email addresses very often.
You probably know this already, but people should have their own domain. Then they can change provider without changing the address.
> You probably know this already, but people should have their own domain.
Until they forget or unable to renew. And then their PII is in the hands of the person who gets the domain.
14 replies →
If you're going to buy a domain for this, don't get fancy with the TLD. I made the mistake of choosing a .io domain for this purpose and with the future of the TLD uncertain, I have been moving away from it, so I'm not left in a bad spot if things go sideways.
8 replies →
People should, but is the existing process simple enough even any laymen can do is the question.
1 reply →
The average person is not intelligent enough to have their own domain.
25 replies →
Do people still use Thunderbird client? I would guess 99% of people use their browser.
I do mostly for work (Alpine does not work out that nice if everyone is sending Exchange-blended tag soup), and a lot of my friends do, many of them (non-IT) engineers.
I use it and feel like it's...fine. A tad slow, and doesn't have some basic features I'd like. But I haven't found any other non-browser clients that I like better than Thunderbird.
> Do people still use Thunderbird client? I would guess 99% of people use their browser.
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.
Virtually nobody uses mail via web browser on phones, the primary computing device of the world right now.
2 replies →
I think it's definitely a minority.
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.
I use it for my email. It does exactly what I need it to, works across several platforms. Is Open Source.
I used it at a previous job that didn't have a web option for email, but for me the killer feature was that it was the only mainstream newsgroup client (the job delivered error notifications via newsgroups).
2 replies →
Thunderbird lets the user change the UI and hide almost every single element of it. I don't like clutter.
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.
At my (small) workplace we all use Thunderbird, and I use it for my personal email as well.
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.
Yes, on desktop (macOS and Linux). It's not a speed demon but I trust it (on Linux I build from source).
On Android I use Fastmail's mobile client, but I'm thinking of trying the new mobile Thunderbird there too.
> I would guess 99% of people use their browser [for email]
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.
I like not looking at ads when reading my email, so I use it. If it added local AI based drafting assistance, I would check out that feature. I don't care about FF Send, but might use it a couple times a year.
3 replies →
Web based email is a disease.
3 replies →
yes i exclusively use thunderbird to check my email
Make thunderbird supports a local database with 100k emails with proper search ! Make us pay for that optimization if needed. Email is a big tool of communication for all businesses, Pros who make money daily through emails need to handle tons of emails, we’re ready to pay for that
> Make thunderbird supports a local database with 100k emails with proper search
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... .
I have ~100k mails in Thunderbird. The GUI always feels a bit sluggish:
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.
2 replies →
How decent is the maildir support? I looked into it a few years ago, and it seemed to still be experimental. My goal was to have other mail clients use the same maildir store, but I didn't feel like it would work at the time.
Woah, how? My global search indexer seems to poop out when the sqlite db gets too big or something.
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.
I have a (non-published) plugin that I'm using that is capable of using elasticsearch for indexing & search from within Thunderbird. I never bothered publishing it, since I never really wanted to maintain it/build a business out of it. Would this be something you are interested in, potentially for a small fee?
Elasticsearch is a pretty bad choice for what really needs to be an embedded database. There are other FTS engines out there of varying quality that would be better suited to this particular case. Off the top of my head, Meillisearch and sqlite3's FTS5 would both be highly embed-able but have other tradeoffs (such as storage overhead).
It might not work for me for various reasons, but pay a fee to release the source code in the wild for anyone (me or others) to pick it up, yes why not ! Safer if you put a way to contact you on your profile
Yes please, would love to try it out!
I mentioned the same problem in one other subthread as well. Current hardware is certainly performant enough not to become this sluggish at just 100 000 or so emails. There's actually no reason it shouldn't work well with say a million emails in one inbox.
I haven't used Thunderbird in a long time, but regularly used Outlook with multi-gigabye .pst files. Surely sqlite on an SSD would be up to the task of handling at least million emails of average size.
8 replies →
Tell that to apple mail. Makes no sense how an app seemingly unchanged since the tiger days when I started using it could still be as performant as it always was on far better hardware. In fact I frequently find it to be the culprit when I wonder what the hell could be spinning my fans on this m3 pro just churning over the database.
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.
1 reply →
We're building what you want.
https://marcoapp.io
I'd love it - email could use serious tools and refinement - but so many questions: Is it local or hosted? What is the story with privacy? Do you use an existing application (like a Thunderbird fork) or something you created?
