Help Keep Thunderbird Alive | Hacker News Reader

Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

updates.thunderbird.net

579 pointsplayfultones392 comments

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.

When you're shopping for a paid product, you're generally trying to minimize your costs (while balancing quality). When you're donating to a free product, you're actually trying to maximize the effectiveness of your donation. If you were simply trying to minimize your cost/benefit ratio, you would donate nothing. Clearly there is a totally different mentality at play.

Consider it also from the recipient's perspective. Their benefactors are more likely to donate more money when they believe it will be put to good use. It's a complicated messaging problem, but being vague is probably not in your best interest.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One look at where donations to "keep Wikipedia free!" wind up should explain all of that for you.

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.

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.

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.

Because of the misuse of funds given to the Mozilla Foundation and Wikimedia Foundation.

When I pay money to buy food I don't need to ask how the shop is going to use that money: I gave money, I got food.

If I am going to donate money to a company/NGO that wants to buy food for poor people, of course I am interested in knowing how much of that money is going to salaries, how much into activities of sort, and how much in actually feeding people.

The most recent report/breakdown I see:

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-...

I have the same beef with the Signal Foundation. A few years ago, I engaged with the new CEO when she was soliciting donations and asked whether they were going to publish any kind of high-level feature roadmap. I explained that there were a few features I was really looking forward to, and that I’d even written some code that might help expedite them getting rolled in. She told me that stuff like publishing roadmaps takes time and resources they don’t have.

https://x.com/Cowmix/status/1597636735688900608

Gah!

> 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 mean, as I've somewhat said above, I do donate to Mozilla for a direct-but-big reason. Overall, I find their work VERY important. I acknowledge that they've never been perfect, but I've watched what they've done for 20-30 years and strongly trust that generally, they're doing good things with my money because that's what they've been doing.

Thunderbird, separate from Mozilla, I don't think has that to rely on. That does feel more like "why should I give money to this project that (for me) has been pretty mid at maintaining a popular piece of software?"

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.

I’ve used it since it was called Netscape Mail. ;-)

> 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?)

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've been using TB for a decade and I too can't find anything better (even if my use case is very simple).

However, I find TB's development very misguided - it's evident to me that they give very little priority to stability:

- addons support (APIs) is a dumpster fire, and IMO a large addon ecosystem is what makes a client unique

- not so long ago, they added an instant messaging client, which has been a waste of dev resources

- at some point they overhauled the UI, but the result was a bloated slow mess (on some platforms), even with broken defaults

- there are bugs open for at least a decade (I consistently hit one)

It gives me the impression that the management prioritizes work that looks good on a screenshot, rather than stability.

I think it'd be positive if the Thunderbird org shut down. There are more pragmatic teams who could take over the project (see Betterbird).

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.

lol, kind of expected someone would notice... it's my personal mail and I don't get much. In my experience, it's better for low volume. I just connect, download, delete it from the server and have it in an easily readable format. I keep my archives from the 90's with no issues.

>Thunderbird seems to be somehow apart from Mozilla now

Source?

Thunderbird is owned by Mozilla ... if I donate, my money goes to Mozilla.

CEO of MZLA (the Mozilla entity that develops Thunderbird). One point of clarification, we don't get money from any source but our donors. After years of funding issues, MZLA was created by the Mozilla Foundation and the Thunderbird Council (our community governance body), to provide a legal/financial home for Thunderbird.

Launching Thundermail this year (an email service) which we hope to help provide even more funds for development, beyond just donations. Also serving a user need (lots of our users ask us to help them get off Gmail).

Lots of interest in how the money is spent - answer: mostly on devs, landed Exchange support recently (big for a lot of MS users), working on Graph support as well, JMAP after that. Updating the calendar (primarily UX/UI there), continuing to improve our Android app, working on a native iOS app and the aforementioned Thundermail service.

We publish yearly reports and will publish one again this year detailing all this.

Here is a 2025 recap: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/12/thunderbird-2025-review...

But the blog has a ton of updates across the different efforts: https://blog.thunderbird.net

Happy to answer questions and we are an open source project so feel free to reach out to us and engage if you really want to see how the sausage is made!

*Edit: More context on what Thunderbird Council is*

Since most of the people here who seem wary about how their donation is getting spent, I have a feeling that "mostly on devs" probably won't cut it for them, though I assume it's true. Have you considered doing any sort of year end cost reporting where you show percentages of what money went where? If it's going where you say it is I think making that information transparent would be a free win. (I know there would be some level of effort constructing the report but I also have to assume you already have reports like this internally)

> Have you considered doing any sort of year end cost reporting

That very much exists, and is issued yearly.

Consolidated Financial Statements 2024-2023:

https://stateof.mozilla.org/pdf/Mozilla%20Fdn%202024%20-%20A...

Expenses in Software Development (2024):

> 290,448,000

Total Expenses (2024):

> 588,215,000

Ryan Sipes, if you can read this, everybody online remembers the 2020 Servo team lay-offs, and the juxtaposition of the C level compensation.

