Comment by ryanleesipes

7 hours ago

CEO of MZLA (the Mozilla entity that develops Thunderbird). One point of clarification, we don't get money from any source but our donors. After years of funding issues, MZLA was created by the Mozilla Foundation and the Thunderbird Council (our community governance body), to provide a legal/financial home for Thunderbird.

Launching Thundermail this year (an email service) which we hope to help provide even more funds for development, beyond just donations. Also serving a user need (lots of our users ask us to help them get off Gmail).

Lots of interest in how the money is spent - answer: mostly on devs, landed Exchange support recently (big for a lot of MS users), working on Graph support as well, JMAP after that. Updating the calendar (primarily UX/UI there), continuing to improve our Android app, working on a native iOS app and the aforementioned Thundermail service.

We publish yearly reports and will publish one again this year detailing all this.

Here is a 2025 recap: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/12/thunderbird-2025-review...

But the blog has a ton of updates across the different efforts: https://blog.thunderbird.net

Happy to answer questions and we are an open source project so feel free to reach out to us and engage if you really want to see how the sausage is made!

*Edit: More context on what Thunderbird Council is*

24 comments

ryanleesipes

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ryanmcbride  3 hours ago

Since most of the people here who seem wary about how their donation is getting spent, I have a feeling that "mostly on devs" probably won't cut it for them, though I assume it's true. Have you considered doing any sort of year end cost reporting where you show percentages of what money went where? If it's going where you say it is I think making that information transparent would be a free win. (I know there would be some level of effort constructing the report but I also have to assume you already have reports like this internally)

  • DoingIsLearning  2 hours ago

    > Have you considered doing any sort of year end cost reporting

    That very much exists, and is issued yearly.

    Consolidated Financial Statements 2024-2023:

    https://stateof.mozilla.org/pdf/Mozilla%20Fdn%202024%20-%20A...

    Expenses in Software Development (2024):

    > 290,448,000

    Total Expenses (2024):

    > 588,215,000

    Ryan Sipes, if you can read this, everybody online remembers the 2020 Servo team lay-offs, and the juxtaposition of the C level compensation.

    If you are serious about winning back donors and trust:

    - Allow for a transparent breakdown of expenses on things like external consultancy and also C level compensation

    - Allow financial ring-fencing of donations. Such that my donation can only finance Firefox devs or Thunderbird devs. (Not teams, not products, not managers/VPs/Directors just developers. Everyone else's compensation should come from corporate donations or other means)

    I love Firefox and Thunderbird, use both everyday, was also a yearly donor up to 2020 (now I just donate to Archive.org and KDE).

    You have great products that people love but if you are serious about gaining back trust you need to show judicious spending on the top side of the org. Justifying it with we need to spend money to get fundraisers doesn't pass the community test.

kn100  6 hours ago

Thundermail is a great idea! I'd be more than happy to switch over assuming the migration path from say Gmail, Fastmail, etc was easy enough, and it supported custom domains.

  • panny  2 hours ago

    >Thundermail is a great idea!

    I think the synergy part is what is great here. Imagine thundermail is a FOSS server app. Imagine they implement things like proof-of-work for senders, and no PoW means the mail goes into a quarantine instead of directly in the user's inbox. That could fight spam, without the centralization and loss of privacy we've had in email. That hasn't happened now, because of the chicken-egg problem. There's no client that supports it because there's no server that supports it because there's no client that supports it.

    Thunderbird is a very big client. It could push email forward like nothing before. I may give Thundermail a try. I'd much rather self-host a Thundermail server... one that works around the port 25 block on every residential IP. Maybe my self hosted instance could receive messages relayed from the "real" thundermail server on something other than port 25.

bachmeier  1 hour ago

Thanks for posting here. This information is helpful.

I strongly encourage you to provide that information on the page asking for donations. Even if it's just one sentence with a link and even if it doesn't fit with Mozilla's corporate policies.

karussell  6 hours ago

With "Graph support" you mean "Microsoft Graph API"?

  • ryanleesipes  6 hours ago

    That's right. We've long had Microsoft account users across Exchange, Office365 and Outlook.com complain about having issues using Thunderbird. So we're trying to account for all protocols from MS.

Ritewut  5 hours ago

You could convince me to switch from gmail but I'm not sure I would switch from Proton to thundermail.

  • ryanleesipes  4 hours ago

    Protonmail = privacy at all costs. Thundermail = freedom at all costs (open standards, use w/ whatever client you want, upload your own encryption key and "go dark")

    • Ritewut  4 hours ago

      I assume if I upload my own key, the receiver of the emails needs to also have my key? I'm not necessarily trying to send encrypted emails to people. I would want zero-access encryption which means not even Thundermail knows what my emails are.

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