ICYMI: Mozilla is looking to challenge Gmail with "Thundermail"

In case you missed it, Mozilla recently announced that it is expanding Thunderbird's capabilities with new services under the "Thunderbird Pro" umbrella. This includes "Thundermail" and other services aimed at enhancing the user experience.

Thunderbird, which already offers features like a calendar, contact book, and RSS reader, is most popular for being an email client. You can sync your various accounts, such as Gmail and Outlook, to it.

However, as Ryan Sipes, Managing Director of Product at Thunderbird, acknowledged last week, Thunderbird faces serious competition from services like Gmail and Office 365, which offer better integration with their first-party clients.

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 third-party clients) and soft lock-ins (through convenience and integration between their clients and services).

That's why Thundermail, among a host of other services, was born. Thunderbird wants to offer a complete alternative that is "100% open source" and "freedom-respecting."

Starting with Thundermail, we don't have much details, and the official website is barebones, but the general idea is to provide email accounts to Thunderbird users (probably @thundermail.com).

For now, Thundermail is experimental and powered by Stalwart Mail Server, an open-source, all-in-one email server written in Rust, supporting protocols like JMAP, IMAP4, POP3, and SMTP.

According to Sipes, if the Thundermail project takes off with a strong user base, it will offer free tiers with limitations, with users having to pay to access more features like higher storage options.

Other services Thunderbird is looking to introduce include:

• Appointment: A scheduling tool developed to "make meeting with others" easier for Thunderbird users. The way it works is that you send a link to someone, and the receiver gets to pick a time on your calendar to meet.
• Send: Remember Firefox Send? It was a free, open-source, E2E encrypted service run by Mozilla from 2017 to 2020. Thunderbird Send is quite similar, albeit with the capability to allow for more "direct methods of sharing files." Although this is not the first time we're hearing of Thunderbird Send, the GitHub Lerna-powered monorepo was made public recently.
• Assist: Assist is an optional, experimental AI service, built in partnership with Flower AI, that will allow users to run language models locally.

In response to an encouraging comment from Mihovil Stanić, who wondered why Mozilla waited so long to sell services similar to Proton and Zoho, built around Thunderbird and open technologies, Sipes expressed confidence that Thunderbird had grown enough to support such offerings and encouraged users to engage with the projects.

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