If you are serious about winning back donors and trust:

- Allow for a transparent breakdown of expenses on things like external consultancy and also C level compensation

- Allow financial ring-fencing of donations. Such that my donation can only finance Firefox devs or Thunderbird devs. (Not teams, not products, not managers/VPs/Directors just developers. Everyone else's compensation should come from corporate donations or other means)

I love Firefox and Thunderbird, use both everyday, was also a yearly donor up to 2020 (now I just donate to Archive.org and KDE).

You have great products that people love but if you are serious about gaining back trust you need to show judicious spending on the top side of the org. Justifying it with we need to spend money to get fundraisers doesn't pass the community test.

That's Mozilla-wide and includes the Mozilla Corporation and other entities.

We have 2023-2024 reporting via these two links:

https://stats.thunderbird.net/#financials

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2024/10/thunderbird-annual-repo...

We need to update the ratio for 2025, but it shouldn't be dramatically different.

You cannot simultaneously increase the percentage of donations going to directly paying "just developers" while decreasing the percentage going to admin costs. Who will be responsible for implementing this ring-fencing of donations, if not precisely the non-developers you'd like them to spend less on?

We still need to produce a big report like this for 2025. But you can find MZLA specific info for 2024 and 2023 via the below links:

https://stats.thunderbird.net/#financials

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2024/10/thunderbird-annual-repo...

As a user from Germany, it would help a lot if you could provide an IBAN to send you money in EUR directly. These payment providers all take a cut and what ends up being used for recurring donations is SEPA direct debit, which costs me about 10€ if my account ever happens do be too low to take the charge. Please make a way around supporting this ecosystem of banking with every donation!

Thundermail is a great idea! I'd be more than happy to switch over assuming the migration path from say Gmail, Fastmail, etc was easy enough, and it supported custom domains.

>Thundermail is a great idea!

I think the synergy part is what is great here. Imagine thundermail is a FOSS server app. Imagine they implement things like proof-of-work for senders, and no PoW means the mail goes into a quarantine instead of directly in the user's inbox. That could fight spam, without the centralization and loss of privacy we've had in email. That hasn't happened now, because of the chicken-egg problem. There's no client that supports it because there's no server that supports it because there's no client that supports it.

Thunderbird is a very big client. It could push email forward like nothing before. I may give Thundermail a try. I'd much rather self-host a Thundermail server... one that works around the port 25 block on every residential IP. Maybe my self hosted instance could receive messages relayed from the "real" thundermail server on something other than port 25.

Also the Thundermail service is based on Stalwart (completely foss). We'll open source any additional relevant bits.

We also released the supporting services:

https://github.com/thunderbird/appointment

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

https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-accounts

Will support custom domains out of the box. Getting real close to launch. Join waitlist at https://thundermail.com

Is unlimited email aliases (with or without custom domains) also on the roadmap?

I can see switching from gmail, but it would have to be really compelling to get me to switch from Fastmail.

What would get you to switch from Fastmail?

Thanks for posting here. This information is helpful.

I strongly encourage you to provide that information on the page asking for donations. Even if it's just one sentence with a link and even if it doesn't fit with Mozilla's corporate policies.

We still need to produce a big report like this for 2025. But you can find MZLA specific info for 2024 and 2023 via the below links:

https://stats.thunderbird.net/#financials

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2024/10/thunderbird-annual-repo...

> CEO of MZLA (the Mozilla entity that develops Thunderbird).

Was it really too hard to say "I am the" or add "here" at the end? Instead we get this lazy "words hard less wrds good" manner of speaking.

Why use many word when few word do trick.

I meant to have a "here" at the end, just typed while excited. Typically known for using too many words.

I've been using Thunderbird exclusively for as long as I can remember (Internet user since '92).

I don't understand why they make it so hard to donate anonymously. I actually found their IBAN (DE05 5123 0500 0500 2158) on the Google results page, not on the page it linked to.

Annoying.

I've been trying to use Exchange support at work but there's an ongoing problem that the OAuth login screen can't display PIN prompts for things like Yubikeys.

So I'd love to use the feature, but modern corporate auth defeats it currently.

I'd love to know more about what you are hitting. Care to open a bug then ping me back here? I'll put it in front of the right people.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Thunderbi...

With "Graph support" you mean "Microsoft Graph API"?

That's right. We've long had Microsoft account users across Exchange, Office365 and Outlook.com complain about having issues using Thunderbird. So we're trying to account for all protocols from MS.

Excited about Thundermail!

You could convince me to switch from gmail but I'm not sure I would switch from Proton to thundermail.

Protonmail = privacy at all costs. Thundermail = freedom at all costs (open standards, use w/ whatever client you want, upload your own encryption key and "go dark")

I assume if I upload my own key, the receiver of the emails needs to also have my key? I'm not necessarily trying to send encrypted emails to people. I would want zero-access encryption which means not even Thundermail knows what my emails are.

