“Thundermail” will be part of a suite of Thunderbird Pro services, as the team behind the venerable Mozilla email client begins building a complete ecosystem.
A way for Mozilla to make money that isn’t ads? Count me in.
Remember kids, without Mozilla, there is no Librewolf, no Waterfox, and no Thunderbird.
Idk, not too keen on supporting a US company rn
Especially one that’s now selling your data. If Mozilla did this instead of selling our personal information, that would have been great. But here we are.
They were selling my data in exactly the way I thought they were.
I thought they were pretty open about their funding sources and we’re just inaccurate on the description on the privacy policy.
Can you explain what you mean by selling your data? I’m not intimately familiar with the controversy, but it was my understanding that they’re not really selling it, it’s just some weird legal ramifications that come with the term “selling” or something?
They tried to weasel out of saying that they sell your data, claiming that the CA law has an absurd definition. But the CA law just defines the term how any reasonable person would: the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) defines “sale” as the “selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by [a] business to another business or a third party” in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration.”
So yes, they’re selling your data, and CA law is finally forcing them to admit it, rather than continuing to lie about it.
It’s the “making available” and “for other consideration” lines that they are covering their ass over.
Why now and not 10 sears ago?
“It is my conviction that all of this should have been a part of the Thunderbird universe a decade ago," Sipes says. “The absence of web services from us means that our users must make compromises that are often uncomfortable ones. This is how we correct that.”
Desperate for cash and the money from Google might be going away soon because of the antitrust case? Can’t take them on directly in Search; this honestly seems like one of the better ventures for them to go to. Still, 10 years ago would’ve been better and Mozilla squandered some of the goodwill they had in recent years; I’d be a little more reticent about moving my digital presence over now.
Can’t take them on directly in Search
Give it a few years, google search is already nearly unusable.
By the way, as a gmail replacement disroot has been great so far. I wonder what the free tier of thundermail will be like, but also worry a little that it might poach donations from smaller, free services.
I for one see this as a very positive development. This is the way to make money without selling out your users but by making them your customers. Honestly I really didn’t want to use gmail as a mail provider, but I wanted to use my own domain for emails so I had to do complicated setups with MXRoute which normal people can’t do. I still have to pay MXRoute and because I’m using Thunderbird as my mail client both on desktop and phone, I might as well switch to Thundermail.
Compared to what is happening with Firefox, I think Thunderbird has been on the right track for many years now. And I’m not alone with this assessment, you can see it on the donations basically doubling every year.
Even their AI experiments they communicate that it will be running locally very cautiously, I’m telling you guys, this is the way. Not by alienating potential customers with a shift towards advertisers but instead offering them a solution to a problem they have (mail hosting) and which is really close to the core business and a natural fit.
Same with Thunderbird Send and Thunderbird Appointment, those are things around email which now are kind of hard to do for people and other clients have it build in like Outlook with Sharepoint and the build in scheduling assistant. With Thunderbird you need to know about something like Doodle and do it on the side manually.
I scroll down and the page turns black with a text in the middle
Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).well that’s a first for me…
Yeah, did they deploy it development mode or something? It just needs to display static HTML, so just ignoring the error would fix this.
From the same company that “I can take any data that is ‘necessary’ to keep the browser working”. I wouldn’t trust those guys anymore.
Writing this in the context of Google being the alternative is an interesting take (especially when Google hijacks internet standards with things like manifestv3 and has ads in their competing email service)
I got your point. However, being “less evil” is not good enough.
Neat! Hopefully I can get in on the beta but even if I can’t I look forward to trying it out!
Nothing there yet on the website.
Mozilla? More like Mo’$$illa
I’m good.
