I have to say I think Mozilla is a complete shambles of an organisation. It must be one of the richest charities in the world with the billions of dollars of commission it earns from search from Google et al.
I can't actually believe this is something they're excited to post a blog about. Charity with 9 figures revenue is hiring a developer (finally) to work on a product which has 25 million users.
I think Mozilla's mission goals are fantastic but something is going seriously, seriously wrong with the way they allocate resources.
I was apprehensive of your comment at first since you start with fierce criticism of Mozilla. But on reflection, I concur that regardless of the high esteem I have for Mozilla generally, it is disconcerting how little attention Thunderbird sees despite its regular use by so many people. I've never agreed with the neglect it has received from Mozilla and, in fact, feel that Mozilla is missing an opportunity to help resuscitate and modernize email.
Email, for all its faults, is among the most successful distributed protocols. And as a champion of protocols over centralized services, Mozilla should be emphatically in support of keeping email relevant, modern, and productive. Not only is Thunderbird part of that, but I'd like to see Mozilla expand their email vision to include tackling client-side encryption (ala GPG, but made user friendly).
Desktop native clients will be in declining use, and Mozilla will know this.
I handle most personal email on my phone, and corporate email increasingly requires MFA via a web-client, for which there is no standard for native clients.
I have native desktop clients for email installed, and prefer them, but in reality I hardly ever use them.
Thunderbird is a great project, but relative to other things Mozilla have their sights on, I can certainly see why it's lower priority.
Especially since most emails worldwide aren’t decentralized since they rely on centralized webmails. As in, Google and fastmail could decide to swipe you and all proofs you’ve ever saved in your emails from the history. Thunderbird is the last way to download emails (...at least in an open format).
Your comment is incredibly mean. Mozilla isn't competing with other "charities", they are competing with Google, Apple and Microsoft, the world's largest corporations.
The Mozilla Foundation might be a not-for-profit corporation, but they have the same constraints as normal businesses ... they have to secure reliable sources of funding, they have to preserve their resources, they have to be smart about investments, they have to pay salaries because people need to put food on the table and they have to plan further than the next quarter.
And given the incredible progress of Firefox, I for one am glad that they've cut unproductive projects.
The current Thunderbird is terrible. It has been a good browser, it might still have life in it, its developers might manage to evolve it and make it awesome, however I haven't been able to use it for more than a week and believe me, I tried doing so, repeatedly.
I was sad to hear that Mozilla is dropping it, but then again, when I heard this news, I was already long gone as a user. Nowadays I'm split between FastMail's and Gmail's web interfaces and MailMate (freron.com), all of which are so much better for my needs, the difference ain't even funny.
Seriously, a web interface and a desktop client made by one guy from Denmark are better than Thunderbird. Thunderbird basically needs a complete overhaul, but then ask its 25 million users how they feel about that, after all, if they wouldn't want the current Thunderbird, they would've switched to something else.
They are not competing against Google, they live mainly from their funding.
With the rise a Chrome and the fall of Firefox, I wounder why Google is still giving them money. Maybe the PR loss from pulling the plug would still be too big?
Perhaps that's the problem. Why are they "competing". Surely the facts of being a charitable organisation should make their focus working for the charitable aims rather than competing with anyone.
>The current Thunderbird is terrible. //
What cross-platform desktop clients are better [I note MailMate is Mac only]. I use a mix of webmail (Outlook, Horde on private server), and Thunderbird (connecting to IMAP accounts) and can't say it's that different an experience for me; it does seem very sub-optimal however.
> It must be one of the richest charities in the world with the billions of dollars of commission it earns from search from Google et al.
It's not even in the top 20 of U.S.-based charities:
Mozilla’s consolidated reported revenue (Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla Corporation and all subsidiaries) for CY 2016 was $520M (US), as compared to $421M in 2015.[0]
When I read that comment, I thought "I see where you are coming from, but clearly you are exaggerating". Then you left your comment, which claims to disprove it, but has in fact conclusively demonstrated its truth. Mozilla is apparently competing favorably with the 20th largest charity in the entire US?! Yeah: this is like the American Heart Association saying "we finally have managed to allocate one full-time employee to look into the connection between sugar and heart issues" :/.
You do realize that there are a lot of non-profits, right? I went to a meeting in Santa Barbara that was just people representing various local non-profits (or people who were thinking of starting a non-profit), and the room was packed. I remembered them saying something like "there are almost a thousand non-profits right here in Santa Barbara". I just did a quick search, and found a site saying that there are estimated 400-1000 non-profits in Santa Barbara.
