[HN Gopher] Give to Thunderbird
___________________________________________________________________
Give to Thunderbird
Author : MzHN
Score : 247 points
Date : 2021-08-06 09:22 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (give.thunderbird.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (give.thunderbird.net)
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| I wouldn't use it anyway. But I would sponsor Firefox like this.
|
| However with Firefox you can only sponsor the Mozilla foundation
| and not the product itself.
| eplanit wrote:
| I'd pay an annual subscription if it was supported and advanced
| like a real product. A viable alternative to chrome is worth
| money to me.
| knadh wrote:
| I donate semi-regularly. Been using Thunderbird as my primary
| email client (almost) since its release. The installation has
| hundreds of thousands of mails across many folders, and yet, it
| is super fast and rock solid.
| jansan wrote:
| I dislike Mozilla's politics and don't use Firefox, but I have
| been using Thunderbird since at least 15 years. So yes, donated
| money for this project, hoping that they don't come up with some
| "revolutionary" UI ideas.
| wott wrote:
| I am not sure what you call "revolutionary" UI ideas, perhaps
| more in-depth changes, but as far as surface is concerned, they
| have already abolished a lot visual cues, by flattening almost
| everything and turning icons into B&W :-(
| ekianjo wrote:
| too bad they dont support Caldav/carddav natively. I hate to rely
| on plugins for something that is so essential.
| _zamorano_ wrote:
| I've been using TbSync for the last couple of years, and CalDav
| works flawlessly for me.
| neurotrace wrote:
| I used Thunderbird for a very long time but recently stopped.
| Every update has made it slower, breaks a host of extensions, and
| the Google Calendar integration is consistently broken no matter
| which solution I use. I really, really want to use Thunderbird
| but email and calendar need to Just Work. I can't keep fixing it
| every time they push out an update
| elric wrote:
| This 13 year old bug in the calendar has been pretty
| frustrating. Would love to donate specifically towards a fix
| for that. But I guess that's not an option.
|
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=475886
| gnuarch wrote:
| FWIW, for some accounts I use a second profile via
| `thunderbird --new-instance`.
| gnuarch wrote:
| On GNU/Linux Thunderbird ist my favourite GUI mail client,
| offering support for a variety of standards, including e.g.
| CalDAV (CardDAV in Beta), OpenPGP and S/MIME.
|
| Not sure whether Chat should be part of it, currently offering
| Google Talk, IRC, Odnoklassniki, and XMPP (Twitter finally gone).
| Support for Usenet News is appreciated, though I enjoy Pan.
|
| On GNU/Linux I thus consider GNOME Evolution as best alternative.
| (Haven't looked at the KDE suite for some time with Akonadi being
| too heavy last time I tried it on my simple machine.) Neither
| Claws, Geary, Sylpheed, or others offer such broad support,
| although those are very nice GUI clients.
|
| Further alternatives are listed in
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_email_client
| Rd6n6 wrote:
| I tried a lot of alternatives to thunderbird on linux for
| mail/calendar/contacts. Every single one had a severe issue at
| some point with something (timeline problems, losing events,
| can't sync contacts, privacy issue for one paid app).
| Thunderbird is just wonderful though and deserves support
| josteink wrote:
| > Neither Claws, Geary, Sylpheed, or others offer such broad
| support
|
| But Geary works nicely on mobile phones, like the PinePhone.
| For me it serves a different niche than Thunderbird (which is
| my default _desktop_ email-client).
| _wldu wrote:
| I've used Sylpheed since the early 2000s. It supports PGP. It
| also considers HTML email as harmful. I agree with that.
| ris wrote:
| KMail _used_ to be wonderful, but Akonadi has been a train
| wreck since day one. I had to switch to Thunderbird for work
| eventually because it just wasn 't acceptable to not respond to
| urgent things because "sorry, my mail client decided to
| silently stop checking for mail again!".
| brnt wrote:
| I want to like Kmail, but it's a bit too opinionated (e.g.
