Mozilla launching “Thundermail” email service to take on Gmail, Microsoft 365

I think it shows real maturity to take this approach and makes me feel more comfortable that they'll be sustainable.

> You probably know this already, but people should have their own domain.

Until they forget or unable to renew. And then their PII is in the hands of the person who gets the domain.

If you're going to buy a domain for this, don't get fancy with the TLD. I made the mistake of choosing a .io domain for this purpose and with the future of the TLD uncertain, I have been moving away from it, so I'm not left in a bad spot if things go sideways.

People should, but is the existing process simple enough even any laymen can do is the question.

The average person is not intelligent enough to have their own domain.

I don't think it's so much that they don't have ideas it's that they're competing with Alphabet's Chrome, who are coincidentally owners of Android, Gmail, YouTube and Google which are internet keystones. I think it's solely by coincidence that I use Firefox rather than Chrome and if I'd started using the Internet a few years later it would have been Chrome.

Also isn't a huge proportion of internet activity mobile users, and outside the US the majority of phones are Android, and most people leave things default, thus Firefox is condemned have a minor share essentially since Chrome is packaged natively with Android?

Anyways I hope they can dislodge some of the Google train. I abhor using Gmail. Better yet if they can compete with Outlook to some extent. Mozilla actually produces software I trust enough, which has enough utility that I'll install it.

> how are they going to develop a new mail competency in such a complete way that they can take on gmail?

They're likely not taking on Gmail, they're taking on Mailbox.org, Proton and Tuta.

GP here: I'm not deeply skeptical; I'm just wondering about these issues.

I use it and feel like it's...fine. A tad slow, and doesn't have some basic features I'd like. But I haven't found any other non-browser clients that I like better than Thunderbird.

Virtually nobody uses mail via web browser on phones, the primary computing device of the world right now.

> Do people still use Thunderbird client? I would guess 99% of people use their browser.

Count me as one. It's nice to have a single local application that is set up for around 5 different accounts on two different providers.

I also like the immediacy of search on the local data. When I search for something I don't want to see a spinning busy-beachball indicator.

I think it's definitely a minority.

I use it to follow three Gmail accounts in parallel, since the web version is a PITA to deal with that scenario. Getting access to my local archive is a bonus point.

I use it for my email. It does exactly what I need it to, works across several platforms. Is Open Source.

Thunderbird lets the user change the UI and hide almost every single element of it. I don't like clutter.

With that feature I could also help an elderly friend after Microsoft abruptly replaced the easy to use Windows Mail with a mess that they didn't even bother to translate into other languages.

I used it at a previous job that didn't have a web option for email, but for me the killer feature was that it was the only mainstream newsgroup client (the job delivered error notifications via newsgroups).

At my (small) workplace we all use Thunderbird, and I use it for my personal email as well.

A good desktop client, once configured, works a lot better than web-based email clients, especially (but not only) when you have different email accounts that you want to use in the same interface.

I have ~100k mails in Thunderbird. The GUI always feels a bit sluggish:

Sometimes spinners don't spin, reactions to clicks take ~500 ms, when I switch from Inbox to Calendar for the first time, I can see how the buttons in the top row render one after the other in ~100ms. (I don't think a human should _ever_ see buttons render!)

Sliding around the size of panels renders at 10 FPS, not so cool.

Opening "Account settings" first produces a full white-flash, then a grey-flash (dark mode), and then renders the UI element.

Startup takes ~5 seconds till the GUI fully shows. Then it hangs at "Opening folder INBOX..." for 60 seconds. Not sure why that sync takes so long when there are no new emails.

So it works acceptably but doesn't feel great.

Searching for e.g. "horse" in the Ctrl+K global search and hitting ender takes 5 seconds for full-text search to produce results. I think that part is OK. I mostly use the "Quick Filter" == "Filter messages" == Shift+Ctrl+K instead to search only subjects and correspondents.

I have ~100 IMAP folders (from +suffix emails). Unfortunately Thunderbird doesn't notice when a new folder gets spawned by a new +suffix email, I have to restart it Thunderbird to ever get to see that email.

RAM usage is 900 MB RES on Linux. (I could not check if that's glibc's fault as so often, because Thunderbird crashes when jemalloc is preloaded.)

When I move the mouse cursor around anywhere in the GUI, that causes 90% CPU usage. For comparison, in Sublime Text, moving the mouse cursor around causes 10% CPU usage over the text buffer and 25% over tabs.

How decent is the maildir support? I looked into it a few years ago, and it seemed to still be experimental. My goal was to have other mail clients use the same maildir store, but I didn't feel like it would work at the time.

Woah, how? My global search indexer seems to poop out when the sqlite db gets too big or something.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Thunderbird/comments/1jjzb6b/global...

On another note, Thunderbird feels quite snappy for me. Fast and responsive, especially global search.

Even so I think I prefer Recoll now that I've got it working. That thing is amazing.

