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Comment by martinald | Hacker News Reader

I have to say I think Mozilla is a complete shambles of an organisation. It must be one of the richest charities in the world with the billions of dollars of commission it earns from search from Google et al.

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.

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I was apprehensive of your comment at first since you start with fierce criticism of Mozilla. But on reflection, I concur that regardless of the high esteem I have for Mozilla generally, it is disconcerting how little attention Thunderbird sees despite its regular use by so many people. I've never agreed with the neglect it has received from Mozilla and, in fact, feel that Mozilla is missing an opportunity to help resuscitate and modernize email.

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).

Desktop native clients will be in declining use, and Mozilla will know this.

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 don't want to discount your experience and preferences. I hear and understand that you are using desktop email less frequently. I use desktop email extensively, and I suspect others do as well.

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.

[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao

I use native Outlook on my Mac for work, connected to an Office 365 mailbox, and whenever I change my password, native Outlook pops up a little webview (instead of native username/password widgets) with our ADFS SAML flow [0]. We use Duo Security as our MFA solution on another SAML IdP we have (not ADFS, but Shibboleth), and I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work within that Outlook webview in the event that we hooked it all up [1]. We also use some native Android/iOS apps (vendor apps, not in-house) where users log in with SAML, and thus could use Duo MFA.

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...

[1] https://duo.com/docs/adfs-30

If MS contiues the way they are going, anyone stuck using Outlook web client and has to do anything mildly advanced, like copy text, will be seeking out a desktop client.

Who says that Thunderbird can't become a mobile app too? Given more developer power, of course.

This is your experience, certainly not representative of any meaningful trends.

Especially since most emails worldwide aren’t decentralized since they rely on centralized webmails. As in, Google and fastmail could decide to swipe you and all proofs you’ve ever saved in your emails from the history. Thunderbird is the last way to download emails (...at least in an open format).

Both Google and fastmail support IMAP (and IIRC POPv3). There are a great _many_ clients (and backup scripts) that support these protocols. In light of this, how is Thunderbird the last way to download emails?

> Thunderbird is the last way to download emails

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.

You can archive your email by using something like this: https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault

Fetchmail?

https://gitlab.com/fetchmail/fetchmail

If you're looking for something like fetchmail, I find fdm to be superior in just about every way: https://github.com/nicm/fdm

Most people use personal email for newsletters and when they forgot their password.

In the professional world, you either use some form of webmail or Outlook.

And here I was thinking I have been a professional developer for last 2 decades. But since I only touched Outlook at the very beginning of my career and still use webmail rarely, I guess I was only fooling myself ;)

Not all professionals are developers.

Your comment is incredibly mean. Mozilla isn't competing with other "charities", they are competing with Google, Apple and Microsoft, the world's largest corporations.

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.

Either TB has been critically underfunded or it hasn’t.

They are not competing against Google, they live mainly from their funding.

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 best way to control your opposition is to organize it.

Perhaps that's the problem. Why are they "competing". Surely the facts of being a charitable organisation should make their focus working for the charitable aims rather than competing with anyone.

>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?

> Why are they "competing"

You should probably read a book on how our economy works.

IMO claws-mail is better than thunderbird for e-mail.

Any specific features you believe makes it better than TB?

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.

What do you mean with non-standard default mail format? Most mail I receive from Claws users seems perfectly fine, which is something you can't say for most other popular MUAs. Outlook and certain web mailers probably being the most egregious examples, only topped by some (thankfully rare) Android vendor mobile apps.

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.

You need to enable a plugin for html mail, but the plugin ships with claws. Up until 2013 the best option was a janky GtkHtml based plugin (about as good as average html e-mail renderings from early 00s, so not good), the current one is webkit based and works great[1]

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...

Excellent, thanks for such a detailed response.

Actually every e-mail client I've used has had its issues, including commercial ones. TB isn't great for composing fancy formatted e-mails; I haven't figured out how to bottom-post such e-mails at all.

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.

Pine is better than Thunderbird at this point.

Perhaps I'll go with mutt again?

You probably should. Unless you manage to find some other, more modern, MUA that you can programmatically integrate with your development workflow and that handles large volumes of mail without slowing to a crawl. Then use that, and please tell me about it.

> It must be one of the richest charities in the world with the billions of dollars of commission it earns from search from Google et al.

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-...

When I read that comment, I thought "I see where you are coming from, but clearly you are exaggerating". Then you left your comment, which claims to disprove it, but has in fact conclusively demonstrated its truth. Mozilla is apparently competing favorably with the 20th largest charity in the entire US?! Yeah: this is like the American Heart Association saying "we finally have managed to allocate one full-time employee to look into the connection between sugar and heart issues" :/.

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".

I was soo ready to agree with GP, in fact I upvoted them, because the rebuttal stands in my opinion (they aren't the richest in the world and they don't make 9 figures), but you are also so very right...