| having a setting letting you set to reply-to-all by default was
| removed because it is 'wrong', as well as having the button
| show up on messages without a roll-down) and just too crashy
| (akonadi...) and impossible to backup configuration (I spend a
| full day tracking all the various files/dirs down, no luck).
|
| I think there's an A-rate tool hiding in Kmail and Kontact, but
| development is glacial and not very responsive feature
| requests. (I even asked for some help setting up a dev env to
| develop something myself but no replies.)
| aidenn0 wrote:
| KDE suite just seems too modular. When something doesn't work,
| I can't figure out how to reconfigure.
|
| Evolution seems to have a similar architecture, but everything
| can be configured from within evolution's gui
| nodejs_rulez_1 wrote:
| No.
| bilherrick wrote:
| I have used Thunderbird at some point in my job, and I might say
| that it is not the easiest to set up, but it makes the job done.
| dotancohen wrote:
| If your company uses Office 365, these guys have a plugin that I
| think parses the HTML website to get your mail (and calendar!)
| into Thunderbird: https://www.beonex.com/owl/
|
| Just this week I gave them 10 Euros for the addon because my
| company refuses to enable IMAP for Office 365. I'm not affiliated
| with them, but I've been using the Tbird addon for a few weeks
| and it works perfectly. The license is per-year, though I guess
| that makes sense because I expect that it needs to be updated
| whenever the Office 365 site is updated.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Interesting, too bad it's not FOSS though. I would like to see
| how it works.
| cxr wrote:
| It's written in unminified JS.
| cweagans wrote:
| See https://sourceforge.net/projects/davmail/ for a FOSS
| solution (similar approach, but it lives outside of
| Thunderbird).
| dannyobrien wrote:
| DavMail was a life saver when I was in an Outlook Web Access
| office a few years ago.
| yunohn wrote:
| Did you get this extension audited by your security team? It
| sounds insane to me that you're bypassing IMAP restrictions,
| with a plug-in that monitors and parses the entire O365
| website...
| FreakyT wrote:
| To be fair, it's the security team's idiotic position on IMAP
| that prompted the parent commenter to find a workaround.
|
| It's like how having super draconian password reset and
| complexity requirements ends up being less secure because
| users will start writing their impossible-to-remember
| passwords on post-it notes.
| yunohn wrote:
| There's a big difference between password reset rules, and
| giving third-parties access to emails and calendar.
|
| There is nothing draconian about restricting IMAP - any app
| could exfiltrate confidential emails once granted access.
| It's a very sane rule to disallow everything except webmail
| or first party apps.
| beprogrammed wrote:
| It's a terrible process for the users. And as we can see
| what did it get them, a third party logging into there
| webmail.
|
| The service is protected with a username and password,
| didn't matter if it was IMAP or webmail.
| yunohn wrote:
| Of course it does matter! Webmail is quite restricted and
| optimized for viewing and replying to emails. IMAP is
| great for that, while also facilitating exporting
| (exfiltrating) the entire mailbox.
| analognoise wrote:
| An employee who redirects company emails to get around a
| security rule becomes an ex-employee very quickly.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| The IMAP blocking is for different draconian reasons.
| Office365 does not support Modern Auth with IMAP, which is
| considered a security baseline now.
| corty wrote:
| Office365 supports Kerberos with IMAP, which would be the
| proper thing to do anyways. Giving passwords to a browser
| or email application is wrong.
| tialaramex wrote:
| "modern Auth" means OAUTH, so, you aren't giving
| passwords to the email application.
|
| If you have IMAP on GMail you get two choices, you can
| admit you're sacrificing security, and they'll mint a
| random password just for that IMAP application, or you
| can use OAUTHBEARER. As I understand it if _enabled_ IMAP
| for Office365 can do OAUTHBEARER.
|
| The nice thing about OAUTH is that it's a natural
| integration for your multi-factor authentication, which
| as I understand it doesn't fit well into Kerberos. But to
| be sure Kerberos is much better than yet another human
| memorable secret password exchange.
