[HN Gopher] Help Keep Thunderbird Alive
___________________________________________________________________
Help Keep Thunderbird Alive
Author : playfultones
Score : 360 points
Date : 2026-04-09 07:27 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (updates.thunderbird.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (updates.thunderbird.net)
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| By donating to MZLA Technologies Corporation? Then I guess I'll
| switch to KMail or Evolution.
| 0x000042 wrote:
| How is KMail and Evolution at this point? I have not tried them
| in like 10 years. Are they actively maintained and a real
| alternative for serious email use?
| teekert wrote:
| Both are ok last time I tried (last year?) but Geary is
| default on Gnome distro's now I think [0]. Geary is much more
| minimal though.
|
| I myself am pretty spoiled by Protonmail I think, really
| enjoying that.
|
| [0] https://github.com/GNOME/geary
| nosioptar wrote:
| Seamonkey or claws mifht be good alternatives too.
|
| http://seamonkey-project.org/
|
| https://claws-mail.org/
| plmpsu wrote:
| I wish I could use Thunderbird at work now that it has Exchange
| support . Unfortunately we're mandated to use Microsoft Outlook.
| Outlook feels like it has completely been forgotten by Microsoft.
| I don't recall the last time they updated anything meaningful in
| the product (at least on macOS), it's quite a mess of a product.
| Wishing Thunderbird all the best it's the competition we need.
| teekert wrote:
| You know what is nice? If you have clients that get
| automatically switched to "the new Outlook" and loose all imap
| connections (and they don't work anymore, period).
|
| Took me so long to learn that the fix was to switch back to the
| old Outlook.
| josephg wrote:
| IMAP works in outlook. Its just horrible to set up and half
| broken. Click "Add account". Then type in your email address,
| click "Choose provider", select IMAP, then click "Sync
| directly with IMAP" (dark pattern hidden button). If you
| don't click that last button, outlook uploads your IMAP email
| credentials to their own MS Cloud instance, and that proxies
| all your emails via microsoft's cloud servers. Do they read
| your email messages for advertising? Nobody knows!
|
| In my testing, the local IMAP client implementation quite
| frequently launches a DoS attack against your IMAP server.
| It'll send the same query requesting new mail messages in a
| tight loop, limited by the round-trip latency. But luckily,
| almost nobody uses IMAP via outlook because its so difficult
| to set up.
| josephg wrote:
| There's also two different applications which are both "Outlook
| for Mac".
|
| If you go into the "Outlook" menu in the app, there's a "Legacy
| Outlook" button, which relaunches outlook using a completely
| different binary. The two outlook implementations have
| different bugs and all sorts of different behaviour.
|
| Outlook For Mac is free but "legacy outlook" requires a MS365
| subscription for some reason.
|
| Outlook is also not to be confused with Microsoft's "Web
| Outlook" client, available at outlook.live.com. It all seems
| totally insane.
| cutler wrote:
| < It all seems totally insane.
|
| This is Microsoft we're talking about, right?
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Anyone using Thunderbird was forced to see this, not sure we _(or
| the well-funded corp)_ need another round.
| account42 wrote:
| Yes, which has ensured I never donate to them again. It's my
| computer not MZLA's billboard.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| I hate to say it, but the Outlook approach would be an
| improvement: cute little ~~advertisements~~ calls to action
| in your inbox.
|
| The full-display-on-focus thing certainly got my interest.
| tristanj wrote:
| Mozilla brings in almost $700 million per year, they have more
| than enough money to sponsor MZLA/Thunderbird development.
| shakna wrote:
| Mozilla tried to kill Thunderbird in 2020. They've been talking
| about not sponsoring it all since 2015.
|
| They might have the money, but they don't really seem to want
| anything to do with the project.
| t0lo wrote:
| Mozilla doesn't have the willpower or vision to do anything
| with anything.
| mb_thd wrote:
| Don't be so harsh on them. (\s) They show lots of willpower
| and some sort of vision when talking about AI in Firefox.
| antisol wrote:
| Don't forget telemetry! The makers of the "privacy-
| focused browser" were super strong-willed about that,
| too.
| hackingonempty wrote:
| It is important that they know exactly how many users are
| permanently switching to Chrome.
| antisol wrote:
| omg best thing I've read all day. Thanks for the good
| long out-loud laugh <3
| antisol wrote:
| Good! I hope they do "kill it off" so that someone who isn't
| totally incompetent can fork it and take it over.
| Vinnl wrote:
| That's basically how you could describe what happened.
| Those competent people are using Mozilla's infrastructure
| and trademarks, but otherwise running on donations.
| antisol wrote:
| Then how come everything they've done in the last 10
| years has been garbage?
| bguebert wrote:
| calling it garbage seems kinda harsh, but I think they
| are moving more to using a javascript rendering method
| instead of xul. I remember reading about it a while back.
| I don't really like it either and one of the first
| updates from back then broke a lot of UI that had been
| working ok. I am not really sure what the problems are
| with working with xul though, but I think firefox moved
| off it a long time ago too. I feel like thunderbird's
| user base is more the type to want to use thunderbird
| because it runs like a local first desktop style app as
| an alternative to using a web interface to their email.
| At least that's what I like about it.
| antisol wrote:
| > they are moving more to using a javascript rendering
| method instead of xul
|
| Yeah, that's what I said: garbage. > I am
| not really sure what the problems are with working with
| xul though
|
| I'm sure they'll yell "for teh securitah!" in a bunch of
| vague fearmongering, just like they did with firefox. But
| the #1 and #2 problems are that it's not shiny and new
| and the CADT brigade[1] only knows javascript.
| > I think firefox moved off it a long time ago too
|
| I wouldn't call it "a long time ago", but I guess that
| depends on your perspective.
|
| And that's the moment when firefox became garbage - just
| another chrome-alike, except slower and more resource-
| hungry. It had been getting worse for a decade prior to
| that, but dropping xul and breaking a ton of my
| extensions and customisability was the (large) straw that
| broke the camel's back. Sound familiar yet?
| > I feel like thunderbird's user base is more the type to
| want to use thunderbird because it runs like a local
| first desktop style app as an alternative to using a web
| interface to their email. At least that's what I like
| about it.
|
| _Exactly_. Which is why moving their UI to a worse,
| javascript-powered, uncustomisable, web-alike trash UI is
| a bad thing. And a big part of why everything they 've
| done in the last ~10 years has been garbage. And why I'll
| almost certainly be switching to something that isn't
| thunderbird next time I'm forced to upgrade it.
|
| (forgive my tone, nothing against you, I just get
| emotional when morons take an excellent piece of software
| I've been using for decades and turn it into broken,
| unusable trash)
|
| [1] https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
| reddalo wrote:
| Mozilla is so sad. They have a lot of money and they could fund
| the development of both Firefox and Thunderbird.
|
| Yet, they decide to waste almost $7 million per year to pay a
| CEO and God knows what else.
| Skywalker13 wrote:
| like all Big Tech
| account42 wrote:
| Except this "big tech" larper is supposedly fully owned by
| a nonprofit.
| glenstein wrote:
| Here we go again. I don't love the CEO pay but it's like 1%
| of their annual revenue and typical for positions like that,
| and Mozilla constantly suffers from these kinds of double
| sided, quantum accusations. Depending on which random HN
| thread you're in, the accusation is that (a) they're running
| out of money and urgently need to innovate to grow their
| revenue streams but also (b) they've got so much money and
| their spending of it is simply more evidence of how wasteful
| they are. Which is it this time?
|
| >and God knows what else.
|
| They publish their financial reports. It's mostly.... the
| browser. They actually spend more in total and in inflation
| adjusted terms directly on the browser than ever in their
| history as a company. Unless they're just faking all those
| reports? Need more than vibes here.
| hackingonempty wrote:
| > urgently need to innovate to grow their revenue streams
|
| No, people are saying that Firefox needs to diversify their
| revenue streams because almost all of their revenue comes
| from their main competitor who (likely) only keeps Firefox
| alive to keep regulators from forcing them to divest their
| browser. The situation has gotten more dire since the
| regulators got fired last year.
| glenstein wrote:
| You're basically restating the very argument I'm citing,
| but phrasing it like you're expressing a disagreement.
| Diversifying revenue and growing revenue are distinct but
| overlapping, and both charges are made against Mozilla.
| This represents one side of the quantum accusation, the
| other being that even their search revenue is excessive
| and unnecessary, they don't need to spend that much
| anyway. According to this perspective, the 1.2 billion
| they have on hand should be enough to finance,
| development in perpetuity.
|
| Which side of the quantum accusation will be invoked in
| any given comment thread? Flip a coin and find out.
| celsoazevedo wrote:
| > ... it's like 1% of their annual revenue ...
|
| There's something about this specific part that doesn't sit
| well with me.
|
| It's like justifying a huge salary for the president of a
| charity because they receive millions a year in donations
| and revenue from charity shops... it's just wrong.
|
| 7 million (assuming that's the correct value) is a lot of
| money. Perhaps not as much as they'd make at Google, but a
| lot of money nonetheless. And Mozilla is supposed to be a
| non-profit, with a good mission, with a manifesto, in a
| David vs Goliath struggle... but the CEO still makes
| millions, even when cuts are being made those working on
| the main mission?
|
| The bar for Mozilla is different because they present
| themselves as being different. Multi-million salaries is
| what you expect from regular companies, not from good non-
| profits, and I think that's why the CEO's salary always
| comes up in these discussions.
|
| With all this said, I also agree with the point about some
| of the criticism. Nothing Mozilla does pleases everyone,
| there's always something. It's a hard position to be in.
| Fervicus wrote:
| What do they do with all that money? According to wikipedia,
| they had about 750 employees. That's a lot of employees for the
| amount of useful products they have.
| smarnach wrote:
| How did you come to the conclusion that 750 people is a lot
| to build a web browser? The Chrome-adjacent teams at Google
| are about 4,000 people, and that doesn't even include all the
| people at Google providing infrastructure (e.g. servers,
| workplace, HR, legal etc.).
|
| Comparing Firefox to Chromium-based browsers doesn't make
| much sense since these browsers don't develop their own web
| engine.
| criticalfault wrote:
| take the reference of ladybird.
|
| in a couple of years they built the engine from scratch.
| it's going to soon enter Alpha. how many people from
| ladybird built that engine? about 10?
|
| all while everyone has said that modern web makes this task
| impossible
| squidbeak wrote:
| > it's going to soon enter Alpha
|
| Perhaps other browser makers want to move faster than
| Ladybird.
| criticalfault wrote:
| that's fine.
|
| point is that Mozilla is wasting money and having 4000
| people working on chrome may not be the correct
| benchmark.
