Mozilla Moves To Monetize Thunderbird, Transfers Project To New Subsidiary (zdnet.com) 108
The Mozilla Foundation announced today that it was moving its Thunderbird email client to a new subsidiary named the MZLA Technologies Corporation. From a report: Mozilla said that Thunderbird will continue to remain free and open source, but by moving the project away from its foundation into a corporate entity they will be able to monetize the product and pay for its development easier than before. Currently, Thunderbird is primarily being kept alive through charitable donations from the product's userbase. "Moving to MZLA Technologies Corporation will not only allow the Thunderbird project more flexibility and agility, but will also allow us to explore offering our users products and services that were not possible under the Mozilla Foundation," said Philipp Kewisch, Mozilla Product Manager. "The move will allow the project to collect revenue through partnerships and non-charitable donations, which in turn can be used to cover the costs of new products and services," Kewisch added.
Not sure why you need an e-mail "client" (Score:1)
Re:Not sure why you need an e-mail "client" (Score:5, Informative)
webmail butchers your privacy and lets pretty much anyone with power or money get the goods on you.
storing data in the cloud has privacy implications. storing on YOUR server does not.
nice try, amazon/google/apple employee.
Re:Not sure why you need an e-mail "client" (Score:4, Insightful)
With other scenarios, sure.
But with webmail? That email client is getting email from a server that has all the access.
Now you could have end-to-end encryption much easier with Thunderbird to make the mail provider oblivious to the encryption. But also you could have self-hosted webmail with the convenience with end-to-end encryption as well.
Using a standalone mail client by itself doesn't add privacy and there are privacy protecting ways to self-host webmail.
Real life: multiple accounts (Score:3)
But with webmail? That email client is getting email from a server that has all the access.
In the addition of GPG, S/MIME and similar encryption(*) that you mention there are other real-life situations:
Not everyone is 100% entirely relying on Gmail for every single last one of their e-mail needs.
Work e-mail address and/or academic one (depending on how far you are in your education/where you work), other private groups' e-mail etc.
Each is probably hosted on an entire different server, not all of witch are automatically under the control of the Google Octopus.
Now how do you handle the situation:
-
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Is it possible to have something running on home server like a PI, where all your email can be hosted by external providers (like godaddy domain hosting and or gmail/yahoo stuff) where it downloads all your email from those hosts.
And then you can connect via webgui/phone app/desktop app? Honestly desktop app isn't needed if webgui.
I;ve poked around with using squirrelmail and a few others.
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1. As long as the emails remain on the provider's email server that provider and any allowed third parties based on the privacy agreements can data mine the emails for marketing research.
2. Unless the law has been changed (which it doesn't seem like it has been since the Email Privacy Act [wikipedia.org] never made it through Congress) the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of '86 [wikipedia.org] declares any data tha
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Just because you delete the mail, doesn't mean the mail provider necessarily deleted the mail. If you don't trust a webmail provider, then you can't trust that same provider to honor your request to delete it.
Re:Not sure why you need an e-mail "client" (Score:4, Informative)
But also you could have self-hosted webmail with the convenience with end-to-end encryption as well.
It's always fun to see someone casually indicate self-hosting like the matter isn't an unmitigated nightmare. Back in the 90s self-hosting email was a serious option. Today, self-hosting will introduce you to a world of administration that few are ready to take up. The setting up the IMAP/POP and SMTP servers are all pretty much the same. Getting the MX DNS record and maintaining it is pretty similar to days of yore. However, what will eventually get you is when popular email domains start blocking every single attempt to email one of its users. That is when you begin to understand greylisting and getting on popular domain's whitelisting. The required back and forth to getting on that magically list that will allow your mail server to be somewhat useful. Additionally, your ISP may cut you off from the required ports to actually do email until you've gotten some sort of DDoS prevention and spam detection put in place before they turn your ports back on.