| zerocrates wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they do? I definitely set up a O365
| account in Thunderbird using IMAP and OAuth, which I
| assume is sufficiently "modern auth."
| nerf_javascript wrote:
| It's the complete opposite, Office365 only supports OAuth
| with IMAP and is phasing out/has phased out Basic Auth
| for IMAP. Additionally more often than not organizations
| are actually running Microsoft Exchange under the hood --
| the majority of MS Exchange servers have Basic Auth
| disabled for IMAP (I believe since 2017 it's been off by
| default).
| dotancohen wrote:
| That addon got the exact same stringent audit by my security
| team as did the Firefox web browser that I installed to
| browse the entire O365 website to begin with.
| yunohn wrote:
| The trust level for Firefox as a browser, versus a random
| extension that parses O365, would be very different for me.
| And at the company I work at.
|
| I'm surprised you got this one approved.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I interpreted his comment as saying he did not ask
| permission. Probably he'll be fine as long as nothing he
| did was explicitly against any rules, even if it is
| clearly against the spirit of the rules. More likely
| still, no one will ever find out.
| yunohn wrote:
| He'll be fine as long as the extension doesn't steal
| data. The moment that happens, his job is on the line.
| cxr wrote:
| What happened to vetting sources? Beonex is Ben Bucksch,
| a Mozilla true believer who's been around since before
| Firefox even existed. The chances that it will suddenly
| turn into malware is about as likely a distro's coreutils
| package maintainer going rogue--and far less likely than
| the revolving door at Mozilla Corp leading to the Firefox
| product team deciding to do something untoward
| themselves.
| mkl wrote:
| I use Thunderbird, and have for a very long time. Unfortunately,
| the new development and progress is gradually breaking more and
| more extensions, making it less useful to me as time goes on.
|
| Bizarrely, the donation page thinks I'm in the UK, when I'm
| almost as far as possible away from there.
| unixhero wrote:
| Lemme guess, Australia!?
| mkl wrote:
| Further!
| signal11 wrote:
| New Zealand?
| mkl wrote:
| Yep.
| [deleted]
| pizza234 wrote:
| > Unfortunately, the new development and progress is gradually
| breaking more and more extensions, making it less useful to me
| as time goes on.
|
| I have very strong suspicions about the engineering quality of
| their work (but can't confirm).
|
| With the recent version, v78, they did broke extensions again,
| however, something very smell is the policy that they've
| adopted - the new replacement APIs are incomplete and
| experimental (see https://developer.thunderbird.net/add-
| ons/updating/tb78):
|
| > While the Thunderbird team plans to add more APIs with
| upcoming releases, the current set of APIs will not be
| sufficient to port most add-ons. To work around this
| limitation, add-ons can introduce their own, additional APIs as
| so-called Experiments.
|
| > As Experiments usually run in the main process and have
| unrestricted access to any aspect of Thunderbird, they are
| expected to require updates for each new version of
| Thunderbird. To reduce the maintenance burden in the future, it
| is in your own interest to use Experiment APIs only to the
| extent necessary for the add-on.
|
| Essentially, they've broken compatibility by introducing a
| half-baked framework, and guaranteed that compatibility will be
| broken _again and again_.
|
| I don't have the technical insight to know if this is really
| necessary (I know that in the past, breaking compatibility was
| a necessity in some cases), but on the outside, this looks like
| terrible, careless, engineering.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Maybe they just lack the resources to do all that work.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| IP-based geolocation is a crapshoot. I frequently get
| teleported to Eastern Europe, Finland, USA, or Canada, despite
| living very far from all of them.
| mkl wrote:
| In practice I've found it works pretty well. Every
| geolocation service I've tried (just did 6-7 now) gets my
| country right, and more than half get the city/region. I've
| always had it get online students' locations right too.
| _zamorano_ wrote:
| Spaniard here. The donation page thinks I'm mexican. Changed to
| es-ES but didn't work at the first time. The paypal link seems
| to do nothing.