| glenstein wrote:
| Wait why is that fine? The whole point was that ladybird
| is yet to enter alpha which is the very reason why it's
| not the correct benchmark. And you said the Chrome
| comparison isn't the correct one but... didn't follow it
| up with an actual reason.
| Fervicus wrote:
| How did you come to the conclusion that it's not? Google
| being bloated is not a good justification for why Mozilla
| should be bloated too. Someone in the comment below
| suggested that Ladybird was built by about 10 people. Call
| me naive, but I don't think you'd need 75x number of people
| to work on a browser that's already established for over 2
| decades.
| ekianjo wrote:
| They need a lot of money to pay their useless execs, so 700
| million must be barely enough to keep things running
| glenstein wrote:
| They publish their 990s so you can look this stuff up if
| you're actually curious. It's mostly the browser.
| markstos wrote:
| That's apparently mostly from Google to be the default search
| engine in Firefox. Diversifying their income streams is a good
| move.
|
| The MZLA company that makes Thunderbird is also working on
| improving self-funding by launching a Thunderbird-branded
| webmail service.
| mhitza wrote:
| Wasn't Thunderbird Pro the avenue for extra project financing?
| Why does it take so long to launch an email service?
| teekert wrote:
| Was going to say it's here, but it's not indeed, you can join
| the waitlist: https://www.tb.pro/en-US/
| vntok wrote:
| To be fair, "Give for TB awareness" has a nice ring to it...
| hillcrestenigma wrote:
| I think email is one of the few critical services that takes a
| lot of effort to get it right. I'd rather have them take a
| while to ensure it is reliable rather than have a buggy mess on
| launch day.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > MZLA Technologies Corporation is a wholly owned for-profit
| subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation and the home of Thunderbird.
|
| I guess I don't understand why the open-source email client with
| zero revenue potential is managed by a _for-profit_ subsidiary,
| nor why that _for-profit_ subsidiary is begging for donations.
|
| Shouldn't this whole thing be managed by the non-profit Mozilla
| Foundation?
| psittacus wrote:
| Not that it answers your question, but the move happened in
| 2020 to "hire more easily, act more swiftly, and pursue ideas
| that were previously not possible".
|
| https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/
| hosteur wrote:
| So here more than 6 years later, did they act more swiftly or
| pursue new ideas? The development pace seems unbearably slow.
| input_sh wrote:
| I don't see them begging anywhere, I only see someone sharing a
| link to their donate page.
|
| For what it's worth because legal names are confusingly
| similar, this is a legal subsidiary of Mozilla that is
| _specific_ to Thunderbird, as in if you give it money it goes
| straight into Thunderbird. Many people here pretend to wish to
| be able to give money directly to Firefox, yet when they can do
| that for Thunderbird, people here are still finding bullshit
| reasons not to do so. Pick a lane.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > For what it's worth because legal names are confusingly
| similar, this is a legal subsidiary of Mozilla that is
| specific to Thunderbird
|
| Right, I get that, but why is it _for-profit_? Fund raising
| is hard enough for nonprofits, convincing people to donate
| their hard-earned cash to a for-profit is on a whole
| different level.
| input_sh wrote:
| I'm definitely not involved with any of them to know for
| sure, but my guess would be that's because non-profits come
| with a lot more regulatory overhead in comparison to for-
| profits of a similar scale. Not saying that's bad in any
| way, but for a team that just wants to build the damn
| thing, for-profits are _absolutely_ less of a hassle.
| account42 wrote:
| Sure but if they want people to donate they better be
| ready to explain their decisions. All that extra overhead
| is there to ensure that the nonprofit is actually a
| nonprofit doing what it says it's doing after all.
| Vinnl wrote:
| One thing that's important to note (which holds for the
| Mozilla Corporation too) is that the for-profit thing is a
| legal status, but the Foundation (an official non-profit)
| is the only shareholder, i.e. the only entity that "profit"
| can flow to. So you're not lining some billionaire's
| pockets.
|
| (Though of course, employees of either entity can be paid
| whatever, which also holds for every other non-profit.)
| glenstein wrote:
| My understanding is the for-profit structure was necessary
| in order to be able to do the search licensing deals
| finance Firefox.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| That's a separate for-profit. This one is narrowly scoped
| to operate thunderbird
| debugnik wrote:
| No, MZLA is _another_ subsidiary. You 're talking about
| Mozilla Corporation.
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| Please no. The Mozilla Foundation has lost their way. I don't
| want them messing with my favorite email client.
| paulnpace wrote:
| This is just organizational structure. "For-profit" doesn't
| mean "profitable". Also, the organization is "wholly owned" by
| a non-profit, so if there are profits declared in the form of
| dividends, those dividends are sent to the non-profit.
|
| Note that many non-profits have exceptionally high-paid
| executives and "contractors".
|
| Regulatory requirements on non-profit organizations are very
| high, and those organizations are, in fact, very limited in
| what they can do and how they receive their money. There are
| very good reasons for a non-profit to own for-profit entities,
| and, similarly, for philanthropic organizations to organize as
| for-profit entities.
| pavon wrote:
| Basically the IRS is highly skeptical of the idea that free
| software development fits the legal definition of a 501(c)(3),
| and tends to reject such applications [1][2]. That is why
| Mozilla Foundation cannot use donations for Firefox
| development, and instead uses them for activism.
|
| So that creates the strange situation where legally it is
| easier for free software developers to accept donations as a
| for-profit corporation than as a 501(c)(3) non-profit. It is
| possible to instead incorporate as a not-for-profit corporation
| which doesn't have the tax advantages of a 501(c)(3), but does
| have the advantage of not being beholden to share holders.
| However, many people react negatively to this assuming that any
| not-for-profit that isn't a 501(c)(3) is a scam.
|
| [1] https://www.stradley.com/business-vantage-point-blog/irs-
| con...
|
| [2] https://www.mill.law/blog/more-501c3-rejections-open-
| source-...
| wsmwk wrote:
| @pavon, spot on.
| code-blooded wrote:
| Campaigns like this need more info. This page doesn't answer any
| basic questions.
|
| How much money do you currently get? How much money do you need
| and how will you use it? Does it even go directly to Thunderbird
| development or will be used up by Mozilla for other projects?
|
| Edit: I found some info here: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-
| US/donate/
|
| Still, my point stands that communication around it should be
| super clear and available on all pages where they collect money.
| It shouldn't require me to search for it.
| upofadown wrote:
| They are an entity separate from Mozilla:
|
| * https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/
| bpt3 wrote:
| They are a wholly owned subsidiary. They're separate from
| Firefox, not Mozilla.
| wsmwk wrote:
| To be more clear: * MZLA are a subsidiary of Mozilla
| FOUNDATION * MZLA are separate from Mozilla CORPORATION aka
| Firefox
| smarnach wrote:
| They are not entirely separate from Mozilla. The MZLA
| Technologies Corporation is a for-profit subsidiary of the
| Mozilla Foundation. They have access to some of Mozilla's
| common infrastructure, but are otherwise entirely funded by
| donations. Donations to MZLA only fund Thunderbird and no
| other products.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| Seems fine if you can donate to Thunderbird development.
| Compared to Firefox, where I don't think it's possible to
| donate to development at all (only to Mozilla activism
| side).
| flopbob wrote:
| You can buy their Products. Afaik if you buy i.e. Firefox
| relay the revenue does not go to the foundation.
|
| Edit: I just checked the Invoice, payment goes indeed to
| Mozilla Corporation, not the foundation.
| throw384949 wrote:
| Mozilla also runs hiring and HR for MZLA. They control who
| gets hired and fired.
|
| It is more like money laundering, than independent entity.
| wsmwk wrote:
| > Mozilla also runs hiring and HR for MZLA. They control
| who gets hired and fired.
|
| This is completely and utterly false.
|
| MZLA hiring posts are placed on the Mozilla hiring site,
| and nothing more.
| zdc1 wrote:
| Yeah, there's basically nothing explaining why the need more
| funding, and what they will do with it. Hosting? Salaries?
| Admin? You'd hope for a bit more context than this.
|
| > How will my gift be used?
|
| > _Thunderbird is the leading open source email and
| productivity app that is free for business and personal use.
| Your gift helps ensure it stays that way, and supports ongoing
| development._
| glenstein wrote:
| Mostly to "technical staff" who work on product and
| infrastructure. I just don't think the point of the donate
| page was to be an information warehouse but instead just a
| dead simple donate page. The other info is googleable if
| you're looking for it.
|
| https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-
| bird-2024-...
| Loic wrote:
| Interestingly, I used Thunderbird for years, it was really the
| best client for some times on Linux. But as the development
| stalled, I moved to Gnome Evolution, the nice integration with
| the general Gnome desktop made the switch less painful (at the
| start, it was hard, Evolution was not that good). But Evolution
| improved nicely, less bugs, faster, still well integrated into
| the desktop and I see no reasons to switch back to another tool.
|
| The only change in my workflow is that now, I am also using in
| parallel a stupid command line tool "vibe coded" in Python to
| read my emails. It allows me to quickly check my emails out of VS
| Code in a Claude Code session, a bit like when I was doing my
| emails directly in Emacs :-)
| elAhmo wrote:
| Mozilla is such a weird company, asking users to donate and keep
| one of their projects alive, while dumping billions in useless
| initiatives is really dishonest.
| latexr wrote:
| If you press the browser's back button on the donation page, they
| send you to a page pestering you for your email address so they
| can send you a reminder to donate later. Talk about a dark
| pattern.
|
| Mozilla has really gone off the rails. An organisation who claims
| to work on behalf of the user and who makes a web browser,
| actively hijacking the user experience to peddle for a few
| dollars?
|
| Why the heck is Thunderbird "fully funded by financial
| contributions from [their] users"? Where do the billions of
| dollars from Google go? All the stupid doomed side projects which
| no one asked for nor wants and are abandoned after one year?
| ksk23 wrote:
| Thought the same..
| user3939382 wrote:
| LibreWolf should have no reason to exist. It does because
| Mozilla's values are largely marketing.
| amiga386 wrote:
| > Where do the billions of dollars from Google go?
|
| They go to the Mozilla Corporation:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances
|
| The Mozilla Corporation then picks and chooses what it finances
| within the Mozilla Foundation. Their financial statements don't
| break down how they spend on software development within the
| Foundation, it only lists out employee salaries, specific
| directors' salaries and grants to outsiders... but it would
| seem Thunderbird doesn't get much if they're out begging.
|
| https://stateof.mozilla.org/pdf/Mozilla%20Fdn%202024%20-%20A...
|
| So, as an example, in 2024, it got:
|
| - $498,218,000 from royalties (e.g. Google)
|
| - $66,396,000 from paid services (e.g Pocket, VPN) and
| advertisers
|
| - $15,782,000 from donations
|
| And it spent:
|
| - $290,448,000 on programmer salaries
|
| - $163,516,000 on manager salaries
|
| - $36,358,000 on servers, cloud, etc.
|
| - $20,258,000 on consultants (e.g. branding consultants)
|
| - $9,573,000 on travel
|
| - $2,192,000 on grants and fellowships
|
| So overall, it didn't spent that much on the stupid doomed side
| projects! It spent a lot more on flying managers and marketing
| consultants to nice soirees.
|
| But the real question, not answered by this financial report,
| is how much programming labour was spent on Thunderbird, versus
| other Mozilla projects?
