Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
I can't actually believe this is something they're excited to post a blog about. Charity with 9 figures revenue is hiring a developer (finally) to work on a product which has 25 million users.
I think Mozilla's mission goals are fantastic but something is going seriously, seriously wrong with the way they allocate resources.
Email, for all its faults, is among the most successful distributed protocols. And as a champion of protocols over centralized services, Mozilla should be emphatically in support of keeping email relevant, modern, and productive. Not only is Thunderbird part of that, but I'd like to see Mozilla expand their email vision to include tackling client-side encryption (ala GPG, but made user friendly).
I handle most personal email on my phone, and corporate email increasingly requires MFA via a web-client, for which there is no standard for native clients.
I have native desktop clients for email installed, and prefer them, but in reality I hardly ever use them.
Thunderbird is a great project, but relative to other things Mozilla have their sights on, I can certainly see why it's lower priority.
I do not know where Mozilla sourced the metric of "25 million users," but let's assume it is within the right order of magnitude. Even if that number is projected to fall, it's sufficient to warrant significant resource investment. I'd argue, as I did above, that the mission statement of Mozilla aligns well with email, so from my perspective a healthy full-time development team seems reasonable for this product category. I don't want Mozilla ceding desktop email as it did desktop browsing; and I especially don't want Mozilla by way of inaction helping cede email generally to centralized alternatives.
Your concern about desktop clients is an echo of Mozilla's challenge with web browsers—namely, they can't achieve a solid foothold on mobile because mobile is (currently) a walled garden. Until that is sorted out, Mozilla should redouble effort in the desktop space, where it is strongest. But for whatever it's worth, having not yet seen something like PAO [1] from Microsoft, I would love to see Mozilla move in that direction.
TL;DR: web-based authentication is not just for full-fledged browsers that users type URLs into.
[0] https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2015/11/19/updated-office-365...
Google Takeout supports one-click exporting of emails to an open format; you just need to make sure to actually do it if you're interested.
In the professional world, you either use some form of webmail or Outlook.
The Mozilla Foundation might be a not-for-profit corporation, but they have the same constraints as normal businesses ... they have to secure reliable sources of funding, they have to preserve their resources, they have to be smart about investments, they have to pay salaries because people need to put food on the table and they have to plan further than the next quarter.
And given the incredible progress of Firefox, I for one am glad that they've cut unproductive projects.
The current Thunderbird is terrible. It has been a good browser, it might still have life in it, its developers might manage to evolve it and make it awesome, however I haven't been able to use it for more than a week and believe me, I tried doing so, repeatedly.
I was sad to hear that Mozilla is dropping it, but then again, when I heard this news, I was already long gone as a user. Nowadays I'm split between FastMail's and Gmail's web interfaces and MailMate (freron.com), all of which are so much better for my needs, the difference ain't even funny.
Seriously, a web interface and a desktop client made by one guy from Denmark are better than Thunderbird. Thunderbird basically needs a complete overhaul, but then ask its 25 million users how they feel about that, after all, if they wouldn't want the current Thunderbird, they would've switched to something else.
With the rise a Chrome and the fall of Firefox, I wounder why Google is still giving them money. Maybe the PR loss from pulling the plug would still be too big?
>The current Thunderbird is terrible. //
What cross-platform desktop clients are better [I note MailMate is Mac only]. I use a mix of webmail (Outlook, Horde on private server), and Thunderbird (connecting to IMAP accounts) and can't say it's that different an experience for me; it does seem very sub-optimal however.
How many full time devs work on TB?
You should probably read a book on how our economy works.
First impressions aren't great -- is Claws an "email should be text only" advocate? -- brief look and the default mail format being non-standard; and all the screenshots on the website showing text only emails; tools including a special script to order threads by date (how else would you order them?); and the latest amendments to those scripts being over a year old; most recent theme links to a website that's offline.
...um, the downloads are from a server without a cert (cert is self-signed for a different domain; and their bugzilla is http only too), think that's a nope from me. Not because of the cert exactly but because not getting that write for a group that are supposed to be dealing in internet security seems like an indication of neglect.
The TLS setup certainly sucks but OTOH, the actual distribution archives are all cryptographically signed. Most users don't get Claws Mail from the website anyway, but use their distro packages, whose maintainers have hopefully verified the signatures before importing a new release.
What do you mean by "default mail https://www.colino.net/wordpress/archives/2013/03/14/claws-m... being non-standard"?
you don't need a script to order threads by date, it's an option in the main menu.
