10 ms·

Give to Thunderbird

260 points by MzHN 5y ago

MzHN 5y ago
>[...] wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation. Funds will be reserved for use in the Thunderbird project. [...] Why doesn't Firefox have this?
- wodenokoto 5y ago
  I’d venture it is because Firefox is developed by a for-profit corporation with hundreds of millions in revenue. So the split is: you can donate to the non-profit organization, while the for-profit corporation only handles taxable income. The reason why it is split is due to taxes. Mozilla created the corporation after getting in trouble with the IRS. Edit: I haven’t kept up with Thunderbird for a very long time, but it looks like they’ve also moved to be developed by a for profit corporation, but a different one then the one that develops Firefox, so different people making different decisions. Also, donations to thunderbird are no longer tax deductible.
  - EMM_386 5y ago
    > I’d venture it is because Firefox is developed by a for-profit corporation with hundreds of millions in revenue. I think a lot of people are confused about this, myself included. A lot of people want to donate directly to Firefox for development. But there are vast sums of money to the tune of $400M+ already involved here. I assume the $20 donations people give to Mozilla go towards the broader initiatives of the Foundation.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- stdbrouw 5y ago
  Even if you could donate to Firefox specifically, that's still no guarantee because Mozilla could decide to just channel less money from other sources of funding towards Firefox and you'd end up where you started.
  - inetknght 5y ago
    That argument is true for every transaction
  - gowld 5y ago
    You end up one step from where you started, and if others join you it's more steps towards exhausting the buffer. But the search ad revenue buffer is huge.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Exactly. I'd really pay for Firefox. But I don't want to sponsor their foundation even though I have a few times in the past. I'd just like to help with Firefox development. I understand about the corporate/foundation split, but they could just sell 'subscriptions' that don't really give anything so they're basically donations. If the pencil pushers really insist something is given in return, they can make a cool subscriber badge in the app or something. Right now they're focusing too much on their VPN stuff which isn't available here and I have no need for anyway.
tr33house 5y ago
> Contributions are not tax-deductible as charitable contributions Why is this? I thought the Mozilla foundation owned this and it's a non profit
- Deukhoofd 5y ago
  They moved it over to MZLA Technologies Corporation last year, which is a for profit, so they could monetize it. https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-moves-to-monetize-thunderbird-transfers-project-to-new-subsidiary/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-moves-to-monetize-thun...
  - orangepanda 5y ago
    > by moving the project away from its foundation into a corporate entity they will be able to monetize the product and pay for its development easier than before. Non profits also are able to monetize products and pay out employees. There must be some other reason for the move?
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      They mean monetise Thunderbird and then use that money for other things. That’s the difference. A charity cannot do that by law.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    What in the world? I thought maybe their original statement would make more sense, but no: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/ We received a lot of donations from the community, so we're going to shift to a for-profit footing? That does not make a lot of sense to me. One of the things I really like about Thunderbird is that it's from a not-for-profit entity. It makes it easier to trust them with so much of my most personal data. It's still wholly owned by a non-profit, which means I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt for now. But especially given the vagueness of that statement, I'm definitely concerned.
nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
No.
mkl 5y ago
I use Thunderbird, and have for a very long time. Unfortunately, the new development and progress is gradually breaking more and more extensions, making it less useful to me as time goes on. Bizarrely, the donation page thinks I'm in the UK, when I'm almost as far as possible away from there.
- unixhero 5y ago
  Lemme guess, Australia!?
  - mkl 5y ago
    Further!
    - signal11 5y ago
      New Zealand?
      - mkl 5y ago
        Yep.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
  IP-based geolocation is a crapshoot. I frequently get teleported to Eastern Europe, Finland, USA, or Canada, despite living very far from all of them.
  - mkl 5y ago
    In practice I've found it works pretty well. Every geolocation service I've tried (just did 6-7 now) gets my country right, and more than half get the city/region. I've always had it get online students' locations right too.
- 5y ago
opheliate 5y ago
I pay for the Owl extension [0] which allows me to use my university's MS Exchange account with Thunderbird. I don't understand why Mozilla don't offer this themselves though, is it too complicated to put the effort in given the size of the userbase? Or is there some reason it has to be proprietary and they're against releasing proprietary software? I really appreciate Owl, but I'd much rather just pay Mozilla directly for it. 0: https://www.beonex.com/owl/ https://www.beonex.com/owl/
- fikama 5y ago
  I think thunderbird is now an independent project, it doesn't belong to Mozilla
  - opheliate 5y ago
    I thought that too, I was a bit confused by the fact Mozilla are still operating the donations in the OP, which is why I mention Mozilla specifically. Definitely s/Mozilla/Thunderbird devs/ if that's wrong though.
  - wodenokoto 5y ago
    From the donation page: > Contributions go to MZLA Technologies Corporation, a California corporation wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation. Funds will be reserved for use in the Thunderbird project. Contributions are not tax-deductible as charitable contributions.
- ruiidont 5y ago