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| My assumption would be that it's very little, given that
| Thunderbird was separated out of the Mozilla Corporation to
| MOZLA (or whatever it's called).
|
| On the bright side, that actually makes me a bit keener about
| donating to it; donating to the Mozilla Corporation seems
| entirely pointless given donations make up ~2.5% of their
| income, and less than 10% of what they spend just on manager
| salaries, whereas giving it to Thunderbird might actually
| have a positive impact.
| amiga386 wrote:
| I'm not sure which part it is in their accounts, but their
| Form 990 says:
|
| https://stateof.mozilla.org/pdf/Mozilla%20Foundation_Form_9
| 9...
|
| > MZLA TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION share of total income:
| $10,760,074
|
| So they don't break it down, but around 10 million went to
| the corporation that runs Thunderbird and other projects
| (versus 658 million to the one that runs the browser)
| vovavili wrote:
| >- $163,516,000 on manager salaries
|
| >- $20,258,000 on consultants (e.g. branding consultants)
|
| >- $9,573,000 on travel
|
| I am very glad to be using Brave at the moment of reading
| this.
| drekipus wrote:
| I don't think it's a dark pattern. Just a common marketing
| thing. Not "everything that annoys me" is a dark pattern.
| addandsubtract wrote:
| Stealing the function of the back button is a dark pattern.
| account42 wrote:
| Most "common marketing things" _are_ dark patterns. Being
| common does not make it right and we expect better than
| common for people who want our donations.
| smarnach wrote:
| I wasn't able to reproduce the back button hijack. It never
| asks me for an email address, regardless of what I try.
| bulbar wrote:
| I have actually bought a lifetime license for em Client.
|
| Thunderbird had consistently (Windows / Linux) a bad performance
| for me and feature and UX wise it has always only been okay for
| me.
|
| Still important that a few FOSS solutions for email exist,
| though.
| OccamsMirror wrote:
| em Client has no Linux version though?
| reddalo wrote:
| Not having a Linux version in 2026 is ridiculous.
| cutler wrote:
| I used TB happily for years on Mac OS but its font rendering on
| Linux was one of the main reasons I never switched.
| sergolala wrote:
| Made an account just to say that I will not support the bloated
| mess that is Thunderbird that pushes on you a new way to
| configure it, a new layout and new workflows with every major
| update, makes it difficult to set up text-only mail and messes up
| line breaks every so often with no way to properly configure it,
| which should be developed by Mozilla, which is flush with money
| but rather spends it on theming their software and executive
| salaries.
|
| I switched away from Thunderbird about a year ago and couldn't be
| happier I have made the change.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| What do you use now?
| Gud wrote:
| This is downvoted but needs to be said. Thunderbird was an
| amazing 90's style piece of software that has unfortunately
| been been changed into a more "modern" look, with excessive
| white space and power-user hostile work flows.
|
| It was near perfect, just needed better search, pretty much.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| "90s style" seems to be a compliment in some posts and a
| negative in others.
|
| Very likely user's age perspective.
|
| It's absolutely correct though.
| antisol wrote:
| Exactly. It used to be good and they're making it worse every
| day.
| registeredcorn wrote:
| What did you switch to?
| daneel_w wrote:
| I sadly have to agree. The damned thing struggles with a
| handful of basic stuff, it still has a config UI of which you
| can't tell head from tail, complete with teeth and whiskers and
| even a full "about:config" panel a la Firefox hidden
| underneath. Spell checker. Calendar. Chat client. Complete web-
| browser internals, with grindy disk-caching. To add insult to
| injury, the macOS bundle is _half a fxxxing GiB in size_
| (universal flavor, but still).
| isaachinman wrote:
| Sorry, isn't Thunderbird meant to be "true FOSS" and essentially
| feature complete?
| jeltz wrote:
| No? It is the best email client of the market but it is far
| from feature complete.
| nottorp wrote:
| Is that a Stripe screen? Set up american style to reduce
| friction, not supporting 3d secure, which means european credit
| cards will deny by default?
| mtmail wrote:
| Fineprint says it's Stripe. My (european) credit card worked
| fine.
| preinheimer wrote:
| Stripe supports 3d secure and has for years.
| https://stripe.com/en-ca/guides/3d-secure-2
| nottorp wrote:
| Heh. No it doesn't because they require their users to treat
| it manually and as a consequence a lot of americans don't.
|
| Example 1 that is definitely going through Stripe: Ars
| Technica.
|
| Example 2 that I don't know what is going through: Asimov's
| Magazine.
|
| In the race for no friction, they add friction for EU users.
| ano-ther wrote:
| As a lot of people in this thread advise against Thunderbird,
| what do you recommend instead (preferably for Windows as I am
| stuck on that)?
| mrks_hy wrote:
| I think they are just hating on Mozilla out of pure principles,
| but without any alternative.
| hk__2 wrote:
| > I think they are just hating on Mozilla out of pure
| principles
|
| Please don't assume bad faith when the reality is that you
| don't know.
| jeltz wrote:
| Please provide an alternative then.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Thunderbird of now is more annoying and less convenient to
| use than when I last time used it in 2010's, before I moved
| to claws-mail.
|
| And only reason using it now is cos of MS fucked up oauth2
| method that is PITA to setup for any other OSS client as it
| requires the app to be added to their catalog and only
| thunderbird was big enough to get that
|
| So I can understand the annoyance
| dangus wrote:
| To be honest while I'm not the biggest fan of Thunderbird I
| struggle to understand how this is true by any measure.
|
| The program is pretty much the same as it was in 2010 from
| a UI standpoint.
|
| My biggest complaints with it are that the profile
| configuration is not portable, and that the UI is too
| cluttered with features. I just want something simple that
| does all the important stuff and remains somewhat powerful.
| twelvedogs wrote:
| I just use geary, it's less annoying and does the job
| Skywalker13 wrote:
| Outlook Express
|
| []->
| dangus wrote:
| I still use Thunderbird but on my Linux system that I just set
| up I would like to try something else.
|
| Some options appear in this thread:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/software/comments/17r3twi/best_wind...
|
| If you're doing a new install and are generally fine with
| Thunderbird, Betterbird is a good option. It has additional
| good stuff that Thunderbird is lacking or took longer to get
| implemented/fixed.
|
| What I don't like about Thunderbird is that the profiles aren't
| portable. It seems like every Thunderbird install is its own
| unique mess. I'd love to find something that allowed me to move
| the same configuration around between computers and platforms.
| I'm not sure if that exists.
|
| I like how Thunderbird has the _ability_ to handle mail,
| calendar, and contacts, but the implementation especially for
| calendar leaves a lot to be desired.
|
| My favorite clients are Apple Mail/Calendar for their
| simplicity and being local-first clients but I'm using macOS
| less and less these days.
|
| The "new outlook" that's offered by Microsoft to consumers for
| free seems to be creepy and syncs your emails to Microsoft
| servers even if you're using a third party client.
|
| I'd also say you only need a truly local client if you have
| multiple email addresses. If you have just one email, let's say
| you're with FastMail or something, their web mail and
| mobile/desktop apps are great.
| jeltz wrote:
| As far as I know there isn't one. Maybe Evolution if they have
| managed to fix all the bugs it used to have. it is a sad state
| of affairs that we have so few useful email clients.
| nisegami wrote:
| I use Thunderbird on both Linux/Android as my sole client for
| personal email. I'm mostly pretty happy with it, aside from
| search. My use case is mostly receiving email rather than sending
| email however. I would be much more amenable to donating if I
| knew that my donation would be going to support Thunderbird
| specifically and not rolled up into the parent MZLA Technologies
| Corporation, but I understand that's usually impractical.
| rambambram wrote:
| Just donated. Have been using Thunderbird for years. I once
| donated to Wikipedia - and they have billions I heard - so might
| as well donate to another important piece of software for my
| digital life.
|
| Now that I read the comments I find out Mozilla might have enough
| money and a CEO taking in millions. Any recommendations for a
| good email client on Linux? Just as a backup for now...
| gostsamo wrote:
| Mozilla and Mozla are two different corporations though both
| under the mozilla foundation.
| yorwba wrote:
| Mozilla Corporation may have enough money, but they don't
| develop Thunderbird. If you used the donation form on this
| page, you didn't donate to Mozilla Corporation, but to the
| company developing Thunderbird. So all is fine.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Mozilla Corporation (for-profit Firefox management org)
| doesn't take donations, and are mostly funded by selling
| search placement to Google.
|
| The Mozilla Foundation (non-profit parent org) does take
| donations. Which they could presumably funnel some of down to
| thunderbird development, but they chose not to, and now have
| this other for-profit management org fundraising Thunderbird
| separately...
| EbNar wrote:
| I'm just using Evolution. Switched from Thunderbird a few weeks
| ago. So far, so good.
| rambambram wrote:
| Yeah, I noticed Evolution as a standard install on some
| distros as well. I might look into it, thanks.
| glenstein wrote:
| >I once donated to Wikipedia - and they have billions I heard
|
| I had no idea one way or the other, but if I'm reading this
| right [1] they are around $150MM currently for their endowment.
| Mozilla, meanwhile is actually around $1.2 billion and
| counting. But I think that makes sense for both, Wiki has the
| strongest donation drive in the world, and Mozilla is much more
| exposed to risk and in need of its firewall.
|
| I don't think it changes anything, they're both good donation
| targets and Thunderbird is separately financed anyway so they
| still benefit from the $$ but I was surprised to see Wiki with
| the lower endowment.
|
| 1.
| https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AFY...
| mghackerlady wrote:
| The reason Wikipedia has so much is that the end goal is for it
| to be self sustaining through interest iirc
| mrks_hy wrote:
| I really like Thunderbird, it's the only truly cross-platform
| mail app, with K9 also now on Android.
|
| Works perfect, I even migrated my Windows install to Linux just
| by copying the data folder, absolutely seamless.
|
| Not sure why people are hating on it so much here. Point to an
| alternative with the same features?
| copperx wrote:
| people point to the rare bug report that deletes absolutely
| everything in the account. but at this point, I don't even know
| if it's true.
| jorvi wrote:
| I've been hit by that bug, although it only deletes mail
| AFAIK. There's a separate bug that completely corrupts the
| mail database on compaction, making Thunderbird lock up
| including for every future launch.