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-...

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).

Mozilla also runs hiring and HR for MZLA. They control who gets hired and fired.

It is more like money laundering, than independent entity.

They are a wholly owned subsidiary. They're separate from Firefox, not Mozilla.

To be more clear: * MZLA are a subsidiary of Mozilla FOUNDATION * MZLA are separate from Mozilla CORPORATION aka Firefox

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 used to be a pretty heavy NNTP user... at some point, while it was largely left to rot, NNTP features themselves became much harder to use... the fact that the leading button on posts now "reply" is an email to the author of a post, instead of a response post is beyond me, and changing the behavior got worse release after release.

The fact that they haven't invested in anything resembling a companion set of services for shared calendar/contacts is also a heavy pain point in contrast to the use of GMail or Outlook/M365/Exchange. If they had offered hosted email/calendar/contacts alone as a monetization option, they could have done so well ahead of GMail or M365 options and could still do so and under-cut them... having an open-core suite just for communications.

They've left a lot of options out there to die... they effectively had Electron a few decades before Electron was a thing. XulRunner was pretty nice to use, and they just left it to die... it got worse over time and just stopped seeing updates. All the while, the charity org and business org just kept spinning their wheels and basically throwing money away... for decades now.

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.

I used to maintain a mailbox in dropbox that tended to work across my mac, linux and windows environments... it was pretty great... at some point a few incompatible releases across the environments broke everything and had other bugs that I could no longer revert from. I pretty much haven't touched it in a while.

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)?

People that want shared/server contacts/calendars that actually work.

I have to say that I am blissfully unaware of them, perhaps due to ublock?

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 my own domain with Gmail

https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1g0m0um/how_to_set_up... is what I did.

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.

Gmail uses stupid amounts of memory, and the web version on iOS is so terrible it's got to be deliberate. The key problem is that they override scroll behavior such that scrolling intents are often registered as clicks, then they reset scroll position on back, the combo of which makes it almost unusable if what you're doing involves scrolling your mail list at all.

They used to still offer "basic HTML" gmail, which was waaaaaay better all around and was the only way I used it on any platform, but they discontinued that some time back.

I don't like their UI either, that's why I'm using the Mac/iPhone Mail app.

> 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?

Basically the IRS is highly skeptical of the idea that free software development fits the legal definition of a 501(c)(3), and tends to reject such applications [1][2]. That is why Mozilla Foundation cannot use donations for Firefox development, and instead uses them for activism.

So that creates the strange situation where legally it is easier for free software developers to accept donations as a for-profit corporation than as a 501(c)(3) non-profit. It is possible to instead incorporate as a not-for-profit corporation which doesn't have the tax advantages of a 501(c)(3), but does have the advantage of not being beholden to share holders. However, many people react negatively to this assuming that any not-for-profit that isn't a 501(c)(3) is a scam.

[1] https://www.stradley.com/business-vantage-point-blog/irs-con...

[2] https://www.mill.law/blog/more-501c3-rejections-open-source-...

I am the CEO of MZLA (the Thunderbird entity). This is a large part of the reason. ^

Nice insight and links. I wonder how Hack Club (501(c)(3)) does it.

What percentage of their money do they spend on developers? If it is more than 50% on "non-charitable activities" (of which software development is not considered) - they may be on the wrong side of the IRS.

Meanwhile, Ladybird succeeded at getting this status[1] (as “charitable”, not even “educational”—huh?). Would be interesting to know what they did differently.

[1] https://ladybird.org/organization/#tax-exemption

@pavon, spot on.

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.

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.)

My understanding is the for-profit structure was necessary in order to be able to do the search licensing deals finance Firefox.

Not that it answers your question, but the move happened in 2020 to "hire more easily, act more swiftly, and pursue ideas that were previously not possible".

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/

So here more than 6 years later, did they act more swiftly or pursue new ideas? The development pace seems unbearably slow.

Judging from the side it seems like there aren't a lot of developers and the current few have their favorite subsystems, those get almost all of the attention. The rest is kept as-is and does not progress. I also don't know if there's a trivial way to find how many external contributions they get from BugZilla, if they even get any?

Total mail UI/UX overhaul, total backend overhaul allowing implementation of new protocols (first new protocol was Exchange), an Android app and monthly release cadence vs yearly. And that's just to name the ones that immediately come to mind. Have plenty of users yelling at us for changing too much.

Take a look at https://blog.thunderbird.net for a play-by-play. But we're doing a helluva lot.

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.

They could EASILY have had and still could have a companion service for free/hosted email/calendar/contacts. It could even have an open implementation for "open-source" private hosting. Could be a great alternative to the enshittified Outlook/M365 even. Could pretty readily undercut alternatives and still be profitable.

At least as a point of funding the open-source work.

Please no. The Mozilla Foundation has lost their way. I don't want them messing with my favorite email client.

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!

