Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

After reading a bunch of negative comments here, let me add a little on the bright side. I've been using Thunderbird for many years, currently both at home and at work to manage gmail accounts, pop at home, imap in the office. It works great for me, with a few annoyances but nothing serious.

As for the donations, Thunderbird seems to be somehow apart from Mozilla now, so I don't think much about specific org structure and will gladly donate.

Maybe on paper there're dozens of alternatives, but when I consider my specific requirements, I haven't found anything better, YMMV.

I really like Thunderbird, it's the only truly cross-platform mail app, with K9 also now on Android.

Works perfect, I even migrated my Windows install to Linux just by copying the data folder, absolutely seamless.

Not sure why people are hating on it so much here. Point to an alternative with the same features?

Campaigns like this need more info. This page doesn't answer any basic questions.

How much money do you currently get? How much money do you need and how will you use it? Does it even go directly to Thunderbird development or will be used up by Mozilla for other projects?

Edit: I found some info here: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/

Still, my point stands that communication around it should be super clear and available on all pages where they collect money. It shouldn't require me to search for it.

Just donated. Have been using Thunderbird for years. I once donated to Wikipedia - and they have billions I heard - so might as well donate to another important piece of software for my digital life.

Now that I read the comments I find out Mozilla might have enough money and a CEO taking in millions. Any recommendations for a good email client on Linux? Just as a backup for now...

How much money goes into the pocket of the Mozilla CEO? How much is used to actually pay the people and to cover infrastructure costs?

> MZLA Technologies Corporation is a wholly owned for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation and the home of Thunderbird.

I guess I don't understand why the open-source email client with zero revenue potential is managed by a for-profit subsidiary, nor why that for-profit subsidiary is begging for donations.

Shouldn't this whole thing be managed by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation?

Interestingly, I used Thunderbird for years, it was really the best client for some times on Linux. But as the development stalled, I moved to Gnome Evolution, the nice integration with the general Gnome desktop made the switch less painful (at the start, it was hard, Evolution was not that good). But Evolution improved nicely, less bugs, faster, still well integrated into the desktop and I see no reasons to switch back to another tool.

The only change in my workflow is that now, I am also using in parallel a stupid command line tool "vibe coded" in Python to read my emails. It allows me to quickly check my emails out of VS Code in a Claude Code session, a bit like when I was doing my emails directly in Emacs :-)

Thunderbird will provider their PRO services using stalw.art as email backend. I was considering using it too to replace really old mail system in our company. It looked like modern stack using jmap, but it seems thunderbird actually does not support jmap? Or is it only in their PRO extension? Does it mean I cannot use this unless it is with their services? I'm confused.

Of course there is still IMAP, but I hoped for better.

Mozilla brings in almost $700 million per year, they have more than enough money to sponsor MZLA/Thunderbird development.

Wasn't Thunderbird Pro the avenue for extra project financing? Why does it take so long to launch an email service?

Donated. I don't even use it, but we needed it for opening email archives from clients at my old employer. We need as many options as possible.

Is that a Stripe screen? Set up american style to reduce friction, not supporting 3d secure, which means european credit cards will deny by default?

As a lot of people in this thread advise against Thunderbird, what do you recommend instead (preferably for Windows as I am stuck on that)?

I wish there was a system that lets users put up a donation that is released once a specific bug is fixed or a specific feature is implemented.

Wouldn't that be cool? The company would have a list of tasks with a dollar amount next to it.

I for one have been dabbling with a bug in ThunderBird for days now that drives me mad:

I recently created a folder in Thunderbird and called it "archive". No way would I have expected that this will lead me to a bug and will take hours out of my day: There seems to be no way to get rid of this folder anymore.

Things I have tried:

"Keep message archives in" in "Copies and Folders" is disabled. I tried temporarily enabling it, setting it to some other dir and disabling it again, that did not help.

I have disabled it in "subscribe".

I cannot rename it.

There is no "archive" folder in the web interface of my email provider, so if it Thunderbird somehow created it on the server, there seems to be no way to see, let alone delete it again in the web interface.

I tried deleting archive.msf on disk. That makes the folder disappear after the next start, but it is recreated after about a second.

I deleted folderTree.json and folderCache.json, that did not help.