Self hosting email isn't some technical hardship. A simple HOWTO will get you up and running. What will keep you up at night is making sure your service can be actually useful. Keeping yourself on the good side of Google and Yahoo, ensuring some asshat halfway across the world doesn't send their bots to crater your server. Pleading with your ISP or whomever to let you back on because of said asshat.
It is a pretty tough job that if your time is worth something, will cost you more than a paid-for 3rd party service. There's reasons to self-host that make sense, but just for the heck of it ain't one of them. There needs to be a real need for you to self-host and even then you need to realistically weigh it with just going with a pair provider. Keeping your emails outside of watchful eyes is indeed a justification, but only if keeping those emails outside of watchful eyes makes dollars sense. Doing so just to make a point, well if that's your cup of tea, go for it. But just be ready for the work that you'll need to put forward to make that point.
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I do hybrid self-hosting. It's a mix of paid Cpanel inboxes along with legacy free G-Suite. They come in there, my own home server then pulls the emails in (through some sort of imapsync connector) and my mail clients all connect to my personal server. Best of both worlds, and I can use the providers' SMTP for reliability.
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I used to do self hosting. However, with all the blacklists out there, just putting a mail server on a common IP space will have it on a DUL list, most likely, so you will need to use the ISP's SMTP server... if they have one, and they allow you to use it.
These days, it isn't worth it. People can find who is mailing you from ISP logs, so you don't gain anything by having mail go to your personal server.
I have long since thrown in the towel and gone with a provider like Rackspace, O365, GSuite, GoDaddy, na
Re:Not sure why you need an e-mail "client" (Score:5, Informative)
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Each website reinvents the wheel as well. Zimbra, OWA, Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud, etc. Something that works well in one environment (S/MIME or PGP) may not be supported at all in another.
Thunderbird has been an excellent client. PGP support? Present. Ability to archive all documents to a local NAS, or a dovecot server on the LAN, so all mail doesn't sit on servers forever? Easy to implement. The only failing about Thunderbird is that its search capabilities are just woefully inadequate. For this, I wind
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People with power and money have private eyes (Score:3)
Privacy is the least of your worries. You should be much, much more concerned about consolidation [independent.co.uk] and income inequality. [fortune.com].
I know it's popular with nerds to think that we can control the world from our PCs (we make our livings from them after all), but Money is power, data is data.
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If there's one thing certain is that the privacy unconscious are not related to being an employee or shill, rather they are now the normal, it's the Slashdot crowd who these days are in the absolute minority.
Why do we need a webmail client? (Score:2)
Why not just run a webmail client client in a browser in your browser?
It's like you never heard of http://copy.sh/v86/ [copy.sh] . Jeez, get with the times!
Yes hello, Xzibit... I didn't know you were
member of the WhatTheFuckWG! Those WebSocketSocketSockets look shiny! It'll buy ten!
-- Mozilla
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You don't know what you're talking about.
For one thing, emails on a server can be obtained without a warrant after an amount of time, the amount depending on whether you've viewed them or not.
Emails downloaded to your PC, whether or not that's a server, too, require a warrant, hands down.
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Ah yes we all know "the cloud" never goes down. Also put a fork in Thunderbird, its done. Say hello to advertisements and metadata scraping.
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I'm not sure that this is a belief, as much as it is a hope. Cloud-based apps are the future because it's all that's being developed. Sure, some may HOPE it goes well, but the rest of us are to realistic to get behind it. I mean after all, we went from dummy terminals, to PCs, to smart devices, to the cloud. However, "the cloud" only brings the "smart devices" to "dummy terminal" status. What next, everyone walking around with a data-center in their pockets?
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I remember when Slashdot was full of stories about how the management were screaming and shouting because the server was down, all because they refused to spend a few $ extra on redundancy and proper backups.
That's much rarer now because most of the servers are in the cloud, and the cloud has very good reliability due to everything being virtualized and easy to move from machine to machine anyway. And if your cloud is down chances are your competitors are too, and you have an SLA so will get some compensati
Re: Not sure why you need an e-mail "client" (Score:2)
The cloud is reliable until it's not. The real reliability risk is the cloud provider just shutting you down.
