> I'm not sure about charging a fee at the start and providing a free tier later

I think this is a smart move. Email isn't a platform where you need to conquer the world to be successful. Hey has been doing great business with an only-paid model. Might as well serve the paying customers first and build up revenue.

Also, whenever you're launching something new, you generally need to limit onboarding. Google did it with Gmail, Bluesky did it with their service. You can't have a flood of 10 million new users all at once before you've had a chance to scale things. Seems reasonable to let paying users in first given that email doesn't have network lock-in effects.

I think there is reasonable skepticism around how committed Mozilla is to this. However, I think that starting with the paid tiers is a smart move given that they'd have to limit signups initially anyway.

> I don't think people want to change email addresses very often.

You probably know this already, but people should have their own domain. Then they can change provider without changing the address.

I'm deeply skeptical as well.

If firefox doesn't have enough compelling ideas and features in its primary domain of the browser, then how are they going to develop a new mail competency in such a complete way that they can take on gmail?

Whether they succeed or fail, this will sap resources from the browser team. And it seems overwhelmingly likely to fail.

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

> Make thunderbird supports a local database with 100k emails with proper search

Currently working with a Thunderbird database which contains over 300,000 messages and search works quite reliably (once in a blue moon have to switch from "Search Messages..." to "Global Search"), though the emails are stored in Maildir format rather than the default mbox: https://tinyapps.org/blog/202207100700_thunderbird_mbox_to_m... .

I have a (non-published) plugin that I'm using that is capable of using elasticsearch for indexing & search from within Thunderbird. I never bothered publishing it, since I never really wanted to maintain it/build a business out of it. Would this be something you are interested in, potentially for a small fee?

I mentioned the same problem in one other subthread as well. Current hardware is certainly performant enough not to become this sluggish at just 100 000 or so emails. There's actually no reason it shouldn't work well with say a million emails in one inbox.

We're building what you want.

https://marcoapp.io

Why tackle problems like search when you can redesign the UI/UX half a dozen times instead?

I don't blame the developers; they do whatever they're paid to do.

Mozilla has terrible leadership and no vision. It's the worst aspects of directionless, corporate software masquerading as an open source project.

Use Betterbird. They upgrade Thunderbird and fix bugs.

There's an input field for an email address below that block for me

So... I need an email address to signup to an email service?

That is without a doubt the worst landing page I have ever seen.

What else could it be but a bitwise AND. If they had used `open_source && privacy_focused && user_controlled`, it would just be `true`, which is hardly an interesting philosophy. This way, you'll be able to do tests like `if (!(philosophy & privacy_focused)) { track_user_activity(); serve_creepy_but_useless_ad_about_something_they_bought_yesterday(); }`. Alternatively, they could have used some kind of set datatype if the number of philosophy variables is large enough, but I think the code would have become unmaintainable if they want to implement every possible philosophical alternative; 64 bits should be enough for everyone.

To be fair, Mozilla's org naming has proven itself confusing. Half my HN karma must be pointing out the difference between the Foundation and the Corporation when people talk about "donating to Firefox".

I agree, the search is quite bad.

The UI is bad and the results seem to be poor. I don't necessarily have the issue that emails are not in the results, but more that results are too numerous and the only way I can narrow down results is putting more constrains in the UI. What often happens for me is that I search using a several terms or some specific phrases and the search returns tons of results (does it just do an OR between words in the search) and I then end up clicking (why can't the time constraint be a slider?!) through different months (based on what I recall about the timeframe of the email) until I find the email.

When I was using notmuch I recall results being much better.

Another annoyance is that Thunderbird only seems to search locally, i.e. if I don't have some folders downloaded it will not do a server search as well as a local search (maybe there's a setting for it?)

I submitted a Thunderbird bug 13 years ago now, that Thunderbird doesn't let you just search for a word, and find all copies of that word: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=752844 . Their search instead tries to be clever, but it then finds stupid stuff like (in my case) "The base of Wedding is wed. The plural of wed is weds. Lets return every email ever from a Wednesday"

Still not fixed.

I've been pretty happy with its search and have never had issues finding emails. The UI isn't great and theres a lot of cruft to filter through but it does work...

I have found that "Quick Filter Bar" is often much better at searching if you know which folder the email is in.

Yes, Thunderbird search become unusable when they removed the option to run search on server. But apparently the "quick filter" works in a different way so if you can live with one folder only you can use it.

It helps to sort the results by date rather than relevance. Relevance is the default and the results are all over the place and it does indeed feel utterly broken :)

Sounds like Apple Mail so maybe no one gets it right.

I run grep on Thunderbird's storage directory and it's significantly faster than anything Thunderbird itself attempts. (It also allows finding exact matches, fuzzy search without language "awareness" is disgusting to use.)

> Rooting for mozilla and their privacy-focused services. Been using the email-masking feature (generate forward email addresses) for a while and really like it.

