Help Keep Thunderbird Alive
updates.thunderbird.net292 points by playfultones 8 hours ago
292 points by playfultones 8 hours ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
So, if Thunderbird instead asked for users to sign up for an annual software subscription, it'd be fine?
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.
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 a 50% shareholder forever after the donation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One look at where donations to "keep Wikipedia free!" wind up should explain all of that for you.
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.
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.
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.
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 Nestlé for decades.
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.
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)
The most recent report/breakdown I see:
https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-...
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.
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.
> 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"
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.
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.
It was originally Minotaur (when the browser was Phoenix), then they were Firebird and Thunderbird, until the browser renamed to avoid a name clash.
I really don't remember (+quick check) Firebird for the email client, do you have source for this?
Predecessor of Firefox was Firebird, and before that it was even called Phoenix.
Firebird was the browser's name, after phoenix and before rebranding to firefox.
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.
> 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.
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?)
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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! ;)
Thunderbird has always been mozilla. They split it out into the other company a few years back.
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.
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.
I'm agog you're still using POP, honestly. ;)
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.
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.
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.
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-...
[flagged]
For the avoidance of doubt, you won't donate to Thunderbird because you disagree with the following policy?
> We do not discriminate on the basis of race [...], religion [...], gender, gender identity, gender expression, color, national origin, pregnancy, ancestry, domestic partner status, disability, sexual orientation, age, genetic predisposition, medical condition, marital status, citizenship status, military or veteran status, or any other basis covered by applicable laws. Mozilla will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics or any other unlawful behavior, conduct, or purpose.
Yes, that is correct. Discrimination is already illegal in hiring. Spelling it out so absurdly verbosely is just virtue signalling. If you're a remote developer, nobody cares about your colour or sex. Except at Mozilla, where people have their pronouns in Bugzilla.
To be clear, I fully support the right to be and feel and think whatever you want, but don't expect me to care about it, and this endless signposting of identity is tiresome.
You say you don't care about these identities, yet you’re willing to let a tool you (presumably) value lose funding over a text block you find 'verbose.' It seems you care enough about the signposting to let it outweigh the software's actual utility.
You won't donate because they will try not to discriminate when hiring? It's illegal to discriminate on things like race, sex and gender when hiring, so pretty much every company avoids it.
Just click away is statement from Mozilla with all the usual buzzwords. I am not convinced thunderbird is separate entity. It clearly shares HR and hiring with Mozilla!
I would be happy to directly sponsor independent developers from poor countries (including Africa). But I am not going to pay $180k+ salaries to some corporation!
They are an entity separate from Mozilla:
* https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/
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.
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).
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.
Mozilla also runs hiring and HR for MZLA. They control who gets hired and fired.
It is more like money laundering, than independent entity.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Gmail can be used from any modern platform through the web and has dedicated Android and iOS apps too.
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)?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
> 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?
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
My understanding is the for-profit structure was necessary in order to be able to do the search licensing deals finance Firefox.
That’s a separate for-profit. This one is narrowly scoped to operate thunderbird
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.)
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".
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.
Please no. The Mozilla Foundation has lost their way. I don't want them messing with my favorite email client.
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.
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...
>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...
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.
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...
The reason Wikipedia has so much is that the end goal is for it to be self sustaining through interest iirc
I'm just using Evolution. Switched from Thunderbird a few weeks ago. So far, so good.
Yeah, I noticed Evolution as a standard install on some distros as well. I might look into it, thanks.
Mozilla and Mozla are two different corporations though both under the mozilla foundation.
Mozilla brings in almost $700 million per year, they have more than enough money to sponsor MZLA/Thunderbird development.
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.
Mozilla doesn't have the willpower or vision to do anything with anything.
Don't be so harsh on them. (\s) They show lots of willpower and some sort of vision when talking about AI in Firefox.
Don't forget telemetry! The makers of the "privacy-focused browser" were super strong-willed about that, too.
Good! I hope they do "kill it off" so that someone who isn't totally incompetent can fork it and take it over.
That's basically how you could describe what happened. Those competent people are using Mozilla's infrastructure and trademarks, but otherwise running on donations.
Then how come everything they've done in the last 10 years has been garbage?
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.
> they are moving more to using a javascript rendering method instead of xul
> I am not really sure what the problems are with working with xul though
> I think firefox moved off it a long time ago too
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.
(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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> it's going to soon enter Alpha
Perhaps other browser makers want to move faster than Ladybird.
that's fine.
point is that Mozilla is wasting money and having 4000 people working on chrome may not be the correct benchmark.
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.
They need a lot of money to pay their useless execs, so 700 million must be barely enough to keep things running
They publish their 990s so you can look this stuff up if you're actually curious. It's mostly the browser.
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 :-)
Wasn't Thunderbird Pro the avenue for extra project financing? Why does it take so long to launch an email service?
Was going to say it's here, but it's not indeed, you can join the waitlist: https://www.tb.pro/en-US/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I wouldn't mind donating if they separate it from Mozilla and move it to Europe.
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.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.
Looks like it's still owned by Mozilla/MZLA and thus subject to US jurisdiction.
If you want to donate, I suggest you look at the Betterbird fork: https://www.betterbird.eu/
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)?
I think they are just hating on Mozilla out of pure principles, but without any alternative.
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
> 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.
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."
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?
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.
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
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
MZLA Technologies, the organization that these donations go to, is not a non-profit.
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.
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?
> 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?
>- $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.
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.
I'm not sure which part it is in their accounts, but their Form 990 says:
https://stateof.mozilla.org/pdf/Mozilla%20Foundation_Form_99...
> 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)
I wasn't able to reproduce the back button hijack. It never asks me for an email address, regardless of what I try.
LibreWolf should have no reason to exist. It does because Mozilla’s values are largely marketing.
I don't think it's a dark pattern. Just a common marketing thing. Not "everything that annoys me" is a dark pattern.
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.
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?
Stripe supports 3d secure and has for years. https://stripe.com/en-ca/guides/3d-secure-2
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.
I wish I could donate without entering an email address.
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.
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.
Once they are no longer part of Mozilla, I would be happy to consider it.
when i used windows i was happy with The Bat email client: https://www.ritlabs.com/en/products/thebat/download.php
I used TB happily for years on Mac OS but its font rendering on Linux was one of the main reasons I never switched.
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.
Anyone using Thunderbird was forced to see this, not sure we (or the well-funded corp) need another round.
Yes, which has ensured I never donate to them again. It's my computer not MZLA's billboard.
Sorry, isn't Thunderbird meant to be "true FOSS" and essentially feature complete?
By donating to MZLA Technologies Corporation? Then I guess I'll switch to KMail or Evolution.
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?
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.
Enable Usenet support in the Android build...
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.
I miss the days we needed Thunderbird for email...such an innocent time.
I really think Mozilla has run it's course. Just die already so there is room for something new.
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.
[dead]
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.
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? :^)
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.
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.
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.