|
| Its a beautiful open source effort but products that have
| bugs like that languish for 10-20 years just aren't reliable.
| I need my mail client to be reliable.
| mrks_hy wrote:
| I've been using it to close to 20 years with multiple
| accounts and it was rock-solid. I wouldn't extrapolate from
| anecdata, in either direction.
|
| But we should not spread FUD. If you can link to the bug
| I'd be interested, otherwise it doesn't add much value to
| claim this.
| wsmwk wrote:
| Yes, FUD and long held myths can be found anywhere. But
| speaking as a staff member and someone who has seen first
| hand user reports, here is some straight shooting:
|
| * there are rare cases of a profile either misplaced
| (exists but not correctly pointed to) or gone - it is
| something which I understand Firefox people are working
| on (Thunderbird uses the Firefox profile system) * there
| are extremely rare reports where prefs.js is corrupted *
| there are no compact failures in current versions - there
| are no open bug reports for recent versions, so it has
| been totally obliterated by a rewrite and subsequent
| fixes. Most user reports of compact failure are
| attributed to other causes of folder corruption * folder
| corruption can occur as easily from external sources as
| from product bugs.
|
| Anyone who has a problem can file a support request at
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-
| US/questions/new/thunderbird to get assistance.
|
| Also, beware drawing broad conclusions about other users'
| experience from one's own personal experience. I have
| almost never experienced corruption - once in the last 10
| years. But I am also using a Thunderbird profile that has
| gone through 5 different laptops, two different OS, using
| daily builds, which is AMPLE opportunity to have had
| multiple catastrophic failures. But because I know other
| users experiences I consider myself lucky.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I used to maintain a mailbox in dropbox that tended to work
| across my mac, linux and windows environments... it was
| pretty great... at some point a few incompatible releases
| across the environments broke everything and had other bugs
| that I could no longer revert from. I pretty much haven't
| touched it in a while.
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| I've been using Thunderbird for my email for a very long time.
| Probably since some early 1.0 release.
|
| In these years, I've also had it on Windows and Linux, I've
| migrated it easily across many OS installs and hardware
| changes, I've used it with different kinds of email accounts
| and servers. It's worked with PGP encrypted mail, with
| SpamAssassin on the server and more.
|
| It's great. It doesn't change much, which is probably a good
| thing, Firefox lost me as a user at some point. Thunderbird
| mostly stays the same, adding features occasionally. As I write
| this, I realize I'm so used to Thunderbird I'm not even sure
| what other clients are available. Definitely one of the best
| programs I've used.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Gmail can be used from any modern platform through the web and
| has dedicated Android and iOS apps too.
| Barbing wrote:
| It's bad enough so many of us have to get our emails through
| them. Adding even more tracking on top of that... No, thank
| you. I don't want all my scroll positions on all my emails to
| be logged in their database forever.
| mrks_hy wrote:
| It cannot do PGP, by design, just for a very obvious fault.
| It won't let you use your own domain and web storage. Sorry,
| no contest.
| cbeach wrote:
| I use Gmail with my own domain (you have to pay for the
| privilege but Google Workspace has been very reliable and
| flexible for my purposes)
|
| I'd rather use Google's web storage than my own. I don't
| have the time nor the expertise to implement multi-region
| replication etc.
|
| I understand that granting Google access to one's emails
| might be a dealbreaker for journalists, dissidents etc,
| though - so clearly Gmail is no good if you have legitimate
| need for PGP.
| dwedge wrote:
| Expanding the acronym really works well here. Gmail is no
| good if you have a legitimate need for pretty good
| privacy.
|
| I would argue everyone does, most people just don't
| really think about what they are giving away. And how
| many emails a day are you receiving that a daily or
| hourly incremental offside backup wouldn't give you
| almost all of the benefits of "multi region replication"?
| dmantis wrote:
| 1. web is too slow compared to any decent desktop client.
| thunderbird navigation/deletion/message opening is basically
| instant from human perception, web version operations are
| visible to human eye.
|
| 2. doesn't cut trackers
| cropcirclbureau wrote:
| Gmail has ads inline that are hard to distinguish from real
| emails. What kind of self-respecting person uses that when
| they have the technical knowhow to spend time on hackernews
| (i.e. options)?
| tracker1 wrote:
| People that want shared/server contacts/calendars that
| actually work.
| lamasery wrote:
| Gmail uses _stupid_ amounts of memory, and the web version on
| iOS is so terrible it 's got to be deliberate. The key
| problem is that they override scroll behavior such that
| scrolling intents are often registered as clicks, _then_ they
| reset scroll position on back, the combo of which makes it
| almost unusable if what you 're doing involves scrolling your
| mail list _at all_.
|
| They used to still offer "basic HTML" gmail, which was
| waaaaaay better all around and was the only way I used it on
| any platform, but they discontinued that some time back.
| dominicq wrote:
| I can't get it to save emails that I've corresponded with on
| the Android app. I always have to find specific emails in the
| email history, and then "Compose message to". If I try to start
| a new email and start typing the name, or email address,
| there's no dropdown, no suggestion. Have you ever had this
| issue on Android?
| tracker1 wrote:
| I used to be a pretty heavy NNTP user... at some point, while
| it was largely left to rot, NNTP features themselves became
| much harder to use... the fact that the leading button on posts
| now "reply" is an email to the author of a post, instead of a
| response post is beyond me, and changing the behavior got worse
| release after release.
|
| The fact that they haven't invested in anything resembling a
| companion set of services for shared calendar/contacts is also
| a heavy pain point in contrast to the use of GMail or
| Outlook/M365/Exchange. If they had offered hosted
| email/calendar/contacts alone as a monetization option, they
| could have done so well ahead of GMail or M365 options and
| could still do so and under-cut them... having an open-core
| suite just for communications.
|
| They've left a lot of options out there to die... they
| effectively had Electron a few decades before Electron was a
| thing. XulRunner was pretty nice to use, and they just left it
| to die... it got worse over time and just stopped seeing
| updates. All the while, the charity org and business org just
| kept spinning their wheels and basically throwing money away...
| for decades now.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| Donated. I don't even use it, but we needed it for opening email
| archives from clients at my old employer. We need as many options
| as possible.
| eu wrote:
| when i used windows i was happy with The Bat email client:
| https://www.ritlabs.com/en/products/thebat/download.php
| isodev wrote:
| I wouldn't mind donating if they separate it from Mozilla and
| move it to Europe.
| criticalfault wrote:
| https://www.tb.pro/en-US/thundermail/ Hosted
| Securely in Germany Your emails are protected by
| strict EU privacy laws and hosted on infrastructure you can
| trust. With servers located in Germany, Thundermail prioritizes
| your privacy while ensuring reliable, fast delivery worldwide.
| niels8472 wrote:
| Looks like it's still owned by Mozilla/MZLA and thus subject
| to US jurisdiction.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| I don't see how it's different from Amazon or Microsoft
| datacenters in the EU, which are _not_ safe from the US
| government. As long as the US parent company can somehow get
| at the data, it is obligated to do so when a US agency asks
| for it.
| narag wrote:
| After reading a bunch of negative comments here, let me add a
| little on the bright side. I've been using Thunderbird for many
| years, currently both at home and at work to manage gmail
| accounts, pop at home, imap in the office. It works great for me,
| with a few annoyances but nothing serious.
|
| As for the donations, Thunderbird seems to be somehow apart from
| Mozilla now, so I don't think much about specific org structure
| and will gladly donate.
|
| Maybe on paper there're dozens of alternatives, but when I
| consider my specific requirements, I haven't found anything
| better, YMMV.
| Skywalker13 wrote:
| I use Thunderbird from the beginning when it was still named
| Firebird (I switched from Outlook Express). I think that it's a
| good product because it continues to do the job since more than
| 20 years. Me too I don't understand the negative comments. It's
| free (MPL license), it's packaged by Debian. All good. I don't
| care about Mozilla.
| Skywalker13 wrote:
| I just check something because my memory as faults...
| Firebird was the name of Firefox and the mail client was
| called something like Mozilla mail or something else.
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| It was originally Minotaur (when the browser was Phoenix),
| then they were Firebird and Thunderbird, until the browser
| renamed to avoid a name clash.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| I really don't remember (+quick check) Firebird for the
| email client, do you have source for this?
| prmoustache wrote:
| Firebird was the browser's name, after phoenix and before
| rebranding to firefox.
| dizhn wrote:
| Firebird was actually the database whose name they
| hijacked when they had access to AOL's legal army.
|
| Also K9Mail is now Thunderbird for Android.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| So it wasn't used before Thunderbird, that was the point
| of OP and myself. We were talking about the email
| client(!).
|
| And I was an user of firebird, the database.
| wisidisi wrote:
| Predecessor of Firefox was Firebird, and before that it
| was even called Phoenix.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#Name_changes
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| So it wasn't used before Thunderbird, that was the point
| of OP and myself. We were talking about the email
| client(!).
|
| And I was an user of firebird, the database.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I've used it since it was called Netscape Mail. ;-)
| Levitating wrote:
| > Thunderbird seems to be somehow apart from Mozilla now
|
| I don't think that's the case.
|
| "Thunderbird is part of MZLA Technologies Corporation, a wholly
| owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation."
|
| Thunderbirds sourcecode is literally part of the same mercury
| codebase as Firefox.
|
| Thunderbird does have a very small team, and I think everyone
| that uses it should considering donating.
| Vinnl wrote:
| Yeah it's all a bit complex (just like the US tax code, I
| suppose). MZLA (which makes Thunderbird) is a subsidiary of
| the Mozilla Foundation. The Mozilla Corporation (which makes
| Firefox) is _also_ a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. In
| practice, this means that the people running Firefox day-to-
| day aren 't the people running Thunderbird day-to-day,
| although of course they do talk, and technology choices made
| in Firefox can and do effect Thunderbird, just like they
| effect e.g. Zen Browser or Tor Browser.
|
| (Also, someone help a non-native speaker: I think the
| "effect"s above should be "affect", but for some reason that
| looked wrong here. Why is that?)
| throwaway667555 wrote:
| Companies will often state a subsidiary is wholly owned by
| the ultimate parent regardless of which tier the subsidiary
| is at. The Thunderbird subsidiary could be under the
| Firefox subsidiary and the statement would still be true.
| antisol wrote:
| I agree that it should be "affect". Affect doesn't look
| wrong to me: and technology choices made in
| Firefox can and do affect Thunderbird, just like they
| effect e.g. Zen Browser or Tor Browser.
|
| I'm no expert on the rules of english, but I think maybe it
| would be slightly more gramatically correct to say that
| "choices made in Firefox can and do _have an effect_ on
| Thunderbird ". I would probably have phrased it like that.
| Maybe that's why it looks wrong to you?
