Thunderbird Pro August 2025 Update | Hacker News Reader

Thunderbird Pro August 2025 Update

blog.thunderbird.net

166 pointsmnmalst72 comments

> These services come with real costs, especially storage and bandwidth. Charging for them helps ensure that users who benefit from these tools help cover their cost, instead of donors footing the bill.

This is the best way to monetize the extra sevices imo.

I don't want their extra services. Just a local email client. I already have servers. Do not want to have to have a "Thunderbird account" in the "cloud", with overreaching terms of service and privacy terms that weaken over time.

Mozilla tried this with "Pocket", then gave up. But as part of Pocket integration, Firefox bookmarks were made less useful. Wonder what will be enshittified in Thunderbird to force people to the "pro" services.

I'm sure you can still go on without the extra services, and you can still donate if you want to.

I see no reason for Thunderbird to be enshitified.

Thunderbird is also not Mozilla anymore.

I agree fully but Thunderbird is operated by MZLA Technologies Corporation, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, so while Thunderbird is part of the broader Mozilla family, it operates independently and is managed as its own entity.

They left Mozilla at some point but later joined again.

And?

And they are still technically somewhat Mozilla indeed (but note this commenter wrote they fully agree with my comment)

Ok? And being Mozilla is a problem why? And what is the alternative and why?

Where did I imply it's a problem? I merely corrected the answer above me which claimed they are "NOT Mozilla anymore".

Please reread carefully. There's actually no disagreement here. You are being too confrontational. I understand why you could be, but you can relax here.

Your reply is dead. None of us two are doing what you say. I'm not hating anybody or anything here, and stating it even less.

There must be some big misunderstanding here.

The other commenter only corrected something I wrote that was technically wrong and I read their comment as quite neutral. And my initial comment was an answer to what actually felt undeserved and misplaced hate. I was pushing back hate.

Yes and that's exactly why they are additional services.

It's like you didn't read the article.

They address exactly that gripe at the end.

  > at the end

Also in the beginning and in the middle.

So don't use/pay for them? Stop manufacturing outrage.

The article is littered with phrases like "optional", "opt-in", "self-host", "For users who prefer to run their own infrastructure", "completely optional suite of (open source) services". How more blatant can they get? Even if your eyes passed over the words I won't believe you if you told me you read the article. It's not reading if you are missing a point that is excessively being shoved in your face.

Funny enough, I'm hitting a 504 when trying to read the article. (Maybe not cached?)

For others: https://archive.is/20250822144210/https://blog.thunderbird.n...

Here’s the link for anyone wanting to join the waitlist for Thundermail (the service):

https://www.thundermail.com/

I really hope this takes off well and provides some funding for the Thunderbird project too. Currently the only way to monetarily support Thunderbird is through donations (https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/ ).

> [...] support Thunderbird is through donations

I doubt donations to MZLA Technologies Corporation will reach the Thunderbird project in any meaningful way.

They'll just use it to pay their executive salaries.

Or support radical activist groups unrelated to software or technology.

Absolutely bonkers.

Like?

Source: https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...

I know people here don’t like Bryan Lunduke, but besides the opinions added, this is factual, sourced reporting.

That kinda proves they would spend it on executive salaries. As the spend on "radical groups" in the article is almost nothing compared to salaries of their management.

This article is from 2023. Recent years they’ve gone into decolonisation, Marxism, anti-capitalism and afro-centrism as well, just to mention a few.

No doubt though that the increase in executive salaries has been way beyond criticism as well.

Their finances seems a total mess and completely hijacked.

Perhaps factual - I can't say.

But it's a different company. EOM.

> I doubt donations to MZLA Technologies Corporation will reach the Thunderbird project in any meaningful way.

You are basing this statement on what data?

https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate is managed by MZLA, it has one open source product, Thunderbird. We pay a required Thunderbird trademark fee to the Mozilla Foundation and little more than that, which is captured in https://stats.thunderbird.net/#financials.

Great to see Thunderbird sponsoring the previous fork of Firefox Send[0]. I employed that for a short time and thoroughly enjoyed it!

[0] https://gitlab.com/timvisee/send

I've used Thunderbird ever since it was released as a standalone mail client and like it - although it has sometimes been a rocky experience in the past. I use it now with Fastmail as my mail provider.

One thing I might be interested in is the "contacts" side of mail. In an effort to move away from too much Google, I ditched Google Contacts and host my own CardDAV using "Radicale" [0]. This works, and I also access it via DAVx on Android.

But would a CardDAV server be something worthwhile via Thundermail? Or perhaps too small a service itself? Maybe part of their scheduling tool "Appointment"? I might prefer having this hosted elsewhere than in my house.