The breaking changes, broken extensions and other bugs stopped me from using it altogether... I still have it on my phone (that version is based on K9 though), but long ago stopped using the shared dropbox profile. The profile rolled forward a version and I could no longer revert to an older version because of bugs in the app itself.

I used to love Thunderbird... I also used it a lot with BBS centric NNTP hosts... at some point those features largely broke as well, and extensions to correct the behavior fell farther and farther behind as well.

The lack of a good calendar/contacts server solution is also a massive pain point imo.

> 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?

Thunderbird lives in an entity called MZLA, created by Mozilla and the Thunderbird Council (the elected open source community leadership) to be the legal and financial home to Thunderbird.

MZLA, which I lead, receives only money via donations from donors. We are a for-profit because the IRS is very skeptical of nonprofits who develop FOSS software (someone down below linked to a bunch of great links on this topic). We, do, however publish tons of information on what we are doing on our blog, and we are open source and a community run project, so if you really want to go deep on this - come join us in making Thunderbird.

Great links:

https://blog.thunderbird.net

https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/participate/

MZLA is owned by the FOUNDATION.

However, MZLA is self funded.

Is "half a billion dollars in yearly revenue" still synonymous with "half a billion dollars in funding from Google" or did they pivot? Are mozilla still trying to reimagine themselves as an ad tech company?

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...

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...

>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...

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.

I installed Thunderbird for the first time in a couple of decades recently. My impression was that it's very feature rich but also quite ugly and not friendly to new users. It comes with a lot of assumptions about what the user wants to do and how, and I found myself having to use cheats and workarounds from the outset. I wanted to import a batch of disparate .eml files that had been seperately exported, and after 15 minutes I was starting to think it might have been easier to just do it in Python.

I also didn't care for the tabbed panels, which make it feel as if the entire thing was just ported from a browser. It really needs some fresh design and user interface work.

Most of the smashing up and disfiguration of a perfectly good interface, uglification, waste and breakage of both data and compatibility were introduced in a rewrite 2023 ostensibly aiming for "fresh" design and user interface work.

I'd heed the call for donation simply for returning to pre-2023 design with up-to-date security patches. As it is, maybe it's merciful if development just comes to a standstill. Almost every visible step lately seems to move in the wrong direction.

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.

I like those two comments giving context on what has happened 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46118243 (parent and child comment).

Don't be so harsh on them. (\s) They show lots of willpower and some sort of vision when talking about AI in Firefox.

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.

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.

like all Big Tech

Except this "big tech" larper is supposedly fully owned by a nonprofit.

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.

> ... it's like 1% of their annual revenue ...

There's something about this specific part that doesn't sit well with me.

It's like justifying a huge salary for the president of a charity because they receive millions a year in donations and revenue from charity shops... it's just wrong.

7 million (assuming that's the correct value) is a lot of money. Perhaps not as much as they'd make at Google, but a lot of money nonetheless. And Mozilla is supposed to be a non-profit, with a good mission, with a manifesto, in a David vs Goliath struggle... but the CEO still makes millions, even when cuts are being made those working on the main mission?

The bar for Mozilla is different because they present themselves as being different. Multi-million salaries is what you expect from regular companies, not from good non-profits, and I think that's why the CEO's salary always comes up in these discussions.

With all this said, I also agree with the point about some of the criticism. Nothing Mozilla does pleases everyone, there's always something. It's a hard position to be in.

> urgently need to innovate to grow their revenue streams

No, people are saying that Firefox needs to diversify their revenue streams because almost all of their revenue comes from their main competitor who (likely) only keeps Firefox alive to keep regulators from forcing them to divest their browser. The situation has gotten more dire since the regulators got fired last year.

>and typical for positions like that

That's the problem. CEOs get paid so much more than everyone else while typically not providing value commensurate with their pay.

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.

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

Thunderbird is in a different company. Doesn't get any Google money. Only funded by donations.

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 :-)

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.

I'd donate to have Mozilla raise Thunderbird to second class.

Good point…

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.

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.

> 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!

I've seen cases where people have it set up like that and it's so awfully slow. Minutes to display a single new message. That cloud brings absolutely zero user-benefit.

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.

< It all seems totally insane.

This is Microsoft we're talking about, right?

The online university I'm attending has something similar set up where third party Exchange client support is disabled, making official Outlook client usage non-optional.

It's very frustrating and I can't think of a valid reason to configure things this way.

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/

Would be very nice if the wait-list included pricing, given that it's apparently here enough to have a sign-in link.

To be fair, "Give for TB awareness" has a nice ring to it...

I think email is one of the few critical services that takes a lot of effort to get it right. I'd rather have them take a while to ensure it is reliable rather than have a buggy mess on launch day.

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?

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)

>- $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.

Credit where it’s due: I just rechecked the page and they no longer hijack the back button.

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.

Thought the same..

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.

Stealing the function of the back button is a dark pattern.

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.