  Did you check if there's a bug report for this (marked as enhancements)? Google bugzilla
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- pm215 5y ago
  I get the impression that this kind of thing depends rather on what specific locked-down settings choices the Exchange admins have made. I use work's Office-365 mail setup (which is I assume basically "exchange in the cloud") with stock thunderbird plus the free "TbSync" and "Provider for Exchange ActiveSync" addons, for instance (and I only need those for calendar and contacts stuff). This relies on the Exchange server not having disabled IMAP and SMTP. So the userbase for this kind of connector feature is not just "people whose organisation uses Exchange" but "people whose organisation uses Exchange and whose mail admins are sufficiently anti non-Outlook clients to have turned off IMAP but not so anti non-Outlook clients as to just say that it's policy that you must use Outlook". (There was a period where stock Thunderbird couldn't handle a "Modern Authentication" Exchange setup, but as of Thunderbird 78 or so it now can.) More generally, I've found in the past that "open source connectors etc to Exchange" support tends to be or become abandonware, because generally the kind of person who writes that sort of addon/integration doesn't really like working in the sort of environment which mandates Exchange and locks it down, and so after a few years when they move on to a new job that doesn't require them to use Exchange the addon becomes abandonware because the original author no longer needs it. So it probably does need to be either Mozilla taking it on as a "we must support this" feature or somebody like Beonex making it a paid product.
NiloCK 5y ago
I use this software every day on multiple machines (rss for work, rss & email personal). It's not without wrinkles, but at least it never feels exploitative. Donated, and will consider setting up something recurring.
meesterdude 5y ago
Use thunderbird everyday on both my machines - but they've been changing things for no good reason and breaking the UI/UX because of it. thanks but no thanks.
- gnomewascool 5y ago
  > but they've been changing things for no good reason and breaking the UI/UX because of it. The reason is the underlying Gecko engine being constantly yanked from under them — they rely on parts of Firefox's codebase and when that changes, they have to keep up, risk having security vulnerabilities or manually backport relevant security patches, in effect maintaining their own forked browser engine.
  - meesterdude 5y ago
    understandable shifting sands; but that's NO excuse for the sort of shoddy work they've done to address it. At best interpretation, there was not enough rudimentary QA done, because some of their changes (at least, in previous releases i worked with) outright broke the ability to compose messages. This was the result of finally hitting the "upgrade" button: black text on a black background. So I rolled back. This, in addition to some of their other UX changes (like moving to SVG icons) - just makes it feel like after 10 years I am no longer their user base, and from what I've read the team is unwilling to be flexible with these changes. Thanks for the middle finger. They're breaking things and I'm supposed to just be happy about it. Regretfully I've fallen out of love with thunderbird, and i am exploring other clients. My needs are not complex, outside of perhaps the google auth song & dance. I want thunderbird to be the FF of email clients.... I guess in a way they are. Open source disappointment that pushes people to non-open solutions.
    - gnomewascool 5y ago
      I understand your frustration — I've similarly been bitten by some changes to Firefox; however please do remember that Thunderbird is developed by a small team with limited funds and adding or even maintaining configurability is expensive. That isn't to say that you should give to thunderbird, since they are currently disappointing you, but it is a bit of a vicious cycle.
spapas82 5y ago
Late versions of Thunderbird have integrated GPG functionality. I have tested and used this extensively and I think it's a required feature that enables most users to have excellent security in their communications. For me, only this would be more than enough enough to switch to Thunderbird as my main mail client!
- throwawaybchr 5y ago
  Does it require the other party to know what gpg is?
- criddell 5y ago
  I recently switched off Thunderbird because the company I work for dropped PGP and switched to Microsoft's OME which is (surprise!) best supported by Outlook. I don't have the feeling that PGP/GPG is growing in popularity and if that's Thunderbird's big feature, it might not help them.
  - gowld 5y ago
    Is OME compatible with freedom? If so, Thunderbird could add support?
    - criddell 5y ago
      I don't think it would be easy. Along with OME comes a different protocol. I don't think it's fully compatible with SMTP or POP or IMAP.
  - spapas82 5y ago
    It ain't Thunderbird's big feature but it's an important one at least for me. The fact that pgp is not growing in popularity is not related to its security but its difficulty of using it properly (and the fact that it is an open and non monetizable solution). Having been integrated in the Thunderbird as a first class feature makes it very easy to use so it may lead to increase in its popularity! I have no experience with OME but I presume it's a proprietary solution.
- 5y ago
ekianjo 5y ago
too bad they dont support Caldav/carddav natively. I hate to rely on plugins for something that is so essential.
- _zamorano_ 5y ago
  I've been using TbSync for the last couple of years, and CalDav works flawlessly for me.
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    Yeha, TBsync is a plugin. That's what I am talking about, it should be part of Thunderbird. Evolution and Kmail both include this by default.
- gnuarch 5y ago
  Thunderbird is about to get native CardDAV support, currently available in Beta via Config mail.addr_book.useNewAddressBook set to true.
gnuarch 5y ago
