Thunderbird is preparing to embark on one of its biggest changes in its long history, with plans to unveil paid “Thunderbird Pro” and “Thundermail” webmail services.
Thunderbird is one of the most popular email applications and a major success story for the open source community. Despite its success, Mozilla Managing Director Ryan Sipes says the application continues to lose out to other platforms, especially those that offer tightly integrated services.
Thunderbird loses users each day to rich ecosystems that are both clients and services, such as Gmail and Office365. These ecosystems have both hard vendor lock-ins (through interoperability issues with 3rd-pary clients) and soft lock-ins (through convenience and integration between their clients and services). It is our goal to eventually have a similar offering so that a 100% open source, freedom-respecting alternative ecosystem is available for those who want it.
The four Pro features include Thunderbird Appointment, Thunderbird Send, Thunderbird Assist, and Thundermail. Sipes breaks down what each feature will include.
Thunderbird Appointment
Appointment is a scheduling tool that allows you to send a link to someone, allowing them to pick a time on your calendar to meet. The repository for Appointment has been public for a while and has seen pretty remarkable development to this point.
Appointment has been developed to make meeting with others easier for our users, and we weren’t happy with the existing tools as they were either: proprietary or very bloated
Thunderbird Send
Send is the rebirth of Firefox Send – well, kind of. At this point, we have a bit of a Ship of Theseus situation – having rebuilt much of the project to allow for more direct methods of sharing files. We opened up the repo to the public yesterday. So I encourage everyone to go and check it out. Once again, if you want to be part of the beta, let me know and I’ll get you on the shortlist.
Thunderbird Assist
Assist is an experiment that, through a partnership with Flower AI will allow users to take advantage of AI features. The hope is that processing can be done on devices that can support the models, and for devices that are not powerful enough to run the language models locally – Flower has leveraged Nvidia’s confidential compute in order to ensure private remote processing (very similar to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute). But, given some users’ sensitivity to this, these types of features will always be optional for use by people who want them. The repo for Assist is not public yet, but it will be soon.
Thundermail
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).With Thundermail, it is our goal to create a next generation email experience that is completely, 100% open source and built by all of us, our contributors and wider contributor community. Unlike the other services, there will not be a single repository where this work is done. But we will try and share relevant places to contribute in future posts to this list.
Sipes says Thundermail will be available via thundermail.com or tb.pro. Sipes also says long-time contributors to Thunderbird will receive the Pro features for free, while everyone else will pay for the services. Sipes also says that, once the paid services have enough users to be self-sustaining, the organization will likely make some free tiers available.
Thunderbird’s Timing
Thunderbird’s announcement comes at a time when companies, organizations, and even entire countries, are looking to open source solutions in a bid to lessen or end reliance on Big Tech. As Sipes points out, despite being a powerful, full-featured option, Thunderbird has lacked some of the advanced features Outlook and Google Workspace provide.
Thunderbird’s Pro plan could well help the organization gain significant traction against commercial rivals, giving organizations around the world a viable open source solution.
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