I don't know how the privacy of this one will shake out, but the privacy focus on the browser includes allowing them to share your data, so that makes me way less enthusiastic about continuing my investment in their ecosystem.

I think a lot of that was just an out-of-control spiral of self-confirmation happening in comments sections that was at best loosely connected to actual facts.

I think that finally along last there's been some real push back against it and it's no longer acceptable to just say it as if it's going to be the presumed default narrative because it really depends on what you mean and a lot of the criticisms were kind of nonsensical and without any sense of proportion.

I still basically trust Mozilla, they're a force for good, and I'm happy to use their services and do what I can to contribute to them being profitable and a successful counterpoint to Google.

That's not my point of view at all, and I have little issue with what happened and have no concern about Mozilla and privacy.

The endless repetition of these comments is becoming spammy - they have nothing to say but the exact same thing again. We get it; you don't need to repeat it. It's like someone writing, at every opportunity, 'I don't trust Meta' and adding nothing more.

I'm cautiously optimistic. It's certainly the most realistic business plan their leadership has put forward in a long time.

And a Mozilla/Thunderbird based email service is well timed. Microsoft's upgrade (read: downgrade) of the newest version of Outlook, making it a glorified web app, has pissed of a lot of users who aren't the sort to browse hacker spaces but do have to use serious email and calendaring every day for their work.

Even if those folks don't see Thunderbird as an alternative to what Outlook/Exchange was, it'll absolutely be an alternative to what Microsoft is turning Outlook into... [1][2][3]

And there's something devilishly funny about the fact that, because DDG uses Bing on the backend, when I search for articles to cite... Everything that comes up trashing the new Outlook is from MSN.

[1]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-new-outlook-fo...

[2]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/windows-11-takes-small-...

[3]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/even-microsoft-s-a...

Yes, and maybe timely with many Countries looking to wean themselves off US based.

I wonder if this service can be segregated by region ?

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

> The final launch will be Thundermail, an email hosting service using the open-source Stalwart stack. Users will be able to pick between thundermail.com and tb.pro domains.

If the article is correct, Thundermail will be built using Stalwart[1], which appears to support JMAP

[1]: https://stalw.art/

Yes! I'm a fastmail user and every couple of months I do a survey of JMAP support and come back disappointed.

Speaking about thunderbird, I liked their UI redesign, but it seems they are taking away quite a bit of plugin capabilities, e.g. there used to be the possibility to run firenvim (a plugin to run neovim in the compose window), but that's not possible anymore.

Is it just JMAP, or why does Fastmail's web app feel so fast? I have moved away from all locally running mail apps to Fastmail and even fetch/alias all my other mail accounts to them because of the much better experience.

It looks like data is stored on US server, which defeats all and any real attempts on true data privacy. But since the company is a US company it doesn't really matter where the data is, the feds will always have enforceable access.

OpenID certainly hasn't replaced email. Young people still all need email to sign up for ~anything online - not to mention things like job/school applications or plenty of other real-world things.

What email has become is an identifier and a receptacle for notices. It's not a social platform for young people. But it's very much a thing!

Email is used everywhere from account management, subscription services, school, and generally every single employer or client I've ever worked with. Sometimes I work with clients through SMS, Signal or Discord but we still fall back to email for certain things.

The Mozilla Corporation does not develop Thunderbird, so why even mention them in this thread. This is MZLA Technologies.

>If Mozilla didnt waste money on dumb things

This has been repeated so many times that people seem to have forgotten they're supposed to actually make arguments to support it. There's no such thing as a missing browser feature that could have returned all the Firefox's market share that they were unable to make on account of spending on the VPN or acquiring Pocket or starting the VC fund or whatever. I don't know where this idea came from, but it seems to have been a mass collective hallucination.

I have problems with dabbling in ad tech. I have problems with strategic vision. But I have more problems with people being confidently wrong in the backwaters of internet comment sections not even pretending to attach these claims to any factual basis whatsoever. I mean if you really want to go look at a recent 990 form from Mozilla, look at the amount spent on browser development, make your best guess as to what it costs to administer the VPN, then make the case that the money used on it represents money that could have been invested in the browser development, but wasn't, make the case for the missing feature that would have otherwise been there, and then make the case that that would have boosted Mozilla's market share back to 33%. Those are all the missing steps of actual logic and reasoning and causation that would be necessary to substantiate this argument. But bafflingly, everyone just repeats this while skipping all the steps.

The Mozilla Corporation is not the organization behind this. It's MZLA Technologies, which is underneath the Mozilla Foundation.

Firefox was never going to be fully ported to Rust, at least not in any short timespan.

The amount of lies that get spread about the Mozilla Corporation and Firefox is insane. The fact that we continue to see it here in a thread about Thunderbird and MZLA Technologies is even crazier.

> That would have made Rust drastically more mature and proven.