On GNU/Linux Thunderbird ist my favourite GUI mail client, offering support for a variety of standards, including e.g. CalDAV (CardDAV in Beta), OpenPGP and S/MIME. Not sure whether Chat should be part of it, currently offering Google Talk, IRC, Odnoklassniki, and XMPP (Twitter finally gone). Support for Usenet News is appreciated, though I enjoy Pan. On GNU/Linux I thus consider GNOME Evolution as best alternative. (Haven't looked at the KDE suite for some time with Akonadi being too heavy last time I tried it on my simple machine.) Neither Claws, Geary, Sylpheed, or others offer such broad support, although those are very nice GUI clients. Further alternatives are listed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_email_client https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_email_client
- aidenn0 5y ago
  KDE suite just seems too modular. When something doesn't work, I can't figure out how to reconfigure. Evolution seems to have a similar architecture, but everything can be configured from within evolution's gui
- _wldu 5y ago
  I've used Sylpheed since the early 2000s. It supports PGP. It also considers HTML email as harmful. I agree with that.
- brnt 5y ago
  I want to like Kmail, but it's a bit too opinionated (e.g. having a setting letting you set to reply-to-all by default was removed because it is 'wrong', as well as having the button show up on messages without a roll-down) and just too crashy (akonadi...) and impossible to backup configuration (I spend a full day tracking all the various files/dirs down, no luck). I think there's an A-rate tool hiding in Kmail and Kontact, but development is glacial and not very responsive feature requests. (I even asked for some help setting up a dev env to develop something myself but no replies.)
- josteink 5y ago
  > Neither Claws, Geary, Sylpheed, or others offer such broad support But Geary works nicely on mobile phones, like the PinePhone. For me it serves a different niche than Thunderbird (which is my default desktop email-client).
bjarneh 5y ago
Thunderbird is such a great program. Ever since I gave up Mutt as my default email program, I've been using all the time. One of the richest guys on the planet (Zuckerberg) was using Thinderbird in a photo some time ago I think. Perhaps if he reads HN; they can get an infinite lifeline.
- gowld 5y ago
  He doesn't trust $trillion corporations with his mail?
- jrm4 5y ago
  HOLD the phone. Can we confirm this? If so, this 100% furthers my idea of "Stop thinking of tech billionaires of being helpfully creative to the world and having imaginations, they are the exact opposite." If a normal person were also a billionaire, they'd stop for half a second and call someone and say "hey, make sure Thunderbird is good for forever." These people can't think that way, they're hampered by the mental defect of "Hmm, what's the angle, how can I make money off this? I can't right now, okay so I'll do nothing."
  - bjarneh 5y ago
    https://twitter.com/topherolson/status/745294977064828929 https://twitter.com/topherolson/status/745294977064828929
    - cossatot 5y ago
      As discussed in the comments it looks like the Cisco VPN client (when I zoom in I think it's that and not Thunderbird, too): https://twitter.com/andrewheumann/status/745332192457396224 https://twitter.com/andrewheumann/status/745332192457396224
    - zem 5y ago
      looks more like he's standing near some random engineer's desk, and had that area temporarily cleared for the photo
jsilence 5y ago
I really wish fixing the Maildir store implementation would be a higher priority so that the local mailstore can be shared with other mail clients.
floor_ 5y ago
I was told to take a hike after reporting a feature regression. So I will not be donating. :(
- adar 5y ago
  Do you have a link to the bug report?
  - floor_ 5y ago
    I've long since deleted the email updates. It was in regards to them removing semicolons as separators for lists of email addresses. You can only use commas now.
    - mappu 5y ago
      Not to justify their behaviour, but, i think it is technically possible to have a ; character be part of an email address. It is not possible to have a , character, so that one is always safe to use as a separator (as From: does)
jansan 5y ago
I dislike Mozilla's politics and don't use Firefox, but I have been using Thunderbird since at least 15 years. So yes, donated money for this project, hoping that they don't come up with some "revolutionary" UI ideas.
- wott 5y ago
  I am not sure what you call "revolutionary" UI ideas, perhaps more in-depth changes, but as far as surface is concerned, they have already abolished a lot visual cues, by flattening almost everything and turning icons into B&W :-(
durnygbur 5y ago
Thunderbird is significant tool in my daily workflows. I created multiple profiles for RSS, email, calendar, contacts and usually have multiple instances opened at once. Everything operates smoothly. I would gladly setup monthly fee but also want to have the possiblity to cancel it at any time by the end of the month. This worries me: > https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US/help/ https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US/help/ How long it takes to process cancellation of recurring contribution?
- buzzy_hacker 5y ago
  The link just says they can’t help with technical issues, not donation issues. You can also use a virtual card https://privacy.com/ https://privacy.com/ that you can cancel when you want.
- cassianoleal 5y ago
  If you use Paypal or a virtual card, request cancellation and immediately cancel the virtual card or the PayPal recurring payment.
sidcool 5y ago
If Google pay were accepted I'd donate in a second.
pjmlp 5y ago
My favourite client, if you want it to stay around, consider donating.
dotancohen 5y ago
If your company uses Office 365, these guys have a plugin that I think parses the HTML website to get your mail (and calendar!) into Thunderbird: https://www.beonex.com/owl/ https://www.beonex.com/owl/ Just this week I gave them 10 Euros for the addon because my company refuses to enable IMAP for Office 365. I'm not affiliated with them, but I've been using the Tbird addon for a few weeks and it works perfectly. The license is per-year, though I guess that makes sense because I expect that it needs to be updated whenever the Office 365 site is updated.
- yunohn 5y ago
  Did you get this extension audited by your security team? It sounds insane to me that you’re bypassing IMAP restrictions, with a plug-in that monitors and parses the entire O365 website…
  - FreakyT 5y ago
