[German]Exciting information that became known at the beginning of April 2025. Mozilla wants to introduce Thundermail and Pro services. The aim is to offer an open source alternative to Gmail and Office365 that focuses on data protection, reducing dependencies and better user control.
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I became aware of this via the following tweet. Linuxiac picked up on the whole thing in the article Thunderbird Launches Open Source Services to Rival Gmail and Office365.
The announcement can be found in the article Thundermail and Thunderbird Pro. The initiative is an unexpected but definitely interesting step that the Mozilla Thunderbird managers are taking, they say. There is a new initiative called Thunderbird Pro and Thundermail.
Thunderbird Pro and Thundermail are web services that improve the use of Thunderbird. All services are open source or will be if the repos are not yet public. The services should be tailored to the needs of users.
The goal is to expand the Thunderbird email client into areas that are currently dominated by Google's Gmail and Microsoft's Office 365. The background for offering these services is that Thunderbird is losing users every day to ecosystems such as Gmail and Office365, which are both clients and services. These ecosystems have both hard vendor lock-ins (due to interoperability issues with third-party clients) and soft lock-ins (due to convenience and integration between their clients and services).
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Mozilla's goal is to create a similar offering so that a 100% open source, freedom-respecting alternative ecosystem is available to those who want it.
Which services are planned?
Mozilla is planning various services as part of this initiative.
Thunderbird Appointment
Appointment is an appointment scheduling tool that allows you to send a link to someone so that they can select an appointment in your calendar. The repository for Appointment has been publicly available for some time and has undergone considerable development to date.
Appointment was developed to make it easier for Mozilla users to meet with others, and the Thunderbird developers were not happy with the existing tools as they were either proprietary or very bloated. Anyone interested in participating in the beta phase can apply at ryan@thunderbird.net.
Thunderbird Send
With Thunderbird Send, Firefox Send is coming back, so to speak. A large part of the project is currently being rebuilt to enable more direct methods for sharing files. The project archive has already been made available to the public. You can also apply for the beta here.
Thunderbird Assist
Assist is an experiment that allows users to take advantage of AI features through a partnership with Flower AI. The hope is that processing can be done on devices that support the models. For devices that are not powerful enough to run the language models locally, Flower uses the computing power of Nvidia confidential compute to provide private remote processing (much like Apple's Private Cloud Compute). However, as some users are sensitive to this, these features will always be optional and can be used by those who want them. The repo for Assist is not yet public, but will be soon.
Thundermail
Thundermail is an email service. We want to provide email accounts to those who love Thunderbird, and we believe we are able to provide a better service than the other providers out there that aligns with our values. We've been experimenting with this for a while now, using Stalwart as the software stack we build on. We've been working with the Stalwart maintainer to improve the features (for example, we've been pushing for calendars and contacts to be a core part of the stack).
Next Generation Email
The goal of the initiative is to create a next generation email experience with Thundermail that is 100% open source. The email domain for Thundermail will be thundermail.com or tb.pro. There is a page on thundermail.com where users can sign up for the beta waiting list.
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