Can you / will you integrate other messaging such as SMS, even WhatsApp, etc.? RSS?
1 reply →
It says "all platforms" but does not list Linux. Is Linux support planned?
1 reply →
Good luck with that, but as a first reaction I must say, what I see on that side is not that impressive. It's just the same feature-set & interface all over again. It's not selling me any reason why I should be more interested in this, than in all the other clients already available.
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.
1 reply →
How does it compare to Apple Mail? That’s my reference local email client.
1 reply →
Your link does not work?
1 reply →
Why tackle problems like search when you can redesign the UI/UX half a dozen times instead?
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.
Use Betterbird. They upgrade Thunderbird and fix bugs.
Took long enough. This was a long time coming.
https://thundermail.com
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?
So... I need an email address to signup to an email service?
Similarly, may need a cell phone to open a bank account to get a cell phone
If the bank wasn't at the birth, do they really know the customer? Pffft.
There's an input field for an email address below that block for me
Turns out, in Firefox mobile, the email submission block isn't present.
I had to open Chrome Mobile to see it.
I hope this, err, 'oversight' isn't indicative of the quality of using Mozilla products.
9 replies →
Yep. You might need to disable Adblock to have it appear.
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
I had to disable uBlock Origin for that to show up.
2 replies →
That is without a doubt the worst landing page I have ever seen.
> using the open-source Stalwart stack
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.
> >> philosophy
> 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.
What else could it be but a bitwise AND. If they had used `open_source && privacy_focused && user_controlled`, it would just be `true`, which is hardly an interesting philosophy. This way, you'll be able to do tests like `if (!(philosophy & privacy_focused)) { track_user_activity(); serve_creepy_but_useless_ad_about_something_they_bought_yesterday(); }`. Alternatively, they could have used some kind of set datatype if the number of philosophy variables is large enough, but I think the code would have become unmaintainable if they want to implement every possible philosophical alternative; 64 bits should be enough for everyone.
But, in that case, shouldn't they be using | here?
Silly Mozilla. Everyone knows you use bitwise OR to perform union operations!
This is an announcement by MZLA Technologies, not the Mozilla Corporation. This thread is completely derailing because people do not understand the difference. Let's actually discuss the service, Thunderbird, or MZLA Technologies.
To be fair, Mozilla's org naming has proven itself confusing. Half my HN karma must be pointing out the difference between the Foundation and the Corporation when people talk about "donating to Firefox".
So... after the Mozilla/Firefox EULA and TOS fiasco... there's no way in Hell that I'd touch this.
As far as I can glean, this is a "me" problem, but does anyone else find Thunderbird's search to be mostly-broken? I.e., will not find emails that should turn up in a query.
Yes, Thunderbird search become unusable when they removed the option to run search on server. But apparently the "quick filter" works in a different way so if you can live with one folder only you can use it.
I agree, the search is quite bad.
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?)
I submitted a Thunderbird bug 13 years ago now, that Thunderbird doesn't let you just search for a word, and find all copies of that word: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=752844 . Their search instead tries to be clever, but it then finds stupid stuff like (in my case) "The base of Wedding is wed. The plural of wed is weds. Lets return every email ever from a Wednesday"
Still not fixed.
I've been pretty happy with its search and have never had issues finding emails. The UI isn't great and theres a lot of cruft to filter through but it does work...
I have found that "Quick Filter Bar" is often much better at searching if you know which folder the email is in.
yes that's true, unfortunately often enough I don't know which folder the email is in.
It helps to sort the results by date rather than relevance. Relevance is the default and the results are all over the place and it does indeed feel utterly broken :)
I run grep on Thunderbird's storage directory and it's significantly faster than anything Thunderbird itself attempts. (It also allows finding exact matches, fuzzy search without language "awareness" is disgusting to use.)
Even worse: the Swedish translation is lacking, so I use English. But my emails are often in Swedish. Making åäö and aao equal is never what I have ever wanted.
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.
That's kind of the point of the Unix text stream philosophy? TB stores as text, and then you can use the best text search tool you have.
Do you use mbox or maildir, out of curiosity?
3 replies →
Sounds like Apple Mail so maybe no one gets it right.
> Usrs will be able to pick between thundermail.com and tb.pro domains.
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 article is pretty light on details so I'm going to ask: why should I get this compared to something like fastmail or protonmail? Does it at least have end to end encryption? Is this just going to be a case of Mozilla partnering with another service provider (eg. mullvad for mozilla vpn), slapping their logo on it, and collecting a royalty?