|
| Tried browsing from google.es and again it was set to Mexico,
| though this time I was able to donate after changing to Spain.
| l0b0 wrote:
| Not stable enough for production. Every time I've tried to use
| them (3-5 times since they got started) they've lost emails and
| calendar events in inexplicable ways, possibly by not taking a
| careful enough approach when dealing with unreliable connections
| or full storage. The suggested solution when reporting bugs has
| several times been to try the latest version with no
| justification other than "it might be fixed now, who knows" or
| reset completely and spend several hours reconfiguring and re-
| downloading everything.
|
| The least terrible solution I've found so far is GNOME Evolution,
| which I don't think has _lost_ anything outright yet, although
| the UX is meh (no option for separate event start /end time
| zones, slow search even when all emails are cached locally,
| randomly requires re-signing in to Google, defaults time zone to
| Antarctica/McMurdo when travelling(?!?), does not seem to give
| any indication whether spam filtering is working or not, groups
| all accounts under my Google account in the Edit - Accounts view,
| and many more I can't remember off the top of my head).
|
| Sorry to be so negative, but so far every single email client
| (Evolution, K-9, Mutt, Outlook, Thunderbird) has been a chore,
| for different reasons. Gmail/Google Calendar is the only
| client(s) I rate, but I'm shutting down that account slowly for
| obvious reasons.
| bjarneh wrote:
| Thunderbird is such a great program. Ever since I gave up Mutt as
| my default email program, I've been using all the time.
|
| One of the richest guys on the planet (Zuckerberg) was using
| Thinderbird in a photo some time ago I think. Perhaps if he reads
| HN; they can get an infinite lifeline.
| gowld wrote:
| He doesn't trust $trillion corporations with his mail?
| jrm4 wrote:
| HOLD the phone. Can we confirm this? If so, this 100% furthers
| my idea of "Stop thinking of tech billionaires of being
| helpfully creative to the world and having imaginations, they
| are the exact opposite."
|
| If a normal person were also a billionaire, they'd stop for
| half a second and call someone and say "hey, make sure
| Thunderbird is good for forever."
|
| These people can't think that way, they're hampered by the
| mental defect of "Hmm, what's the angle, how can I make money
| off this? I can't right now, okay so I'll do nothing."
| bjarneh wrote:
| https://twitter.com/topherolson/status/745294977064828929
| cossatot wrote:
| As discussed in the comments it looks like the Cisco VPN
| client (when I zoom in I think it's that and not
| Thunderbird, too):
| https://twitter.com/andrewheumann/status/745332192457396224
| zem wrote:
| looks more like he's standing near some random engineer's
| desk, and had that area temporarily cleared for the photo
| sidcool wrote:
| If Google pay were accepted I'd donate in a second.
| opheliate wrote:
| I pay for the Owl extension [0] which allows me to use my
| university's MS Exchange account with Thunderbird. I don't
| understand why Mozilla don't offer this themselves though, is it
| too complicated to put the effort in given the size of the
| userbase? Or is there some reason it has to be proprietary and
| they're against releasing proprietary software? I really
| appreciate Owl, but I'd much rather just pay Mozilla directly for
| it.
|
| 0: https://www.beonex.com/owl/
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I find davmail to be the best way to access exchange. It
| connects to exchange and sets up local proxies using pop, IMAP,
| SMTP, and calDav.
|
| Then I can use whichever client I like. Otherwise it's just
| bouncing between which client has had the exchange plugins
| updated most recently.
|
| As a bonus, it's distributed as a jar, so you can download and
| run for the latest support, even on an LTS of a Linux distro
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| How heavy is davmail on the system? I am always a little
| paranoid about java apps.
