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.
Google only checked out and cashed in after getting a monopoly. Mozilla let themselves fade into irrelevance.
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
yes but this takes time. its great to have alternatives in the meantime.
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.
…and then join the big tech at some point.
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.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)
The big providers problem is already true, but DMARC and DKIM mitigated that problem.
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.
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Oh, that’s a very good point! Makes you look at this proposal in a completely different way.
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’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.So… Exactly how it was 20 years ago. Kids Those Days used AIM and Yahoo Messenger instead of slack and discord.
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.
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Any business2business or consumer2business communication will likely still happen over email for a very long time
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?
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.
I have fond memories of self-hosting a qmail setup for a long time, then eventually migrating to a postfix configuration, back in the day.
Keeping up with spam filtering finally did me in.
The spam filtering is painful. I kinda work around it by giving a unique e-mail for everything and of one starts getting spammed I just rid of that e-mail. Tends to give you advance warning of data breaches too since you’ll start seeing the spam come in before the announcement.
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?
VPS, I wouldn’t run a mail server from my home network. If you go with mailinabox you don’t need to set up a proxy, it’s pretty simple.
It’s a colocated server. I provided the physical server and they put it into a rack in a datacenter with power and networking (static IP).
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.
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.
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.
I do think the brave devs or teams starting spreading the “switch to brave” as a growth hack. No right minded person would pick brave over ff. Maybe librewolf sure.
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.
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.
Mine is E2EE.
Do you so it over PGP? Or is it done with ZAE like with Proton?
Unless everyone you communicate with have agreed to use the same standard as you, no, it is not.
What is it that you’re concerned about? Assume that I have no idea what either the new or old Mozilla privacy policy is, please. I tend to assume that all such are a pack of lies and everything is spying on me.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-firefox-i-loved-is-gone-how-to-protect-your-privacy-on-it-now/
That article says it better than I can in s short post. Firefox’s terms of use/privacy policy went over like a lead balloon last month.
Thanks for the link.
I was thinking ab this being april fool bcz it’s posted on 1st…
Google announced Gmail on April 1
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”
“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.
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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.
You imply OP knows how to read & they read the whole article and noticed the source. 💀
I went looking for something official but couldn’t find it.
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.
lol @ ftp client
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.
True.
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.
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.
if it’s anything like gmail, they’d offer imap so you can set it up in thunderbird and download your messages locally.
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.
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.
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.
Oh good to see!
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.
Syncthing was only ever self-hosted…
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
It works I already tried. But I stopped short of jumping on board because its not the safest. No, what we need is some fedi style development. We need email on fedi.
I have a 20ish year old history in my Gmail account organized in labels and all that. I wonder if it will be viable to migrate?
Considering labels are very non-standard, which caused trouble over IMAP since forever, I wouldn’t count on that part.
Labels are displayed as folders on IMAP, which means that a single message could appear in multiple folders. Are there any other problems you’re talking about?
One of the problems that annoyed me in the past is the complexity and ambiguity of deleting an email over IMAP. Depending on whether it’s the last label of the deleted email, deleting an email from a label’s directory either removes a label from this email, or actually deletes the email.
Please archive shit. It’s OK to save old data, but not on the service. There are ways. Even banks, the most obsessive and legally strapped data hoarders keep their 5+ year old data in deep cold storage, away from the active services. 99.9^% of information that old won’t be looked at by anyone.
Not true.
It’s much easier to keep old data in active storage where it can be classified, searched, and have retention/deletion policies applied. Moving it elsewhere makes it more likely you’ll just hang onto it forever while not using it at all.
When was the last time you had to find a 20 year old email? Share your anecdotes.
Edit: I’m not being snarky, there are legitimate and more functional solutions.
I don’t disagree that you should set up retention policies to delete old email, I disagree that you should remove old emails from primary service/storage.
I actually did need a 15 year old email a few months ago. I don’t recall what I needed, but I then set up a retention policy to delete old stuff.
Warranty… Some are 15-20 years, but you need proof of purchase docs, which are often emailed data.
Why not having an archive of exclusively warranties? Emails can be downloaded, indexed and compressed. I agree on keeping archives of old stuff. But emails used as cloud drives are a huge problem for IT and security reasons. A legal folder is better and facilitates backup, encryption and much more accessibility.
So you don’t really want to archive in the technical sense, you want it offline for security, which is valid but extremely inconvenient for regular end users.
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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’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
If its not zero access its just more ameritech bullshit.
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Yes, sort of. Thundermail addresses, apparently, or bring your own. From the linked article you’re commenting on:
Users can send and receive email using new Thundermail accounts they sign up for. The service will also allow using your own custom domain (e.g. your.name@yourdomain.com).
You have always been able to use your own domain email with Thunderbird. The big news here is the fact that they are launching not only a web based mail service a la Thunderbird but also providing an email server for addresses of [yourchosenname]@thundermail.com. which is gonna be pretty great.
I assume they mean that you can use your own domain with their email server.
I.e point your MX records to them.
Of course you always could use your own domain in their email client. It would be a pretty shitty email client otherwise.
Yeah, but the Thunderbird client… ain’t great.
And yes, I’m a Linux nerd since 2003. Thunderbird’s client sucks.
That said, I hope this is successful.
I’ve been using Thunderbird for email for years. I use it with some SMTP servers on shared hosting platforms, a yahoo account and a few gmail accounts - one with calendars. I don’t have any problems with it. Runs stable, doesn’t crash or do weird things. My only complaint would be search is a little clunky, but it works.
I had to use Outlook client for year at another job and that client was hot garbage.
and it does RSS
What client do you recommend instead?
For Linux, I can’t think of another user side client. I use web based.
So, I’m happy to see Mozilla get into that arena.
Depends what you’re after. I’m a Thunderbird user, but if user friendliness is the aim then Geary is quite good.
Whats wrong with the thunderbird client.
Even when I was on windows back on XP I used it. Never had a problem with it or its functionality, personally.
Nerds like us can figure it out.
But it’s hardly user friendly. I’m not going to get into the minutiae, but Joe Blow could probably get it to fetch, and send, but the user interface options like font size, etc., blows. Typical nerd “It’s good enough for me, RTFM, losers.”
And I’m too old to fuck with things for fun. I want it to just work, and I’m not paying Apple prices for that, or supporting Microsoft’s eventual SaaS subscription model, which WILL eventually happen.
I mean… It doesnt exactly take being hackerman, master of all hackermans to open a dropdown menu, bro.
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.
It is extremely easy to switch email providers these days. I’d suggest start by setting up a forwarded mail box between Gmail and whatever new mail provider you choose. Then slowly but surely start using the new email address instead of Gmail and change the most important accounts to the new one.
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