It doesn't offer downloading over HTTPS, but a GPG signature is provided. Old-school, but not at all insecure.
Things it does better than TB:
TB has corrupted it's mail store on 3 separate occasions, in 3 different releases spread out over a decade. Claws has never done that. That's the reason I switched.
It's builtin filtering, sorting, &c. tools are really great. Full-text search is slower than I'd like, but header based searching is plenty fast (the mode I use most searches all of from/to/subject, which is mostly what I want to do). When I need to do full-text searching I fall back on notmuch.
My requirements for an e-mail client are fairly simple (in order of importance):
1) Let me read my mail
2) Don't lose my mail
3) Give me some reasonable way to automate the parts of my workflow that it makes sense to.
TB has failed so bad at #2, that I've not spent the time to explore how it is at #3. It's about equal at #1.
1: https://www.colino.net/wordpress/archives/2013/03/14/claws-m...
Outlook seems to change lots of little things I don't care about every release, making it harder to use, since I can't gain familiarity well. Furthermore I hate corresponding with people who use it, since it puts a lot of effort into breaking threading.
Thunderbird is just not a reliable store of data; perhaps it's fine for people who IMAP and store data on the server, but it's not for me.
Which leads me into trojita; this is actually a fairly nice imap client, but I tend to keep my e-mail local, so I haven't used it much as my daily driver.
mutt is terminal-only which rules it out for a lot of people (note that terminal only doesn't rule out reading html e-mail, it just rules out reading html e-mail in a manner that looks any better than lynx/links2).
All of the notmuch frontends I've tried are kind of "the 10% of gmail that's easy to implement" and then abandoned. Bower has been both the most performant and the most stable, but it, like mutt, is terminal only, and is relatively feature-poor. I'd hack on it, but it's written in a statically-typed dialect of prolog that will probably take me weeks to learn.
Note that I actually use a modified form of notmuch-web for handling mailing-lists; threads come in tagged as unanswered, so people can easily see what needs to be responded to.
It's not even in the top 20 of U.S.-based charities:
Mozilla’s consolidated reported revenue (Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla Corporation and all subsidiaries) for CY 2016 was $520M (US), as compared to $421M in 2015.[0]
The Largest U.S. Charities For 2016[1]
1. United Way Worldwide, $3.708 billion.
2. Task Force for Global Health, $3.154 billion.
3. Feeding America, $2.150 billion.
...
20. American Heart Association, $634 million.
[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2016/
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/williampbarrett/2016/12/14/the-...
You do realize that there are a lot of non-profits, right? I went to a meeting in Santa Barbara that was just people representing various local non-profits (or people who were thinking of starting a non-profit), and the room was packed. I remembered them saying something like "there are almost a thousand non-profits right here in Santa Barbara". I just did a quick search, and found a site saying that there are estimated 400-1000 non-profits in Santa Barbara.
So yes: it is (apparently, as demonstrated by your "rebuttal"), entirely fair to say that Mozilla "is one of the richest charities in the world".
Why the eff haven't they hired a $120k/yr rounding error to work on the application? Maybe they have tried, but no one wanted the job (especially to do solo). There could be plenty of answers to this, but I wish they would have hired a team of developers.
That's the Mozilla Corporation. That's not a charity. It also explicitly does not work on Thunderbird.
The charity is the Mozilla Foundation. It has a lot less money than that.
The developer position in question is being effectively paid by the Thunderbird Council (but officially hired by the Mozilla Foundation, which has the infrastructure to do legal compliance like payroll taxes in place). The Thunderbird Council has even less money than the Mozilla Foundation.
> I can't actually believe this is something they're excited to post a blog about.
The Thunderbird Council is excited to post about this, because this is the first hire they've done as far as I know.
> seriously wrong with the way they allocate resources.
Well, "Mozilla" (both the Corporation and the Foundation) has decided to not allocate resources to Thunderbird, period, though some Mozilla employees contribute to Thunderbird in their spare time, like any other open-source project. You can disagree with what the two Mozilla organizations are focusing on, but it's a pretty deliberate decision, not something falling out by accident or something, or a result of the organization being a "shambles".
"Mozilla" as an organization (both of the organizations involved) is providing pretty minimal support for TB, if any. They've been very upfront and explicit about it.
I was addressing why the blog post exists: it's not posted by "Mozilla", but by the people who are actually supporting TB.