    To be fair, it’s the security team’s idiotic position on IMAP that prompted the parent commenter to find a workaround. It’s like how having super draconian password reset and complexity requirements ends up being less secure because users will start writing their impossible-to-remember passwords on post-it notes.
    - jabroni_salad 5y ago
      The IMAP blocking is for different draconian reasons. Office365 does not support Modern Auth with IMAP, which is considered a security baseline now.
      - corty 5y ago
        Office365 supports Kerberos with IMAP, which would be the proper thing to do anyways. Giving passwords to a browser or email application is wrong.
        tialaramex 5y ago
hpcjoe 5y ago
I set up a recurring monthly contribution of $10. I've used Thunderbird for years, its my go-to client. Unfortunately these days, day job forces windows 10 and lookout. But I use it everywhere else. FWIW, lookout is itself dangerous software to install/use. There are many hacks of it, including new and exciting zero-days where you don't even need to interact with the mail in any way, to have a compromise occur. It is simply not worth the risk, on any platform. I've used (and paid for) both Owl and ExQuilla for office365 integration when needed. Owl was iffy ... had lots of problems. ExQuilla just worked.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
I wouldn't use it anyway. But I would sponsor Firefox like this. However with Firefox you can only sponsor the Mozilla foundation and not the product itself.
- eplanit 5y ago
  I'd pay an annual subscription if it was supported and advanced like a real product. A viable alternative to chrome is worth money to me.
  - ssbash 5y ago
    Me too. I wouldn't even want any extra features behind this paywall. The only perk I would like is some sort of weighted/priority feedback. I do feel like Firefox needs to do its best to hold on to the existing power users, in addition to growing its casual user base. I feel like Firefox really disregards feedback from its biggest fans (i.e. the scheduled removal of compact view), and is overly focused on converting chrome users.
bilherrick 5y ago
I have used Thunderbird at some point in my job, and I might say that it is not the easiest to set up, but it makes the job done.
neurotrace 5y ago
I used Thunderbird for a very long time but recently stopped. Every update has made it slower, breaks a host of extensions, and the Google Calendar integration is consistently broken no matter which solution I use. I really, really want to use Thunderbird but email and calendar need to Just Work. I can't keep fixing it every time they push out an update
- elric 5y ago
  This 13 year old bug in the calendar has been pretty frustrating. Would love to donate specifically towards a fix for that. But I guess that's not an option. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=475886 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=475886
  - gnuarch 5y ago
    FWIW, for some accounts I use a second profile via `thunderbird --new-instance`.
knadh 5y ago
I donate semi-regularly. Been using Thunderbird as my primary email client (almost) since its release. The installation has hundreds of thousands of mails across many folders, and yet, it is super fast and rock solid.
l0b0 5y ago
Not stable enough for production. Every time I've tried to use them (3-5 times since they got started) they've lost emails and calendar events in inexplicable ways, possibly by not taking a careful enough approach when dealing with unreliable connections or full storage. The suggested solution when reporting bugs has several times been to try the latest version with no justification other than "it might be fixed now, who knows" or reset completely and spend several hours reconfiguring and re-downloading everything. The least terrible solution I've found so far is GNOME Evolution, which I don't think has lost anything outright yet, although the UX is meh (no option for separate event start/end time zones, slow search even when all emails are cached locally, randomly requires re-signing in to Google, defaults time zone to Antarctica/McMurdo when travelling(?!?), does not seem to give any indication whether spam filtering is working or not, groups all accounts under my Google account in the Edit → Accounts view, and many more I can't remember off the top of my head). Sorry to be so negative, but so far every single email client (Evolution, K-9, Mutt, Outlook, Thunderbird) has been a chore, for different reasons. Gmail/Google Calendar is the only client(s) I rate, but I'm shutting down that account slowly for obvious reasons.
stereoradonc 5y ago
A better way to use email is through the browser, isn't it? I wonder what's use of an email client; especially now since the storage cost in the "cloud" have plummeted. I can't imagine backing up my 10 years worth of email locally when Fastmail on the web works well.
- upofadown 5y ago
  Doing your email locally on a device you control means you can do effective end to end encryption. Otherwise you end up having to trust that your webmail provider does not become interested in the content of your emails.
nokya 5y ago
done. thanks for the reminder!
bsdice 5y ago
After using TB for 10 years I uninstalled it half a year ago. Because of bad UI decisions and constant extension and PGP breakage. Got to a point where I froze the installation at version 68 just to be left alone. A security nightmare of course. In the end I trusted it less and less to not one day kill my e-mail archive going back 25 years. Also I still have PGP 2.6 encrypted e-mails that require IDEA/MD5 support. I know this scheme is insecure, but you can't disconnect me from my archive by no longer supporting those ancient formats. Since I self-host e-mail anyway, I switched to a well-greased Roundcube web UI for desktop and FairEmail on the phone. Searching through 20 GB of mail, including text in PDF and Office formats, is more or less "Google-instant" thanks to dovecot-fts-xapian. Having everything in Maildirs for me is very pleasant. For calendaring I now use Radicale and either Infcloud web UI on desktop or CalDAV-Sync on phone. Could be tighter integrated with e-mail but the old Unix ways of one tool for one job have merits, like all calendar entries are now file system objects and under Git control. Impossible now to fat-finger half the calender and having to jump through hoops to restore entries.