|
| Can you accept/reject meeting invites with it? The Tbsync
| extension that I am using does not have this feature.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| accept/reject meeting invites seems to depend on your
| CalDAV client. It doesn't work well with TB, but works
| great with Evolution. I haven't dug into what's actually
| happening because when it didn't work with TB, it was
| spamming peoples inboxes (e.g. one time it decided to
| reject _every single instance_ of a recurring meeting that
| had been going on for years), so I just set the calendar to
| read-only in TB.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| It uses about half a GB of ram when actively running on my
| system. CPU usage is fine except when I sync an IMAP folder
| that has over 10k or so messages, at which point it does
| pin one CPU.
|
| [edit]
|
| I noticed I'm running it with "java -Xmx512M" which
| probably explains the half-GB of ram usage. It's possible
| that if I increased that value it would perform better with
| large folders, but I keep my inbox fairly reasonable and I
| don't care if the other folders take a bit of time to sync.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Thanks. I am not going to use 500 MB of my RAM for this
| one thing.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| You can certainly try running it with a smaller heap,
| some of the modern java GCs can run at very close to 100%
| heap utilization.
|
| Also, FWIW, it's the 10th largest item in my top listing,
| with even Thunderbird using more RAM (850MB). I suspect
| mutt, offlineimap and davmail would combine to be smaller
| than TB alone.
|
| [edit]
|
| Also consider getting your employer to buy you more RAM?
| A 32GB SO-DIMM kit from corsair is under $200, so nobody
| should have to worry about half a gig on their work
| machine...
| jcranmer wrote:
| > I don't understand why Mozilla don't offer this themselves
| though, is it too complicated to put the effort in given the
| size of the userbase?
|
| That's the short answer to the question.
|
| A longer answer: the underlying Exchange protocol is another
| IMAP-level of complexity of protocol, and the IMAP protocol
| implementation in Thunderbird is itself running somewhere in
| the 50KLOC region. On top of that, the protocol itself (I
| believe) largely works in Outlook's not-a-regular-RFC
| 822-email-message representation, which means you need to build
| in a translation layer to make it work well. Finally, a lot of
| the logic in Thunderbird isn't really designed for pluggable
| account types, and that it's even possible to a degree is up to
| work that rkent and I did to make it barely possible for
| extensions to do so; incorporating the code in core would
| require properly fixing several of the places rather than
| continuing the various levels of hacks in place.
|
| Now what's the benefit of adding it core? If you're using TB
| for your small/medium enterprise, then the better answer is to
| just switch on IMAP access on the server, which is much better
| supported in TB (and other clients). So the value-add is
| comparatively minimal, especially compared to doing something
| like supporting JMAP (which is somewhat closer to a sane
| modernization of IMAP than EWS is). It's going to rank lower
| priority than other fixes, then, especially given the technical
| debt TB suffers from.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Does Owl allow you to proprly respond (accept/reject) to
| meeting invites? I am using TBSync and Provider for Exchange
| ActiveSync and that cannot do so.
| fikama wrote:
| I think thunderbird is now an independent project, it doesn't
| belong to Mozilla
| wodenokoto wrote:
| From the donation page:
|
| > Contributions go to MZLA Technologies Corporation, a
| California corporation wholly owned by the Mozilla
| Foundation. Funds will be reserved for use in the Thunderbird
| project. Contributions are not tax-deductible as charitable
| contributions.
| opheliate wrote:
| I thought that too, I was a bit confused by the fact Mozilla
| are still operating the donations in the OP, which is why I
| mention Mozilla specifically. Definitely
| s/Mozilla/Thunderbird devs/ if that's wrong though.
| ruiidont wrote:
| Did you check if there's a bug report for this (marked as
| enhancements)?
|
| Google bugzilla
| [deleted]
| pm215 wrote:
| I get the impression that this kind of thing depends rather on
| what specific locked-down settings choices the Exchange admins
| have made. I use work's Office-365 mail setup (which is I
| assume basically "exchange in the cloud") with stock
| thunderbird plus the free "TbSync" and "Provider for Exchange
| ActiveSync" addons, for instance (and I only need those for
| calendar and contacts stuff). This relies on the Exchange
| server not having disabled IMAP and SMTP. So the userbase for
| this kind of connector feature is not just "people whose
| organisation uses Exchange" but "people whose organisation uses
| Exchange and whose mail admins are sufficiently anti non-
| Outlook clients to have turned off IMAP but not so anti non-
| Outlook clients as to just say that it's policy that you must
| use Outlook". (There was a period where stock Thunderbird
| couldn't handle a "Modern Authentication" Exchange setup, but
| as of Thunderbird 78 or so it now can.)