Elasticsearch is a pretty bad choice for what really needs to be an embedded database. There are other FTS engines out there of varying quality that would be better suited to this particular case. Off the top of my head, Meillisearch and sqlite3's FTS5 would both be highly embed-able but have other tradeoffs (such as storage overhead).

It might not work for me for various reasons, but pay a fee to release the source code in the wild for anyone (me or others) to pick it up, yes why not ! Safer if you put a way to contact you on your profile

Yes please, would love to try it out!

I haven't used Thunderbird in a long time, but regularly used Outlook with multi-gigabye .pst files. Surely sqlite on an SSD would be up to the task of handling at least million emails of average size.

Tell that to apple mail. Makes no sense how an app seemingly unchanged since the tiger days when I started using it could still be as performant as it always was on far better hardware. In fact I frequently find it to be the culprit when I wonder what the hell could be spinning my fans on this m3 pro just churning over the database.

Iphone version is arguably worse because it also has performance issues but doesn’t support inbox rules. Then again those inbox rules often fail to filter emails anyhow.

I'd love it - email could use serious tools and refinement - but so many questions: Is it local or hosted? What is the story with privacy? Do you use an existing application (like a Thunderbird fork) or something you created?

Can you / will you integrate other messaging such as SMS, even WhatsApp, etc.? RSS?

Good luck with that, but as a first reaction I must say, what I see on that side is not that impressive. It's just the same feature-set & interface all over again. It's not selling me any reason why I should be more interested in this, than in all the other clients already available.

Granted there is very little on that side, but I hope if you really start from scratch, you will also look more outside the box of the established mail clients. Think about how RSS Feed readers are working and the interfaces they offer, think about task&note-managment-tools are working and what they offer. For example, why is there no mail client with a kanban-board-view, allowing to organize mails by status or tags. Why is there no client with a social media feed-interface or even a tweetdeck-like view, allowing to observe multiple mail sources in parallel. This is the kind of innovation I'd like to see in a new mail client. Not just a bit better performance and new colors.

It says "all platforms" but does not list Linux. Is Linux support planned?

How does it compare to Apple Mail? That’s my reference local email client.

Your link does not work?

Similarly, may need a cell phone to open a bank account to get a cell phone

If the bank wasn't at the birth, do they really know the customer? Pffft.

Turns out, in Firefox mobile, the email submission block isn't present.

I had to open Chrome Mobile to see it.

I hope this, err, 'oversight' isn't indicative of the quality of using Mozilla products.

Yep. You might need to disable Adblock to have it appear.

I was still hoping for something more than a simple email waitlist signup however. But I didn’t find anything obvious hidden in the page that would allow immediate signup

I had to disable uBlock Origin for that to show up.

But, in that case, shouldn't they be using | here?

Silly Mozilla. Everyone knows you use bitwise OR to perform union operations!

yes that's true, unfortunately often enough I don't know which folder the email is in.

Even worse: the Swedish translation is lacking, so I use English. But my emails are often in Swedish. Making åäö and aao equal is never what I have ever wanted.

Not as bad as gnome which - in addition - has not let me reliably set things like date formats or first day of the week since several years despite using Swedish as my language.

That's kind of the point of the Unix text stream philosophy? TB stores as text, and then you can use the best text search tool you have.

Do you use mbox or maildir, out of curiosity?

I probably say this too much too, but it feels like just a justification to keep using shiny Chrome. Even though the recent ToS fiasco basically had the same language as Chrome's ToS, and wasn't really as bad as everybody freaked out about. People still just find whatever excuse.

Like fine if you like Chrome, just admit you love Chrome because it's shiny.

But I do care about privacy, and other people do too. And I can read between the lines, and never take PR for fact. What remains is that Mozilla is looking for new cash, and sees selling user data as a solution for that. They want to call it differently, they want us to think it's all OK, but it's not. It's still better than other browsers though.

>I have little issue with what happened and have no concern about Mozilla and privacy.

Others clearly do, so your dismissing also ironically adds nothing like the comments you referred to. Those who continue to ignore Mozilla's enshittification over the years are part of the problem; as are normies who fall for their marketing about privacy. Spreading awareness about this is important, whether here or other online fora.

They're trying to square the circle with anonymized data, but I think even that is still about profiling, and group profiling is only one degree less concerning than individually user profiling.

So I don't love it, but I know how to differentiate it from the worst of the worst.

I thought MSN was not owned by MS anymore, but turns out I was wrong. It's MSNBC that MS divested ownership in. MSN is still 100% owned by MS.

At least they aren't filtering out bad MS news on MSN I guess.

>> For example, can people in Europe use a service that is fully based in Europe.

As long as it's still owned by Mozilla it's subject to the whims of the US government.

There are already many good European mail services (e.g. Proton Mail).

You know Mozilla is American right? There's no way for it to be "fully based in Europe" when Mozilla runs it.

Something like Kolab Now, you mean?