260 points by MzHN 5y ago

MzHN 5y ago

>[...] wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation. Funds will be reserved for use in the Thunderbird project. [...] Why doesn't Firefox have this?

wodenokoto 5y ago
I’d venture it is because Firefox is developed by a for-profit corporation with hundreds of millions in revenue. So the split is: you can donate to the non-profit organization, while the for-profit corporation only handles taxable income. The reason why it is split is due to taxes. Mozilla created the corporation after getting in trouble with the IRS. Edit: I haven’t kept up with Thunderbird for a very long time, but it looks like they’ve also moved to be developed by a for profit corporation, but a different one then the one that develops Firefox, so different people making different decisions. Also, donations to thunderbird are no longer tax deductible.
- EMM_386 5y ago
  > I’d venture it is because Firefox is developed by a for-profit corporation with hundreds of millions in revenue. I think a lot of people are confused about this, myself included. A lot of people want to donate directly to Firefox for development. But there are vast sums of money to the tune of $400M+ already involved here. I assume the $20 donations people give to Mozilla go towards the broader initiatives of the Foundation.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
stdbrouw 5y ago
Even if you could donate to Firefox specifically, that's still no guarantee because Mozilla could decide to just channel less money from other sources of funding towards Firefox and you'd end up where you started.
- inetknght 5y ago
  That argument is true for every transaction
- gowld 5y ago
  You end up one step from where you started, and if others join you it's more steps towards exhausting the buffer. But the search ad revenue buffer is huge.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
Exactly. I'd really pay for Firefox. But I don't want to sponsor their foundation even though I have a few times in the past. I'd just like to help with Firefox development. I understand about the corporate/foundation split, but they could just sell 'subscriptions' that don't really give anything so they're basically donations. If the pencil pushers really insist something is given in return, they can make a cool subscriber badge in the app or something. Right now they're focusing too much on their VPN stuff which isn't available here and I have no need for anyway.

tr33house 5y ago

> Contributions are not tax-deductible as charitable contributions Why is this? I thought the Mozilla foundation owned this and it's a non profit

Deukhoofd 5y ago
They moved it over to MZLA Technologies Corporation last year, which is a for profit, so they could monetize it. https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-moves-to-monetize-thunderbird-transfers-project-to-new-subsidiary/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-moves-to-monetize-thun...
- orangepanda 5y ago
  > by moving the project away from its foundation into a corporate entity they will be able to monetize the product and pay for its development easier than before. Non profits also are able to monetize products and pay out employees. There must be some other reason for the move?
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    They mean monetise Thunderbird and then use that money for other things. That’s the difference. A charity cannot do that by law.
- wpietri 5y ago
  What in the world? I thought maybe their original statement would make more sense, but no: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/ We received a lot of donations from the community, so we're going to shift to a for-profit footing? That does not make a lot of sense to me. One of the things I really like about Thunderbird is that it's from a not-for-profit entity. It makes it easier to trust them with so much of my most personal data. It's still wholly owned by a non-profit, which means I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt for now. But especially given the vagueness of that statement, I'm definitely concerned.

nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago

No.

mkl 5y ago

I use Thunderbird, and have for a very long time. Unfortunately, the new development and progress is gradually breaking more and more extensions, making it less useful to me as time goes on. Bizarrely, the donation page thinks I'm in the UK, when I'm almost as far as possible away from there.

unixhero 5y ago
Lemme guess, Australia!?
- mkl 5y ago
  Further!
  - signal11 5y ago
    New Zealand?
    - mkl 5y ago
      Yep.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
IP-based geolocation is a crapshoot. I frequently get teleported to Eastern Europe, Finland, USA, or Canada, despite living very far from all of them.
- mkl 5y ago
  In practice I've found it works pretty well. Every geolocation service I've tried (just did 6-7 now) gets my country right, and more than half get the city/region. I've always had it get online students' locations right too.
5y ago

opheliate 5y ago

I pay for the Owl extension [0] which allows me to use my university's MS Exchange account with Thunderbird. I don't understand why Mozilla don't offer this themselves though, is it too complicated to put the effort in given the size of the userbase? Or is there some reason it has to be proprietary and they're against releasing proprietary software? I really appreciate Owl, but I'd much rather just pay Mozilla directly for it. 0: https://www.beonex.com/owl/ https://www.beonex.com/owl/