|
| More generally, I've found in the past that "open source
| connectors etc to Exchange" support tends to be or become
| abandonware, because generally the kind of person who writes
| that sort of addon/integration doesn't really like working in
| the sort of environment which mandates Exchange and locks it
| down, and so after a few years when they move on to a new job
| that doesn't require them to use Exchange the addon becomes
| abandonware because the original author no longer needs it. So
| it probably does need to be either Mozilla taking it on as a
| "we must support this" feature or somebody like Beonex making
| it a paid product.
| NiloCK wrote:
| I use this software every day on multiple machines (rss for work,
| rss & email personal). It's not without wrinkles, but at least it
| never feels exploitative.
|
| Donated, and will consider setting up something recurring.
| meesterdude wrote:
| Use thunderbird everyday on both my machines - but they've been
| changing things for no good reason and breaking the UI/UX because
| of it. thanks but no thanks.
| gnomewascool wrote:
| > but they've been changing things for no good reason and
| breaking the UI/UX because of it.
|
| The reason is the underlying Gecko engine being constantly
| yanked from under them -- they rely on parts of Firefox's
| codebase and when that changes, they have to keep up, risk
| having security vulnerabilities or manually backport relevant
| security patches, in effect maintaining their own forked
| browser engine.
| meesterdude wrote:
| understandable shifting sands; but that's NO excuse for the
| sort of shoddy work they've done to address it. At best
| interpretation, there was not enough rudimentary QA done,
| because some of their changes (at least, in previous releases
| i worked with) outright broke the ability to compose
| messages. This was the result of finally hitting the
| "upgrade" button: black text on a black background. So I
| rolled back.
|
| This, in addition to some of their other UX changes (like
| moving to SVG icons) - just makes it feel like after 10 years
| I am no longer their user base, and from what I've read the
| team is unwilling to be flexible with these changes. Thanks
| for the middle finger. They're breaking things and I'm
| supposed to just be happy about it.
|
| Regretfully I've fallen out of love with thunderbird, and i
| am exploring other clients. My needs are not complex, outside
| of perhaps the google auth song & dance.
|
| I want thunderbird to be the FF of email clients.... I guess
| in a way they are. Open source disappointment that pushes
| people to non-open solutions.
| gnomewascool wrote:
| I understand your frustration -- I've similarly been bitten
| by some changes to Firefox; however please do remember that
| Thunderbird is developed by a small team with limited funds
| and adding or even maintaining configurability is
| expensive.
|
| That isn't to say that you should give to thunderbird,
| since they are currently disappointing you, but it is a bit
| of a vicious cycle.
| wott wrote:
| > That isn't to say that you should give to thunderbird,
| since they are currently disappointing you, but it is a
| bit of a vicious cycle.
|
| Well, not exactly, because while it was on low-effort
| maintenance mode, there was no such changes; it was just
| doing the same job in the same way since forever.
| Problems arose when a new team with a new mission, new
| funding, and worst of all, "new" ideas ("new" being the
| same fate other pieces of software underwent in the last
| decade: inserting more web tech, changing the look into
| something more modern, i.e. more web-like), became
| active.
| MzHN wrote:
| >[...] wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation. Funds will be
| reserved for use in the Thunderbird project. [...]
|
| Why doesn't Firefox have this?