A privacy-focused email service by Mozilla is a welcomed addition to the market! Given the ongoing concerns around data security, it's refreshing to see companies like Mozilla pushing for better privacy standards.
It looks like data is stored on US server, which defeats all and any real attempts on true data privacy. But since the company is a US company it doesn't really matter where the data is, the feds will always have enforceable access.
A few months ago I would have been excited and telling my friends. But no longer. I had long been an outspoken Firefox advocate in my city. Fix your trust issue.
Trust once lost is not easily regained.
I think a lot of that was just an out-of-control spiral of self-confirmation happening in comments sections that was at best loosely connected to actual facts.
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.
That's not my point of view at all, and I have little issue with what happened and have no concern about Mozilla and privacy.
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.
I probably say this too much too, but it feels like just a justification to keep using shiny Chrome. Even though the recent ToS fiasco basically had the same language as Chrome's ToS, and wasn't really as bad as everybody freaked out about. People still just find whatever excuse.
Like fine if you like Chrome, just admit you love Chrome because it's shiny.
1 reply →
But I do care about privacy, and other people do too. And I can read between the lines, and never take PR for fact. What remains is that Mozilla is looking for new cash, and sees selling user data as a solution for that. They want to call it differently, they want us to think it's all OK, but it's not. It's still better than other browsers though.
1 reply →
>I have little issue with what happened and have no concern about Mozilla and privacy.
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.
1 reply →
Rooting for mozilla and their privacy-focused services. Been using the email-masking feature (generate forward email addresses) for a while and really like it.
> Rooting for mozilla and their privacy-focused services. Been using the email-masking feature (generate forward email addresses) for a while and really like it.
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.
They're trying to square the circle with anonymized data, but I think even that is still about profiling, and group profiling is only one degree less concerning than individually user profiling.
So I don't love it, but I know how to differentiate it from the worst of the worst.
> "Usrs will be able to pick between thundermail.com and tb.pro domains."
It's not easy for me to believe that these domain names are chosen for email address by someone in the email business.
This is the best news I've heard of Mozilla in a long time.
I'm cautiously optimistic. It's certainly the most realistic business plan their leadership has put forward in a long time.
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...
I thought MSN was not owned by MS anymore, but turns out I was wrong. It's MSNBC that MS divested ownership in. MSN is still 100% owned by MS.
At least they aren't filtering out bad MS news on MSN I guess.
Yes, and maybe timely with many Countries looking to wean themselves off US based.
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.
>> 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).
You know Mozilla is American right? There's no way for it to be "fully based in Europe" when Mozilla runs it.
1 reply →
Something like Kolab Now, you mean?
Mozilla's Thundermail could be a game-changer, especially if they nail the privacy and security aspects. The market needs more competition, but it won't be easy to convert Gmail/Outlook users. Curious to see how the UI and features stack up. Hopefully, it's a polished product at launch.
Game-changer... how? There are at least two players in email space that provide encrypted email and various auxiliary suites (Protonmail and Tuta), plus at least one well-trusted well-respected email service (Fastmail), and of course people can always self-host if they dare. What revolutionary they could possibly realistically bring in areas privacy and security to be an actual "game-changer"?
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.
I hope this service will use JMAP and push the Thunderbird client itself to adopt it
> The final launch will be Thundermail, an email hosting service using the open-source Stalwart stack. Users will be able to pick between thundermail.com and tb.pro domains.
If the article is correct, Thundermail will be built using Stalwart[1], which appears to support JMAP
[1]: https://stalw.art/
Yes! I'm a fastmail user and every couple of months I do a survey of JMAP support and come back disappointed.
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.
Is it just JMAP, or why does Fastmail's web app feel so fast? I have moved away from all locally running mail apps to Fastmail and even fetch/alias all my other mail accounts to them because of the much better experience.
Because most working web developers actually have no idea how to write JS; they follow what is presented (perpetuated) as industry standard practice, but in a React-and-NPM world, "industry standard practice" means bad practices.
Previously:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33794755>
Probably partially because of JMAP, partially because they have a single mission and know when to leave well enough alone
also competing with square and apple...
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.
Unless they pull out something really cool and revolutionary this is probably just a fax machine.
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.
OpenID certainly hasn't replaced email. Young people still all need email to sign up for ~anything online - not to mention things like job/school applications or plenty of other real-world things.
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!
