Plans: Thunderbird to receive Mail and Pro service

Mozilla has ambitious plans for the Thunderbird mail client. A mail service and other Pro services are to be added. The project wants to earn money with this.

The plans were made public at the weekend and were discussed by Managing Director Ryan Sipes. "Thunderbird is losing users every day to rich ecosystems that are both clients and services, like Gmail and Office365," Sipes discusses. "These ecosystems have hard lock-in, through interoperability issues with third-party clients, as well as soft lock-in through convenience and integration between their clients and services," he continues.

Thunderbird alternative: open source, respecting freedoms

The Thunderbird manager also explains: "Our goal is to eventually have a similar offering so that a 100% open-source and freedom-respecting alternative ecosystem is available for those who want it."

Several services are in the pipeline. The heavyweight will certainly be Thundermail. The email service will offer email accounts to "those who love Thunderbird" and provide better services than "other providers out there" that are "in line with our values". The developers have been experimenting with this for a while and are relying on "Stalwart" as the basis for the software stack. The Thunderbird team is working with the maintainer of the project and has worked with him to expand the capabilities – in particular to make calendars and contacts a core component of the software stack.

The development will take place together with the community and will be completely open source, but unlike the other announced services, it will not have its own repository. The e-mail domain will be thundermail.com or tb.pro. Interested parties can already register for beta access on a waiting list at thundermail.com.

"Thunderbird Appointment" is an appointment scheduling tool. It allows users to send someone a link with which the recipient can choose an appointment. Existing tools for this were too proprietary or bloated for the developers. Behind "Thunderbird Send" is a reincarnation of"Firefox Send", a service for simply sending large files. Nowadays, a product announcement would not be complete without artificial intelligence, which is why "Thunderbird Assist" is to receive AI functions originating from Flower AI. If the local system does not have enough resources to run a language model, Nvidia's Confidential Compute will be used. However, it remains unclear what the assistant will actually do – it certainly provides buzzwords for the announcement.

Earning money

Sipes is quite open about the fact that all this will cost money to offer. Initially, the new functions will be offered to users who consistently participate in the community, then even for free. Other interested parties will have to pay for access. As soon as Thunderbird has a sufficiently strong user base for the new services so that they appear to be sustainable, the project wants to offer different free offers – with restrictions such as less storage space, depending on the service. As is known from other providers, some of these are practically conditional, as email addresses and file sharing are susceptible to abuse if they are offered free of charge.

The first repositories are already publicly accessible, for example for Thunderbird Appointment or Thunderbird Send. However, Sipes is not giving a more precise timetable.

(dmk)