In the last weeks. I have been thinking a lot about some compromises we have done at Mozilla, to fulfill specific metrics, cater to the masses, or simply because its safer to follow the flow sometimes. Thunderbird is one of those compromises I still cannot believe we haven’t corrected yet (yes, I believe it’s a mistake). I have written a thorough blogpost about the importance of Thunderbird on a ideological level, as well as on a Mission and Marketing level.
There has been quite some new happenings in the Thunderbird community in the last year and after thinking about this for several weeks now, I wanted to address it here, as a lot of other Mozillians feel the same.
So before making this a too lengthy post, I kindly ask you to have a read through the blogpost and share your input towards this. Having said that, I am convinced of the importance of this topic and will not let this die down until we have received a proper decentralized discussion regarding this throughout the community and leadership teams.
I have to disagree, Mozilla is already loosing time, money and focus on lot of things where it should not. Long story short - Firefox, Firefox OS, MDN and Persona should be “all” for Mozilla.
Oh bird, I didn’t even know Thunderbird was not supported. I joined Mozilla last year and started using Thunderbird and a privacy-aware email service just around that time. Thunderbird and Enigmail is still the recommended option for a GPG encrypted conversation on Desktop. And I know people who religiously use Thunderbird from 2007 and have large (2GB, 6GB) backups of email archives. I’m just gonna install thunderbird beta now.
Your blog post makes perfect sense to me.
It must be read in conjunction with the fact that Firefox OS does not support encrypted emails yet, and we have failed to enable third party clients that support encryption - textsecure and whiteout. This very thing has made us lose some lovely supporters. Maybe they found it ironic that we talk so much about privacy and yet there’s no way to send a private email with the tools we provide.
If we had a #BirdYeah campaign, one of the memes that come up would be how one can send emails like Edward Snowden does, with Thunderbird.
Maybe it is time to rethink ways to innvoate Thunderbird. Maybe Thunderbird should be seamlessly integrated with Firefox accounts and Firefox OS. Maybe Thunderbird could be the missing piece that holds everything else together.
I use Thunderbird from 2007 for my emails with the same profile folder (moved from many pc and os) but i don’t feel the need of a new release. The new features like the upload of big attachment on box, dropbox ecc and the support for IMs, i’ve tried but i no use very much.
I’m waiting the lightning integration but wait Thunderbird is a client for email and doing her job well so is this the reason that i don’t wait a new release.
At the same time for all the reason explained from Elio we need Thunderbird.
But we need Thunderbird with a development active for fix the bugs (if exist) or add new features (if yes maybe integrate some extensions like enigmail). Marketing without active development is useless.
Some problem of thunderbird are the same of firefox os that i’ve written here http://www.mte90.net/en/2015/05/the-firefox-os-1-x2-x-problems/
@vladimirkrstic Thats actually quite scratching the surface and Im not sure how you are able to write such a strong statement, as if the strategy Mozilla should take is glass clear
In any case, I think I’ve stated my stance on the blogpost quite thoroughly, so I’d appreciate other inputs too.
@helios Sad “long story short”, I observe Mozilla for… don’t know 4-5 years. It isn’t glass clear but should be close. Mozilla stretched too much for non-profit and open company/foundation. With a focus Mozilla should achieve much much more for open web, for users for Mozilla.
I agree with you that we should have Thunderbird reborn but not by Mozilla. Would love to see some other organization/community reincarnating Thunderbird.