As of late 2024, Thunderbird was doing well financially.[1] About $8 million a year in donations, most spent on developers. What went wrong?

It's basically in maintenance mode. Are they trying to add features nobody really wants to justify their existence, like Mozilla?

[1] https://chipp.in/news/thunderbird-financials-doing-really-we...

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?

1. $0. 2. Probably close to 100%.

Probably nothing. It is the Firefox revenue that pays her unreasonable salary.

If you want to donate, I suggest you look at the Betterbird fork: https://www.betterbird.eu/

Why mozilla doesn't approach a similar strategy with firefox? I see with thunderbid most of the recent focus is in making the product better and the raising of the funding it's focused on user donations. With Firefox the focus is not in making the product better and instead on adding useless features, and the raising of funding is focused in advertising and random quests not related to the browser

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.

Yes. But this is not clever stuff. I'd expect the most simple-minded Bayesian filter to identify it.

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

To be honest while I’m not the biggest fan of Thunderbird I struggle to understand how this is true by any measure.

The program is pretty much the same as it was in 2010 from a UI standpoint.

My biggest complaints with it are that the profile configuration is not portable, and that the UI is too cluttered with features. I just want something simple that does all the important stuff and remains somewhat powerful.

I just use geary, it's less annoying and does the job

team geary needs more love. geary works well for most day to day tasks with no showstopping bugs.

> 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.

Please provide an alternative then.

I still use Thunderbird but on my Linux system that I just set up I would like to try something else.

Some options appear in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/software/comments/17r3twi/best_wind...

If you’re doing a new install and are generally fine with Thunderbird, Betterbird is a good option. It has additional good stuff that Thunderbird is lacking or took longer to get implemented/fixed.

What I don’t like about Thunderbird is that the profiles aren’t portable. It seems like every Thunderbird install is its own unique mess. I’d love to find something that allowed me to move the same configuration around between computers and platforms. I’m not sure if that exists.

I like how Thunderbird has the ability to handle mail, calendar, and contacts, but the implementation especially for calendar leaves a lot to be desired.

My favorite clients are Apple Mail/Calendar for their simplicity and being local-first clients but I’m using macOS less and less these days.

The “new outlook” that’s offered by Microsoft to consumers for free seems to be creepy and syncs your emails to Microsoft servers even if you’re using a third party client.

I’d also say you only need a truly local client if you have multiple email addresses. If you have just one email, let’s say you’re with FastMail or something, their web mail and mobile/desktop apps are great.

Thank you. Am moving away from Outlook and Thunderbird is my default option. Betterbird looks promising, so I'll give it a try (or some of the ones in the thread)

Just don’t expect Betterbird to be way different than Thunderbird. It is better but if you don’t like Thunderbird fundamentally I’d keep looking.

It’s way more work but this subject got me thinking about the idea of self-hosting the all in one nextcloud suite.

For Windows the pickings are unfortunately slim. On Apple platforms I use Mail.app which has done its job quite well for decades but as of yet haven't found analogues for Windows and Linux.

Under Linux, Geary once held promise but has long since stagnated and is too basic.

I've tried so many while doing a bit of research into MUAs and I can't say there are any alternatives that could replace it properly. But depending on your usage or if you're not a demanding user, there might be something out there.

As far as I know there isn't one. Maybe Evolution if they have managed to fix all the bugs it used to have. it is a sad state of affairs that we have so few useful email clients.

Outlook Express

[]->

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.

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.

How many more donations until we get a functional UI like we used to have, and a system tray icon on Linux?

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.

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.

It appears to belong to another subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation: MZFO GERMANY GMBH, which would be subject to German, not US, law.

I tried for a long time to work with Thunderbird, but what kept bothering me was that I couldn’t simply define keyboard shortcuts. In the end, I landed on AERC and created my own extreme Vim-style keyboard configuration (the idea is to look at the list of mails like looking at a buffer in vim) for it. I’ve never been this fast when it comes to email.

https://aerc-mail.org/ https://github.com/rafo/aerc-vim

I'm gonna say it: we need to build a Thunderbird replacement. It's got too much technical debt. It can't convert new users. We need something that does.

I really don’t understand the structure that Mozilla has setup here where Thunderbird lives under their for-profit branch, but is so dependent on donations. I remember reading they were considering charging for Thunderbird services when the move was announced 6 years ago, but as far as I can tell, nothing has happened and they’re still desperate for funding.

Now not only does it still need donations, the tax exemption for donors has evaporated. Great.

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.

What was the source of this link OP? A monthly newsletter?

Either way, they have more information on their donate page as well as a whole knowledge base set of pages:

https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/#faq

https://give.thunderbird.net/hc/en-us

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

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.

Fineprint says it's Stripe. My (european) credit card worked fine.

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.

Is there still no way to export and import your filters in Thunderbird? This is why I shunned it 20 years ago. The absurd idea that you're going to manually run around to all your computers all the time and manually set up (and maintain) mail filters should have been rejected in version 1.0.

