Thundermail… yeah yeah. :gently pushes my aol.com account under the sofa:
welp I signed up for the waitlist.
I’ll use it for a disposable email at first, and if it endures and does well I’ll move my main shit off to it.
I’d consider it. If they host things outside of the US/start moving operations overseas, it’d be a lot more interesting. I sub to Proton for email, VPN, and drive support. Still hoping someday for proper Linux drive support so Mozilla/Thunderbird can target that
I’m listening…
But how is a small non-profit going to afford a free email service? Ads in every email?
Based on what I’ve seen in their forums it will be a paid service. I think it will be free at first for beta testers but I assume they are targeting people who currently use services like Proton.
Thanks for the info.
But I think they’ll still need an ad driven free version to gain acceptance.
nah. ad free paid emails are already a thing
Out of all the articles and the official release announcement, you could share, you shared forbes which violate people privacy.
Why?
Tbh because it was the one shared on Reddit. Though if you have the right browser extensions when I wouldn’t worry about it too much.
Upvoted for honesty lol.
I went looking for something official but couldn’t find it.
You imply OP knows how to read & they read the whole article and noticed the source. 💀
No matter how much I hate Mozilla’s new path, companies like this challenging big tech are bold and have a lot of courage. If I set aside my personal op opinions about Mozilla, I actually admire them for this. They can actually dent big tech with funding from big tech itself.
I keep hearing a lot of negative comments about Mozilla lately. I’m wondering if this move is more in line with then just turning into another google rather than disrupting the marketplace.
yeah, might seem good to have yet another choice, but it’s an illusion
If they’re user funded, their incentives are fundamentally different from Google’s. Even thinking as a business, it makes no sense to enshittify the way Google does. It’s a different choice, even if it’s not the choice you wanted.
different, yes. but by how much and will it be different in ways that truly matter
For now, they’re better than Google. I have some bad opinions about them, but anything better than Google competing with Google is an improvement.
Yeah it’s not even close.
It’s a saturated market and email is starting to disappear (it’ll take years, but the signs are there).
They’d be better using it on the browser and ditching other products.No its never going to disappear. If you are referring to people using slack and chat apps, those are locked in walled gardens where your messages cant ever leave.
Email can be moved anywhere easily.
Email isn’t going anywhere. It’s the ipv4 of communication. You can list 100 things bad about it and none of it matters, too many things are now built on top of it, no competitor can possibly have a chance without first reimplementing email, and then they’re just adding extensions which everyone else ignores, and email continues.
The more plausible threat to email is that it gets siloed into the top 5 or 6 providers and everyone else gets filtered out as spam (ie you need gmail, hotmail, etc or your emails will never reach anyone)
Sounded great until the “assist” ai feature. I friggin hate Gemini in gmail so any other kind of ai is an automatic nogo for me
I think it’s incredibly important that people know, with absolute certainty, whether or not the new Mozilla/Firefox privacy policy in any way applies to / covers such a service.
I’m not saying I know the answer- What I’m saying without a concrete, permanently applied answer it’s not even considerable.
There is no email service that exists without a terms of use and privacy policy. I still feel everyone overreacted about Firefox. It’s funnier how many people said they switched to Brave because of it and all the super shady stuff Brave has done.
Firefox/Mozilla operated without any of the new additions for nearly the entire history of the internet until this year. If anything, “over”-reacting to the new policies was too weak a reaction. You do you and all, but I’ll agree to very strongly disagree.
at exists without a terms of use and privacy policy. I still feel everyone overreacted about Firefox. It’s funnier how many people said they switched to Brave because of it and all the super shady stuff Brave has done.
Being angry at the Mozilla foundation for those changes is understandable. Switching to Brave because of it is plain stupid.
You can’t know that with absolute certainty. Sorry, but if you’re using someone elses server for your communications and they’re not end to end encrypted, you should just assume that they can and do read your emails, and act accordingly.
