2 weeks Ago By Paul Thurrott
Every few years, it seems there’s news about yet another plan to reimagine the ancient Thunderbird email application. But this might be Mozilla’s best idea for the brand yet: A Gmail-like webmail service called Thundermail and a set of email services called Thunderbird Pro. “Thunderbird Pro and Thundermail are web services that enhance the experience of using Thunderbird, all open source (or will be for repos that aren’t public yet) and built to serve the needs of our users,” .
“Thunderbird loses users each day to rich ecosystems that are both clients and services, such as Gmail and Office 365. These ecosystems have both hard vendor lock-ins (through interoperability issues with 3rd-party clients) and soft lock-ins (through convenience and integration between their clients and services). It is our goal to eventually have a similar offering so that a 100 percent open source, freedom-respecting alternative ecosystem is available for those who want it.
” Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday — get free copies of Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (normally $9.99) as a special welcome gift! Thundermail is basically Mozilla’s version of Gmail, a web-based email service based on the open source software stack. It will be email-only at first, but Mozilla is “pushing hard” on getting contacts and calendaring services into the stack as well.
The email domain for Thundermail will be Thundermail.com or tb.pro, Sipes says, and you can navigate to today to sign up for the beta waitlist.
Thunderbird Pro is a set of services that includes the Thunderbird Appointment scheduling tool, the Thunderbird Send file sharing tool (and a rebirth, of sorts, of Firefox Send), and Thunderbird Assist, an AI assistant based on that promises to offer privacy features similar to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute. And Appointment and Send will be available to others who want to run them on their own servers. As for the cost, Thundermail and the Thunderbird Pro services will be free at first to “consistent community contributors,” while others will have to pay .
.. something, it’s not clear yet.
And in time, Mozilla plans to offer free tiers with limitations, as with other webmail services. “Thunderbird is unique in the world,” he says. “Our focus on open source, open standards, privacy, and respect for our users is something that should be expressed in multiple forms.
The absence of web services from us means that our users must make compromises that are often uncomfortable ones. This is how we correct that.” Paul Thurrott is an award-winning technology journalist and blogger with 30 years of industry experience and the author of 30 books.
He is the owner of and the host of three tech podcasts: with Leo Laporte and Richard Campbell, , and with Brad Sams. He was formerly the senior technology analyst at Windows IT Pro and the creator of the SuperSite for Windows from 1999 to 2014 and the Major Domo of Thurrott.com while at BWW Media Group from 2015 to 2023.
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