Being “upfront and explicit” doesn’t magically popularize unpopular choices.
Firstly, if you bother to read the OP, Mozilla hasn't chosen to hire anyone:
"The Thunderbird Project is hiring for a software engineer! [...] Please note that while the Thunderbird project is a group of individuals separate from the Mozilla Foundation that works to further the Thunderbird email client, the Mozilla Foundation is the Project’s fiscal home."
Secondly, Mozilla is not "one of the richest charities in the world"; the Mozilla Corporation may have $300 million a year in revenue, but the Mozilla Foundation, which is the charity, has revenues that are a hundredth of that. And US law is very specific about what charities may spend revenue on, and developing email client software is not on that list (nor is developing web browser software, for that matter).
A typical startup might deploy anywhere from 3 to 15 engineers on a product such as Thunderbird. Considering the amount of legacy it's saddled with, let alone the competing interests around e-mail in general, hiring a single engineer to work on this thing sounds like a token move at best, and likely a terrible waste of that person's time.
So why is it being neglected? There is some history here; way back when Netscape was a kitchen sink, factoring the mail client out of the browser was an important and successful decision. The mail part, Thunderbird, became persona non grata for some; it certainly lost the bulk of the mind share to the browser.
However, I think the ongoing indifference is because there isn't a workable business model. Firefox is an advertising platform from which Mozilla earns hundreds of millions. It isn't clear how Thunderbird is supposed to earn.
Wow, I’d wondered about that for years as well. I think you hit the nail on the head.
Mozilla likes to paint itself as a charity but it won’t even allocate .1% revenue to a non-profit project that it created and millions rely on.
But what you can do is have a _for profit_ company that makes T-shirts and sells them for $10, and then a charity which _owns_ the for-profit company and receives all of the profits as a donation from the for-profit. That's legal.
So, Mozilla has a corporation to do all the stuff a charity isn't allowed to do, and then a foundation which owns the for-profit corporation. Getting paid a pile of money by a Search Engine to make their engine your default is not a charitable donation, because there's a quid pro quo, so the Mozilla Corporation takes all the Google money, for example.
I'm not familiar with US charity law, but it's worth noting that a charity in the UK can '"sell" stuff and make money' the key thing is what happens to the money made, it has to be directed to the charities registered aims - eg paying staff. They can't disperse profits, but they can pay phenomenal wages, some charity CEOs take home 7 figure wages [£3M was the highest wage in 2017, to a non C-grade too, https://www.thirdsector.co.uk/charity-pay-study-2017-highest...].
There are restrictions, charity shops can't get reductions on business rates if ordinary selling is a large part of their income, for example.
That places limits on what sorts of commercial agreements the foundation can make, among other things.
Mozilla isn’t trying to tax dodge like certain other companies; the Mozilla Corporation is taxable, hires engineers, and enters into search agreements.
The corporation being owned by the foundation means it is obligated to follow the foundation’s public benefit goals.
I guess I'm just curious to the pros and cons of the way they're organized as of now.
I don't know what you're asking. Different from what?
You think the fact that your friends have never heard that Mozilla is a non-profit contradicts what I wrote? I did not say that most people know that Mozilla is a non-profit. I didn't even say that most technical people would know that.
Care to elaborate? Genuinely interested.
Maybe Mozilla ought to change their mission statement to "Maximize revenue" then: neglecting Thunderbird does not jibe with "Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all." The Internet is much more than the web - email is a huge part of it. Maybe I'm being naive, but IMO, money ought to be a means to an end for Mozilla, not the end unto itself.
Also, how much money did Mozilla get from IoT/FirefoxOS? I think it's close to $0, and yet they spent way more money on it than Thunderbird. I don't think your theory holds.
The sad part is that the vast majority of people have no idea this is the case. Email? Oh I just use gmail in my browser (rather than a client with SMTP and IMAP). Discussion groups? Oh I just use Google groups or some person's private walled forum in my browser (rather than usenet with NNTP). Chat? Oh I use Slack in my browser (rather than IRC with an IRC client).
B.S. in Computer Science would be lovely, but real-world experience is preferred.
From the post:
" The Thunderbird Project is hiring for a software engineer!
...
Please note that while the Thunderbird project is a group of individuals separate from the Mozilla Foundation that works to further the Thunderbird email client, the Mozilla Foundation is the Project’s fiscal home. The Thunderbird Council, separate from Mozilla, manages the Project and will direct the software engineer’s work."