So yes: it is (apparently, as demonstrated by your "rebuttal"), entirely fair to say that Mozilla "is one of the richest charities in the world".
> with the billions of dollars of commission it earns from search from Google
That's the Mozilla Corporation. That's not a charity. It also explicitly does not work on Thunderbird.
The charity is the Mozilla Foundation. It has a lot less money than that.
The developer position in question is being effectively paid by the Thunderbird Council (but officially hired by the Mozilla Foundation, which has the infrastructure to do legal compliance like payroll taxes in place). The Thunderbird Council has even less money than the Mozilla Foundation.
> I can't actually believe this is something they're excited to post a blog about.
The Thunderbird Council is excited to post about this, because this is the first hire they've done as far as I know.
> seriously wrong with the way they allocate resources.
Well, "Mozilla" (both the Corporation and the Foundation) has decided to not allocate resources to Thunderbird, period, though some Mozilla employees contribute to Thunderbird in their spare time, like any other open-source project. You can disagree with what the two Mozilla organizations are focusing on, but it's a pretty deliberate decision, not something falling out by accident or something, or a result of the organization being a "shambles".
Firstly, if you bother to read the OP, Mozilla hasn't chosen to hire anyone:
"The Thunderbird Project is hiring for a software engineer! [...] Please note that while the Thunderbird project is a group of individuals separate from the Mozilla Foundation that works to further the Thunderbird email client, the Mozilla Foundation is the Project’s fiscal home."
Secondly, Mozilla is not "one of the richest charities in the world"; the Mozilla Corporation may have $300 million a year in revenue, but the Mozilla Foundation, which is the charity, has revenues that are a hundredth of that. And US law is very specific about what charities may spend revenue on, and developing email client software is not on that list (nor is developing web browser software, for that matter).
When I saw the headline on HN, my first thought was: "Just the one?!"
A typical startup might deploy anywhere from 3 to 15 engineers on a product such as Thunderbird. Considering the amount of legacy it's saddled with, let alone the competing interests around e-mail in general, hiring a single engineer to work on this thing sounds like a token move at best, and likely a terrible waste of that person's time.
I too believe they are neglecting a significant user base. Thunderbird could be a rock star product for Mozilla with many times more users (if not revenue.) It is very useful now, but the potential is immense.
So why is it being neglected? There is some history here; way back when Netscape was a kitchen sink, factoring the mail client out of the browser was an important and successful decision. The mail part, Thunderbird, became persona non grata for some; it certainly lost the bulk of the mind share to the browser.
However, I think the ongoing indifference is because there isn't a workable business model. Firefox is an advertising platform from which Mozilla earns hundreds of millions. It isn't clear how Thunderbird is supposed to earn.
> However, I think the ongoing indifference is because there isn't a workable business model. Firefox is an advertising platform from which Mozilla earns hundreds of millions. It isn't clear how Thunderbird is supposed to earn.
Wow, I’d wondered about that for years as well. I think you hit the nail on the head.
Mozilla likes to paint itself as a charity but it won’t even allocate .1% revenue to a non-profit project that it created and millions rely on.
Is it a charity? It's the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation. Despite some explanations I've received, I've never quite understood how the money flows there. I suppose I could look up their financial statements, but my understanding is that if you donate money to Mozilla, it won't be directly used for developing software.
A charity can't function like a normal business. Income to the charity must be donations, and it's OK to give something of low value back but you can't just "sell" stuff and make money. Hence, "Donate $250 and get this T-shirt".
But what you can do is have a _for profit_ company that makes T-shirts and sells them for $10, and then a charity which _owns_ the for-profit company and receives all of the profits as a donation from the for-profit. That's legal.
So, Mozilla has a corporation to do all the stuff a charity isn't allowed to do, and then a foundation which owns the for-profit corporation. Getting paid a pile of money by a Search Engine to make their engine your default is not a charitable donation, because there's a quid pro quo, so the Mozilla Corporation takes all the Google money, for example.
Correct. If you donate money it goes directly to the Mozilla Foundation, whereas it is the Mozilla Corporation who hires developers to work on Firefox, etc.
To piggyback off this how does their corporate structure work? Mozilla Foundation, 501(c)(3) owns a for-profit wholly? What is the purpose or advantage of this organization?
