> 3. Invest more in Thunderbird the application and develop Thunderbird the privacy focus email service for independent professionals and small businesses.
I know Mozilla's non-Firefox projects aren't popular here, but if Thunderbird really wanted a niche in the business world Mozilla would need to start an email service to go with it. The age of non-integrated email clients for the average user ended a while ago.
In my experience, the vast majority of corporate is hooked on Outlook, which is actually quite unreliable in its 365 version and constantly has annoying bugs and performance issues.
It still might be a good idea to host an e-Mail service or create an Exchange pendant.
I often wonder why there never has been a popular open pendant to domain controllers in Windows. I think there were multiple attempts, but I don't think anything really caught on.
What many don't realize is the reason open/free software doesn't easily make it in the corporate zone is that there's no company behind them to put their name behind an SLA. This and integration with the ecosystem (MS has an easier time selling Windows+365+Exchange+cloudstuff).
The jump from "providing an email client" to "providing a privacy focus email service for independent professionals and small businesses" is already quite large. Being able to sell that by giving some guarantees (in signed SLA form) is yet another jump on an entirely different scale.
> there's no company behind them to put their name behind an SLA.
I agree that this is a sticking issue; most procurement offices have vendor/supplier questionnaires that ask about their cash flows etc., because companies want to deal with going concerns. FOSS without an org doesn't check that box.
BUT isn't this exactly the point of having a Mozilla Corporation, as separate from the nonprofit???
> isn't this exactly the point of having a Mozilla Corporation
This is the critical part. If I am using Thunderbird (or the hypothetical mail service discussed above) in my company today and have an issue or request (bug, configuration error, need assistance with a deployment, want additional features in the product, want additional integration with other products) can I contact someone directly and know that this will be treated according to my specific expectations?
In other words can I call someone at Mozilla Corporation now and ask for dedicated tech support, for a bug fix in a specified time frame, for a consultant to listen to my needs and come up with a solution? Because if my business relies on that product or service and I get no guarantees then I won't be happy to pay you just so I can queue up on Github and raise issues, and I'll go with %prominent software vendor% who gives me that.
RedHat doesn't sell you "Linux", they sell everything that comes with it, and create an entire ecosystem to go with that (partners that offer certification, training, consultancy and support, dev support, etc.).
Not to mention that companies like Google and Microsoft also offer different levels of technical support alongside their products.
For smaller companies, or companies that want to invest less in their technology stack IT department, it sounds like a better deal to have all services provided and backed by a larger computation corporation (even if that's not always actually cheaper in the long run).
For small/new companies, approx $15/head/mo for 365 (however it's branded now) is pretty hard to argue with. That gives you sharepoint/onedrive exchange & teams, and all the usual word/excel/outlook etc.
You can go quite a ways with that before you would get close to breaking even on even a single dedicated IT person. Assuming their cloud services etc. fit your business needs of course - but that's an awful lot of companies.
Then look no further than public institutions, where (leaving everything else aside) almost every tender is public [0]. You'll never see Thunderbird in any of the submitted bids because there's no company behind it to write the bid and put its weight behind it.
It's a good canary to see if a service or product has anyone capable of supporting it, or if it can be monetized in any way. This doesn't have to be the developer, just any company that can realistically push it into the corporate world.
There is a ton of public procurement out there. It all has some level (sometimes an insane level) of hoop jumping and domain knowledge to be successful with. In my limited experience, the people who understand this don't have a lot of overlap with people who advocate and use open source solutions - although I have seen a few (e.g. CentOS rollouts).
Yeah, and Outlook is available on Android/iOS so it's something many business users are already accustomed to. Then there's the entire domain integration thing (ex. Intune) which is a bit more cumbersome to set up/manage for sysadmins for OSS.
Agree. Mozilla should focus more on online services, nicely integrated in the browser. Online email, password management, vpn services, file storage and sharing, ... All privacy focused and with paid offerings, to make them more independent from Google.