"Mozilla is allocating funding to The Thunderbird Project to hire a developer to work on Mozilla Thunderbird"
i.e. the distinction is only relevant in terms of the direction of day-to-day work on the project. Or are Mozilla not funding this at all?
The following quotes seem to indicate that the distinction isn't really relevant in the context of the hiring process at least:
> send us your resume with a cover letter to apply@mozillafoundation.org.
> The successful applicant will be hired as freelancer (independent contractor) through the Mozilla Foundation’s third-party service Upwork
> By applying to this job, you are agreeing to have your applications reviewed [...] by staff members of the Mozilla Foundation.
Incidentally there was a post that was heavily critical of Upwork but is now "dead", it included points like:
>Then they take a 2.75% cut from the client, a 20% cut from the freelancer //
It seemed, factual, apposite, and informed; definitely strange it was killed.
The Mozilla Foundation just forces Thunderbird to use Upwork as the channel to hire people. I think it's obvious that if Thunderbird Council was able to decide, they would never use Upwork.
LOL. Last time I checked you still couldn't make an image fill the available space while keeping its aspect ratio :D
img {
width: 100%;
height: auto;
}This would not fit a skinny image to a fat container.
But yeah, HTML is like lightyears ahead of anything else :^)
Well it is only a six month contract for a single developer.
1. https://www.colbyrussell.com/2017/08/06/contributors-dilemma...
We're talking about Thunderbird development. When I wrote that they changed to a compatible license and reached out to say "please use this", that's not referring to their attempt to get users. That's a reference to their attempt to donate their code and energy towards improving Thunderbird.
> They could only help replace free (from mail vendors) Thunderbird, playing by the rules of the Thunderbird.
Huh?
(*My edit in brackets) You meant towards improving Nylas Mail, not Thunderbird? If not, I don't get any sense in this argument, it sounds like Nylas was reaching out Mozilla to replace Thunderbird with their re-licensed Nylas Mail. I'm not sure that ever happened (and I'm not sure GPL is a totally suitable license for Mozilla Foundation[1]). If you made a typo and meant "Nylas Mail", then I get your argument about development, but I see how community (me included) would be reluctant to make any contributions into a not entirely free product without forking.
> Huh?
Simply put, I'm fully agree that upstream Thunderbird could clearly indicate their will to move off Gecko to stimulate code contributions from community. I see how it might work out for the already popular, long time-tested, free Thunderbird, but I don't believe Nylos Mail is the same case here.
No. What I wrote is what I meant.
> it sounds like Nylas was reaching out Mozilla to replace Thunderbird with their re-licensed Nylas Mail
Yes. (But not "replace", necessarily. Replace parts. Merge. Improve.)
> I'm not sure that ever happened
Uh, okay? If you hadn't heard that before, that's... fine. But, I mean, now you have. And I don't know what else to say.
> I'm not sure GPL is a totally suitable license for Mozilla Foundation
You're right; it's not. Thunderbird is MPL. They can't accept GPL contributions and continue to make releases available under MPL. That's why I specifically mentioned how Nylas relicensed their code to one that is compatible (MIT).
> I'm fully agree that upstream Thunderbird could clearly indicate their will to move off Gecko
I didn't say move off Gecko. I said dropping XUL. Moving off Gecko is almost definitely not in plans for the short term, and probably not even in the long term.
This conversation has been excruciating.
I was sure it's GPL, I missed that point.
> Uh, okay? If you hadn't heard that before, that's... fine.
> But, I mean, now you have. And I don't know what else to say.
> This conversation has been excruciating.
LOL, too much drama for the product below the radar. I can't even google anything about this proposal.
XPCOM kinda sucked but it is still better than MS COM
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XUL/Tu...
Did you know that "decomification" was a word?
Not knowing much about Mozilla, is this the norm there?
Looks like there was a downside to staying with MoFo after all.
https://lobste.rs/s/e0uh2y/we_re_hiring_developer_work_on#c_...
I thought you might have been exaggerating, but that truly is utterly absurd! I just can't believe people actually work under such conditions!
Their post has nothing about that, and the Thunderbird page at Mozilla also has no "Developers", "Source code" or similar link anywhere. That should be there at least in the page footer.
Ok, so here is the Mercurial repo and build instructions: https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...
That link should be part of the job description.
The directory size (du -sh) is 148 MB after "hg clone", and 5.4 GB after "./client.py checkout".