Filters are stored in a file which you can easily copy between computers: https://kb.mozillazine.org/Message_Filters#Export.2FImport

Thanks. But expecting end users to go online and perform a search to find out where the filters are stored on their platform (or platforms, if the source and destination are different) and copy them is pretty inexcusable at this point.

I don't understand the opposition to filter import/export.

I recently started using Thunderbird for work which uses O365 (horrific service) for mail. I've found that 2FA with O365 to be totally unreliable no matter the client, even using the iOS app.

Does anyone use Thunderbird with Gmail and 2FA, and does it work correctly 100% of the time there?

The law of Software Envelopment. Jamie Zawinski in 1995 stated that "software inevitably expands to include email functionality, or it is replaced by software that does"

Clearly, that's not the case anymore. Nowadays you just swap out "email" for "LLM"

In this thread, a bunch of people complaining about an open source app not asking for donations the right way but will be the first people to ask "Why didn't they stick a donate button on the website" or "they should have asked for money!"

when i used windows i was happy with The Bat email client: https://www.ritlabs.com/en/products/thebat/download.php

we're still waiting for macOS version of The Bat!, which was promised years ago.

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."

I don't see anyone mentioning Betterbird here. I use that instead of Thunderbird. But it really baffles me that even in Betterbird, the ability to star an email exist but not a way to show all the starred emails.

In Thunderbird's message list, you can bring all the starred emails to the top by sorting on the star column. Just click on the column header.

Also, in the Quick Filter, you can click the star button to "Show only starred messages".

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.

em Client has no Linux version though?

Not having a Linux version in 2026 is ridiculous.

"If you get value from Thunderbird"

I'm reading this and I'm feeling like, maaan, I wish you hadn't asked me that.

So, compare to Mozilla (which apparently they're not with anymore?) I actively use Firefox and probably more importantly, I remain very impressed with their ability to try to keep up with the times. They do fail at this sometimes, but over 20-30 years, that track record is solid.

Thunderbird? Ugh. I want it to be good, but I'm not so sure there's much of a point here anymore. My line in the sand was different colored multiple accounts which was trivially easy and then one day wasn't; moreover AI is really killing them there for me (in terms of taking something old like Claws or Neomutt and very easily customizing it a way that was too much of a pain before)

I was about to donate $5 until I saw the minimum is $7 CAD. What?

I have donated ... multiple times. I wish there was a way to keep the "Please Donate" from popping up if we have donated within the last N days, weeks, months, etc.

>I have donated ... multiple times. I wish there was a way to keep the "Please Donate" from popping up if we have donated within the last N days, weeks, months, etc.

Just to be clear, you're asking for Thunderbird to track all of its users and link them to the dates of payment, payment amounts and payment methods of all of its donors on all of their platforms so that you don't see a pop up once or twice a year? Is that correct?

I'm not being snarky here, but AFAICT you really didn't think that through.

How about a local option being able to opt out of fundraising popups instead? No tracking required. Perhaps you might file a feature request for either of the above?

I'd be more likely to donate if they kept it like it was 10+ years ago. I still use an old version because they keep making gratuitous changes to the UX.

A bit more context would be helpful, as someone happy to donate -- what is the current situation, why the urgency? Just some more info would be good.

Why does there need to be urgency? Isn’t it better to avoid a situation where there’s a critical need?

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?

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.

I sadly have to agree. The damned thing struggles with a handful of basic stuff, it still has a config UI of which you can't tell head from tail, complete with teeth and whiskers and even a full "about:config" panel à la Firefox hidden underneath. Spell checker. Calendar. Chat client. Complete web-browser internals, with grindy disk-caching. To add insult to injury, the macOS bundle is half a fxxxing GiB in size (universal flavor, but still).

What do you use now?

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.

I liked the old style, too. Nevertheless there is View → Density → Compact / Default / Relaxed.

Exactly. It used to be good and they're making it worse every day.

“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.

What did you switch to?

Not many people know this, but Thunderbird also supports RSS, so if you want to use it as just an RSS client you can.

I used TB happily for years on Mac OS but its font rendering on Linux was one of the main reasons I never switched.

I really think Mozilla has run it's course. Just die already so there is room for something new.

As if writing a browser and an email client is a piece of cake and there are tons of alternatives ready to take over. Blink and WebKit don't count.

That's the whole point of the argument as long as there is Mozilla nothing new will come because there is Mozilla. That's why Google is still funding them.

What's stopping people from working on another project? We have Ladybird [1], but it's still a work in progress. There are also LibreWolf, Icecat and other forks of Mozilla Firefox.

[1]: https://ladybird.org/

I haven't used Thunderbird in 15 years.

Donated anyway. I was very happy with it for the years I did use it.

My usual reminder that actually Mozilla has a lot of money (mostly from Google), and, for example, donates six figure numbers to random political organizations not related to browsers and internet (not EFF)

Here is a breakdown, which was posted on HN few years ago – https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...

