Once an open-source powerhouse – these days struggling Mozilla – continues to look for ways to “steady the ship.”
Years of experimentation with services, at some point devices, and involvement in, to all intents and purposes, political issues, proved to be distracting enough to result in a serious userbase decline affecting Mozilla’s core products, Firefox and Thunderbird.
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Google and Microsoft rule those markets with their browsers, email clients, and productivity suites. Mozilla is now trying to compete by building additional services for Thunderbird, the email client.
Product Managing Director Ryan Sipes last week published a note to the public Thunderbird Planning group, updating the community on the development of Thunderbird Pro services and Thundermail.
Sipes noted that Thunderbird “loses users each day” to client and service systems like Gmail and Office365 and that the intent here is to provide a fully open-source alternative.
Sipes goes on to list the services that will be included in the new offering, which include the scheduling tool Thunderbird Appointment, file sharing tool Thunderbird Sent (an attempt to revive the discontinued Firefox Send), and Thunderbird Assist, referred to as “an experiment” developed in partnership with Flower AI.
Thundermail, meanwhile, is described as a “next-generation” email hosting service.
Now, onto how Mozilla’s products might finally start to make money, at least to be independently sustainable, instead of relying heavily on the millions from the Google search deal.
Sipes writes that the Thunderbird Pro and Thundermail are expensive, singling out Send in particular, because of storage costs. So the plan is to allow only “consistent community contributors” free access at first while charging all other users.
If this, over a period, of time results in a “strong enough” userbase, feature-limited free tiers would be introduced.
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In his post to the community, Sipes acknowledges that all of this – that is, the inclusion of web services – is happening about a decade later than it should have, but that Thunderbird’s open-source and privacy angle still make it competitive.
Speaking of privacy – Sipes was asked by The Register whether there are plans to support encrypted email.
“We are still evaluating how we want to approach end-to-end encryption for our users. Right now, in testing, it is easy to have all mail encrypted, but the other piece is ensuring encrypted mail between users and key management,” he replied.