Rust's successes in a variety of codebases and in a variety of organizations does far more for maturing and proving Rust's value proposition than a single codebase would be.

How would email be able to express anything the chat interface cannot? Attachments, tools, and long-form content are all well-supported. Email allows for asynchronous communication but that is usually not seen as a benefit - when I talk to AI I want a ~instant response, not wait for someone to check their mailbox.

Gmail was also announced on April Fools'...

I'd love for that to be true, but Google through me out of their free tier a decade ago, and I've been paying various amounts for my wife and my accounts ever since.

I don't think the definition of success here has to be overtaking Gmail. In fact, I think that would be doomed to fail. Instead, you want to appeal to people willing to pay for an alternative, which I think is probably a real population of users and honestly one of Mozilla's best strategic moves in years.

Services that take on Google can not just win over some user base but even become profitable (see Kagi's example), so it's not strictly about $0 price tag. But they gotta be really good (for some target audience), and the hard part is beating the already established offerings, of which there are plenty and covering for every kind of crowd I can think of. I wish MZLA luck, but given all the Mozilla Foundation history (which started amazing but is less than stellar in terms of recent PR) I'm quite skeptical.

Maybe it doesn't work at Mozilla's scale, but a business doesn't need to take overtake Gmail to win.

What trust issues do you have with MZLA Technologies, the organization that currently develops Thunderbird?

There are email providers based in Switzerland. My current favourite provider is Migadu :-).

Those are absolutely fair requests. I sure hope people won't forget what happened then and why.

Wow, I'm sorry to hear they took that down. It's a perfectly normal and rational request for accountability on January 6th, which actually I would say makes me feel more favorably about the company.

Thank you for sharing this, I was completely unaware that this was Mozilla's stance. This is shocking and disappointing to me.

Jesus Christ. Maybe I will give in and switch to Chrome.

I certainly hope not. I like Kagi and I don't want Mozilla messing with it.

Just use Proton

They are using stalwart, another open source product, for the backend stack. So you should be able to host your own server instance with custom domain when it gets built out. Stalwart itself just received a European funding grant to build out the features needed. From Thunderbird announcement:

> Thundermail is an email service. We want to provide email accounts to those that love Thunderbird, and we believe that we are capable of providing a better service than the other providers out there, that aligns with our values. We have been experimenting with this for a while now and are using Stalwart as the software stack we are building upon. We have been working with the Stalwart maintainer to improve its capabilities (for instance, we have pushed hard on calendar and contacts being a core piece of the stack).

https://thunderbird.topicbox.com/groups/planning/T437cd854af...

https://stalw.art/blog/nlnet-grant-collaboration

Mozilla is a no-profit foundation, not a company which needs to be sustainable or be profitable.

I agree Mozilla lost its way but I would still hope in them improving over time than trusting yet another for-profit to serve us in the long-term.

Once I can bring my own domain, I'll be more interested.

sounds more like google to me

I feel reasonably confident at this point, declaring this a myth. Mozilla absolutely made missteps and lost browser market share, but it had almost nothing to do with spending on side bets, if you look at the budget and you look at the numbers of these things. Most of the sidebets already happened after they lost the market share and did not happen at such prohibitive costs that they prevented them from investing in browser development. And there's no such thing as a missing browser feature they could have developed that would have recovered all of the market share, which they failed to develop because of a side bet.

Nobody who repeats this has even looked at Mozilla's budget, or checked to see whether the side bets overlap with the time where Mozilla lost market share. The one exception to this is Firefox OS, which does appear to have used significant resources and happened during a critical time where they lost market share. And while that one at least would be a fair criticism where there's real data behind it, I actually respect it as a bold strategic move and personally deeply wished it worked out. But for whatever reason, a complete disconnection from factual reality has never stopped people from claiming that the VPN or the Mozilla Foundation or whatever was the problem.

MZLA Technologies is separate from the Mozilla Corporation.

Game-changer... how? There are at least two players in email space that provide encrypted email and various auxiliary suites (Protonmail and Tuta), plus at least one well-trusted well-respected email service (Fastmail), and of course people can always self-host if they dare. What revolutionary they could possibly realistically bring in areas privacy and security to be an actual "game-changer"?

Not saying it cannot possibly be - just that I cannot think of any novel way how it would deserve a title like this in such a particularly tricky niche as email suite service.

I've used Thunderbird for years and know half a dozen other people using it, including one who has folders with tens of thousands of emails, and have never heard of any data corruption.

Thunderbird is my daily driver email client for all my business email for over a decade.

I've never had a single corruption problem in that time, with probably hundreds of thousands of emails. Take that for what its worth.

The only complaint I've ever had is when they redid their UI a year or two ago it got unbearably slow - which improved over the next few iterations until its now fine again.

My coworker uses thunderbird since time immemorial, and I don’t think it ever corrupted his mailbox.

I have been using Thunderbird myself for years and never had any such problems.