Once they are no longer part of Mozilla, I would be happy to consider it.

I miss the days we needed Thunderbird for email...such an innocent time.

I wish I could donate without entering an email address.

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.

> we don't run ads

Proceeds to run an ad. An ad for yourself is still an ad.

Why couldn't this be shown when I upgraded thunderbird, rather than at a random time of your choosing?

Now that Protonmail has an ok-ish PGP interface they've been bleeding users, it's a really important piece of the open source infrastructure and I hope folks support it -- back when I was with Mozilla, I said they should focus on using less ram and less CPU, not weird little side quests like... well the list goes on and on.

One thing I think we should do is allow Thunderbird to return to the early Firefox model -- it's a stable product, that people can install extensions on. Save for security updates and keeping up with OS quirks, it doesn't need constant tinkering.

I'm not saying they don't need the money, I'm just saying I'm concerned how and why we got to this point.

Is anyone using mail clients anymore?

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.

I hate to say it, but the Outlook approach would be an improvement: cute little ~~advertisements~~ calls to action in your inbox.

The full-display-on-focus thing certainly got my interest.

By donating to MZLA Technologies Corporation? Then I guess I'll switch to KMail or Evolution.

Seamonkey or claws mifht be good alternatives too.

http://seamonkey-project.org/

https://claws-mail.org/

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.

[0] https://github.com/GNOME/geary

Sorry, isn't Thunderbird meant to be "true FOSS" and essentially feature complete?

No? It is the best email client of the market but it is far from feature complete.

What features do you think it lacks? I'm not talking about AI slop. Surely it's IMAP feature complete.

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.

Mozilla gets like 500 trillion a year from Google, no, I will not give money.

Yeah, no. They finance a lot of DEI stuff instead of investing it in the code.

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? :^)

Maybe.

I did try (politely, btw!) reporting a couple of issues on their bugtracker a long time ago, but the usual thing happened: nothing at all. IIRC there was no response of any kind. Which makes me reticent to put more time into writing more bug reports for them to ignore.

I just found out about betterbird today. It looks interesting. I might give it a try. And if I see the same issues there, maybe I'll report it on their bugtracker.

I and a bunch of others have been screaming loudly at mozilla for like 15 years now. They're not interested in hearing what we have to say. Which is why the firefox marketshare is as dismal as it is these days.

As for embarrassing Mozilla publicly, apparently their troll factory watches HN - I got downvoted a lot for describing facts.

I think the best option for me really is to just find a new mail client and be done with Mozilla forever.

I said it before, but I'll just say it again: It's a real pity, Thunderbird used to be a truly excellent piece of software once upon a time. I remember switching to it from outlook and being all "Whoa! This is great!". It was a similar experience to going from IE6 -> Firefox. How the mighty have fallen.

If you want any negatively inclined people to be unable to resort to think that you are lying, a good thing for you to do would be to link to the bugtracker issues that you created long ago.

You actually got me thinking about it, because I've been living with a lot of this trash for so long now that I think I've probably forgotten a bunch of my gripes with thunderbird.

So here are the ones that spring to mind when I gave it a little bit of thought. I'm sure there are others that I've forgotten about because I've adopted new workflows that don't involve thunderbird (e.g my calendar is a bit like that, but I remember it because I feel like an email client with a calendar should probably be able to sync with my caldav server, and because of the stupidity of the bug). I'm also sure that as soon as I hit 'post' I'll think of more (edit: this totally happened).

* Searching IMAP folders. Worked just fine in 2010, does nothing now, no matter how long you wait. These days I just grep my maildir, like it's 1975.

* Forgetting the sort order and display preferences for folders. It LOVES to do this after an "upgrade". Because the 300,000 times I've previously told it not to show my 'cron' folder in threaded view isn't enough, apparently. I must want threaded view, but I'm just too stupid to realise it, and if they switch back to threaded view one more time maybe I'll just accept it and learn the new and better way because Mozilla knows best. Ditto for showing folder contents with the newest messages as the top - you know, the default and most useful sorting order for email. Nooooooooooo - thunderbird knows better! It loves to semi-randomly switch folders to "oldest messages at the top".

* Flat-out refusing to talk to certain older email servers because they're serving up SSL certificates using an algo that's old and which mozilla has decided they don't like anymore. What's that? The machine is one that you don't have control over and that's difficult to upgrade due to it being an ancient SunOS machine running software from like 2001, and that you're connecting to over a very secure VPN and which isn't publicly accessible, so it's no security risk at all? Tough shit, use an email client that isn't thunderbird, we're not going to provide a "proceed anyway" button for people who understand what they're doing, because Mozilla knows better than you.