And yes, hiring a single developer to work all alone by himself would be akin to killing the project itself as just understanding the codebase, design, technology and architecture would be too much for one person to handle.
We’re looking for an amazing developer to come on board to help make Thunderbird the best Email client on the planet!
I've used Thunderbird off and on since it was announced and I know that it has many advanced features. It's no slouch and I deeply respect that there's still a local mail and news client that somewhat works and sometimes gets a little bit of TLC. But the ecosystem is in shambles, and this is only going to get worse as Firefox diverges.
It would obviously take time for a serious revamp to reach parity, but Thunderbird needs a total skeletal reconstruction to pull it off life support and get people excited again. This is just upping the cholesterol meds.
All the other "client-side email software" applications in recent memory have been Electron apps. Surely Mozilla can do us one better, and build a revitalized Thunderbird with staying power on an appropriate modern stack? This seems like a great pilot project for a serious Rust-based desktop toolkit.
They could charge for this to recover operating costs and remain a “non profit”.
Whether or not such charges were only to recover operating costs, they'd probably be treated as “unrelated business income” and thus taxable, at the gross amount, if Mozilla retained it's charity status.
It would make more sense to have the non-charity subsidiary do that.
Of course, finding the kind of money it would take to go head to head with Google would be a challenge in any case.
AIUI they could locate in the UK and charge as much as they like above the cost price and remain a charity. They couldn't pay shareholders as a charity however.
I remember a few bumps around 08..2010 where I ran beta builds because of some bugs. Also, I used to have extensions that colorized patches and highlighted quotes/threads... but those eventually broke and disappeared.
So, right now I am running a stock Thunderbird with a few profile customizations that tweak fonts (colors and sizes). Hitting GMail (work) and Fastmail (home) servers every minute or so.
Go Thunderbird!
It would also be nice to have a proper three vertical pane view. The way it currently works is horrendous.
What's wrong with View > Layout > Vertical view? Not my preference, just curious what's different as superficially it looks like other such programs.
Everything else works as it should. I'm not using calendars or syncing address books which probably places me in the long tail of the user distribution.
and instead it provides an input box, one per line, per email address. When you have a large to list, this gets painful.
I don't have any details. I just heard they were planning a major rewrite when I reported a bug a long time ago (over 10 years ago) and in the bug tracker the conclusion was that fixing it should be done as part of the major rewrite that was upcoming.
For anyone curious, here's the bug (from memory).
I had a host with a POP3 mail server running on the normal POP3 port. That host also had a second POP3 mail server on a different port [1].
I tried to set up two email accounts in Thunderbird, one for a POP3 account for user tzs on that host on the standard POP3 port, and the other for tzs on that host on the second port.
The second account could not be created because it said that I already had a tzs POP3 account on that host. Thunderbird was using user/host as a unique account key, rather than the more correct user/host/port (or the even more correct user/host/protocol/port).
I reported this as a bug, figuring that this would be an easy fix. At worst somewhat tedious but no challenge. Soon someone marked the bug as a possible duplicate, linking to a bug from a couple years earlier that was also due to user/host being assumed unique.
In the discussion one of the developers said that the user/host as key assumption was hardwired into the code in too many places, but that was one of the things being redone in the upcoming rewrite.
[1] The second server wasn't actually on that host. That host was using an SSH tunnel to make my work POP3 server appear on my LAN.
But of course that would be untenable for Mozilla because it would be admitting defeat to Chrome.
The problem is that Mozilla has no alternative to Electron. There are a number of false starts and head fakes, but none of them have any buy in or support or future.
but they failed: "As noted in the blog post Positron Discontinued [1], this project has been discontinued. The source remains available, and you're welcome to reuse it." [1] https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/
In fact, xulrunner was another much earlier attempt at developing an Electron-like platform, but Mozilla's heart just wasn't in it, and they didn't care about or adequately support third party developers who were trying to develop applications with it, like TomTom Home for example (which I worked on).
Xulrunner was never meant to be a platform for desktop or embedded apps the way WebKit was -- its singular purpose was to support the desktop version of Firefox.
Which is exactly how Thunderbird got into the hopeless dead-end situation it's in right now. Its best move would be to switch to Electron, which is impossible only because of the obvious political reasons.
There's no reason to expect Mozilla to ever support any other Electron-like platform any better than they did xulrunner.
In the mean time: wake up, smell the coffee, and use Electron. Problem already solved!
