Thunderbird's donation-driven revenue rose to $2.7M in 2021(ghacks.net)
ghacks.net
Thunderbird's donation-driven revenue rose to $2.7M in 2021
https://www.ghacks.net/2022/05/15/thunderbirds-donation-drive-revenue-rose-21-in-2021/
9 comments
That’s maybe revenue for 20-30 engineers at a moderate (though less than 100) %age of Silicon Valley salary. While they aren’t having to do the full render engine work I don’t think it’s going to be a purely nominal amount of work.
Congratulations to MZLA Technologies Corp
I've always been interested in using a desktop client for email, and a few times I have installed and configured one.
But I've always gone back to the web client. What are the advantages of using a desktop client over a web client?
But I've always gone back to the web client. What are the advantages of using a desktop client over a web client?
For me personally, I am actively monitoring 6 different accounts across 3 different services. There's no way I'm pinning, at minimum, 3 different tabs in my browser to accomplish something that Thunderbird or Spark handles much more effectively.
In addition to what others have already said, one can back up their emails and archive them wherever. This is useful not only for account termination but also for migrating to other email providers. Combine this with using a custom domain and one can have much more control over their communications. One can choose whether to leave emails on the server or move them locally and manage backing them up locally or even push an encrypted backup into the cloud.
Thunderbird can encrypt emails very easily to at least keep the body of the email hidden from machine learning. There are how-to's and videos for creating and managing encryption keys.
Thunderbird can encrypt emails very easily to at least keep the body of the email hidden from machine learning. There are how-to's and videos for creating and managing encryption keys.
You need less resources. Your data is always with you. You can add extensions that make things more suitable for your workflow.
A random selection of benefits that I see on an almost daily basis:
Combining multiple accounts from multiple providers in the same interface is a lot easier.
Alt + Tabbing to your mail client is a lot easier. It's absolutely brilliant in something like i3 where I pin my mail app to a desktop, and so my mail is always a single key combo away.
Having multiple open message/compose windows is a lot easier.
Stuff like multiple mail selections using your keyboard and even mouse is a lot easier.
Notifications work better and can be controlled in a much more granular way.
There are a ton of automations that can be made a lot easier.
Attaching files to email is a lot easier. Most OS'es/file browsers can make it a single right click process.
Rules can be far more powerful.
Downloading means you can access your messages (maybe even all messages) at anytime, whether you have access to the internet or not.
You can maintain email hygiene much better. For example, I have my email check set to once every 15 minutes, which means I will only be able to see new email once every 15 mins at most. Until I really got used to not checking and refreshing every time, I had even more aggressive strategies where I blocked network access to the email app and had to manually enable it and manually download emails, each time I wanted to check emails. There may be better strategies or alternatives, but the point is that you have a lot more control.
The downsides of desktop mail clients: Search tends to be slower and often worse.
No easy access from other computers.
Some missing "advanced" features (e.g. the GMail style promotions tabs, etc., and the additional live features GMail often provides)
Labels don't work well with most desktop clients (although GMail focused clients do an excellent job, but personally I don't prefer them because I have many non GMail accounts that I also want to use in the same interface).
IMAP syncing is slow and silly. I wish we had a better protocol. This doesn't make much of a difference in practice unless you're trying to use email as an IM application.
Combining multiple accounts from multiple providers in the same interface is a lot easier.
Alt + Tabbing to your mail client is a lot easier. It's absolutely brilliant in something like i3 where I pin my mail app to a desktop, and so my mail is always a single key combo away.
Having multiple open message/compose windows is a lot easier.
Stuff like multiple mail selections using your keyboard and even mouse is a lot easier.
Notifications work better and can be controlled in a much more granular way.
There are a ton of automations that can be made a lot easier.
Attaching files to email is a lot easier. Most OS'es/file browsers can make it a single right click process.
Rules can be far more powerful.
Downloading means you can access your messages (maybe even all messages) at anytime, whether you have access to the internet or not.
You can maintain email hygiene much better. For example, I have my email check set to once every 15 minutes, which means I will only be able to see new email once every 15 mins at most. Until I really got used to not checking and refreshing every time, I had even more aggressive strategies where I blocked network access to the email app and had to manually enable it and manually download emails, each time I wanted to check emails. There may be better strategies or alternatives, but the point is that you have a lot more control.
The downsides of desktop mail clients: Search tends to be slower and often worse.
No easy access from other computers.
Some missing "advanced" features (e.g. the GMail style promotions tabs, etc., and the additional live features GMail often provides)
Labels don't work well with most desktop clients (although GMail focused clients do an excellent job, but personally I don't prefer them because I have many non GMail accounts that I also want to use in the same interface).
IMAP syncing is slow and silly. I wish we had a better protocol. This doesn't make much of a difference in practice unless you're trying to use email as an IM application.
> IMAP syncing is slow and silly.
JMAP might help a bit with that, but that still has a few design choices I don't understand.
JMAP might help a bit with that, but that still has a few design choices I don't understand.
If you use gmail, one advantage is that you won't lose years of emails if Google randomly decides to terminate your account.