|
| English is a bit of a bastard language IIUC, and so we
| accept the way you've phrased it too, but in that case it
| should be "affect".
|
| I hope this helps rather than making things more confusing!
| ;)
| wccrawford wrote:
| "Effect" as a verb means to bring about, or to bring it
| into existence. "Affect" means to have influence on them.
|
| It's definitely wrong in that paragraph.
| mplanchard wrote:
| For their more common meanings, like in your paragraph, as
| a verb you want affect, and as a noun, effect. So, when in
| doubt, use that as a rule of thumb.
|
| However, both have alternative meanings as the other part
| of speech.
|
| Affect as a noun means emotion or disposition, and is
| mostly used in psychology. Your psychologist may say you
| have a depressed affect.
|
| Effect as a verb means to bring about. You might say that a
| successful protest effected change in society.
|
| As a verb, in addition to "have an impact on," affect can
| also mean "to pretend to have," like "she affected an air
| of mystery," although this is less common.
| lamasery wrote:
| "Effect" and "affect" are hilariously messed-up. They have
| subtly overlapping definitions _sometimes_ but other times
| mean totally different things. They look almost the same in
| writing. They _can_ sound almost the same. In spoken
| English, for some senses of each word we denote what we
| mean by changing the sound ( "affect" may be pronounced
| _almost_ like "effect", or, for one of its noun
| definitions and a related verb definition, very
| differently) or stress (for "effect", in some cases we hit
| the second syllable a _little_ harder than other times).
|
| The way you used "effect" here, its verb sense of "to bring
| about or cause" is the one that suggests itself, which
| isn't what you meant.
|
| The simple way to keep the words' overlapping meanings
| straight, is that it's "effect" when it's a noun, "affect"
| when it's a verb. "Effect" can also be a verb, and "affect"
| can be a noun, but those definitions don't overlap.
|
| Your post did indeed call for "affect", as you suspected.
| antisol wrote:
| Thunderbird has always been mozilla. They split it out into
| the other company a few years back.
| Twirrim wrote:
| Likewise. Long time Thunderbird user since the original 1.0
| days, for both work and personal use.
|
| There's been a few ups and downs along the way but I've found
| it generally "just works" and gets out the way, which is
| exactly what I want in an email client.
|
| I've tried almost every single email client I could find on
| Linux, and several on Windows (including Pegasus mail, if
| anyone remembers that), but always come back to Thunderbird.
|
| I've been a regular donator to the project ever since they spun
| it out to MZLA Technologies Corporation.
| squidbeak wrote:
| I'm another appreciative long-term user. There are things about
| it that piss me off (especially the absence of a comfortable
| reading mode - with a quarter of an ordinary screen given over
| to ui and message headers) but it's been dependable over
| decades.
| bachmeier wrote:
| I've been using Thunderbird for decades, I've donated in the
| past, and am likely to donate again. With that out of the way,
| the lack of transparency as to what happens to my money kills
| the incentive to donate.
|
| "How will my gift be used?"
|
| "Thunderbird is the leading open source email and productivity
| app that is free for business and personal use. Your gift helps
| ensure it stays that way, and supports ongoing development."
|
| Well that tells me exactly nothing. This might not be as big an
| issue if they were separate from Mozilla. To be concrete, and
| focusing only on the development of Firefox, there's now an AI
| chatbot in the sidebar. I think that's a good addition.
| However, when the only options are proprietary services, it's
| hard for me to see the point of Firefox. It would be easier to
| get out my credit card for Thunderbird if I didn't have those
| thoughts in the back of my mind. As it stands, my donation
| might be going to fund the Mozilla CEO's salary.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I find that a weird sentiment. Why do people demand to know
| and control how every one of their donations goes, while
| nobody questions how corporations use their money.
| Ironically, the demand for this increased transparency
| significantly increases compliance cost, which means more and
| more money is driven away from the actual cause toward the
| administrative costs. Exactly what people don't want to
| support.
| sassymuffinz wrote:
| I don't think it's that weird. If they sold it as a product
| then the understanding is that there is a profit motive and
| profits mean CEO's get paid.
|
| If you're asking for donations and holding your cap out,
| the implication is that every penny will go toward
| development.
|
| Mozilla should either just make it a product that you have
| to pay for, or sub to, or keep donations cleanly separated.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| One look at where donations to "keep Wikipedia free!" wind
| up should explain all of that for you.
| 1dom wrote:
| The defining difference about paying money to a corporation
| in exchange for a product is you're paying for something
| already there, an agreed exchange of value. The whole point
| about a donation is it's given not in exchange for doing
| any particular task, but gratuitously.
|
| It's not a weird sentiment to want to know what benefits a
| gift is providing. That's all people are asking for when
| they want transparency around donations: tell us how you're
| benefiting from it so we can feel good about gifting you.
|
| Is it necessary? No. The point being made is that people
| would be happier and potentially gift more if there was
| more transparency. If your argument is transparency costs
| more than the extra gifts then the solution to that is -
| ironically - be transparent about it and people might gift
| means to make transparency cheaper and make donations
| viable.
| multiplegeorges wrote:
| So, if Thunderbird instead asked for users to sign up for
| an annual software subscription, it'd be fine?
| gjm11 wrote:
| If Thunderbird _required_ users to sign up for an annual
| subscription, then _that specific problem_ -- not being
| able to tell what good one 's payment would do -- would
| go away. There would be a very specific reason to pay the
| money.
|
| (In practice, they presumably couldn't do that, at least
| not effectively, because the code is open source and
| someone else could fork it. But let's imagine that
| somehow they could require all Thunderbird users to pay
| them.)
|
| That doesn't, of course, mean that it would be better
| overall. Thunderbird users would go from getting
| Thunderbird for free and maybe having reason to donate
| some money, to having to pay some money just to keep the
| ability to use Thunderbird: obviously worse for them.
| There'd probably be more money available for Thunderbird
| development, which would be good. The overall result
| might be either good or bad. But it would, indeed, no
| longer be unclear whether and why a Thunderbird user
| might choose to pay money to the Thunderbird project.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Aside, they should. This thread is a good example of how
| groveling for donations distorts what should be a simple
| transaction.
|
| Instead, people act like they're buying in to a 50% share
| with their $5 and then act like they cofounded the
| project forever after the donation.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > Instead, people act like they're buying in to a 50%
| share with their $5 and then act like they cofounded the
| project forever after the donation.
|
| You've twisted the timing. My comment is about
|
| "Give me money." "Okay, tell me why I should give you
| money."
|
| not
|
| "I gave you money. Tell me what you did with it." It's a
| big difference. It's easy for me to just not give them
| money if I don't know what I'm donating to.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Those two examples map to the first and second parts of
| my claim.
|
| Though I'm making a general reflection rather than trying
| to antagonize any individual here. I was already thinking
| about this when clicking into TFA to see that yes, it's
| another donation beg.
|
| The answer to the person I replied to is basically: yes.
|
| There's a nit in human psychology between mutual
| transactions (even lopsided against our favor) and
| voluntary unilateral ones (like donations) where the
| latter results in disproportionate scrutiny and
| entitlement compared to the former.
|
| I once started accepting donations on my forum. I noticed
| people acted like they were about to make the grandest
| gesture in the world, would I be so lucky to deserve it
| after answering their questions despite having built a
| forum they spend four hours a day on. (They gave me $5)
|
| And once they donated, they saw themselves as a
| boardmember-like persona with veto power and a
| disproportionate say on what I do, often pointing out
| that they're a donor. (They gave me $5)
|
| I'm exaggerating a bit to paint a picture of what I mean.
| I think it's all unintentional, and they might be
| embarrassed if I'd told them this.
|
| But I ended up refunding everyone after a while.
|
| Yet when I charged $5 to let users expand their PM inbox
| size or max avatar resolution, nobody ever brought it up.
| They understood the transaction ended there. What is the
| $5 used for? -- What do you mean? It doubled my PM inbox
| size.
|
| It's a funny quirk of our brain. I think a license
| purchase aligns expectations much more than groveling for
| donations, and it creates a natural freemium model for
| open source (or source-available rather?) projects.
| groby_b wrote:
| > It's not a weird sentiment to want to know what
| benefits a gift is providing.
|
| "I bought you tickets for your favorite artist for your
| birthday. I expect a detailed trip report" :)
|
| Yes, you're right, personal gifts aren't donations, but
| then maybe we should stop calling donations gifts, too.
| Gifts are given without any expectations attached.
| Donations do and should have expectations.
| masfuerte wrote:
| When making purchasing decisions lots of people look beyond
| the utility of the product to the broader behaviour of the
| corporation and how it impacts society. I know people
| who've been avoiding Nestle for decades.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| Investors do very much question how corporations use their
| money, and that is why corporations publish quarterly
| financial statements and have shareholder meetings and hire
| accountants and auditors. Investors want to make sure that
| they're going to get their investment back plus profit and
| thus care about a company's balance sheet. Any financial
| transparency in non-profit donations is derived from the
| financial transparency required by for-profit investments.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| People are generally happier to donate money to a charity
| if they know it will go to a good cause, and not the CEO's
| seven million dollar salary.
|
| It also isn't that unusual for donations to be ring fenced
| for certain things.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Mozilla and Wikipedia for example are causes I support. But
| why would I give money to _them_ if they are going to turn
| around and give money to some cause I don 't support (OR am
| actively against)? These non-profits love to shuffle money
| around to unrelated causes. As a non profit, supporting
| open source software, I think expecting a large percentage
| of the donation to go to engineering and not admin, social
| causes, etc. is a reasonable expectation.
| antiframe wrote:
| Yes that's all reasonable but the comparison is paying
| for (or giving them other revenue) corporations who also
| love to shuffle money around and can support causes you
| are actively against. The point being made was that
| people give causes trying to improve society _more_
| scrutiny than they give for-profit mega corporations who
| have in the past shown that they use their money for a
| lot of things detrimental to society.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Assuming there is a healthy market, then you have
| alternatives you can purchase your products and goods
| from. These alternatives may have other trade-offs and in
| fact, there may well be open and closed alternatives as
| well as hybrid options.
|
| Some people simply want the "best fit" solution for a
| product. IMO, this used to be Outlook+Exchange, hands
| down... M365 scaling has enshittified the bundle in a lot
| of ways leaving a wide gap for alternatives. Google's
| GMail is a leading alternative that is a closed service.
| Thunderbird is an open solution that solves part of the
| problem (shared calendars/contacts only having half the
| solution).
|
| When you pay for a product, you often are able to give
| feedback and request for features... the expectation is
| that you are getting value for what you are paying and
| that the company continues to do so while adding features
| that add more value in time.
|
| When you donate to an open-source project, and that
| project redirects funds to have a multi-million dollar
| marketing event that only benefits middle managers and
| seeks to add revenue with features the majority of donors
| oppose, then someone who would otherwise support the
| development might rightly feel a bit betrayed or choose
| not to donate altogether, much like someone might not
| purchase a given product or service from a company that
| does what they feel are bad things.
