- Thunderbird email client to evolve to Gmail-like service.
- Services to be fully open-source and privacy-respecting.
- Paid-for tier initially, with free tiers possibly to come.
The organisation behind the open-source email client Thunderbird intends to offer web services it’s calling Thunderbird Pro and Thundermail to compete directly with the two giants of the email space, O365 and Gmail.
Mozilla’s Thunderbird Pro will comprise of Appointment, Send and Assist, while magnificently-titled Thundermail is to be an enhanced email service based on software from Stalwart, with whom the Thunderbird team have been working closely. Stalwart combines the traditionally and historically separated components of an email client (Sendmail, IMAP synchronisation, spam filtering, authentication, DMARC/DKIM, etc.) into one extensible platform.
Thunderbird Appointment is a scheduling tool with which users of services like Calendly will be familiar, which allows users to send links for recipients to book appointments according to the account owner’s personal calendar availability. Ryan Sipes, Thunderbird’s Managing Director claims that existing platforms offering this feature are “proprietary or very bloated.”
Thunderbird Send will be a file-sharing service like WeTransfer or TransferNow. Its public code repository was opened on March 27th, and like for Thunderbird Appointment, early-adopters are invited to sign up to be among the first beta test users.
Long-time users of the Firefox web browser may remember Firefox Send, a service Mozilla had to close in 2020 due to the cost overheads its operation caused. Thunderbird Send will be a replacement for those that mourned its sister organisation’s passing, although much of the original software underpinning Firefox Send has been rewritten by the Thunderbird team.
The third element of Thunderbird Pro is optional, using Flower AI’s distributed AI framework to offer AI services to enhance email and appointment features. Given the open source-oriented nature of many Thunderbird and Mozilla users, some may not consider the addition of AI a positive move. Flower AI’s services for Thunderbird Pro will use Nvidia’s confidential computing service.
Thundermail’s web portal will be at thundermail.com or tb.pro, and would-be users can head there now to sign up for the beta waiting list.
Users will have to pay for Thundermail and Thunderbird Pro from the outset, although the organisation has plans to introduce a feature- or storage-limited service as a free tier once the paying user base has reached sustainable numbers. Services that offer file transfer are particularly costly to run as data has to be stored for finite periods while users upload and download what would otherwise be large email attachments.
Thunderbird Send and Appointment’s source code is publicly available, licensed under MPL-2.0, so early-adopters can run the services on their own servers immediately. Those wishing to use the hosted versions of Thunderbird Pro and Thundermail will have to wait a little longer until the organisation launches the web applications officially.
Existing services from big-name providers like Microsoft and Google operate what Sipes calls ‘hard’ and ‘soft vendor lock-in’ policies. A hard lock-in applies to accessing email and services hosted by Microsoft’s O365 platform for instance, access to which can be highly complex and unreliable when not using an official Outlook software client due to Microsoft’s use of proprietary code and protocols of its own invention. A soft lock-in describes a situation in which basic features of communication like email and calendaring are enhanced by other elements of proprietary platforms, making it at least inconvenient for users to migrate to an alternative client.
Sipes states, “everything we do will be out in the open and you can come and help us build it.” Thunderbird’s new services aim to offer the same type of convenience and capabilities of a platform like Outlook or Gmail, but be a 100% open-source alternative for those that want it.
