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Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

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Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#311

Post by Vinnl »

antisol wrote: post #98
Vinnl wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's basically how you could describe what happened. Those competent people are using Mozilla's infrastructure and trademarks, but otherwise running on donations.

Then how come everything they've done in the last 10 years has been garbage?

I'm not a Thunderbird user myself, and obviously everyone's experiences are different, but I've seen lots of people happy with Thunderbird's development. And just the fact that they've ensured that k9mail is still maintained seems like an objective win, even if it's now called Thunderbird. Exchange support is also something I've been hearing people wish for in non-Outlook email clients in general for ages.

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#312

Post by nonameiguess »

1dom wrote: post #145
cycomanic wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that a weird sentiment. Why do people demand to know and control how every one of their donations goes, while nobody questions how corporations use their money. Ironically, the demand for this increased transparency significantly increases compliance cost, which means more and more money is driven away from the actual cause toward the administrative costs. Exactly what people don't want to support.

The defining difference about paying money to a corporation in exchange for a product is you're paying for something already there, an agreed exchange of value. The whole point about a donation is it's given not in exchange for doing any particular task, but gratuitously. It's not a weird sentiment to want to know what benefits a gift is providing. That's all people are asking for when they want transparency around d…

US nonprofits are as transparent as can get. Their tax returns have to be public record by law. Maybe a press release shared to Hacker News doesn't have the information you want, but you can call them up any time you please and get a detailed categorized line items of everything they spend money on, or use any number of aggregator services that publish IRS Form-990s for free on the web. You can also get it directly from the IRS itself, which has a searchable database. Here is Mozilla's tax return for 2024: https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/200097189_202412_990_...

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#313

Post by Avamander »

josephg wrote: post #20
teekert wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 you…

> 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!

I've seen cases where people have it set up like that and it's so awfully slow. Minutes to display a single new message. That cloud brings absolutely zero user-benefit.

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#314

Post by Avamander »

ano-ther wrote: post #32

As a lot of people in this thread advise against Thunderbird, what do you recommend instead (preferably for Windows as I am stuck on that)?

I've tried so many while doing a bit of research into MUAs and I can't say there are any alternatives that could replace it properly. But depending on your usage or if you're not a demanding user, there might be something out there.

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#315

Post by criticalfault »

glenstein wrote: post #133
criticalfault wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's fine. point is that Mozilla is wasting money and having 4000 people working on chrome may not be the correct benchmark.

Wait why is that fine? The whole point was that ladybird is yet to enter alpha which is the very reason why it's not the correct benchmark. And you said the Chrome comparison isn't the correct one but... didn't follow it up with an actual reason.

I meant it's fine for others to want to move faster and hire more people (like Google). just replying to your sentence. it's fine for others to want things different...

About ladybird, I think it is quite a good benchmark:

- they have accomplished a task many thought impossible in the modern world

- they accomplished it while having a handful of people

- they had a fraction of resources compared to both google and Mozilla. only about a year ago they had few hundred of thousands as support money to get them started.

The engine may not be finished yet. may not be as performant as the other two. but they did a 3rd engine. and given 10% of the budget Mozilla has, they would progress much more. Ladybird Team has shown how everything about Mozilla is mismanaged and simply broken.

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#316

Post by ryanleesipes »

pavon wrote: post #226
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?

Basically the IRS is highly skeptical of the idea that free software development fits the legal definition of a 501(c)(3), and tends to reject such applications [1][2]. That is why Mozilla Foundation cannot use donations for Firefox development, and instead uses them for activism. So that creates the strange situation where legally it is easier for free software developers to accept donations as a for-profit corporat…

I am the CEO of MZLA (the Thunderbird entity). This is a large part of the reason. ^

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#317

Post by firefax »

Now that Protonmail has an ok-ish PGP interface they've been bleeding users, it's a really important piece of the open source infrastructure and I hope folks support it -- back when I was with Mozilla, I said they should focus on using less ram and less CPU, not weird little side quests like... well the list goes on and on.

One thing I think we should do is allow Thunderbird to return to the early Firefox model -- it's a stable product, that people can install extensions on. Save for security updates and keeping up with OS quirks, it doesn't need constant tinkering.

I'm not saying they don't need the money, I'm just saying I'm concerned how and why we got to this point.

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#318

Post by Avamander »

hosteur wrote: post #215
psittacus wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

So here more than 6 years later, did they act more swiftly or pursue new ideas? The development pace seems unbearably slow.

Judging from the side it seems like there aren't a lot of developers and the current few have their favorite subsystems, those get almost all of the attention. The rest is kept as-is and does not progress. I also don't know if there's a trivial way to find how many external contributions they get from BugZilla, if they even get any?

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#319

Post by Diti »

OhioMan2943 wrote: post #26
shakna wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla tried to kill Thunderbird in 2020. They've been talking about not sponsoring it all since 2015. They might have the money, but they don't really seem to want anything to do with the project.

Mozilla doesn't have the willpower or vision to do anything with anything.

I like those two comments giving context on what has happened 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46118243 (parent and child comment).

Re: Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

#320

Post by hk__2 »

jeltz wrote: post #228
hk__2 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think they are just hating on Mozilla out of pure principles Please don’t assume bad faith when the reality is that you don’t know.

Please provide an alternative then.

I’m not the one criticizing Thunderbird. I personally don’t use any email client on Linux; I just use whatever web interface the hosting provider has.
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