I think you're spot on here. The only people using desktop mail clients are techies with multiple accounts (such as us HN users), and business users (who all use Outlook).
As a counterpoint, the non-techies in my family have become so used to the iPhone and iPad mail client that they look for (and find, and use) the desktop mail client on their Macs. Even my mom knows she has to "find the mail and give it my GMail" when she gets a new device.
> The age of non-integrated email clients for the average user ended a while ago.
As someone currently beta testing Mimestream (3rd party Gmail desktop client for Mac), I couldn't disagree more. A good UI and a responsive interface makes an absolute world of difference. Gmail's web interface isn't bad, but a desktop client is just so much better to use.
Yes, it is integrated with Google, in that it uses the Google API.
However, relevant to this thread, it's not developed by Google, as Thunderbird would not be. And so Thunderbird could still provide value as such a client.
I think this was the key. No average user I know uses an email client on their PC, outside of the corporate one. It's one more thing to take care of and average users rarely want that.
It's easier on mobile where people are used with the "app" concept, not really on the PC. This is one reason why Thunderbird doesn't enjoy the kind of popularity browser based email does.
Of course it's not impossible. But also they must be tech savvy enough to go look for an email client where they already had the usual web interface, get to testing a few and settle on Thunderbird, then configure and stick with it.
But that obviously it doesn't happen that often or else Thunderbird would boast a lot more users than it actually does. Relatively few users use it at all, and it's a reasonable assumption that the usage is higher among the more tech savvy than the average user.
I'm a fairly average user, in reality. One personal email address. Few rules. No integrations.
I still find it to be a significant improvement, even if most of my interactions involve arrow keys and the backspace key (ironically the keys I can't use in their web interface).
I disagree - the feature they need is better calendar integration with Exchange based services and the Exchange address book (GAL). As a corporate user this is the Achilles heel and always has been for 20 years, like it or not Exchange is king of the hill in large sprawling companies and Thunderbird has always left it to 3rd party add-ons (some of which they just killed due to the extension redesign) to try and handle.
I recently had to buy an such an add-on (Owl), because my umiversity's IT department killed IMAP support and only offers Exchange (which is stupid, but what can you do?).
Solutions like Owl are actually kind of nice, I have been using a similar one on my phone (AquaMail) for many years and it's worked out great. Thanks for the tip, might give it a shot - I see it's by the same author as ExQuilla which has been around for awhile as well.
Besides this rather serious bug, which does not allow you to accept Exchange meeting invites from within Thunderbird [1], everything else works perfectly with this extension.
Very much this. Gmail (well, all of Google properties anymore) is pretty terrible from a UI perspective. Not to mention the abject privacy considerations with anything Google related.
I would love for Mozilla to start a competing email service that focused on performance, UI, privacy and integrated well with not only Thunderbird but other desktop mail clients.
If standalone email clients really are dead for the average user, that to me would suggest Thunderbird should focus on power-users and/or corporate deployments, not that it should shift its focus to being part of yet another "service". It's perfectly fine to make a product with an audience that isn't everyone on Earth.
It might be because it's searching using the IMAP server, for some reason those can't often deal with non-ASCII characters. Searching with diacritics seems to work for me in locally-downloaded folders.
Well, wasn’t email designed in a time when the only supported standards were everyone’s form of Extended ASCII? So it would make sense that IMAP only supports ASCII. Heck, attachments are encoded in some base## form before being sent because the entire standard is based on text.
Here I like to quote my favorite penguin:"don't give me excuses, give me results". MS products somehow can do it, and it is a big showstopper dor adaptation in (a lot of) countries with special characters if you cannot search for the product name/customer name/project. (But maybe I remember wronfly and MS also cannot do with IMAP, so exchange it is)
I know Mozilla's non-Firefox projects aren't popular here, but if Thunderbird really wanted a niche in the business world Mozilla would need to start an email service to go with it. The age of non-integrated email clients for the average user ended a while ago.