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.
I was thinking ab this being april fool bcz it’s posted on 1st…
Google announced Gmail on April 1
I hope to god one day the developers at Mozilla finally get tired of this shit and fork everything under a new org.
Fuck off with more services and give me my integrated FTP client back. No one who uses Mozilla software wants more cloud shit or online services from Mozilla.
integrated FTP client
Why though? SFTP is leagues better.
For transfers between systems you own yes, but when grabbing a Linux iso from a public server FTP works fine.
For years Firefox allowed you to crawl FTP sites natively.
lol @ ftp client
No one who uses Mozilla software wants more cloud shit or online services from Mozilla.
I don’t think that’s unanimous. I’d like to use Firefox Relay, myself, and I’m willing to give thundermail a chance.
Used to think I’d go full Proton eventually, but leaning more towards a diverse set of service providers, nowadays. It’s also my hope that these services allow Mozilla to depend less on companies like Google, and more on the users they ought to serve, which would be healthier for the org and better for users.
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.
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.
…and then join the big tech at some point.
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.
On top of that, people still use email to sign up for these gardens. Technically, you could use your phone number too. I wonder how far could you take this idea of living completely without email.
Job applications, and several other sign ins still depend on email, so that’s going to be a bit of a hitch.
Yeah and then we can really go hard destroying the lives of people without phone access.
I work for a healthcare company that serves the under privileged and right now in most cities it’s easier to guarantee someone has email than a consistent phone number thanks to free WiFi hotspots. You can miss a phone payment and still read your email even if you’re cut off from cellular service.
Oh, that’s a very good point! Makes you look at this proposal in a completely different way.
Any business2business or consumer2business communication will likely still happen over email for a very long time
I’m curious, not bashing. What signs have you seen that lead you to believe email is dying?
It’s insecure by default and Kids These Days™ prefer messaging apps, which have boomed in the last decade.
Time will tell.What do you make of the use of email in the business world? You’re right that quite a bit of that has turned into instant messaging as well, ie I text my boss instead of sending them mail but it definitely feels like that’s going away a lot slower if not expanding
Email is a must for between businesses. Having said that, lots of internal communication is findingther channels, like Teams, Slack, and so on.
We actually heavily rely on connected channels to talk to most of our vendors now. Once you are on enterprise level support pretty much every vendor gives you a dedicated slack or teams channel.
It’s great since people come and go and we don’t lose our vendor comms history in random inboxes or have someone not CCd on. Any vendor we have linked is also one less vendor someone is likely to be phished talking to the wrong person on the wrong email. For support tickets there’s no wrapping and encrypting shit steps to send critical info over email, we use the slack channel. It really solves a lot of BS
So… Exactly how it was 20 years ago. Kids Those Days used AIM and Yahoo Messenger instead of slack and discord.
email is starting to disappear
The fuck it is lol, do you have any idea how much email is used in literally everything? How old are you?
Email won’t disappear sooner or later. It’s a huge part of communication between companies, nonprofit, state, etc. It may be less between people or with consumers. But, it still is widely use otherwise.
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.
yes but this takes time. its great to have alternatives in the meantime.
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
Google only checked out and cashed in after getting a monopoly. Mozilla let themselves fade into irrelevance.
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.
Sooo… where will be your email server then? On your home computer?
At home but separate computer with reverse proxy.
Oh You will have trouble getting your outbound mail delivered
Syncthing still works like that. It’s completely self hostable. I have it on a pi 1B+ lol
I have it but it eats up battery on the phones and the Dev left so it’s probably going to go caput at some point.
Check out the fork on fdroid
I know there’s a fork. I’m hoping it picks up devs from where its at. It works beautifully.
That fork is what the Syncthing devs recommend. Pretty sure it’s fine.
You really need to clarify your comment, as it’s already causing confusion.
- The official Syncthing project is going strong, and is not the same thing as the Android app.
- The Android app was discontinued late last year due to Google’s increasingly difficult requirements to publish on the Play Store.
- Syncthing-Fork is now what Syncthing recommends for Android users.
Aw man, I really love syncthing, especially across my computers/backup server at home. I don’t even know what I’d use instead
Syncthing isn’t going anywhere. The Android app is the only thing that was dropped, and that was only because of Google’s increasingly-difficult requirements to publish on the Play Store.
Syncthing-Fork is the spiritual successor to the original Android app and can be found on F-Droid.
if it’s anything like gmail, they’d offer imap so you can set it up in thunderbird and download your messages locally.
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 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”
“nvidia’s confidential compute” had me choke when reading it. Sure bro, sure.
This sounds like proton except I haven’t heard a thing about cost or encryption which leads me to believe you will pay with your data and there will be no encryption.
Proton is the bare minimum for email services. Email should be fully redone at its core.
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. 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.
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.
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.
If its not zero access its just more ameritech bullshit.
Archive link for anyone else for whom that article crashed their tab.
Out of all the articles and the official release announcement, you could share, you shared forbes which violate people privacy.
Why?
You imply OP knows how to read & they read the whole article and noticed the source. 💀
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.
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
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
Doesn’t like 90% of Mozilla’s funding come from Google? At least expanding their paid services could be seen as trying to turn that around.
The anti-monopoly lawsuit against Google fixed that
Now Mozilla has to find a way to offset that loss, which would be attracting the non-Firefox market
Nice! Good for them.
From my understanding thunbird is somewhat separated from this. From the article linked by OP it says:
What’s crystal clear is that Thunderbird’s ever-increasing donation revenue (currently its sole source of income) is allowing for some explosive growth that’s long overdue. To add some context to this, Thunderbird received $2.8 million in donation revenue during 2021. Two years later, in 2023, it received $8.6 million in donations. I’m told that total financial contributions for 2024 were even higher, though the final amount hasn’t been officially released.
I should donate again. As someone who still depends on gmail, I keep forgetting how annoying it was to get ads every time I refreshed my inbox, before I switched to their app. Glad things seem to be working out.
