ryanleesipes

This was built with money from an grant from Mozilla. See the bottom of this page: https://www.thunderbolt.io/announcing-thunderbolt

No, this was built with money from an grant from Mozilla.

No, this was built with money from an grant from Mozilla.

Yes, we should. Will do that today

Love it!

Yeah. We need to create a docker container and make it easy to deploy for folks. We're not ready with the hosted option at the moment.

Head of Thunderbird project here.

Our scheduling tool, Thunderbird Appointment, will always be open source.

Repo here: https:// github.com/thunderbird/appointment

Come talk to us and build with us. We'll help you replace Cal.com

Thunderbird is in a different company. Doesn't get any Google money. Only funded by donations.

Total mail UI/UX overhaul, total backend overhaul allowing implementation of new protocols (first new protocol was Exchange), an Android app and monthly release cadence vs yearly. And that's just to name the ones that immediately come to mind. Have plenty of users yelling at us for changing too much.

Take a look at https://blog.thunderbird.net for a play-by-play. But we're doing a helluva lot.

Unlimited aliases at custom domains are a part of the offering. Technically, Thundermail supports sieve rules, we do need to come up with UX to expose it to users for management.

With custom domains... Yes! :)

Already a part of the offering. :)

I meant to have a "here" at the end, just typed while excited. Typically known for using too many words.

Sign up for the waitlist here: https://Thundermail.com

Also the Thundermail service is based on Stalwart (completely foss). We'll open source any additional relevant bits.

We also released the supporting services:

https://github.com/thunderbird/appointment

https://github.com/thunderbird/tbpro-add-on

https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-accounts

I'd love to know more about what you are hitting. Care to open a bug then ping me back here? I'll put it in front of the right people.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Thunderbi...

What would get you to switch from Fastmail?

We still need to produce a big report like this for 2025. But you can find MZLA specific info for 2024 and 2023 via the below links:

https://stats.thunderbird.net/#financials

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2024/10/thunderbird-annual-repo...

We still need to produce a big report like this for 2025. But you can find MZLA specific info for 2024 and 2023 via the below links:

https://stats.thunderbird.net/#financials

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2024/10/thunderbird-annual-repo...

That's Mozilla-wide and includes the Mozilla Corporation and other entities.

We have 2023-2024 reporting via these two links:

https://stats.thunderbird.net/#financials

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2024/10/thunderbird-annual-repo...

We need to update the ratio for 2025, but it shouldn't be dramatically different.

No, we rely on PGP encrypted email. What I'm talking about is the latter. Emails are encrypted with your public key before being stored in the database. (Our stack is based on Stalwart, you can read about how it works here: https://stalw.art/docs/encryption/overview )

Protonmail = privacy at all costs. Thundermail = freedom at all costs (open standards, use w/ whatever client you want, upload your own encryption key and "go dark")

Will support custom domains out of the box. Getting real close to launch. Join waitlist at https://thundermail.com

What percentage of their money do they spend on developers? If it is more than 50% on "non-charitable activities" (of which software development is not considered) - they may be on the wrong side of the IRS.

Sign up for the waitlist at https://thundermail.com

That's right. We've long had Microsoft account users across Exchange, Office365 and Outlook.com complain about having issues using Thunderbird. So we're trying to account for all protocols from MS.

Thunderbird lives in an entity called MZLA, created by Mozilla and the Thunderbird Council (the elected open source community leadership) to be the legal and financial home to Thunderbird.

MZLA, which I lead, receives only money via donations from donors. We are a for-profit because the IRS is very skeptical of nonprofits who develop FOSS software (someone down below linked to a bunch of great links on this topic). We, do, however publish tons of information on what we are doing on our blog, and we are open source and a community run project, so if you really want to go deep on this - come join us in making Thunderbird.

Great links:

https://blog.thunderbird.net

https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/participate/

CEO of MZLA (the Mozilla entity that develops Thunderbird). One point of clarification, we don't get money from any source but our donors. After years of funding issues, MZLA was created by the Mozilla Foundation and the Thunderbird Council (our community governance body), to provide a legal/financial home for Thunderbird.

Launching Thundermail this year (an email service) which we hope to help provide even more funds for development, beyond just donations. Also serving a user need (lots of our users ask us to help them get off Gmail).

Lots of interest in how the money is spent - answer: mostly on devs, landed Exchange support recently (big for a lot of MS users), working on Graph support as well, JMAP after that. Updating the calendar (primarily UX/UI there), continuing to improve our Android app, working on a native iOS app and the aforementioned Thundermail service.

We publish yearly reports and will publish one again this year detailing all this.

Here is a 2025 recap: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/12/thunderbird-2025-review...

But the blog has a ton of updates across the different efforts: https://blog.thunderbird.net

Happy to answer questions and we are an open source project so feel free to reach out to us and engage if you really want to see how the sausage is made!

*Edit: More context on what Thunderbird Council is*

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

Product Manager here. The answer is because we are tied to the ESR release cycle we have to release at a certain time (we are working on changing this). So we're shipping all the work that is done and stable. There is still work to be done to the front-end and as much as people want to trivialize it, it's not so simple. To make the changes we did, we had to rewrite a very complicated front-end with some code that has been there for 20 years and had entire systems built upon it. We are going to get to what the mockup showed. But we're going to build it right, and that means rewriting large pieces of our codebase. We'll ship the remaining stuff when they are ready.

Thunderbird Product Manager here. We have no intention to replace the backend or most of the components. It will not be a different app. It's still run by the K-9 project maintainer. The difference? We didn't want to see K-9 die because of a lack of funding, and our visions were aligned - so it made sense to work together. That's it. Thunderbird is community run (unlike Firefox, our community representatives approve our team's budget and goals), so our aims are just to provide for our users and community what they want. And they want to use email on their phones as well as desktop.

The way you present it sounds devious. But we're just truly trying to work together in the open source ecosystem the best we can and put our resources to their best use.