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.

My best guess is that Thunderbird has no internal sponsor: email is not sexy tech - Mozilla is made up of people, and people would rather work on cutting-edge compiler research, "IoT" or the money-maker (Fx).

You're probably right about having no internal sponsor, but I'm sure you could find some people that still find an email client sexy. Old boring tech seems to get some modern, trendy traction every once in awhile; Google Inbox, Sparrow, Airmail. For awhile Twitter clients were pushing the boundaries of UX and recently chat applications seem to have steam.

Firefox makes money for Mozilla. Thunderbird does not. QED.

> with the billions of dollars of commission it earns from search from Google

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".

Perception is reality, and a list of technical reasons why Mozilla won’t modestly support TB fails to impress.

I'm really not sure what you're trying to say.

"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.

This thread is about Mozilla failing to support apps which are crucial but perhaps not profitable, in contrast with their stated values. Tiny amounts in comparison to their other recent failures.

Being “upfront and explicit” doesn’t magically popularize unpopular choices.

This whole comment is incorrect.

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).

When I saw the headline on HN, my first thought was: "Just the one?!"

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.

I had the same initial reaction, but in the post, it says "Since we are looking to fill one or more positions.."

I too believe they are neglecting a significant user base. Thunderbird could be a rock star product for Mozilla with many times more users (if not revenue.) It is very useful now, but the potential is immense.

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.

> 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.

Or was it Jamie who sank the ship?

Is it a charity? It's the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation. Despite some explanations I've received, I've never quite understood how the money flows there. I suppose I could look up their financial statements, but my understanding is that if you donate money to Mozilla, it won't be directly used for developing software.

A charity can't function like a normal business. Income to the charity must be donations, and it's OK to give something of low value back but you can't just "sell" stuff and make money. Hence, "Donate $250 and get this T-shirt".

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 think I'd describe the situation you give as "charities can make and sell stuff for profit but have to structure themselves as owners of a for-profit in order to do so".

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.

Correct. If you donate money it goes directly to the Mozilla Foundation, whereas it is the Mozilla Corporation who hires developers to work on Firefox, etc.

Yes, specially it’s “hourly contract”. Seems a cheap way to do business.

To piggyback off this how does their corporate structure work? Mozilla Foundation, 501(c)(3) owns a for-profit wholly? What is the purpose or advantage of this organization?

501(c)(3) literally means the Mozilla Foundation is tax exempt. That is what the section of the law establishes.

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'm familiar with tax exemption - my question is more surrounding any benefits of the way they're organized. They, for example could just be a benefit corporation. I doubt this would be better as donations would no longer be tax exempt, among other things.

I guess I'm just curious to the pros and cons of the way they're organized as of now.

Mozilla has always reaped a lot of benefits, PR-wise, out of the impression people form when they hear that it's a non-profit.

Are you implying it somehow is meaningfully different? Also, I actually tried asking my technically inclined friends and none of them were aware that Mozilla was a non-profit, to my surprise. So I can’t agree with either your premise or your conclusion.

> Are you implying it somehow is meaningfully different?

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.

> one of the richest charities in the world with the billions of dollars of commission it earns from search from Google et al.

Care to elaborate? Genuinely interested.

IIRC they got at $300m/year for having Google as the search provider in the top right box.

Not only that, but they added a clause to their contract with Yahoo that let them get out of it while still forcing Yahoo to pay if Yahoo was purchased by another company. When Verizon bought Yahoo, Mozilla switched their default search engine back to Google. I believe they're receiving double pay from both search companies for the next year or two.

I remember when the Vz-Yahoo deal was going down, and realizing how all this would play out. That they got that deal, and now are reaping double pay like that...incredible.

Every year(?) all the big search engine providers make an $$$ offer to Mozilla to become the default search engine in Firefox for anyone who newly installs it.

richest charities? not even close? look at ikea.

How is Ikea a charity?

IIRC the brand is owned and licensed by a Dutch organization – legally a charity – created by the founder for tax avoidance purposes.

Yeah it's some blackhole of companies holding each other i don't even know how to picture how all this works without pen and paper.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stichting_INGKA_Foundation

Minute MBA has a really good explanation of their set-up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvxRePIv85Y

Great video, that's genius - good job to the lawyers and financial advisors

The issue is where the MONEY for Mozilla is coming from. It certainly is not from email clients. Firefox is the reason why Mozilla receives so much money, and it is obvious that they want to capitalize and concentrate their efforts on the browser. Considering that they're getting a lot of success on this effort, it is difficult to criticize them for doing this.

> The issue is where the MONEY for Mozilla is coming from. It certainly is not from email clients.

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 Internet is much more than the web - email is a huge part of it.

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).

You must be fun at parties.

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