Is this a known thing? I'm convinced it's the case, especially for emails from the 2000s. My email usage dropped in the 2010s, so I don't have as much important stuff stored in there, but there are periods of my Inbox history, where I know I was using Gmail heavily, that have basically little more than a handful of emails anymore.
It has happened, so it's a known thing.
Better PGP integration
To be fair there's not much to do with it. Market share wise there's Thunderbird followed by a large chasm and then maybe Protonmail and other clients with plugins.
S/MIME is significantly more widespread, but has a cost of entry, it's fairly undocumented and quite a few clients have buggy implementations.
S/MIME is significantly more widespread, but has a cost of entry, it's fairly undocumented and quite a few clients have buggy implementations.
It's blazing fast in comparison, you have much more flexibility in configuration, you can do neat things with your data that's all there, etc...
> The Thunderbird project has a total of 18 employees. The team wants to hire several engineers without spending more money than what is coming in.
You will need more than 2.7M for that.
You will need more than 2.7M for that.
That’s 170k/engineer which is well below Bay Area engineering salary. Not sure how much of the TBird team is in the bay vs other locations
I still don't understand the lack of Mozilla's support for Thunderbird, right as the mail client space was hitting peak hotness.
This was the time Google and Apple were paying millions to buy the likes of Sparrow and Inbox, etc.
This was the time Google and Apple were paying millions to buy the likes of Sparrow and Inbox, etc.
How do you back up Thunderbird profiles?
The profile is one big file. Each time I rsync the profile to a remove server, because the file has changed, the whole profile has to be transferred again to the server.
The profile is one big file. Each time I rsync the profile to a remove server, because the file has changed, the whole profile has to be transferred again to the server.
I think there is a switch somewhere which changes the mail store from monolithic to one file per mail. Or is it the database which is so large?
I've been running thunderbird for what, ~20 years now? Its a love/hate relationship. I curse it almost daily, but have issues with most of the alternatives as well.
So, I was excited about the fact that thunderbird was going to get some attention, and was even going to throw some $ at them.
Then I read their planning/backlog
https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap-1
and things I simply could not agree with poped out at me, particularly the plan (now partially done?) to reimplement the IMAP support in javascript.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1707547
The IMAP support is one of the weakest things about thunderbird, because its horribly slow, buggy, doesn't scale, etc, etc, etc. And frankly I cannot see how rewritting in it JS will solve any of that. What it needs is IMAP support that can sync lots of folders and doesn't peg CPUs (which is already a problem) while doing it. My own biases seeing what others have accomplished with their JS rewrites (usually electron, so maybe that is part of the problem) give me a very low opinion of them.
So, I will give it a chance, but I predict it won't work with my mailflow out of the box, and generally will make everything even worse, and the developers will ignore those of us that get more than 1k worth of emails in a day.
(I mean look where firefox has gone, I can't even get it to draw pages consistently, and its not the platform/computer because I see it doing the same buggy behaviors on my linux and windows machines. I've even resurected my firefox kill all scripts because that seems to "fix" it for another 1/2 day until it goes bonkers again).
So, I was excited about the fact that thunderbird was going to get some attention, and was even going to throw some $ at them.
Then I read their planning/backlog
https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap-1
and things I simply could not agree with poped out at me, particularly the plan (now partially done?) to reimplement the IMAP support in javascript.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1707547
The IMAP support is one of the weakest things about thunderbird, because its horribly slow, buggy, doesn't scale, etc, etc, etc. And frankly I cannot see how rewritting in it JS will solve any of that. What it needs is IMAP support that can sync lots of folders and doesn't peg CPUs (which is already a problem) while doing it. My own biases seeing what others have accomplished with their JS rewrites (usually electron, so maybe that is part of the problem) give me a very low opinion of them.
So, I will give it a chance, but I predict it won't work with my mailflow out of the box, and generally will make everything even worse, and the developers will ignore those of us that get more than 1k worth of emails in a day.
(I mean look where firefox has gone, I can't even get it to draw pages consistently, and its not the platform/computer because I see it doing the same buggy behaviors on my linux and windows machines. I've even resurected my firefox kill all scripts because that seems to "fix" it for another 1/2 day until it goes bonkers again).
I use Firefox every day and never have problems.
As far as JS for IMAP, I seriously think that the developers of Thunderbird would understand the pros and cons of using it more than those of us sitting in the peanut gallery.
I would bet that if it was implemented without any fanfare, you probably would not notice anything.
As far as JS for IMAP, I seriously think that the developers of Thunderbird would understand the pros and cons of using it more than those of us sitting in the peanut gallery.
I would bet that if it was implemented without any fanfare, you probably would not notice anything.
As far as JS for IMAP, I seriously think that the developers of Thunderbird would understand the pros and cons of using it more than those of us sitting in the peanut gallery.
So, peering at my crystal ball, I would guess what actually happens is that they roll it out, 9 out of 10 of their users don't notice the change, and the remaining couple percent that are the ones complaining about it now, end up leaving because its worse. I've already found another client I think i can "fix" enough to make it work.
You don't donate to Thunderbird, therefore, just like Firefox, you shouldn't expect your money to go to Thunderbird developers
And by the way, you promote that kind of behavior by doing so:
https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html