[0] https://radicale.org/v3.html

Is there a reason why you don’t use FastMail’s CalDav server ?

https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000278342-Se...

And CardDAV too:

https://www.fastmail.com/blog/carddav-your-contacts-everywhe...

I had to think to recall the reason. I had a support ticket at Fastmail about this in 2024 - I wanted to host my own CardDAV server and have Fastmail use and sync to this. This was not possible - I was told that two-way sync with other services was a "calendar only feature". I might re-visit.

Do you like Thunderbird better than Fastmail’s UI?

I’ve always felt TB to be clunky, outdated with an ecosystem of abandoned extensions that haven’t been updated since GMail got popular, but I haven’t tried it in the last 3 years to see if it got better.

If you want to have your email offline, you must use an application built for that. Thunderbird has its shortcomings but it does actually do the job. Web user interfaces have their place (such as on phones, which make development harder), but there is no replacing the desktop email client.

Fair, though in this day and age I find being offline is quite a rare event, and when it happens (I’m driving in the middle of nowhere), I don’t need my emails.

I’ll give TB another try. Web apps always feel terrible.

It's not about being away from the internet (for me), it's about keeping my data on my own machine. I'm still trying to figure out how to delete everything from the server and still have my own copy. But that is kind of a niche requirement these days. It's better for everything to stay available on the server, usually.

I find this totally reasonable. I think it's a good way to fund open source. I just hope this doesn't create any perverse incentives to make self hosting harder than necessary

I am still waiting for the announced redesign in 2022 [0] :-)

[0]: https://www.omglinux.com/major-thunderbird-redesign-early-lo...

It's such a shame that what was shipped there was so far off what the designs had suggested might be possible [1]

Two years ago we were told:

> We're going to build it right, and that means rewriting large pieces of our codebase. We'll ship the remaining stuff when they are ready.

I'm not sure how much more of the designs have actually been realised since then?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36664515

> No menus

> Cryptic icons with no text

> Optimised for looking good on a screenshot and not for actual user interaction

No thanks :)

Indeed, and 16:9 monitors are passé already.

Someone should really make a UI where three black lines is a skewmorphic grippy surface (like you see on steps sometimes) to move the window around, just to mess with the hamburger menu devotees.

It's mostly already available, just not the default: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/08/make-thunderbird-yours-...

I followed the steps in that blog post and was able to mostly get there. I have a bit less padding between folders than the mock-up showed (which seems like a theme thing rather than a configuration item), and I don't have profile pictures in the message list.

I really wish we could make uniformity a trend again. GTK has basically made it a rule that applications must do whatever the heck they want.

Then next day I'm using Inkscape on a Mac. Cmd-A on the canvas selects all elements. Cmd-A in a text field selects all elements on the canvas - and whatever text was in the field, now applies to the selection, so I start typing and instantly get garbage.

How do you Select All in a text field? Ctrl-A of course! - On the only system that has a non-broken copy/paste in the terminal.

I guess props to Thunderbird for leaving some space on the title bar to drag the window around? Do not take it for granted.

Thunderbird is technically rendered with GTK on Linux, but is mostly written using web tech. They are mostly not GTK, I'm don't think GTK is even involved on Windows for instance (don't know about Mac). For this reason, I doubt they will follow everything gtk Gnome does.

I hope we'll see them set up as an Identity Provider for oAUTH/SAML/OpenID/whatever other stupid plethora of single-sign-on protocols there are. It's disappointing to always see Facebook and Google for single-sign-on providers, never a privacy-respecting OSS org.

> The upcoming email hosting service from Thunderbird will support IMAP, SMTP and JMAP out of the box

Ahh, will Thunderbird finally see full JMAP support? Hooray!

For the self-hosters (other than those using Stallwart):

Cyrus does, of course, support JMAP (it's what Fastmail uses); Dovecot has apparently no interest / no manpower to really implement it themselves, but are willing to take a contribution[0].

One day I am going to configure Cyrus just for JMAP.

[0]: https://dovecot.org/mailman3/archives/list/dovecot@dovecot.o...

The Thunderbird Pro Add-on Repo [1] doesn't really make it clear - if I want to self host Appointment and Send, do I need to build the addon myself and change the endpoints? Or is there some kind of config?

1. https://github.com/thunderbird/tbpro-add-on

site down, archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250822103720/https://blog.thun...

Site works for me but a backup link can't hurt.