Yes we agree, email has become an identity used to sign up for things (usually through OpenID) and a notification center. But few are keeping in touch with their friends through email, this is not 1998 "You got mail" with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan anymore.
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.
Email is used everywhere from account management, subscription services, school, and generally every single employer or client I've ever worked with. Sometimes I work with clients through SMS, Signal or Discord but we still fall back to email for certain things.
I love Thunderbird the platform, but I'm gonna pass on a paid service, I am extremely happy with Migadu as a personal email provider. https://migadu.com/
Mozilla has lost all trust from me, the recent privacy policy fiasco was the straw that broke the camel's back.
The Mozilla Corporation does not develop Thunderbird, so why even mention them in this thread. This is MZLA Technologies.
"Thunderbird operates in a separate, for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation."
https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/about/
Guilty by association.
If Mozilla didnt waste money on dumb things I would sign up, but they could have done this long ago, and they definitely waste their income on dumb things. Like what happened to making Firefox fully oxidized? That would have made Rust drastically more mature and proven.
>If Mozilla didnt waste money on dumb things
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.
> That would have made Rust drastically more mature and proven.
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.
The Mozilla Corporation is not the organization behind this. It's MZLA Technologies, which is underneath the Mozilla Foundation.
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.
It’s so seamless for chat to become the medium that we mostly communicate with this AI industry that it’s a shame email, which may have come about first, a little hazy on the history, email didn’t become the means of which we communicate with AI tools
How would email be able to express anything the chat interface cannot? Attachments, tools, and long-form content are all well-supported. Email allows for asynchronous communication but that is usually not seen as a benefit - when I talk to AI I want a ~instant response, not wait for someone to check their mailbox.
Seems like a Proton and Fastmail competitor more.
"Sipes confirmed Mozilla would ultimately end up charging for the features"
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.
I don't think the definition of success here has to be overtaking Gmail. In fact, I think that would be doomed to fail. Instead, you want to appeal to people willing to pay for an alternative, which I think is probably a real population of users and honestly one of Mozilla's best strategic moves in years.
I'd love for that to be true, but Google through me out of their free tier a decade ago, and I've been paying various amounts for my wife and my accounts ever since.
Services that take on Google can not just win over some user base but even become profitable (see Kagi's example), so it's not strictly about $0 price tag. But they gotta be really good (for some target audience), and the hard part is beating the already established offerings, of which there are plenty and covering for every kind of crowd I can think of. I wish MZLA luck, but given all the Mozilla Foundation history (which started amazing but is less than stellar in terms of recent PR) I'm quite skeptical.
Maybe it doesn't work at Mozilla's scale, but a business doesn't need to take overtake Gmail to win.
Outlook allows several key productivity features that Thunderbird currently lacks. These include unified categories and tags across emails, events, contacts, and tasks; customizable views that consolidate all item types by category; the ability to drag emails or contacts directly into the calendar or task list to create new associated items; and precise control over reminder times for every item type. Without these integrated capabilities, Thunderbird cannot fully replicate Outlook’s seamless and interconnected workflow.
A few months ago I would have been excited and telling my friends and community. But no longer. My long term endorsement is over.
Trust once lost is not easily regained.
Fix your trust issue.
What trust issues do you have with MZLA Technologies, the organization that currently develops Thunderbird?
Is this an April Fools leftover?..
Gmail was also announced on April Fools'...
This is a step in the right direction. I worry it’s about 12 years too late.
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.
For me the two big things to assess will be how it handles aliases / catch all aliases and search.
I would be much happier to learn i could use tbird on my iphone.
When I helped people migrate to Thunderbird, the number one missing feature is simply the focused inbox provided by Gmail. Unfortunately it ends up being a deal breaker.
Where will this data be hosted? There's no way I'm leaking even more data into the USA with the way US politics is going.
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.
Mozilla should've been what Proton is. A company that sells privacy focused services. They went off chasing too many geese and now they are panicking. I don't think I would trust this service at this point.
Where are the servers located?
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43554197
Cringe name.
Dooblydoo@thundermail.com
i wonder what the price will be and if it supports custom domains
A bit late to the party, but it's one of the best mail clients available.
another dilution of mozilla's resources :/
I feel reasonably confident at this point, declaring this a myth. Mozilla absolutely made missteps and lost browser market share, but it had almost nothing to do with spending on side bets, if you look at the budget and you look at the numbers of these things. Most of the sidebets already happened after they lost the market share and did not happen at such prohibitive costs that they prevented them from investing in browser development. And there's no such thing as a missing browser feature they could have developed that would have recovered all of the market share, which they failed to develop because of a side bet.