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That's much rarer now because most of the servers are in the cloud, and the cloud has very good reliability due to everything being virtualized and easy to move from machine to machine anyway. And if your cloud is down chances are your competitors are too, and you have an SLA so will get some compensation. All your IT staff needs to worry about is the network.
Instead we have services that can be gained access to if you have security questions or have no recovery function at all if you get locked out. Cloud
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So how much down time as Azure cloud had lately? And when was Gmail last blacklisted?
In my experience the IP address your ISP provides is much more likely to be blacklisted for email, for example.
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So how much down time as Azure cloud had lately? And when was Gmail last blacklisted?
On hosted exchange the IP address ending up blocked happened every other month, thankfully my current employer doesn't use it.
Google apps were down just yesterday by some interesting coincidence.
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Re:Not sure why you need an e-mail "client" (Score:5, Informative)
Thunderbird has a plug-in architecture and the usual suspects (ABP, uBlock et al) have offered blockers since forever. Even if Thunderbird starts getting ads, it'll mean maybe one extra step in blocking them.
More likely, it'll do things like prompt people to create accounts on specific services or offer paid integration to something-or-other.
I paid an add-on developer $5 for a tool that puts a bunch of extra Google functionality in Thunderbird. It was worth $5 so my Google Voice stuff could run in the same place as all my other messaging tools.
A lot of my email sits on Google Apps domains but I use a stand-alone client because I do have Email accounts I don't want to pass through Gmail for one reason or other. I also appreciate that Thunderbird uses the same data format as the IMAP server I run at home. It's a good tool and I hope it continues to be developed.
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The problem is Firefox. Thunderbird mostly uses the same code as Firefox and over the last few years, especially since 52ESR, Mozilla has been removing all kinds of stuff from the Firefox code base (Mozilla-Central) giving the Thunderbird developers a full time job (I believe they had to hire a full time developer) just keeping it compiling. This includes having to move code from Mozilla-Central to Comm-Central where Thunderbird and SeaMonkey live.
SeaMonkey, with no money to hire developers and few voluntee
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Re:Not sure why you need an e-mail "client" (Score:4, Informative)
Roundcube.
From what I understand, encryption happens in your browser, if you use the mailvelope extension.
https://documentation.online.n... [online.net]
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A stand-alone client allows anyone to use end-to-end encryption over ANY e-mail provider that uses industry-standard e-mail protocols (IMAP, SMTP).
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> From what I understand, encryption happens in your browser, if you use the mailvelope extension.
Maybe. If you inspect all the JS code in the page and thoroughly review Mailvelope's interactions with it then you might be certain that right now the webmail provider does not get the clear text of your message. 10 minutes from now... who knows?
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Proton?
Mailvelope (Score:2)
Which web mail clients support end-to-end encryption with PGP?
Mailveloppe browser extension does, but with a long list of caveats:
- Not all webmail interfaces are supported.
- Very often you can only encrypt the body of the text (the content of the textarea html tag), not the attachement.
- In addition to reducing security, the above also breaks standards.
etc.
So in theory, yes, end-to-end is achivable as the above poster says.
But in practice, just install Thunderbid and Enigmail and by done with it.
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You're just not thinking this all of the way through. You create an email in something like thunderbird or some other local email program. Then you encrypt the entire email, subject, address and everything. Then you send that encrypted email through your cloud based web mail as an attachment. And if you send it to a thousand random email addresses as well as the one you want it to go to (who has the encryption key), you can disguise even the recipient.
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I've found that for web clients, one is best off with a PGP client where one can select text, decrypt it from the clipboard and view/download the results. Similar with signing/encrypting stuff. The webmail standards are laughable.
If you want an even worse kettle of fish, try S/MIME with web based clients.
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GPG ; Work server (Score:3)
Except your emails are on some else's server.
Two obvious rebutals:
- if you use GPG or S/MIME: no *your* emails aren't. Only a pile of gibberish that the server won't be able to analyse.
