Help Keep Thunderbird Alive • Hacker News Board

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#11

Post by code-blooded » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 9:55 AM UTC

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.

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#12

Post by teekert » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 9:56 AM UTC

plmpsu wrote: post #3

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.

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#13

Post by Loic » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 9:56 AM UTC

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 :-)

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#14

Post by teekert » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 9:58 AM UTC

0x000042 wrote: post #10

shaky-carrousel wrote: post #2

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

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

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#15

Post by elAhmo » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 9:58 AM UTC

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.

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#16

Post by josephg » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 9:59 AM UTC

plmpsu wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#17

Post by latexr » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 10:00 AM UTC

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?

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#18

Post by bulbar » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 10:01 AM UTC

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.

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#19

Post by psittacus » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 10:02 AM UTC

swiftcoder wrote: post #9

> 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?

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/

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#20

Post by josephg » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 10:03 AM UTC

teekert wrote: post #12

plmpsu wrote: post #3

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.