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.
MZLA Technologies is separate from the Mozilla Corporation.
Too little, too late. Already happy with Proton since 5+ years and it keeps getting better. Enterprise mail was a mess back then, now it's doable. In 5 years it should be good.
Mozilla is American and with what's going in the world, we need a service like Gmail served by non-US entity.
Many businesses are looking away from US based services.
If Mozilla moved headquarters to Switzerland, UK or Norway, then maybe it would make sense.
There are email providers based in Switzerland. My current favourite provider is Migadu :-).
is there a future where Mozilla buys Kagi and becomes the privacy Google?
I certainly hope not. I like Kagi and I don't want Mozilla messing with it.
Just use Proton
Proton says they care about security and privacy but at the same time makes it impossible to use your own keys or properly export the original emails from your inbox. I really can't take this suggestion seriously.
7 replies →
> Thunderbird Pro
Is this a late April fools joke?
i would not get an email for a domain that will be up for sale in 10 years. mozilla is not a sustainable org and has lost its core principles. Mozilla best serves people by shutting down and letting younger and better orgs replace it.
They are using stalwart, another open source product, for the backend stack. So you should be able to host your own server instance with custom domain when it gets built out. Stalwart itself just received a European funding grant to build out the features needed. From Thunderbird announcement:
> Thundermail is an email service. We want to provide email accounts to those that love Thunderbird, and we believe that we are capable of providing a better service than the other providers out there, that aligns with our values. We have been experimenting with this for a while now and are using Stalwart as the software stack we are building upon. We have been working with the Stalwart maintainer to improve its capabilities (for instance, we have pushed hard on calendar and contacts being a core piece of the stack).
https://thunderbird.topicbox.com/groups/planning/T437cd854af...
https://stalw.art/blog/nlnet-grant-collaboration
> we have pushed hard on calendar and contacts being a core piece of the stack
Imagine maintaining a useful piece of FOSS and then Mozilla shows up and "pushes hard" for some feature they want for a service that's missed the boat by a decade and doesn't even elicit much hope from loyal users (including myself).
2 replies →
Mozilla is a no-profit foundation, not a company which needs to be sustainable or be profitable.
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 might be misunderstanding the org chart but Thunderbird is operated by MZLA Technologies Corporation, which is for-profit (although I guess it's owned by the non profit Mozilla, similar to how openai was?)
NPOs still need to be financially sustainable/viable. They still need to pay their employees and pay their vendors.
1 reply →
Sure, but this sort of thing (email, plus likely mostly shitty calendaring and contacts) is a very ok business. The fastmail people make a fine living at it (their product is as good as anything outside gmail. If you haven't, you should try it! I'm a happy decade-long customer). But it's not the sort of business that supports the massive employee count that Mozilla has.
Once I can bring my own domain, I'll be more interested.
Why does this matter?
I can't pick my own domain when using Gmail, and still works just fine.
6 replies →
sounds more like google to me
Mozilla, let me directly fund Firefox instead please.
[dead]
Never forget Mozilla’s stance on deplatforming & censorship (since scrubbed from Mozilla’s blog): https://web.archive.org/web/20210108215449/https://blog.mozi...
Wow, I'm sorry to hear they took that down. It's a perfectly normal and rational request for accountability on January 6th, which actually I would say makes me feel more favorably about the company.
Those are absolutely fair requests. I sure hope people won't forget what happened then and why.
Thank you for sharing this, I was completely unaware that this was Mozilla's stance. This is shocking and disappointing to me.
Jesus Christ. Maybe I will give in and switch to Chrome.
I've tried to use Thunderbird multiple times over the years, but I always end up with a corrupted mailbox after a week or two, so I go back to Outlook. Is TB finally reliable enough to try again? I'd love to ditch Outlook, but I don't want to be a sucker.
Update: OK, I'm trying it again.
I've used Thunderbird for years and know half a dozen other people using it, including one who has folders with tens of thousands of emails, and have never heard of any data corruption.
The only issue with "large" mailboxes is that Thunderbird tends to become really slow. But this issue plagues other desktop clients as well.
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.
3 replies →
I have used Thunderbird for over a decade.
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.
Thunderbird is my daily driver email client for all my business email for over a decade.
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.
My coworker uses thunderbird since time immemorial, and I don’t think it ever corrupted his mailbox.
I have been using Thunderbird myself for years and never had any such problems.