Thunderbird Pro will apparently be:
This email thing plus Thunderbird Send (which is basically https://send.vis.ee/), Thunderbird Appointment - a scheduling tool and Thunderbird Assist, which is:
“…at least for now, being cautiously labeled as “an experiment” that will allow users to take advantage of AI features within their email. However, the goal is to be lightweight enough that the language models can be run locally on a user’s PC in the interest of privacy. This service is being developed in partnership with Flower AI, which leverages Nvidia’s confidential compute to provide private remote processing in the event a user’s PC isn’t powerful enough. Sipes emphasizes that any remote processing features attached to Thunderbird Assist will always be optional, in the interest of ensuring complete user privacy.”
So AI shit that nobody asked for or wants.
This covers my thoughts about damn near every “helpful” feature this side of auto-complete email addresses.
They said it will be opt-in and are trying to make it local-first. Their provider(?) apparently allows fallback to nvidia cloud compute when the hardware can’t handle it.
I’m not using AI to write my fucking emails, regardless. Just wanted to let people know.
p.s. Sorry, I’m dumb, skipped over quote in parent comment. Point is, there’s more to the service than optional AI bullshit, and you shouldn’t have to disable it.
"[…] This service is being developed in partnership with Flower AI, which leverages Nvidia’s confidential compute to provide private remote processing in the event a user’s PC isn’t powerful enough. Sipes emphasizes that any remote processing features attached to Thunderbird Assist will always be optional, in the interest of ensuring complete user privacy.”
That’s a lot of words to say “we made an AI that totally won’t suck up your data, trust me bro”
Here’s what I want… I leave a computer on at home and it checks my email. I get emails from it at my phone. No setup. Make it work like Sinkthing used to work. I don’t want cloud anything. Fucking backup nightmare where my shit ends up kidnapped by a company for monthly ransom.
So the Mozilla Foundation is gonna waste google money on email infrastructure? Hmmm… 'k… it’s not like their browser could use some love…
are you implying firefox is in a state of neglect?
No there yet but not getting the love it deserved either.
Maybe they oughta try asking for money like Wikipedia and KDE, maybe then they could become independent from Google and focus on actually developing a quality browser instead of making every app be about profit.You’re making no sense.
If this works out it might be a nice place to migrate to away from my self-hosted e-mail provided they eventually let you bring your own domain. Just sucks that e-mail is essentially the most secure thing you need to have since compromising that can compromise every account attached to the e-mail. That’s a lot of trust you need to instill in your e-mail host.
You say you’re self hosting your email, how are you doing that?
I meant hosting wise, at home or using a VPS? How did you get a fixed IP/ what are you using for a proxy?
Whatever their doing, it’s not worth it.
Eh it depends. I’m fortunate enough to be in a good IP block so I don’t get my e-mails dropped purely on that. It’s been a good learning experience and I’ve leaned on my own server a number of times for troubleshooting at work since I can see the whole mail flow. The only problem I have is the free Outlook/Hotmail will not accept my e-mails. Everybody else seems fine. All that said, I don’t host anybody else’s e-mail so I haven’t had any spam come out of my IP, and I would never in a million years host e-mail for a customer.
Lol sure destroy all the trust with your users THEN launch an email service. Hard pass fro me.
I guarantee you they’re already planning to train an LLM on everybody’s emails, or at least sell them to AI companies doing training.
Yet thunderbird still can’t single click open an email in a new window. If I recall correctly the request has been filed in 2014 or smt 💀
Nope, still requires double click.
It’s almost like you didn’t read my comment and went straight to angry. This has been suggested for years with 0 response from Thunderbird team and there’s no way to extend it without forking and patching everything yourself.
If you’ve done nothing but complain for 14 years then I’m glad you still have to double click.
Lmao sure buddy i should have forked a web browser, learn their front end and patched everything myself! Ir you know fuck right off to a billion other email clients that don’t ship literally the most complex piece of software in the world with it 🙄
People still use Email???
the entire world.
If only they could develop a federated short message system.
Messenger/WhatsApp/slack messaging style but federated like email
Email is federated, it’s just not really a medium people want to limit to 500 chars…
Nothing at all stopping you from writing a client that only allows 500 char messages in and out.
Someone even built a chat system that used email under the hood.
Email was originally one of the first federated systems. Anyone can host a server and send messages back and forth from other servers with a set standard. That basically is federation.