- if we're talking about your work e-mail address, these mails are stored at your company/your university and only there - an acceptable "some else".
If you use an IMAPS client to access them (or open yet another webmail tab in your browser) it stays this way.
If you point Gmail to that server "to have the convenience of everything in the same place", you're setting loose
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Not all mail servers have a web interface. And of those that do, not all have a long retention time/storage capacity.
Talking corporate mail servers here.
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Webmails lack many basic features, such as the possibility to edit the "from" field.
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Web-based mail works just fine, honestly it solves a lot of the issues you run into trying to run a dedicated e-mail client and is dead-simple and cross platform/device.
Sounds interesting. How do you archive all of your email in a single local file when using Web mail?
Re: Not sure why you need an e-mail "client" (Score:2)
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apt-mark hold thunderbird (Score:4, Informative)
corp ownership?
guess I'll freeze what I have now and be very careful about any future updates.
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To be fair, E-mail hasn't changed much in the past twenty years and it's not likely to change in the next twenty. If there's any software that would be least affected by a development freeze, it's Thunderbird.
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Email that's rendered in HTML has not changed much in the past 20 years either, but it has changed enough to need an updated renderer. For that matter, a lot of email providers are moving to OAuth or similar instead of a single password, and that's still a moving target.
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HTML rendering is always changing, and there are always new security issues, especially when a library gets changed. Operating systems also change, so an application that worked perfectly on a previous version of Windows, macOS, or Linux may not work at all in 2-3 years. For example, a 32 bit app on macOS may be perfection incarnate... but it will have to be recompiled or it won't run on recent revs of the OS.
Thunderbird is one of the last bastions of "it works". No ads, no pop-ups, no inline videos, no
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Thankfully it is open source... maybe there might be interest in forking it, if it takes a serious turn for the worse.
There were a couple of attempts around the time of the beginning of the extension changes, based on Pale Moon and such, they didn't go anywhere, which isn't surprising as Thunderbird itself has a hard enough time attracting volunteers.
There's also SeaMonkey which uses the same mail code, it is doing terribly due to lack of volunteers even though there are still lots of people who like the Suite.
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Sure it has. Not transporting email (SMTP), but we've come to realise email is a lot better with extra supporting stuff - contacts, calendars, tasks lists, SPAM databases, could based storage for the mail itself with a local self-synchronising cache. This is what a client like Thunderbird adds. Unlike your typical web based email system, Thunderbird can and does merge multiple providers (again
Re: apt-mark hold thunderbird (Score:2)
Yup, I'll be doing the same. I don't understand impetus behind this, Thunderbird is a pretty mature product that doesn't need a lot of development.
"Monetization" in my experience only makes things drastically worse for the user. I'd rather pay upfront than be monetized to death.
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It's not that mature. It handles long operations badly (throws unresponsive script dialog boxes) and really doesn't handle the draft folder being on IMAP well at all.
Thunderbird has been neglected and there is still a bunch of development that needs doing
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Thunderbird shares much code with Firefox and Firefox has been changing so much the last few years that just keeping it compiling is a full time job, not to mention adapting things like the extensions.
Then there's still some stuff that is likely left over from Netscape, the address book, some of the databases it uses. Last I looked they had quite a list of stuff that needed to be brought into the 21st century.
Monetize (Score:2)
These days monetizing means harvesting data from the user. Content data , behavioural data, metadata
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You may want to freeze for other reasons. Thunderbird is changing the way add-ons work to be more like Firefox, which means a lot of them will break come version 78.
One add-on developer has set up a Kickstarter asking for $50k to update his add-ons to keep working. Interestingly he seems to be suggesting in his blurb that he has maybe 70-100k active users.
https://www.kickstarter.com/pr... [kickstarter.com]
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Of note for OSX Thunderbird users, the top pane default font is so small as to be almost unusable - even on a 24-inch monitor. There was a plugin I was using to fix this that broke on a recent TB upgrade. I went to the plugin's home page and (after jumping through a couple of hoops) there were instructions on how to change the font from inside TB without the plugin.