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Exactly. I'd really pay for Firefox. But I don't want to
| sponsor their foundation even though I have a few times in the
| past. I'd just like to help with Firefox development.
|
| I understand about the corporate/foundation split, but they
| could just sell 'subscriptions' that don't really give anything
| so they're basically donations. If the pencil pushers really
| insist something is given in return, they can make a cool
| subscriber badge in the app or something.
|
| Right now they're focusing too much on their VPN stuff which
| isn't available here and I have no need for anyway.
| stdbrouw wrote:
| Even if you could donate to Firefox specifically, that's still
| no guarantee because Mozilla could decide to just channel less
| money from other sources of funding towards Firefox and you'd
| end up where you started.
| inetknght wrote:
| That argument is true for every transaction
| gowld wrote:
| You end up one step from where you started, and if others
| join you it's more steps towards exhausting the buffer.
|
| But the search ad revenue buffer is huge.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I'd venture it is because Firefox is developed by a for-profit
| corporation with hundreds of millions in revenue.
|
| So the split is: you can donate to the non-profit organization,
| while the for-profit corporation only handles taxable income.
|
| The reason why it is split is due to taxes. Mozilla created the
| corporation after getting in trouble with the IRS.
|
| Edit: I haven't kept up with Thunderbird for a very long time,
| but it looks like they've also moved to be developed by a for
| profit corporation, but a different one then the one that
| develops Firefox, so different people making different
| decisions. Also, donations to thunderbird are no longer tax
| deductible.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| > I'd venture it is because Firefox is developed by a for-
| profit corporation with hundreds of millions in revenue.
|
| I think a _lot_ of people are confused about this, myself
| included. A lot of people want to donate directly to Firefox
| for development.
|
| But there are vast sums of money to the tune of $400M+
| already involved here. I assume the $20 donations people give
| to Mozilla go towards the broader initiatives of the
| Foundation.
| [deleted]
| pjmlp wrote:
| My favourite client, if you want it to stay around, consider
| donating.
| jsilence wrote:
| I really wish fixing the Maildir store implementation would be a
| higher priority so that the local mailstore can be shared with
| other mail clients.
| floor_ wrote:
| I was told to take a hike after reporting a feature regression.
| So I will not be donating. :(
| adar wrote:
| Do you have a link to the bug report?
| floor_ wrote:
| I've long since deleted the email updates. It was in regards
| to them removing semicolons as separators for lists of email
| addresses. You can only use commas now.
| hpcjoe wrote:
| I set up a recurring monthly contribution of $10. I've used
| Thunderbird for years, its my go-to client. Unfortunately these
| days, day job forces windows 10 and lookout. But I use it
| everywhere else.
|
| FWIW, lookout is itself dangerous software to install/use. There
| are many hacks of it, including new and exciting zero-days where
| you don't even need to interact with the mail in any way, to have
| a compromise occur. It is simply not worth the risk, on any
| platform.
|
| I've used (and paid for) both Owl and ExQuilla for office365
| integration when needed. Owl was iffy ... had lots of problems.
| ExQuilla just worked.
| tr33house wrote:
| > Contributions are not tax-deductible as charitable
| contributions
|
| Why is this? I thought the Mozilla foundation owned this and it's
| a non profit
| Deukhoofd wrote:
| They moved it over to MZLA Technologies Corporation last year,
| which is a for profit, so they could monetize it.
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-moves-to-monetize-thun...
| orangepanda wrote:
| > by moving the project away from its foundation into a
| corporate entity they will be able to monetize the product
| and pay for its development easier than before.
|
| Non profits also are able to monetize products and pay out
| employees.
|
| There must be some other reason for the move?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| They mean monetise Thunderbird _and then use that money for
| other things_. That's the difference. A charity cannot do
| that by law.
| wpietri wrote:
| What in the world? I thought maybe their original statement
| would make more sense, but no:
|
| https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/
|
| We received a lot of donations from the community, so we're
| going to shift to a for-profit footing? That does not make a
| lot of sense to me.
|
| One of the things I really like about Thunderbird is that
| it's from a not-for-profit entity. It makes it easier to
| trust them with so much of my most personal data.