I wouldn't mind donating if they separate it from Mozilla and move it to Europe.

I wish I could use Thunderbird at work now that it has Exchange support . Unfortunately we're mandated to use Microsoft Outlook. Outlook feels like it has completely been forgotten by Microsoft. I don't recall the last time they updated anything meaningful in the product (at least on macOS), it's quite a mess of a product. Wishing Thunderbird all the best it's the competition we need.

I have actually bought a lifetime license for em Client.

Thunderbird had consistently (Windows / Linux) a bad performance for me and feature and UX wise it has always only been okay for me.

Still important that a few FOSS solutions for email exist, though.

when i used windows i was happy with The Bat email client: https://www.ritlabs.com/en/products/thebat/download.php

If you press the browser’s back button on the donation page, they send you to a page pestering you for your email address so they can send you a reminder to donate later. Talk about a dark pattern.

Mozilla has really gone off the rails. An organisation who claims to work on behalf of the user and who makes a web browser, actively hijacking the user experience to peddle for a few dollars?

Why the heck is Thunderbird “fully funded by financial contributions from [their] users”? Where do the billions of dollars from Google go? All the stupid doomed side projects which no one asked for nor wants and are abandoned after one year?

I used TB happily for years on Mac OS but its font rendering on Linux was one of the main reasons I never switched.

I miss the days we needed Thunderbird for email...such an innocent time.

Sorry, isn't Thunderbird meant to be "true FOSS" and essentially feature complete?

Mozilla is such a weird company, asking users to donate and keep one of their projects alive, while dumping billions in useless initiatives is really dishonest.

I use Thunderbird on both Linux/Android as my sole client for personal email. I'm mostly pretty happy with it, aside from search. My use case is mostly receiving email rather than sending email however. I would be much more amenable to donating if I knew that my donation would be going to support Thunderbird specifically and not rolled up into the parent MZLA Technologies Corporation, but I understand that's usually impractical.

I really think Mozilla has run it's course. Just die already so there is room for something new.

By donating to MZLA Technologies Corporation? Then I guess I'll switch to KMail or Evolution.

Anyone using Thunderbird was forced to see this, not sure we (or the well-funded corp) need another round.

Made an account just to say that I will not support the bloated mess that is Thunderbird that pushes on you a new way to configure it, a new layout and new workflows with every major update, makes it difficult to set up text-only mail and messes up line breaks every so often with no way to properly configure it, which should be developed by Mozilla, which is flush with money but rather spends it on theming their software and executive salaries.

I switched away from Thunderbird about a year ago and couldn't be happier I have made the change.

DO NOT donate to Thunderbird. Let it "die". As with all of Mozilla's software, that would be the best outcome - if it does, someone who isn't totally incompetent might fork it and actually improve it.

Literally every change that's been made to thunderbird in the last 10+ years has made it worse. Mozilla are doggedly using the same philosophy as they are with firefox: "in what new and exciting ways can we make it more shit?".

There are a bunch of things that I used to do in thunderbird with no problem on much less powerful machines that I can't do today.

For example, since they decided to rewrite their perfectly-functional calendar parsing in a trash language, it now eats 100% of my CPU for ~30mins at a time trying to parse my decades-long, many-many-thousands-of-entries calendar. Then when it finishes it notices that it's been 30 mins since it synchronised my calendar, so it syncs and starts parsing all over again! This effectively locks up the whole of thunderbird, making it totally unusable. This issue has persisted for years. The solution I came up with is "stop using thunderbird for my calendar".

There's a similar fun bug which means it won't sync my contacts anymore either. A feature that I had by about 2010 which my nokia phone could manage, modern thunderbird cannot do.

If you'd like another 20 examples of how it's worse today than it was 10 years ago, just ask, and I'll write up a hundred thousand words or so of vitriol.

It's extremely likely that next time I upgrade my distro I'll be shopping for a new email client. Currently I have thunderbird marked as held so that it doesn't upgrade. When I upgrade my distro there will be a new version of thunderbird, and I'd estimate about a 90% chance that that's when I'll make my exit, after ~20 years or so.

It's sad. Thunderbird used to be a great piece of software.

Don't give mozilla your money.