|
| It's not dramatically different, it's just when/where the
| individual might expect a level of transparency, value or
| direction. A purchase is against existing value... a
| donation is against future value.
| Aldo_MX wrote:
| Let's just say that Mozilla raised CEO salaries while
| laying off developers. The demand of transparency is well
| grounded on past behavior.
|
| If I donate, I want more devs getting paid, not a CEO
| parasiting the non-profit.
| unsungNovelty wrote:
| When the product is in dire state but the company does
| unnecessary things and increase CEO salary YoY with ever
| declining userbase, yes... Maybe the people who donates
| want to know. Am talking about Firefox there BTW. So it's
| absolutely understandable that people want to know.
| tracker1 wrote:
| For that matter, Mozilla pretty much left Thunderbird to
| die off for over a decade... it was a group of committed
| contributors that kept it alive... Moz now wants to try
| to monetize the software in a way to support the larger
| org. Moz.org has been problematic and antithetical to
| just making great software and you can agree or disagree
| with their stated goals and where/how they spend their
| money, but most people would also agree that they're
| probably spending too much outside the core competency,
| which should be building great software.
|
| Firefox should have a war chest worth of cash at hand, if
| it hadn't been spent on massive layers of managers and
| marketers. They've tried repeatedly to spin off
| monetization in order to increase the overall charity,
| and I can understand that desire... but they've done so
| to levels that absolutely compromise the core of what the
| org is known for... the software.
|
| They effectively _HAD_ electron decades before electron..
| they left it unsupported and let it die... they _HAD_ a
| great mail /nntp platform, they left it to die and only
| recently realized it was a thing and tried to resurrect
| it only as a potential for more monetization. They _HAD_
| an engineering staff that was reshaping the direction of
| low-level development (Rust and related) and they let
| them all go so they could keep paying middle-managers and
| marketeers for a charity that was never self-sufficient
| and only served to drain or monetize their core products
| to detrimental effect.
|
| I would _like_ Mozilla to have great products and
| succeed... but frankly, I don 't like the parent org,
| charity structure or their direction at all. They're the
| worst examples of "woke HR" you can find online and I
| emphatically won't be giving them cash... I truly hope
| that at some point the developers can just spin off the
| open-source itself into a new org similar to Libre
| Office, and break away. If all they did was the software
| and their existing monetization, they'd have all of their
| developer staff and a long headroom of funding in the
| bank.
| psalaun wrote:
| Exactly what I've been saying when people complain about
| how public sector spends the taxes (especially when
| comparing against private sector so-called efficiency when
| managing hospitals or schools)
| gjm11 wrote:
| The reason "nobody questions how corporations use their
| money" is that in 99.9% of cases when I pay a corporation
| money for a product, I'm doing it not for the sake of what
| they can do with the money, but because otherwise I don't
| get to use the product, at least not legally.
|
| If instead I donate to an open-source project, I'm not
| doing it in order to get access to the product; I already
| have that. I'm doing it because I hope they will do
| something with the money that I value. (Possible examples:
| Developing new features I like. Rewarding people who
| already developed features I liked. Activism for causes I
| approve of. Continuing to provide something that benefits
| everyone and not just me.)
|
| And so I care a lot what they're going to do with the
| money, in a way I don't if I (say) pay money to Microsoft
| in exchange for the right to use Microsoft Office. Because
| what they're going to do with the money _determines what
| point there is in my giving it_.
|
| Sometimes, everything the project does is stuff I think is
| valuable (for me or for the world). In that case I don't
| need to ask exactly what they're doing. Sometimes, it's
| obvious that what happens to the money is that it goes into
| the developer's pockets and they get to do what they like
| with it. In that case, I'll donate if the point of my
| donation is to reward someone who is doing something I'm
| glad they're doing, and probably not otherwise.
|
| In the case of Thunderbird, it's maybe not so obvious.
| Probably the money will go toward implementing Thunderbird
| features and bug fixes, but looking at the history of
| Firefox I might worry that that's going to mean "AI
| integrations that actual users mostly don't want" or
| "implementing advertising to help raise funds", and I might
| have a variety of attitudes to those things. Or it might go
| toward some sort of internet activism, and again I might
| have a variety of attitudes to that depending on exactly
| what they're agitating for. Or maybe I might worry that the
| money will mostly end up helping to pay the salary of the
| CEO of Mozilla. (I don't think that's actually possible,
| but I can imagine situations where Mozilla wants some
| things done, and if they can pay for them via donations
| rather than using the company's money they'll do so, so
| that the net effect of donating is simply to increase
| Mozilla's profits.)
|
| And I don't think anyone's asking for anything very
| burdensome in the way of transparency. Just more than,
| well, _nothing at all_ which is what we have at the moment.
| The text on the actual page says literally nothing beyond
| "help keep Thunderbird alive". The FAQ says "Thunderbird is
| the leading open source email and productivity app that is
| free for business and personal use. Your gift helps ensure
| it stays that way, and supports ongoing development." which
| tells us almost nothing. And "MZLA Technologies Corporation
| is a wholly owned for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla
| Foundation and the home of Thunderbird." which tells us
| that donations go to a for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla
| Foundation (which I believe is the same entity that owns
| the Mozilla Corporation, but like most people I am not an
| expert on this stuff and don't know what that means in
| practice about how the Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla
| Corporation and MZLA Technologies Corporation actually work
| together).
|
| Maybe donated money will lead to MZLA Technologies
| Corporation hiring more developers or paying existing
| developers more? Maybe it'll be used to buy equipment, or
| licences for patented stuff? Maybe it'll be used to
| advertise Thunderbird and get it more users? Maybe it'll be
| used to agitate for the use of open email standards or
| something like that? Maybe. Maybe some other thing
| entirely. There's no way to get any inkling.
| plufz wrote:
| This in a larger perspective at least, IS a problem for
| NGO:s from what i know. That donors seems to be much more
| careful where they money go when its in the form of a
| donation. I dont know about open source project specifics
| here. I totally get what you mean and probably mostly
| agree as well, but the money you give to corporations
| have consequences as well. You can for example fund a
| company you have strong moral disagreements with without
| knowing or miss a company that you would want to support
| for the opposite reasons.
|
| With that said I also think we should expect more then
| "it helps fund the development". Its not that difficult
| to write a couple paragraphs more and be a little more
| specific. Then again, maybe they get so little in
| donations that they cant really say how the money will be
| used and its more of a "buy me a beer" type of thing to
| keep the developers happy. Unless suddenly people start
| giving more and a developer actually could invest more
| hours in the project.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Because of the misuse of funds given to the Mozilla
| Foundation and Wikimedia Foundation.
| triage8004 wrote:
| 99% of donations get misappropriated
| mhurron wrote:
| Well for one, when you purchase something from a
| corporation, you know where the money went because you got
| the thing or access to the service you just paid for. With
| a donation you don't have that and because you're donating
| you probably care about whatever subject you want to
| improve so you'd like to know that is were your money is
| going instead of finding out later it just went to the CEO
| of whatever to blow on blackjack and hookers.
|
| In the case of Mozilla, you actually know donating to the
| Mozilla Foundation does not in any way benefit Firefox or
| Thunderbird, which is probably the whole reason you were
| actually donating in the first place. Donating to the
| Mozilla Foundation funds all the pointless side projects
| they they decide to pick up and pay the CEO quite frankly
| an undeservedly large salary.
| sph wrote:
| > Your gift helps ensure it stays that way
|
| Written this way, it sounds like "donate or we'll have to
| make you pay for it"
| chrisjj wrote:
| That's exactly what it means.
| LamaOfRuin wrote:
| The most recent report/breakdown I see:
|
| https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-
| bird-2024-...
| roysting wrote:
| It is not my domain, but I was quite surprised at the 10%
| processing fee expense. That's ~$1M at their ~$10 income.
|
| Isn't that quite a bit high? Or am I looking at something
| incorrectly. Maybe someone has some suggestions for them on
| how to lower that amount.
| multiplegeorges wrote:
| That is very high. Not sure who they are using for
| processing, but I know Stripe will give registered
| charities a (very small) cut on their fees, I'm not sure
| about non-profits. But even with market rates, the
| average fees through Stripe would be well below 10%, IME.
| mywittyname wrote:
| That probably means they receive a lot of small
| donations. Payment processors often have a fee structure
| that's 2.9% + <flat fee around $0.30>. So any donation
| below ~$4.50 would end up having a >=10% processing fee.
|
| There could be currency exchange rates that are factored
| in at the donation end as well.
|
| I agree that 10% is high, but it's still explainable.
| bachmeier wrote:
| That's a good explanation. It would make a lot of sense for
| them to link to it when they're asking for donations.
| jrm4 wrote:
| I mean, as I've somewhat said above, I _do_ donate to Mozilla
| for a direct-but-big reason. Overall, I find their work VERY
| important. I acknowledge that they 've never been perfect,
| but I've watched what they've done for 20-30 years and
| strongly trust that generally, they're doing good things with
| my money because that's what they've been doing.
|
| Thunderbird, separate from Mozilla, I don't think has that to
| rely on. That does feel more like "why should I give money to
| this project that (for me) has been pretty mid at maintaining
| a popular piece of software?"