Sorry about lack of details, not in front of my iMac at the moment - but IIRC it's under config editor in advanced preferences and increasing t
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corp ownership?
Mozilla Foundation is a corporation and has been for almost twenty years. Welcome to the 20th Century.
Hello Claws, goodbye corporate Thunderbird (Score:3)
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Correct, it is. I originally was using Sylpheed, the moved to Claws, and even with the HTML options they provide, alas, the lack of HTML composing forced me to end up going with Thunderbird due too many email filtering systems now flag plain-text emails.
Thunderbird is magnitudes slower than Claws and consumes quite a lot more resources. Can't be all down to the HTML composing.
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Evolution also has an EWS plugin that lets it work with Exchange servers.
I haven't gotten it to work yet, but I've barely gone beyond the "install it, see what happens" stage.
Nothing good can come of this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless their plan is to make it a direct competitor with MS Outlook and then charge businesses for support, I don't foresee any way this could turn out any way except badly. I've seen how things usually end up and it's also integration of undesired features that ultimately make the product worse. On the one-in-a-million chance that they are going head-to-head against MS Outlook then they would be better off building something from scratch.
RIP Thunderbird
MZLA (Score:1)
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When your revenue climbs into the hundreds of millions it's hard to resist the urge to try and get more.
"to collect revenue through partnerships" (Score:2)
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No longer work in corporate IT but (Score:1)
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Exchange (Score:2)
Exchange support IMAPS access.
So out-of-the-box Thunderbird can access all e-mails.
There are also special conducts to access Exchange calendars.
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Exchange support IMAPS access.
Nobody turns that feature on. One, Exchange only is log into your computer, here's the email. Turn on IMAP and now you need to officially support that channel as well and that also means taking support calls on when someone doesn't configure something correctly. Two, it's a new avenue for access. It's bad enough to secure an Exchange server by itself. Adding in IMAPS to that equation is a lot more maintenance with not a whole lot more to gain. Three, non-standard client. When you get a phone call fro
Exchange (Score:2)
I've personally never seen an Exchange server that didn't have IMAPS turned on as well.
(But I've mostly worked in universities that had large IT department that could handle the extra access exposure)
Still there are ways to support exchange in Thunderbird:
- random example of paid plugin:
https://www.beonex.com/owl/ [beonex.com]
- random example of a Java daemon that communicates with WebDAV/EWS (Exchange WebService) to Microsoft Exchange and then further communicates with IMAPS and other standard protocols to your favori
Why not just use getmail? (Score:2)
"getmail - retrieve messages from one or more POP3, IMAP4, or SDPS mail
boxes and deliver to a maildir, mboxrd-format mbox file, or external
MDA"
nice, clean, simple, command line interface.
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I don't think getting the mail is the problem. Reading it is.
So... why not just use mutt? Because of html, embedded images and issues when integrating with getmail/fetchmail/exim/procmail.
Still, if thunderbird dies this will be the only option.
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Interesting (Score:3)
Sure seems like Mozilla is going all in for marketing browser data for profit using Firefox as a collection platform.
Odd that there wasn't any interest in someone taking it over.
Just my 2 cents
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Sometimes change is good. Thunderbird is already dying on the vine---albeit very slowly. Maybe this will either put it out of its misery or save it.
New OSS Business Model (Score:2)
When you're ready to abandon a product that doesn't have a chance of being a money maker, move it over to your commercial company, and when it fails to make money with it, they can kill it.
Same difference (Score:1)
Maybe Mozilla can pull it off but this kind of thing always seems to end a in a free lame version missing key features and a closed source for profit version that is useful.
It also has a risk of having a knock on affect for add-ons/extensions as developers shy away from giving code away to closed source.
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Be hard to close the source, which is mostly MPL.
RIP Thunderbird. Another victim of profit. (Score:3)
WHY must it be profitable?
What good does that do the project? Or humanity?
Why can't development just be paid by Patreon subscribers and the code stay free?