501(c)(3) literally means the Mozilla Foundation is tax exempt. That is what the section of the law establishes.
That places limits on what sorts of commercial agreements the foundation can make, among other things.
Mozilla isn’t trying to tax dodge like certain other companies; the Mozilla Corporation is taxable, hires engineers, and enters into search agreements.
The corporation being owned by the foundation means it is obligated to follow the foundation’s public benefit goals.
Every year(?) all the big search engine providers make an $$$ offer to Mozilla to become the default search engine in Firefox for anyone who newly installs it.
The issue is where the MONEY for Mozilla is coming from. It certainly is not from email clients. Firefox is the reason why Mozilla receives so much money, and it is obvious that they want to capitalize and concentrate their efforts on the browser. Considering that they're getting a lot of success on this effort, it is difficult to criticize them for doing this.
> The issue is where the MONEY for Mozilla is coming from. It certainly is not from email clients.
Maybe Mozilla ought to change their mission statement to "Maximize revenue" then: neglecting Thunderbird does not jibe with "Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all." The Internet is much more than the web - email is a huge part of it. Maybe I'm being naive, but IMO, money ought to be a means to an end for Mozilla, not the end unto itself.
Also, how much money did Mozilla get from IoT/FirefoxOS? I think it's close to $0, and yet they spent way more money on it than Thunderbird. I don't think your theory holds.
With how unrealistic experience expectations can be for positions, It's nice to see they're looking at junior and senior candidates and have this line:
B.S. in Computer Science would be lovely, but real-world experience is preferred.
This title is inaccurate. Mozilla is _not_ hiring a developer to work on Thunderbird full-time. See below:
From the post:
"
The Thunderbird Project is hiring for a software engineer!
...
Please note that while the Thunderbird project is a group of individuals separate from the Mozilla Foundation that works to further the Thunderbird email client, the Mozilla Foundation is the Project’s fiscal home. The Thunderbird Council, separate from Mozilla, manages the Project and will direct the software engineer’s work."
No, the funds are Thunderbird's alone, originating from donations. Mozilla Foundation is just their fiscal home. Thunderbird Council went shopping for a new fiscal home for a while, even considering The Document Foundation, but decided to stay with MoFo: https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2017/05/thunderbirds-fu...
The most important thing here is that there's now a serious plan in place to move Thunderbird off of XUL and XPCOM. If Thunderbird builds can happen without incurring the expense of building Gecko (and there's no reason that shouldn't be the ultimate goal), then community contributions in the form of code changes would likely increase several times over.
I have fond memories of XPCOM and XUL... Back in 04 we had a desktop application mostly a collection of C++ bindings to the Firebird database and for silly reasons I started the GUI with Gtk+ but as we continued to struggle with porting to Win32 (like we sell this to people in Win32 not Linux) and I started to find a need to embed web content (cause like we should have written the whole thing as a web app - native apps are silly). I recall hacking the event loop to get Gtk+ and gecko to play nice in Win32. Anyways, XPCOM allowing me to write IDL files and expose my C++ work as JavaScript was at the time amazing and allowed me to quickly rewrite most of the UI in XUL and keep all the SQL work we'd done such that if I recall correctly we were able to port the application some 500k lines of code over to XUL. This was right before XulRunner... I still to this day feel good things about IDL/XPCOM and XUL for converting to see the light with JavaScript and HTML. XUL is just like a basically less well supported version of HTML and so is that MS markup language and event Gtk+'s Glade is just an XML editor for a UI... I beleive even OSX via xcode has an underlying XML format to describe the UI... and IMO HTML is light years ahead for UI.
Sure, but the big thing is the "serious" part. We're basically talking about the patch paradox[1]. At any point in time, someone could have stepped up and made it known they were willing to do the necessary work to move off XUL. But without a similar commitment from upstream to accept a future involving a mail client built on web standard tech, it would be a wasted effort. Heck, Nylas even built their own such email client, relicensed it to a compatible license (GPL -> MIT), reached out to say, "please use this" and ask how they could help, and still nothing happened.
Sweeeeeeet. Maybe they'll be competitive with Mail.app. if they could match the speed and design of new Firefox, and support loading a bigger set of past emails than Mail.app can without performance issues, i'd love to use Thunderbird.
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo! XUL is really cool. Still one of my favorite GUI kits. It is like electron (but actually native!) and
had a good reason to be slow (spidermonkey wasn't super fast) :(
XPCOM kinda sucked but it is still better than MS COM
It's not that XUL was bad, exactly. But priorities have changed to security, battery life, and multi-threaded performance. The weight of XUL cruft that has built up over time was holding the project back.