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I'm agog you're still using POP, honestly. ;)
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| I too prefer POP. I don't read email on my phone, I alternate
| between a desktop and notebook computer for that (and most
| everything else), and simply copy my Thunderbird profile back
| and forth (using robocopy) when I switch. I have four primary
| mail identities, and use the Thunderbird unified folders to
| easily manage it all.
| narag wrote:
| lol, kind of expected someone would notice... it's my
| personal mail and I don't get much. In my experience, it's
| better for low volume. I just connect, download, delete it
| from the server and have it in an easily readable format. I
| keep my archives from the 90's with no issues.
| pizza234 wrote:
| I've been using TB for a decade and I too can't find anything
| better (even if my use case is very simple).
|
| However, I find TB's development _very_ misguided - it 's
| evident to me that they give very little priority to stability:
|
| - addons support (APIs) is a dumpster fire, and IMO a large
| addon ecosystem is what makes a client unique
|
| - not so long ago, they added an instant messaging client,
| which has been a waste of dev resources
|
| - at some point they overhauled the UI, but the result was a
| bloated slow mess (on some platforms), even with broken
| defaults
|
| - there are bugs open for at least a decade (I consistently hit
| one)
|
| It gives me the impression that the management prioritizes work
| that looks good on a screenshot, rather than stability.
|
| I think it'd be positive if the Thunderbird org shut down.
| There are more pragmatic teams who could take over the project
| (see Betterbird).
| BoredPositron wrote:
| I really think Mozilla has run it's course. Just die already so
| there is room for something new.
| TekMol wrote:
| I wish there was a system that lets users put up a donation that
| is released once a specific bug is fixed or a specific feature is
| implemented.
|
| Wouldn't that be cool? The company would have a list of tasks
| with a dollar amount next to it.
|
| I for one have been dabbling with a bug in ThunderBird for days
| now that drives me mad:
|
| I recently created a folder in Thunderbird and called it
| "archive". No way would I have expected that this will lead me to
| a bug and will take hours out of my day: There seems to be no way
| to get rid of this folder anymore.
|
| Things I have tried:
|
| "Keep message archives in" in "Copies and Folders" is disabled. I
| tried temporarily enabling it, setting it to some other dir and
| disabling it again, that did not help.
|
| I have disabled it in "subscribe".
|
| I cannot rename it.
|
| There is no "archive" folder in the web interface of my email
| provider, so if it Thunderbird somehow created it on the server,
| there seems to be no way to see, let alone delete it again in the
| web interface.
|
| I tried deleting archive.msf on disk. That makes the folder
| disappear after the next start, but it is recreated after about a
| second.
|
| I deleted folderTree.json and folderCache.json, that did not
| help.
| j-bos wrote:
| You can do that. It's called a restricted donation. If you make
| a donation with a cover letter or a check memoizing a specific
| purpose and the nonprofit accepts it, then by law they're
| legally obligated to follow through and use that money for that
| purpose. With bugs it's probably easier because you can just
| write the bug ID on the check.
| antisol wrote:
| There are also a couple of bug bounty websites out there for
| exactly this kind of thing: you and others throw some money
| into the pot for fixing a given bug or implementing some
| feature, and coders can claim that bounty once they've
| written the code.
|
| I've seen a few of these sites over the years but I can't
| remember the name of any RN. Search engines are your friend.
| cge wrote:
| MZLA Technologies, the organization that these donations go
| to, is not a non-profit.
| Noaidi wrote:
| I miss the days we needed Thunderbird for email...such an
| innocent time.
| muhehe wrote:
| Thunderbird will provider their PRO services using stalw.art as
| email backend. I was considering using it too to replace really
| old mail system in our company. It looked like modern stack using
| jmap, but it seems thunderbird actually does not support jmap? Or
| is it only in their PRO extension? Does it mean I cannot use this
| unless it is with their services? I'm confused.
|
| Of course there is still IMAP, but I hoped for better.
| sylens wrote:
| Curiously, JMAP is on the roadmap for the iOS client, but I
| don't see it in the desktop client roadmap
| https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap. But seeing
| as how it will power their Thundermail service, I would assume
| all clients would need the support
| antisol wrote:
| DO NOT donate to Thunderbird. Let it "die". As with all of
| Mozilla's software, that would be the best outcome - if it does,
| someone who isn't totally incompetent might fork it and actually
| improve it.
|
| Literally every change that's been made to thunderbird in the
| last 10+ years has made it worse. Mozilla are doggedly using the
| same philosophy as they are with firefox: "in what new and
| exciting ways can we make it more shit?".
|
| There are a bunch of things that I used to do in thunderbird with
| no problem on much less powerful machines that I can't do today.
|
| For example, since they decided to rewrite their perfectly-
| functional calendar parsing in a trash language, it now eats 100%
| of my CPU for ~30mins at a time trying to parse my decades-long,
| many-many-thousands-of-entries calendar. Then when it finishes it
| notices that it's been 30 mins since it synchronised my calendar,
| so it syncs and starts parsing all over again! This effectively
| locks up the whole of thunderbird, making it totally unusable.
| This issue has persisted for _years_. The solution I came up with
| is "stop using thunderbird for my calendar".
|
| There's a similar fun bug which means it won't sync my contacts
| anymore either. A feature that I had by about 2010 which my nokia
| phone could manage, modern thunderbird cannot do.
|
| If you'd like another 20 examples of how it's worse today than it
| was 10 years ago, just ask, and I'll write up a hundred thousand
| words or so of vitriol.
|
| It's extremely likely that next time I upgrade my distro I'll be
| shopping for a new email client. Currently I have thunderbird
| marked as held so that it doesn't upgrade. When I upgrade my
| distro there will be a new version of thunderbird, and I'd
| estimate about a 90% chance that that's when I'll make my exit,
| after ~20 years or so.
|
| It's sad. Thunderbird used to be a great piece of software.
|
| Don't give mozilla your money.
| registeredcorn wrote:
| In all seriousness, it might be good to write up more of the
| issues that you have for at least a few reasons:
|
| 1. TB probably(?) doesn't consider use cases like the one that
| you described. If there is any hope of them fixing it, it would
| be best to be underscored in detail. Perhaps then someone can
| try to propagate some fake test data to try and test against.
|
| 2. There's always the chance someone might be willing to fork
| it in hopes of improvement (E.g. BetterBird; betterbird.eu)
|
| 3. Sometimes screaming loud enough gains attention of people in
| a position to do something about it. Not super common, but does
| happen from time-to-time.
|
| 4. Who would pass up a chance to embarass Mozilla publicly? :^)
| antisol wrote:
| Maybe.
|
| I did try (politely, btw!) reporting a couple of issues on
| their bugtracker a long time ago, but the usual thing
| happened: nothing at all. IIRC there was no response of any
| kind. Which makes me reticent to put more time into writing
| more bug reports for them to ignore.
|
| I just found out about betterbird today. It looks
| interesting. I might give it a try. And if I see the same
| issues there, maybe I'll report it on their bugtracker.
|
| I and a bunch of others have been screaming loudly at mozilla
| for like 15 years now. They're not interested in hearing what
| we have to say. Which is why the firefox marketshare is as
| dismal as it is these days.
|
| As for embarrassing Mozilla publicly, apparently their troll
| factory watches HN - I got downvoted a lot for describing
| facts.
|
| I think the best option for me really is to just find a new
| mail client and be done with Mozilla forever.
|
| I said it before, but I'll just say it again: It's a real
| pity, Thunderbird used to be a truly excellent piece of
| software once upon a time. I remember switching to it from
| outlook and being all "Whoa! This is great!". It was a
| similar experience to going from IE6 -> Firefox. How the
| mighty have fallen.
| antisol wrote:
| You actually got me thinking about it, because I've been
| living with a lot of this trash for so long now that I
| think I've probably forgotten a bunch of my gripes with
| thunderbird.
|
| So here are the ones that spring to mind when I gave it a
| little bit of thought. I'm sure there are others that I've
| forgotten about because I've adopted new workflows that
| don't involve thunderbird (e.g my calendar is a bit like
| that). I'm also sure that as soon as I hit 'post' I'll
| think of more.
|
| * Searching IMAP folders. Worked just fine in 2010, does
| nothing now, no matter how long you wait. These days I just
| grep my maildir, like it's 1975.
|
| * Forgetting the sort order and display preferences for
| folders. It _LOVES_ to do this after an "upgrade". Because
| the 300,000 times I've previously told it not to show my
| 'cron' folder in threaded view isn't enough, apparently. I
| must want threaded view, but I'm just too stupid to realise
| it, and if they switch back to threaded view one more time
| maybe I'll just accept it and learn the new and better way
| because Mozilla knows best. Ditto for showing folder
| contents with the newest messages as the top - you know,
| the default and most useful sorting order for email.
| Nooooooooooo - thunderbird knows better! It loves to semi-
| randomly switch folders to "oldest messages at the top".
|
| * Flat-out refusing to talk to certain older email servers
| because they're serving up SSL certificates using an algo
| that's old and which mozilla has decided they don't like
| anymore. What's that? The machine is one that you don't
| have control over and that's difficult to upgrade due to it
| being an ancient SunOS machine running software from like
| 2001, and that you're connecting to over a very secure VPN
| and which isn't publicly accessible, so it's no security
| risk at all? Tough shit, use an email client that isn't
| thunderbird, we're not going to provide a "proceed anyway"
| button for people who understand what they're doing,
| because Mozilla knows better than you.
|
| * Hey there! I see you've repeatedly removed the garbage
| hamburger menu. This must have been an accident and not
| that you do not want and did not ask for it and will never
| want it under any circumstances ever due to your strongly-
| held opinion that a traditional hierarchical menu bar
| across the top of an application is a superior UI in every
| way and that hamburger menus are less efficient and have no
| place on a high-resolution desktop interface. So as part of
| the latest thunderbird "upgrade", I'm just going to
| helpfully slip that shitty hamburger menu that you've
| removed 10,000 times back into the toolbar where I think it
| should be, so it can waste some screen real-estate for
| something you'll never use. That should correct that
| oversight where you accidentally removed it 10,000 times.
| Glad I could help!
|
| * Hey there! I see you've accidentally removed the shitty
| hamburger menu for the 50,000th time. I'm going to do you a
| solid and solve this problem once and for all - by simply
| making it not optional and not configurable anymore. The
| top right hand corner of your toolbar WILL be a hamburger
| menu now and forevermore. That should sort that problem
| out.
|
| * Hey there! I notice that you like a traditional
| hierarchical menu bar, like computers have had since the
| 1980s. Unfortunately this isn't fashionable anymore and
| isn't great on phones, so what we're going to do on your
| high-res desktop machine is put a toolbar above the menu
| bar, creating a completely bizarre interface where the "get
| messages" button is above the File menu, in condradiction
| of 35+ years of UI conventions. We're also going to make
| this something that isn't configurable anymore. Sure, the
| UI used to be super-configurable for 20+ years, but that
| wasn't done with javascript, so we had to remove it. You
| really should just use the hamburger menu instead. We like
| it, you see, and we're not interested in your opinion if
| it's not the same as ours. Mozilla knows best, you see.
|
| * I noticed that you don't have thunderbird's adaptive junk
| mail filter(tm) turned on. This must be an accident and not
| because you have sophisticated and extremely reliable
| enterprise-grade spam filtering solution set up on your
| server, with rules to do things like move email to a
| specific folder and mark it as read if it's determined to
| be spam. So what I'm going to do with this latest
| thunderbird "upgrade" is just silently enable the adaptive
| junk mail filter(tm), and then let that decide that about
| 40% of the thousands and thousands of messages in your
| inbox are junk, and then move them into a completely
| different and previously-unknown junk folder that you've
| never seen before. Now you might wonder "hey why has that
| colleague I was emailling back and forth with gone silent?"
| and you might check your junk folder to see if maybe your
| spam filter has gone haywire. But his messages (and a bunch
| of messages from your boss) won't be there! They'll be in
| the new and previously-unknown junk folder that I think
| spam should go into! And you can spend literally hours
| trying to find the email that's gone missing. As a bonus,
| we've also made it really difficult to find that missing
| email by breaking the search feature, and this new junk
| folder isn't in your maildir structure (or even on your
| server!), so you can't just grep for it. Have fun!