fikama 5y ago
I think thunderbird is now an independent project, it doesn't belong to Mozilla
- opheliate 5y ago
  I thought that too, I was a bit confused by the fact Mozilla are still operating the donations in the OP, which is why I mention Mozilla specifically. Definitely s/Mozilla/Thunderbird devs/ if that's wrong though.
- wodenokoto 5y ago
  From the donation page: > Contributions go to MZLA Technologies Corporation, a California corporation wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation. Funds will be reserved for use in the Thunderbird project. Contributions are not tax-deductible as charitable contributions.
ruiidont 5y ago
Did you check if there's a bug report for this (marked as enhancements)? Google bugzilla
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
pm215 5y ago
I get the impression that this kind of thing depends rather on what specific locked-down settings choices the Exchange admins have made. I use work's Office-365 mail setup (which is I assume basically "exchange in the cloud") with stock thunderbird plus the free "TbSync" and "Provider for Exchange ActiveSync" addons, for instance (and I only need those for calendar and contacts stuff). This relies on the Exchange server not having disabled IMAP and SMTP. So the userbase for this kind of connector feature is not just "people whose organisation uses Exchange" but "people whose organisation uses Exchange and whose mail admins are sufficiently anti non-Outlook clients to have turned off IMAP but not so anti non-Outlook clients as to just say that it's policy that you must use Outlook". (There was a period where stock Thunderbird couldn't handle a "Modern Authentication" Exchange setup, but as of Thunderbird 78 or so it now can.) More generally, I've found in the past that "open source connectors etc to Exchange" support tends to be or become abandonware, because generally the kind of person who writes that sort of addon/integration doesn't really like working in the sort of environment which mandates Exchange and locks it down, and so after a few years when they move on to a new job that doesn't require them to use Exchange the addon becomes abandonware because the original author no longer needs it. So it probably does need to be either Mozilla taking it on as a "we must support this" feature or somebody like Beonex making it a paid product.

NiloCK 5y ago

I use this software every day on multiple machines (rss for work, rss & email personal). It's not without wrinkles, but at least it never feels exploitative. Donated, and will consider setting up something recurring.

meesterdude 5y ago

Use thunderbird everyday on both my machines - but they've been changing things for no good reason and breaking the UI/UX because of it. thanks but no thanks.

gnomewascool 5y ago
> but they've been changing things for no good reason and breaking the UI/UX because of it. The reason is the underlying Gecko engine being constantly yanked from under them — they rely on parts of Firefox's codebase and when that changes, they have to keep up, risk having security vulnerabilities or manually backport relevant security patches, in effect maintaining their own forked browser engine.
- meesterdude 5y ago
  understandable shifting sands; but that's NO excuse for the sort of shoddy work they've done to address it. At best interpretation, there was not enough rudimentary QA done, because some of their changes (at least, in previous releases i worked with) outright broke the ability to compose messages. This was the result of finally hitting the "upgrade" button: black text on a black background. So I rolled back. This, in addition to some of their other UX changes (like moving to SVG icons) - just makes it feel like after 10 years I am no longer their user base, and from what I've read the team is unwilling to be flexible with these changes. Thanks for the middle finger. They're breaking things and I'm supposed to just be happy about it. Regretfully I've fallen out of love with thunderbird, and i am exploring other clients. My needs are not complex, outside of perhaps the google auth song & dance. I want thunderbird to be the FF of email clients.... I guess in a way they are. Open source disappointment that pushes people to non-open solutions.
  - gnomewascool 5y ago
    I understand your frustration — I've similarly been bitten by some changes to Firefox; however please do remember that Thunderbird is developed by a small team with limited funds and adding or even maintaining configurability is expensive. That isn't to say that you should give to thunderbird, since they are currently disappointing you, but it is a bit of a vicious cycle.

spapas82 5y ago

Late versions of Thunderbird have integrated GPG functionality. I have tested and used this extensively and I think it's a required feature that enables most users to have excellent security in their communications. For me, only this would be more than enough enough to switch to Thunderbird as my main mail client!

throwawaybchr 5y ago
Does it require the other party to know what gpg is?
criddell 5y ago
I recently switched off Thunderbird because the company I work for dropped PGP and switched to Microsoft's OME which is (surprise!) best supported by Outlook. I don't have the feeling that PGP/GPG is growing in popularity and if that's Thunderbird's big feature, it might not help them.
- gowld 5y ago
  Is OME compatible with freedom? If so, Thunderbird could add support?
  - criddell 5y ago
    I don't think it would be easy. Along with OME comes a different protocol. I don't think it's fully compatible with SMTP or POP or IMAP.
- spapas82 5y ago
  It ain't Thunderbird's big feature but it's an important one at least for me. The fact that pgp is not growing in popularity is not related to its security but its difficulty of using it properly (and the fact that it is an open and non monetizable solution). Having been integrated in the Thunderbird as a first class feature makes it very easy to use so it may lead to increase in its popularity! I have no experience with OME but I presume it's a proprietary solution.
5y ago

ekianjo 5y ago

too bad they dont support Caldav/carddav natively. I hate to rely on plugins for something that is so essential.

_zamorano_ 5y ago
I've been using TbSync for the last couple of years, and CalDav works flawlessly for me.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  Yeha, TBsync is a plugin. That's what I am talking about, it should be part of Thunderbird. Evolution and Kmail both include this by default.
gnuarch 5y ago
Thunderbird is about to get native CardDAV support, currently available in Beta via Config mail.addr_book.useNewAddressBook set to true.