Previous thread on the initial product announcement,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43560885 ("Mozilla launching “Thundermail” email service to take on Gmail, Microsoft 365 (techradar.com)"—4 months ago, 341 comments)

> The upcoming email hosting service from Thunderbird will support IMAP, SMTP and JMAP out of the box

Is there any email hosting out there with support for JMAP?

Fastmail has had it for a while.

I'd hope so, they kinda made it :)

AFAIK, only Fastmail (which was the creator of JMAP).

Also https://stalw.art/

Stalwart is a mail server program, not a live email server you can pay someone money to use.

One can of course use Stalwart to run a hosted email service.

https://stalw.art/managed-email/

> Let us handle the complexities of your email infrastructure with our comprehensive managed email server service.

That's fair! I didn't know they were offering that. I think it's a recent development -- it's not generally available ("contact us"), and it seems more focused at enterprise-type deployments than end-user mail that your typical Fastmail/Protonmail/etc.

But for the original question:

> Is there any email hosting out there with support for JMAP?

Stalwart really isn't a practical answer, at least yet.

Thundermail uses Stalwart

I much prefer POP, as I only send and receive emails on my desktop computer and I want to decide when I fetch new emails. Is there any way to make IMAP work more like POP?

Just disable any automatic fetching. IMAP is not pushing mails to you, but the client regularly pulls.

fdm, imapsync, lots of similar alternatives. Synchronize email to your machine and then use any MUA, or even several of them, to read it from a local directory (Thunderbird also works AFAIK).

They can also remove email from the remote and keep just the local copy. Pretty much 1:1 with POP. I've been using this setup (with fdm) for probably more than a decade.

I would hope this starts building momentum outside of Fastmail and maybe we see support added to clients like Apple Mail

The @thundermail.com domain name is pretty solid. The domain name is an underrated aspect of email services IMO.

Any info on pricing for Thundermail?

I haven't seen any information on that.

I wonder if there's a plan to prevent the spam/malware/csam issues of the previous iteration of Send. Maybe that it's a paid service will help stop that?

Is this the first confirmation we have that the Thunderbird app will be getting JMAP support since Thundermail will support it?

gateway timeout :\

I actually really like this. Seems like a good way to sustain the platform. Everything is free and open source, so you can run all the services on your own if you want, but allows users to pay to outsource that work and get direct support. Sounds a lot like the Red Hat model, which has been successful. I also *absolutely love* how transparent they are about future development. It's nice to hear about what features are being prioritized and what are still in the planning phase. I wish this was more common.

I like that everything is optional. Nothing is forced on people. I know Mozilla gets these complaints a lot and while there is some validity to them it's not like this also isn't true about any other platform... Plus, most complaints are about optional things...

I'd love to see integration with Relay[0]. I already use this as it is a big help to reduce spam. Integrate with bitwarden and I can give every website a unique email and password. I hate that this is a thing that needs be done, but it is a big help and worth 2 beers a year.

I've actually always been surprised more people don't use Thunderbird. It's got problems, but I've had fewer problems with it than GMail, Apple Mail, or Outlook. Some "features" on those platforms even feel hostile[1]. Hell, just the filtering capabilities make a massive improvement[1]. I mean there's of junk mail I catch this way that none of the other services do. I'm all for advanced spam filtering but come on, if I can catch it with "[To or CC] + [contains] + [<name>]" then you've done fucked up[3].

[0] https://relay.firefox.com/

[1] I never understood how people fall for those Paypal bitcoin scams until I saw one of those emails on my iPhone (and then checked Apple Mail to see if it was the same). Straight up rendered the PDF in browser giving no indication that it was a PDF and not text (GMail doesn't do this). I mean I don't have a Paypal account but I could see how my grandma could fall for that. Plus, they hide the addresses where in thunderbird this is much more apparent.

[2] One favorite filter is those "logged in from a new device". I get the toast notification on my machine (which I want) but it gets pushed to another folder so doesn't litter my inbox. Similar idea for other things like newsletters and email that borderlines junk (or is literal junk and hard to capture).

[3] These are LLM generated emails where the source is drastically different from what renders. Google support just told me to click "Report Spam" despite me telling them I've been doing that for a year and get these emails a few times a month...

I'm hoping this doesn't mean that "regular" Thunderbird will be phased out. :-/

This is about the Thundermail service - not the email client.

Adding these additional subscription services will never compromise the features, stability or functionality our users are accustomed to in the free Thunderbird desktop and mobile applications. These services come with real costs, especially storage and bandwidth. Charging for them helps ensure that users who benefit from these tools help cover their cost, instead of donors footing the bill.

> Adding these additional subscription services will never compromise the features, stability or functionality our users are accustomed to in the free Thunderbird desktop and mobile applications.

Has this been true ever?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com