WHY was Thunderbird 115 called "Supernova?" What caused the press to declare Thunderbird dead back in 2012? And how did we turn the ship around? Ryan Sipes answers these questions and much more in his personal recollection of Thunderbird's history.
  • mnmalst@lemmy.zip
    24·
    11 months ago

    In addition, we’re going to develop the tools that give people choices other than the big three.

    This sentence at the very end makes me very curious. Is this a hint for a Thunderbird mail service or something similar?

    On the one hand I would love to have a mail service offered by the Thunderbird team that would also fund Thunderbird development. On the other hand it’s probably not a good idea to split the development resources too thin.

    • kixik@lemmy.ml
      3·
      11 months ago

      Well, there are alternatives. There’s /e/ (murena.io now a days) and distroot, and you can use gnupg with others who also use gnupg, and with distroot you can use its own encryption as well. There’s tutanota and prrotonmail, which use their own encryption mechanisms but only work with the same providers and not with other providers…

      I mean there are already several non big corps providers of email. Distroot also provides xmpp, nextcloud, and several other services, the same as /e/. I can’t tell I’d trust more TB than the alternatives, several of them are non profit. But there are options. It’s sad before smart phones, some big corps were already dominating the services, and after them, things got even worse. But there have been, and still are, options for refugees. That’s not the issue in my mind.

      The big issue, is that those big corps do what they want, excluding those not using them. All of them, no exception, place received messages from /e/ to the spam, that if the email even reaches the final user, some times it gets discarded by the service without even getting to the end receiver. Several mail registrations for whatever account, banks, insurance, stores and so on, don’t even accept email addresses if not from the big corps. So the huge and toxic influence from big corps doesn’t get corrected by another non big corp service. It’s like with FLOSS alternatives, or more private alternatives in general, the issue is the power most users give to those big corps. Most users prefer those corps services, at times ignoring the non big corps are not less comfortable, but most of the time they don’t even care, even if told there are easy enough alternative they would still select big corps. Then with such power, big corps not only dominate, but also discriminate non big corps users…

      • mnmalst@lemmy.zip
        1·
        11 months ago

        I am aware, I am using an alternative service myself for several years now. My point was that having an email service that helps fund Thunderbird would be nice. Furthermore, more alternative that ethically align with my views are always good.

  • thayer@lemmy.caEnglish
    16·
    11 months ago

    Looking so forward to seeing K-9 Mail incorporate even more modern features (snooze!) and take on the new branding. It has already come a long way these past couple of years, and made my degoogling journey much easier. Would love to see an Android-based calendaring equivalent too. Shout out to cketti for all his hard work!

    • dan@upvote.au
      2·
      11 months ago

      I love FairEmail but I’ve been giving K-9 a try over the last few days and it’s definitely a lot better than it was a few years ago.

  • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
    10·
    11 months ago

    The second-newest is my favourite logo, but it makes sense to have a shared design language between Firefox and Thunderbird.

    • dan@upvote.au
      11·
      11 months ago

      Some people don’t like the new logo, but I personally like the symmetry.

  • BCsven@lemmy.ca
    5·
    11 months ago

    “What caused the press to declare Thunderbird dead?” as a user who loved firefox from 2009-2012 it was Mozillas own mailings / web page wording that made everyone think the project had been terminated/no longer supported.

  • Anonymouse@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    It references a sort of partnership with K9 Mail on android, but later says they’re looking to expand Thunderbird into the iOS & Android space. Either they’ll be direct competitors of each other or they’ll start to blend into each other. I’m wondering which.

    • americanwaste@lemmy.ml
      81·
      11 months ago

      Previous blogs have mentioned K-9 is just being rebranded as Thunderbird for Android once the Android app is closer in features to the desktop release. The iOS release will be new entirely as I don’t know of an existing iOS email app they can rebrand.