Thunderbird News Center:
Hello TB Planning,
Some of you may have already heard and seen some of this work - but it's time to shine some light on efforts to expand Thunderbird's offerings with what we are calling "Thunderbird Pro" services and "Thundermail". These are web services that enhance the experience of using Thunderbird, all open source (or will be for repos that aren't public yet) and built to serve the needs of our users.
The Why for offering these services is simple. Thunderbird loses users each day to rich ecosystems that are both clients and services, such as Gmail and Office365. These ecosystems have both hard vendor lock-ins (through interoperability issues with 3rd-pary clients) and soft lock-ins (through convenience and integration between their clients and services). It is our goal to eventually have a similar offering so that a 100% open source, freedom-respecting alternative ecosystem is available for those who want it.
What Are The Services?
Thunderbird Appointment
Appointment is a scheduling tool that allows you to send a link to someone, allowing them to pick a time on your calendar to meet. The repository for Appointment has been public for a while and has seen pretty remarkable development to this point.Appointment has been developed to make meeting with others easier for our users, and we weren't happy with the existing tools as they were either: proprietary or very bloated. I hope that everyone here will check out the project and, if you would like to be a part of the beta, please let me know.
Thunderbird Send
Send is the rebirth of Firefox Send - well, kind of. At this point, we have a bit of a Ship of Theseus situation - having rebuilt much of the project to allow for more direct methods of sharing files. We opened up the repo to the public yesterday. So I encourage everyone to go and check it out. Once again, if you want to be part of the beta, let me know and I'll get you on the shortlist.Thunderbird Assist
Assist is an experiment that, through a partnership with Flower AI will allow users to take advantage of AI features. The hope is that processing can be done on devices that can support the models, and for devices that are not powerful enough to run the language models locally - Flower has leveraged Nvidia's confidential compute in order to ensure private remote processing (very similar to Apple's Private Cloud Compute). But, given some users' sensitivity to this, these types of features will always be optional for use by people who want them. The repo for Assist is not public yet, but it will be soon.Thundermail
Thundermail is an email service. We want to provide email accounts to those that love Thunderbird, and we believe that we are capable of providing a better service than the other providers out there, that aligns with our values. We have been experimenting with this for a while now and are using Stalwart as the software stack we are building upon. We have been working with the Stalwart maintainer to improve its capabilities (for instance, we have pushed hard on calendar and contacts being a core piece of the stack).With Thundermail, it is our goal to create a next generation email experience that is completely, 100% open source and built by all of us, our contributors and wider contributor community. Unlike the other services, there will not be a single repository where this work is done. But we will try and share relevant places to contribute in future posts to this list.
The email domain for Thundermail will be Thundermail.com or tb.pro. Heading to thundermail.com you will see a sign up page for the beta waitlist. Please add your name to it!
Final Thoughts
Don't Services cost money to run?
Something you may be thinking "this all sounds expensive, how will Thunderbird be able to pay for it?" And that's a great question! Services such as Send are actually quite expensive (storage is costly). So here is the plan: at the beginning, we plan to offer these services for free to consistent community contributors. Other users will have to pay for access. Once we have a strong enough user base that the services appear to be sustainable, we will open up free tiers with limitations, such as less storage or the like - depending on the service. You see this with other providers, some of it is practical as email addressing and file sharing are also prone to abuse when there are free tiers.The Realization of a Dream
This has been a long time coming. It is my conviction that all of this should have been a part of the Thunderbird universe a decade ago. But it is better late than never. Just like our Android client has expanded what Thunderbird is (as will our iOS client), so too will these services.Thunderbird is unique in the world. Our focus on open source, open standards, privacy and respect for our users is something that should be expressed in multiple forms. 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.
I hope that all of you will check out this work and share your thoughts and test these things out. What's exciting is that you can run Send or Appointment today, on your own server. And everything that we do will be out in the open and you can come and help us build it. Together we can create amazing experiences that enhance how we manage our email, calendars, contacts and beyond.
Feel free to ask me any questions directly or on this thread.
Thank you for being on this journey with us.
Ryan Sipes Managing Director, Product Thunderbird
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