They also mention XUL, which as I understand it isn't part of Firefox any longer.
Maybe they should think about how to make a mobile version of it. Still a mail client is a "solved problem". Most of email's problems are behind the client, not on it (like spam control)
I'm personally a reluctant Thunderbird user. I use it, I don't mind it all that much, but I can't say it's a delightful experience to use. But it does give me access to my email when I'm offline, and it lets me do GPG for sensitive email.
And I agree, it's not very nice to use
But at some point, there isn't much a mail client can do as it's limited by the tech and the stack
A solved problem is not a sports car, it's the 10year old car that costs 1k. Very few people want to pay for a mail client
But I'm sure you have analytics sources to prove your assertion :)
That's... that feels like the road to accepting mediocrity.
> A solved problem is not a sports car, it's the 10year old car that costs 1k. Very few people want to pay for a mail client
I fully admit that I drive a '91 Ranger :). I don't know that I call it a solved problem though, because 4WD would be really nice to have in the winter.
The mail client thing is interesting re: paying for it though. I guess I technically pay for Outlook as part of my Office 365 subscription, although I don't think much of it. The really hard part for me paying for a mail client is that most of the new paid ones I've seen come out in the last couple years have all been Electron-based, and memory/battery hogs. Outlook's not much better on that front (I think the Mac one, which I use occasionally, idles at about 900MB of RAM).
Thunderbird isn't a great solution to my problem. It's just the least bad, and there doesn't seem to be anyone willing to take my money for something better.
Deleted comment
So, if posting jobs for working on free applications is ok outside of Who Is Hiring, let me try to advertise this job for another free email client, Mailpile, which got killed when I tried to post it earlier:
I currently use Evolution for email, which is ok and I've gotten used to its limitations, but I would love a more modern client!
Edit: I guess it's not ok. I'm confused.
But the Mozilla foundation isn't the one fronting money for this job, is it? Doesn't that money come from the Mozilla Corporation? Hm, the job ad says that MoFo is the fiscal home, but the candidate will be hired via UpWork.
I'm really a bit confused about how money flows around Mozilla.
The money presumably came from selling FF users to Google but Mozilla Corp decided spending on TB was wasting money.
Whose driving this at Mozilla Corp? Seems like a sea-change to very money & business orientated position, like Mozilla's is basically being privatised and unprofitable (in the financial sense) parts are being ditched.
The "Key Issues" of the Mozilla Foundation (https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/foundation/issues/) appear to fit well with providing a FOSS email client, as otherwise people are going to go with Google/MS/Apple primarily which moves email in a way that contradicts the aims laid out there.
[Interesting that the Mozilla Foundation use Google for hosting files (eg https://mzl.la/foundation-strategy), seems a bit contradictory.]
For what it's worth, I agree with you this thing is a bad post - it's just a job ad. You can try to divine what Mozilla's Thunderbird plans are from it but that's true for lots of job ads, they're still job ads. An article about Mozilla's actual Thunderbird plans could be a good article, even if it had links to job ads.
I don't know of a rule against job ads in general. I would guess generally such would be mostly just not interesting.
YC company job listings are a special case though, they appear on the front page without voting possibility. This had been the case since the beginning of HN.
Mailpile is interesting because it's trying to give a convenient frontend for encryption. Maybe if encryption had a better UI, more email would be encrypted.
> Can I post a job ad?
> Please don't post job ads as submissions to HN.
> A regular "Who Is Hiring?" thread appears on the first weekday of each month. Most job ads are welcome there. [...]
> The other kind of job ad is reserved for YC-funded startups. [...]
But IMHO this is an special case that deserve an exception. (Usually following the rules the 100% of the time blindly is not optimal.)
This is a very big/popular project, and it is the first hire, so the are changing the internal organization of the developers. (The #87 hire will not be interesting.)
Your post is essentially offtopic. You should submit it as a separate topic.
Maybe now we can finally have the bug fixed where Thunderbird displays random stuff from the email body in the Inbox tree's From and Date fields (instead of the proper envelope sender and MTA timestamp from the Return-Path and final Received headers).
I hope they hire a full-time Firefox developer next. I'm going to upgrade to Quantum (currently my apt-get is holding Firefox 54) as soon as accidentally hitting CTRL-Q instead of CTRL-W on Linux doesn't activate a magical Linux-only hotkey that blows up the whole Firefox browser and looses all of your web-related work.