|
| It's still wholly owned by a non-profit, which means I'm
| going to give them the benefit of the doubt for now. But
| especially given the vagueness of that statement, I'm
| definitely concerned.
| archerx wrote:
| The Mozilla CEO clearly needs more money!
| gowld wrote:
| > it's from a not-for-profit entity. It makes it easier to
| trust them with so much of my most personal data.
|
| Why? Non-profit status has nothing to do with privacy
| policy. It just means that money goes to employees and
| vendors instead of owners (who could be the same people for
| all practical purposes).
| howtofly wrote:
| Er... Just about to make a monthly 5 bucks donation, then I
| read this.
| gowld wrote:
| If you love the product, why do you care how they spend the
| money for they value they already gave you? Do you ask for
| a refund from for-profit businesses after you use their
| product if you don't trust where the money will go?
| durnygbur wrote:
| Thunderbird is significant tool in my daily workflows. I created
| multiple profiles for RSS, email, calendar, contacts and usually
| have multiple instances opened at once. Everything operates
| smoothly. I would gladly setup monthly fee but also want to have
| the possiblity to cancel it at any time by the end of the month.
| This worries me:
|
| > https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US/help/
|
| How long it takes to process cancellation of recurring
| contribution?
| buzzy_hacker wrote:
| The link just says they can't help with technical issues, not
| donation issues. You can also use a virtual card
| https://privacy.com/ that you can cancel when you want.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| If you use Paypal or a virtual card, request cancellation and
| immediately cancel the virtual card or the PayPal recurring
| payment.
| spapas82 wrote:
| Late versions of Thunderbird have integrated GPG functionality. I
| have tested and used this extensively and I think it's a required
| feature that enables most users to have excellent security in
| their communications.
|
| For me, only this would be more than enough enough to switch to
| Thunderbird as my main mail client!
| criddell wrote:
| I recently switched off Thunderbird because the company I work
| for dropped PGP and switched to Microsoft's OME which is
| (surprise!) best supported by Outlook.
|
| I don't have the feeling that PGP/GPG is growing in popularity
| and if that's Thunderbird's big feature, it might not help
| them.
| spapas82 wrote:
| It ain't Thunderbird's big feature but it's an important one
| at least for me.
|
| The fact that pgp is not growing in popularity is not related
| to its security but its difficulty of using it properly (and
| the fact that it is an open and non monetizable solution).
| Having been integrated in the Thunderbird as a first class
| feature makes it very easy to use so it may lead to increase
| in its popularity!
|
| I have no experience with OME but I presume it's a
| proprietary solution.
| gowld wrote:
| Is OME compatible with freedom? If so, Thunderbird could add
| support?
| criddell wrote:
| I don't think it would be easy. Along with OME comes a
| different protocol. I don't think it's fully compatible
| with SMTP or POP or IMAP.
| themulticaster wrote:
| Just a nitpick, but FYI: Thunderbird now has an integrated PGP
| implementation, but it does not use GnuPG (GPG). Rather they
| integrated another PGP implementation called RNP. The standard
| is called OpenPGP, PGP is the original (proprietary)
| implementation and GnuPG was originally created as a compatible
| free software alternative to PGP. In previous Thunderbird
| versions (before 78), the quasi-standard Enigmail extension
| provided OpenPGP support via GPG.
|
| A side effect of this is that Thunderbird does not interact
| with your GPG keyring anymore. So if you locally trusted a
| certain key using GPG for example, Thunderbird won't know about
| it and will ask you to verify it again.
|
| Sources: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/09/openpgp-in-
| thunderbird-... and
| https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:OpenPGP:Migration-From-...
| spapas82 wrote:
| Yes that's the case. Thunderbird does not use gnupg anymore
| and the enigmail extension is not needed.
|
| However I think that Thunderbird having everything integrated
| in its UI, without the need to use or even install a third
| party program line gnupg makes the experience much better for
| inexperienced users.
| throwawaybchr wrote:
| Does it require the other party to know what gpg is?
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