gnuarch 5y ago

On GNU/Linux Thunderbird ist my favourite GUI mail client, offering support for a variety of standards, including e.g. CalDAV (CardDAV in Beta), OpenPGP and S/MIME. Not sure whether Chat should be part of it, currently offering Google Talk, IRC, Odnoklassniki, and XMPP (Twitter finally gone). Support for Usenet News is appreciated, though I enjoy Pan. On GNU/Linux I thus consider GNOME Evolution as best alternative. (Haven't looked at the KDE suite for some time with Akonadi being too heavy last time I tried it on my simple machine.) Neither Claws, Geary, Sylpheed, or others offer such broad support, although those are very nice GUI clients. Further alternatives are listed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_email_client https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_email_client

aidenn0 5y ago
KDE suite just seems too modular. When something doesn't work, I can't figure out how to reconfigure. Evolution seems to have a similar architecture, but everything can be configured from within evolution's gui
_wldu 5y ago
I've used Sylpheed since the early 2000s. It supports PGP. It also considers HTML email as harmful. I agree with that.
brnt 5y ago
I want to like Kmail, but it's a bit too opinionated (e.g. having a setting letting you set to reply-to-all by default was removed because it is 'wrong', as well as having the button show up on messages without a roll-down) and just too crashy (akonadi...) and impossible to backup configuration (I spend a full day tracking all the various files/dirs down, no luck). I think there's an A-rate tool hiding in Kmail and Kontact, but development is glacial and not very responsive feature requests. (I even asked for some help setting up a dev env to develop something myself but no replies.)
josteink 5y ago
> Neither Claws, Geary, Sylpheed, or others offer such broad support But Geary works nicely on mobile phones, like the PinePhone. For me it serves a different niche than Thunderbird (which is my default desktop email-client).

bjarneh 5y ago

Thunderbird is such a great program. Ever since I gave up Mutt as my default email program, I've been using all the time. One of the richest guys on the planet (Zuckerberg) was using Thinderbird in a photo some time ago I think. Perhaps if he reads HN; they can get an infinite lifeline.

gowld 5y ago
He doesn't trust $trillion corporations with his mail?
jrm4 5y ago
HOLD the phone. Can we confirm this? If so, this 100% furthers my idea of "Stop thinking of tech billionaires of being helpfully creative to the world and having imaginations, they are the exact opposite." If a normal person were also a billionaire, they'd stop for half a second and call someone and say "hey, make sure Thunderbird is good for forever." These people can't think that way, they're hampered by the mental defect of "Hmm, what's the angle, how can I make money off this? I can't right now, okay so I'll do nothing."
- bjarneh 5y ago
  https://twitter.com/topherolson/status/745294977064828929 https://twitter.com/topherolson/status/745294977064828929
  - cossatot 5y ago
    As discussed in the comments it looks like the Cisco VPN client (when I zoom in I think it's that and not Thunderbird, too): https://twitter.com/andrewheumann/status/745332192457396224 https://twitter.com/andrewheumann/status/745332192457396224
  - zem 5y ago
    looks more like he's standing near some random engineer's desk, and had that area temporarily cleared for the photo

jsilence 5y ago

I really wish fixing the Maildir store implementation would be a higher priority so that the local mailstore can be shared with other mail clients.

floor_ 5y ago

I was told to take a hike after reporting a feature regression. So I will not be donating. :(

adar 5y ago
Do you have a link to the bug report?
- floor_ 5y ago
  I've long since deleted the email updates. It was in regards to them removing semicolons as separators for lists of email addresses. You can only use commas now.
  - mappu 5y ago
    Not to justify their behaviour, but, i think it is technically possible to have a ; character be part of an email address. It is not possible to have a , character, so that one is always safe to use as a separator (as From: does)

jansan 5y ago

I dislike Mozilla's politics and don't use Firefox, but I have been using Thunderbird since at least 15 years. So yes, donated money for this project, hoping that they don't come up with some "revolutionary" UI ideas.

wott 5y ago
I am not sure what you call "revolutionary" UI ideas, perhaps more in-depth changes, but as far as surface is concerned, they have already abolished a lot visual cues, by flattening almost everything and turning icons into B&W :-(

durnygbur 5y ago

Thunderbird is significant tool in my daily workflows. I created multiple profiles for RSS, email, calendar, contacts and usually have multiple instances opened at once. Everything operates smoothly. I would gladly setup monthly fee but also want to have the possiblity to cancel it at any time by the end of the month. This worries me: > https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US/help/ https://give.thunderbird.net/en-US/help/ How long it takes to process cancellation of recurring contribution?

buzzy_hacker 5y ago
The link just says they can’t help with technical issues, not donation issues. You can also use a virtual card https://privacy.com/ https://privacy.com/ that you can cancel when you want.
cassianoleal 5y ago
If you use Paypal or a virtual card, request cancellation and immediately cancel the virtual card or the PayPal recurring payment.

sidcool 5y ago

If Google pay were accepted I'd donate in a second.

pjmlp 5y ago

My favourite client, if you want it to stay around, consider donating.

dotancohen 5y ago

If your company uses Office 365, these guys have a plugin that I think parses the HTML website to get your mail (and calendar!) into Thunderbird: https://www.beonex.com/owl/ https://www.beonex.com/owl/ Just this week I gave them 10 Euros for the addon because my company refuses to enable IMAP for Office 365. I'm not affiliated with them, but I've been using the Tbird addon for a few weeks and it works perfectly. The license is per-year, though I guess that makes sense because I expect that it needs to be updated whenever the Office 365 site is updated.