* Hey there! I see you've repeatedly removed the garbage hamburger menu. This must have been an accident and not that you do not want and did not ask for it and will never want it under any circumstances ever due to your strongly-held opinion that a traditional hierarchical menu bar across the top of an application is a superior UI in every way and that hamburger menus are less efficient and have no place on a high-resolution desktop interface. So as part of the latest thunderbird "upgrade", I'm just going to helpfully slip that shitty hamburger menu that you've removed 10,000 times back into the toolbar where I think it should be, so it can waste some screen real-estate for something you'll never use. That should correct that oversight where you accidentally removed it 10,000 times. Glad I could help!

* Hey there! I see you've accidentally removed the shitty hamburger menu for the 50,000th time. I'm going to do you a solid and solve this problem once and for all - by simply making it not optional and not configurable anymore. The top right hand corner of your toolbar WILL be a hamburger menu now and forevermore. That should sort that problem out.

* Hey there! I notice that you like a traditional hierarchical menu bar, like computers have had since the 1980s. Unfortunately this isn't fashionable anymore and isn't great on phones, so what we're going to do on your high-res desktop machine is put a toolbar above the menu bar, creating a completely bizarre interface where the "get messages" button is above the File menu, in condradiction of 35+ years of UI conventions. We're also going to make this something that isn't configurable anymore. Sure, the UI used to be super-configurable for 20+ years, but that wasn't done with javascript, so we had to remove it. You really should just use the hamburger menu instead. We like it, you see, and we're not interested in your opinion if it's not the same as ours. Mozilla knows best, you see.

* I noticed that you don't have thunderbird's adaptive junk mail filter(tm) turned on. This must be an accident and not because you have sophisticated and extremely reliable enterprise-grade spam filtering solution set up on your server, with rules to do things like move email to a specific folder and mark it as read if it's determined to be spam. So what I'm going to do with this latest thunderbird "upgrade" is just silently enable the adaptive junk mail filter(tm), and then let that decide that about 40% of the thousands and thousands of messages in your inbox are junk, and then move them into a completely different and previously-unknown junk folder that you've never seen before. Now you might wonder "hey why has that colleague I was emailling back and forth with gone silent?" and you might check your junk folder to see if maybe your spam filter has gone haywire. But his messages (and a bunch of messages from your boss) won't be there! They'll be in the new and previously-unknown junk folder that I think spam should go into! And you can spend literally hours trying to find the email that's gone missing. As a bonus, we've also made it really difficult to find that missing email by breaking the search feature, and this new junk folder isn't in your maildir structure (or even on your server!), so you can't just grep for it. Have fun!

* OMG ALL YOUR RSS FEEDS ARE BROKEN! I tried to update them twice, and got an error! This must mean that all your RSS feeds coincidentally died at the same time, and is absolutely definitely not because your internet was down for maintenance for a couple of hours. So I'm going to do the only sensible thing - mark all your RSS feeds as broken and just stop ever trying to update them again until you manually tell me to update each and every one individually. No, I will not allow you to multi-select feeds so that you can update them all at once.

* I see that you like extensions. You have several installed and you use them and rely on them daily, and have for 20+ years. So what We're going to do is turn our extensions API into a shifting quagmire of incompatibility, such that extension authors have to jump through hoops every 25 minutes to make sure their extensions are compatible with the latest thunderbird, until most of them just give up. That way we can phase out the whole extensions thing like we did with firefox, giving you an objectively worse experience.

- Did you like your email headers taking up less than 50% of the message area and having the ability to double-click on the header area to toggle between full headers and compact headers? Didn't think so.

- Aah, you want to manually sort the folders in your inbox. Nah, that would be much to useful.

- Ha! A GUI to manage your sieve filters in a user-friendly and intuitive manner? That sounds far too XUL for our tastes! Begone!

(these are just the big-deal extensions that I still miss all the time and can remember off the top of my head, there used to be a BUNCH of others, too, that I used less frequently and would struggle to remember)

* What's that? You think that interfaces should get faster as computers increase in power? Oh, my sweet summer child, have you not heard the tale of Javascript and the melting CPU? No, see, we needed to disable all those xul extensions because it was bogging us down and making things inefficient! And what we're going to do is replace that with javascript trash, so that it's a whole new level of slow and unresponsive. Did you notice how I mentioned that parsing the calendar brings the whole of thunderbird to a grinding halt, making it totally unresponsive and unusable? Yeah, see that's because all this new code is very well-engineered and async / multithreaded, you see - it can fully utilise the power of a modern processor to do much much less in much much more time.

* I can't start thunderbird maximised. Haven't been able to for a few "upgrades" now. If thunderbird is in the maximised state when I close it, when I re-open it, it starts in the maximised state, and just gives me an empty window frame which it never draws anything in. To work around this, I have to: unmaximise, then close the window, then re-launch thunderbird, then once it launches normally I can maximise it and it will work. But I just don't bother maximising it these days, because that means I have to do the unmaximise/close/relaunch thing every time I start it. Instead these days I just leave thunderbird in an unmaximised state that's almost as big as it would be if it were maximised. Hilarious incompetence.

I told you it'd be vitriol ;)

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