(No, for-profit ALWAYS stops being free as soon as they can. No exceptions. They're just always lying at first, to get you to swallow that cock.)
By the way: Why wasn't E-Mail extended to support all the instant messaging features, and merged with IRC? Why create over-engineered XML behemoths like XMPP an SIP and layers upon layers and walled gardens?
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They've been trying to go with volunteers and donations. Keeping up with the ever changing Firefox shared code has become very hard, little well fixing some of the old code.
SeaMonkey, which shares a lot of the code, has even been doing worse. People love free and do not want to pay for it.
Oh boy. (Score:3)
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> I'm so glad Mozilla has found a way to monetize Thunderbird
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The html interface on gmail is clunky in a few respects-- it might take you a few clicks to do something that you could do with one with the javascrap version-- but overall I think it's waaay better. You get lightweight, consistent, predictable behavior, where message composition takes place in a TEXTAREA again.
Which is not to say you can't do better with desktop email clients (I like emacs MH-E, myself, t
So what's next? (Score:1)
Time to Fork Thunderbird (Score:4, Insightful)
Needs a good server, and much more. (Score:1)
I'll bet one reason for so many companies are continuing on the Outlook (Microsoft Office) train is their tight integration with Exchange and Active Directory. And that drives Windows sales and continued use. Heck they have a web page version of Outlook that works on Linux.
Doesn't hurt Thunderbird isn't especially better in any way either. Yeah when I attempted to use it I could see and send emails. But that's a low bar. It wasn't especially fast, and could be mistaken for an old Outlook version by the UI
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T-bird has no trouble scheduling meetings. I have no trouble dealing with meeting invitations that I receive from Outlook users in T-bird emails. I can't say I've ever sent out invitations for meetings to those users using T-bird -- setting up meetings with Gmail users is no problem -- but I have no reason to think the scheduling feature is one-way when Outlook is inv
I think "fuck you, Mozilla" is how I respond (Score:5, Interesting)
"..but will also allow us to explore offering our users products and services that were not possible under the Mozilla Foundation"
So in other words, sounds to me like they're saying "we're turning it over to a company that will shove ads in your face and/or sift through your emails, all while nagging you to pay for what was otherwise FOSS". If so screw you Mozilla. I'm not even mad, I'm just very, very disappointed. Guess when this actually happens I'll stop accepting updates to Thunderbird.
I used to use Tbird years ago... (Score:3)
For about a year I used it, and it was good. Best gui email client IMO, and I tried out quite a few.
But for years before that, and since, I use pine (well, alpine now).
Sounds crazy, right? But I love it! It is fast, no frills. I can do 95% of what I need to do. The only thing it doesn't handle very well is when an email has many images attached and you just want to scroll through them. Or if the email doesn't have a "view in web browser" option and I need to see images.
I use fetchmail to pull email from quite a few accounts into my local inbox. I create dummy email accounts on my domain host to avoid a lot of spam. It also pulls in my kids' emails, because they young enough that I still monitor them. They don't use email hardly at all though. .pinerc and .fetcmailrc into place and I am back up and running.
I've switched distros before, and it's a quick matter of copying my
I can ssh into my machine and check emails quickly. I archive emails by year-month, and have them all the way back to 2002.
If I need a GUI, I just use Roundcube on my hosted domain server to check it. I need to do that maybe a couple times a year. It's funny all the visual garbage that gets put into emails that I simply don't see.
Great (Score:2)
I just moved back to using Thunderbird because Outlook was being a PITA.
Or ... (Score:2)
Thunderbird is primarily being kept alive through charitable donations from the product's userbase.
It could get funding support from Mozilla, like Firefox.
"Moving to MZLA Technologies Corporation will not only allow the Thunderbird project more flexibility and agility, but will also allow us to explore offering our users products and services that were not possible under the Mozilla Foundation," ...
Why is this a good/better option for Thunderbird and not, say, Firefox? Or is this move with TB an experiment and it's just a matter of time before FF goes this route too?
thanks for all the fish (Score:2)