|
| * OMG ALL YOUR RSS FEEDS ARE BROKEN! I tried to update them
| twice, and got an error! This must mean that all your RSS
| feeds coincidentally died at the same time, and is
| absolutely definitely not because your internet was down
| for maintenance for a couple of hours. So I'm going to do
| the only sensible thing - mark all your RSS feeds as broken
| and just stop ever trying to update them again until you
| manually tell me to update each and every one individually.
| No, I will not allow you to multi-select feeds so that you
| can update them all at once.
|
| * I see that you like extensions. You have several
| installed and you use them and rely on them daily, and have
| for 20+ years. So what We're going to do is turn our
| extensions API into a shifting quagmire of incompatibility,
| such that extension authors have to jump through hoops
| every 25 minutes to make sure their extensions are
| compatible with the latest thunderbird, until most of them
| just give up. That way we can phase out the whole
| extensions thing like we did with firefox, giving you an
| objectively worse experience. - Did you like your email
| headers taking up less than 50% of the message area and
| having the ability to double-click on the header area to
| toggle between full headers and compact headers? Didn't
| think so. - Aah, you want to manually sort the folders in
| your inbox. Nah, that would be much to useful. - Ha! A GUI
| to manage your sieve filters in a user-friendly and
| intuitive manner? That sounds far too XUL for our tastes!
| Begone! (these are just the ones that I still miss every
| day and can remember off the top of my head, there used to
| be a BUNCH of others, too)
|
| * What's that? You think that interfaces should get faster
| as computers increase in power? Oh, my sweet summer child,
| have you not heard the tale of Javascript and the melting
| CPU? No, see, we needed to disable all those xul extensions
| because it was bogging us down and making things
| inefficient! And what we're going to do is replace that
| with javascript trash, so that it's a whole new level of
| slow and unresponsive. Did you notice how I mentioned that
| parsing the calendar brings the whole of thunderbird to a
| grinding halt, making it totally unresponsive and unusable?
| Yeah, see that's because all this new code is very well-
| engineered and async / multithreaded, you see - it can
| fully utilise the power of a modern processor to do much
| much less in much much more time.
|
| _I told you it 'd be vitriol_ ;)
| foofloobar wrote:
| How much money goes into the pocket of the Mozilla CEO? How much
| is used to actually pay the people and to cover infrastructure
| costs?
| Hasnep wrote:
| 1. $0. 2. Probably close to 100%.
| jeltz wrote:
| Probably nothing. It is the Firefox revenue that pays her
| unreasonable salary.
| anthk wrote:
| Enable Usenet support in the Android build...
| Squeeeez wrote:
| The Android build is a re-branded (and some might say,
| crippled) K-9 Mail, which AFAIR did not support NNTP. Adding it
| might be more work than they are willing to do.
| account42 wrote:
| The other day I cam to my computer with Thunderbird showing me a
| full page screen instead of my email list that I had open before.
| Not going to donate to projects that disrespect users like that -
| my computer is not your advertising space even if you consider
| your ads "helpful information".
| Hasnep wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they show it something like once a year, and it
| takes two seconds to close it, if you can't spare two seconds
| of your life every year for something you get for free then you
| were never going to donate anything.
| squigz wrote:
| I think it's more disrespectful to judge so harshly a company -
| that puts out wonderful, free, open source software - asking
| for donations 1 or 2 times a year with a message that is easy
| to close.
| yuters wrote:
| If you want to donate, I suggest you look at the Betterbird fork:
| https://www.betterbird.eu/
| Hasnep wrote:
| There's a bunch of misinformation in the comments here, so I'll
| just add that I started using Thunderbird again around the time
| they became independent (ish) of Mozilla and I've really enjoyed
| it, it's fast, supports all my email accounts and the Android app
| is good too.
| paride5745 wrote:
| To be honest, I wish Thunderbird would become part of
| LibreOffice, to become a real contender to MS Outlook/MS Office.
|
| Mozilla is managing Thunderbird as a second class citizen since
| way too long.
| chrisjj wrote:
| I'd donate to have Mozilla raise Thunderbird to second class.
| paride5745 wrote:
| Good point...
| gizzlon wrote:
| Thunderbird is great <3 use it daily, for all my work and
| personal mail. Donating
|
| Edit: They won't let me: "We couldn't verify that this email
| address is able to receive mail. Try again or enter a different
| email address to continue."
| mhb wrote:
| Long shot, but I'll ask. For a while Thunderbird spam filter will
| work fine. Then, spontaneously, it stops working and starts
| showing me many which are obvious, identical junk. And after
| flagging them as junk, it doesn't seem to learn anything.
|
| For when this happens, it would be nice to have an explicit (and
| easy) way to blacklist items. Creating new filters for each of
| them is too involved.
| velcrovan wrote:
| I hope you have spam filtering happening somewhere upstream of
| your local computer. Spammers are constantly adjusting to find
| ways around filters, and there is no way a third class open
| source legacy email client I going to be able to give their
| filter the continuous attention it needs to stay effective.
| mhb wrote:
| Yes. But this is not clever stuff. I'd expect the most
| simple-minded Bayesian filter to identify it.
| Ringz wrote:
| I tried for a long time to work with Thunderbird, but what kept
| bothering me was that I couldn't simply define keyboard
| shortcuts. In the end, I landed on AERC and created my own
| extreme Vim-style keyboard configuration (the idea is to look at
| the list of mails like looking at a buffer in vim) for it. I've
| never been this fast when it comes to email.
|
| https://aerc-mail.org/ https://github.com/rafo/aerc-vim
| seanalltogether wrote:
| I wish I could donate without entering an email address.
| sherr wrote:
| I've just donated. I use Thunderbird every day and have used it
| for years now. Mozilla, Firefox and Thunderbird are very
| important to me and my internet usage. For all the complaints
| (many just unwarranted in my opinion) I'm a happy user.
| blacklion wrote:
| I wish Thunderbird fix their plain text editor (it is at level of
| old Notepad, and chrome for it looks ugly, and line wrapping is a
| mess, especially with in-line quotation), add ability to store
| Folder properties (including Identity used for this folder,
| retention period and such) as IMAP properties and not locally to
| have same settings on different devices.
|
| And, yes, proper support for Sieve, including per-folder Sieve.
| Sieve is a pain after they changed something and 3rd party Sieve
| plugin died (become Electorn Application).
|
| Now Thunderbird has so many rough edges (I named only my top-3,
| but I'm sure anybody can add others!), but still one and only
| usable cross-platform e-mail client.
|
| Oh, yes, development pace is unbearable slow: after killing
| "Manually sort folders" plugin it takes more than year (!) to add
| this as "core" feature with huge help from aforementioned
| plugun's author. Very slow process of review, integrating,
| releasing which takes MONTHS to integrate ready feature. It
| should be very discouraging for contributors.
|
| Thunderbird now provide like 10% of features of old and almost
| forgotten (but still alive) windows-only client "The Bat!" from
| end of 1990s, beginning of 2000s and was written by team of like
| 5 people.
|
| But still, I've donated!
| TheCoreh wrote:
| > We don't have corporate funding
|
| I thought you were owned by Mozilla? A corporation that has over
| half a billion dollars in yearly revenue? If they decided to
| allocate zero funding to you, wouldn't it be vastly more
| effective to start some sort of campaign/movement (either
| internal or external) to get that funding back, or to entirely
| fork and leave Mozilla to be your own independent project, than
| to ask for random donations?
| dwedge wrote:
| Is "half a billion dollars in yearly revenue" still synonymous
| with "half a billion dollars in funding from Google" or did
| they pivot? Are mozilla still trying to reimagine themselves as
| an ad tech company?
| wsmwk wrote:
| MZLA is owned by the FOUNDATION.
|
| However, MZLA is self funded.
| registeredcorn wrote:
| Once they are no longer part of Mozilla, I would be happy to
| consider it.
| dwedge wrote:
| I seem to remember an article in lwn a year or so ago about them
| hiring a new PM who was basically a donation campaign manager,
| and one of the points was "telemetry is good, actually, and
| should be opt out not opt in."
|
| I get the feeling the amount they fundraise is more a quarterly
| target than a requirement, but I could be wrong. All of mozilla
| gives me a bad taste recently.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| How is their Exchange support going? Flawless support for 365 and
| a UI that can be made to function like outlook for people to
| transition over?
| addybojangles wrote:
| Torn about this due to multiple factors...but I think the core
| reasoning remains: if it's a tool you like, there are actual
| people working on it, and if you want those actual people to stay
| employed and continue working on the tool, it's in your best
| interest to do things like donate and talk/share about them.
| coder68 wrote:
| A bit more context would be helpful, as someone happy to donate
| -- what is the current situation, why the urgency? Just some more
| info would be good.
| orev wrote:
| Why does there need to be urgency? Isn't it better to avoid a
| situation where there's a critical need?
| BeetleB wrote:
| I haven't used Thunderbird in 15 years.
|
| Donated anyway. I was very happy with it for the years I did use
| it.
| fishgoesblub wrote:
| How many more donations until we get a functional UI like we used
| to have, and a system tray icon on Linux?
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| What was the source of this link OP? A monthly newsletter?
|
| Either way, they have more information on their donate page as
| well as a whole knowledge base set of pages:
|
| https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/#faq
|
| https://give.thunderbird.net/hc/en-us
| jrm4 wrote:
| "If you get value from Thunderbird"
|
| I'm reading this and I'm feeling like, maaan, I wish you hadn't
| asked me that.
|
| So, compare to Mozilla (which apparently they're not with
| anymore?) I actively use Firefox and probably more importantly, I
| remain very impressed with their ability to try to keep up with
| the times. They do fail at this sometimes, but over 20-30 years,
| that track record is solid.
|
| Thunderbird? Ugh. I _want_ it to be good, but I 'm not so sure
| there's much of a point here anymore. My line in the sand was
| different colored multiple accounts which was trivially easy and
| then one day wasn't; moreover AI is really killing them there for
| me (in terms of taking something old like Claws or Neomutt and
| very easily customizing it a way that was too much of a pain
| before)
| jasonlotito wrote:
| In this thread, a bunch of people complaining about an open
| source app not asking for donations the right way but will be the
| first people to ask "Why didn't they stick a donate button on the
| website" or "they should have asked for money!"
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| Why mozilla doesn't approach a similar strategy with firefox? I
| see with thunderbid most of the recent focus is in making the
| product better and the raising of the funding it's focused on
| user donations. With Firefox the focus is not in making the
| product better and instead on adding useless features, and the
| raising of funding is focused in advertising and random quests
| not related to the browser
| noobahoi wrote:
| Yeah, no. They finance a lot of DEI stuff instead of investing it
| in the code.
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