yunohn 5y ago
Did you get this extension audited by your security team? It sounds insane to me that you’re bypassing IMAP restrictions, with a plug-in that monitors and parses the entire O365 website…
- FreakyT 5y ago
  To be fair, it’s the security team’s idiotic position on IMAP that prompted the parent commenter to find a workaround. It’s like how having super draconian password reset and complexity requirements ends up being less secure because users will start writing their impossible-to-remember passwords on post-it notes.
  - jabroni_salad 5y ago
    The IMAP blocking is for different draconian reasons. Office365 does not support Modern Auth with IMAP, which is considered a security baseline now.
    - corty 5y ago
      Office365 supports Kerberos with IMAP, which would be the proper thing to do anyways. Giving passwords to a browser or email application is wrong.
      - tialaramex 5y ago

hpcjoe 5y ago

I set up a recurring monthly contribution of $10. I've used Thunderbird for years, its my go-to client. Unfortunately these days, day job forces windows 10 and lookout. But I use it everywhere else. FWIW, lookout is itself dangerous software to install/use. There are many hacks of it, including new and exciting zero-days where you don't even need to interact with the mail in any way, to have a compromise occur. It is simply not worth the risk, on any platform. I've used (and paid for) both Owl and ExQuilla for office365 integration when needed. Owl was iffy ... had lots of problems. ExQuilla just worked.

GekkePrutser 5y ago

I wouldn't use it anyway. But I would sponsor Firefox like this. However with Firefox you can only sponsor the Mozilla foundation and not the product itself.

eplanit 5y ago
I'd pay an annual subscription if it was supported and advanced like a real product. A viable alternative to chrome is worth money to me.
- ssbash 5y ago
  Me too. I wouldn't even want any extra features behind this paywall. The only perk I would like is some sort of weighted/priority feedback. I do feel like Firefox needs to do its best to hold on to the existing power users, in addition to growing its casual user base. I feel like Firefox really disregards feedback from its biggest fans (i.e. the scheduled removal of compact view), and is overly focused on converting chrome users.

bilherrick 5y ago

I have used Thunderbird at some point in my job, and I might say that it is not the easiest to set up, but it makes the job done.

neurotrace 5y ago

I used Thunderbird for a very long time but recently stopped. Every update has made it slower, breaks a host of extensions, and the Google Calendar integration is consistently broken no matter which solution I use. I really, really want to use Thunderbird but email and calendar need to Just Work. I can't keep fixing it every time they push out an update

elric 5y ago
This 13 year old bug in the calendar has been pretty frustrating. Would love to donate specifically towards a fix for that. But I guess that's not an option. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=475886 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=475886
- gnuarch 5y ago
  FWIW, for some accounts I use a second profile via `thunderbird --new-instance`.

knadh 5y ago

I donate semi-regularly. Been using Thunderbird as my primary email client (almost) since its release. The installation has hundreds of thousands of mails across many folders, and yet, it is super fast and rock solid.

l0b0 5y ago

Not stable enough for production. Every time I've tried to use them (3-5 times since they got started) they've lost emails and calendar events in inexplicable ways, possibly by not taking a careful enough approach when dealing with unreliable connections or full storage. The suggested solution when reporting bugs has several times been to try the latest version with no justification other than "it might be fixed now, who knows" or reset completely and spend several hours reconfiguring and re-downloading everything. The least terrible solution I've found so far is GNOME Evolution, which I don't think has lost anything outright yet, although the UX is meh (no option for separate event start/end time zones, slow search even when all emails are cached locally, randomly requires re-signing in to Google, defaults time zone to Antarctica/McMurdo when travelling(?!?), does not seem to give any indication whether spam filtering is working or not, groups all accounts under my Google account in the Edit → Accounts view, and many more I can't remember off the top of my head). Sorry to be so negative, but so far every single email client (Evolution, K-9, Mutt, Outlook, Thunderbird) has been a chore, for different reasons. Gmail/Google Calendar is the only client(s) I rate, but I'm shutting down that account slowly for obvious reasons.

stereoradonc 5y ago

A better way to use email is through the browser, isn't it? I wonder what's use of an email client; especially now since the storage cost in the "cloud" have plummeted. I can't imagine backing up my 10 years worth of email locally when Fastmail on the web works well.

upofadown 5y ago
Doing your email locally on a device you control means you can do effective end to end encryption. Otherwise you end up having to trust that your webmail provider does not become interested in the content of your emails.

nokya 5y ago

done. thanks for the reminder!

bsdice 5y ago

After using TB for 10 years I uninstalled it half a year ago. Because of bad UI decisions and constant extension and PGP breakage. Got to a point where I froze the installation at version 68 just to be left alone. A security nightmare of course. In the end I trusted it less and less to not one day kill my e-mail archive going back 25 years. Also I still have PGP 2.6 encrypted e-mails that require IDEA/MD5 support. I know this scheme is insecure, but you can't disconnect me from my archive by no longer supporting those ancient formats. Since I self-host e-mail anyway, I switched to a well-greased Roundcube web UI for desktop and FairEmail on the phone. Searching through 20 GB of mail, including text in PDF and Office formats, is more or less "Google-instant" thanks to dovecot-fts-xapian. Having everything in Maildirs for me is very pleasant. For calendaring I now use Radicale and either Infcloud web UI on desktop or CalDAV-Sync on phone. Could be tighter integrated with e-mail but the old Unix ways of one tool for one job have merits, like all calendar entries are now file system objects and under Git control. Impossible now to fat-finger half the calender and having to jump through hoops to restore entries.