How was XPCOM better than MS COM? Feature set? Nope. Tooling? Nope. Language support? Nope. Ecosystem? Nope. OLE components? Nope. Distributed COM? Nope. Doesn't trigger knee-jerk anti-Microsoft reactionaries even though it's a shallow clone of Microsoft technology? Check.
>The successful applicant will be hired as freelancer (independent contractor) through the Mozilla Foundation’s third-party service Upwork (www.upwork.com).
Not knowing much about Mozilla, is this the norm there?
I'm considering applying for this as I use Thunderbird for all my email, wrote a couple of XUL applications years ago, and have an Upwork account, and the first thing I need to do is to see what the source code and build process looks like: I've built Firefox and FirefoxOS before, and it was not trivial.
Their post has nothing about that, and the Thunderbird page at Mozilla also has no "Developers", "Source code" or similar link anywhere. That should be there at least in the page footer.
There is likely a team working on this. The job posting said for someone to come on board.
And yes, hiring a single developer to work all alone by himself would be akin to killing the project itself as just understanding the codebase, design, technology and architecture would be too much for one person to handle.
We’re looking for an amazing developer to come on board to help make Thunderbird the best Email client on the planet!
Thunderbird was moved to "community development" with Mozilla providing only stability and security updates. https://web.archive.org/web/20161003075603/https://blog.mozi... In the interview it says that employees might only work on the project part-time.
Quite a bit of that code was shared between Thunderbird, Firefox and Seamonkey. But now Firefox don't want to play along any more, and dragging the other two along for the ride...
I fully believe that people should be wary of "just rewrite it mentality". However, in this case, when we've had a mostly-dormant Thunderbird for a long time, based on what is now an outmoded development toolkit (the outmoding of which supposedly had a non-trivial amount to do with security) backed by a very complex and large upstream codebase, which is itself in the process of being abandoned for next-gen solutions, is it really wiser to resurrect the old code?
I've used Thunderbird off and on since it was announced and I know that it has many advanced features. It's no slouch and I deeply respect that there's still a local mail and news client that somewhat works and sometimes gets a little bit of TLC. But the ecosystem is in shambles, and this is only going to get worse as Firefox diverges.
It would obviously take time for a serious revamp to reach parity, but Thunderbird needs a total skeletal reconstruction to pull it off life support and get people excited again. This is just upping the cholesterol meds.
All the other "client-side email software" applications in recent memory have been Electron apps. Surely Mozilla can do us one better, and build a revitalized Thunderbird with staying power on an appropriate modern stack? This seems like a great pilot project for a serious Rust-based desktop toolkit.
Readit News
I can't actually believe this is something they're excited to post a blog about. Charity with 9 figures revenue is hiring a developer (finally) to work on a product which has 25 million users.
I think Mozilla's mission goals are fantastic but something is going seriously, seriously wrong with the way they allocate resources.
Email, for all its faults, is among the most successful distributed protocols. And as a champion of protocols over centralized services, Mozilla should be emphatically in support of keeping email relevant, modern, and productive. Not only is Thunderbird part of that, but I'd like to see Mozilla expand their email vision to include tackling client-side encryption (ala GPG, but made user friendly).
I handle most personal email on my phone, and corporate email increasingly requires MFA via a web-client, for which there is no standard for native clients.
I have native desktop clients for email installed, and prefer them, but in reality I hardly ever use them.
Thunderbird is a great project, but relative to other things Mozilla have their sights on, I can certainly see why it's lower priority.
In the professional world, you either use some form of webmail or Outlook.
The Mozilla Foundation might be a not-for-profit corporation, but they have the same constraints as normal businesses ... they have to secure reliable sources of funding, they have to preserve their resources, they have to be smart about investments, they have to pay salaries because people need to put food on the table and they have to plan further than the next quarter.
And given the incredible progress of Firefox, I for one am glad that they've cut unproductive projects.
The current Thunderbird is terrible. It has been a good browser, it might still have life in it, its developers might manage to evolve it and make it awesome, however I haven't been able to use it for more than a week and believe me, I tried doing so, repeatedly.
I was sad to hear that Mozilla is dropping it, but then again, when I heard this news, I was already long gone as a user. Nowadays I'm split between FastMail's and Gmail's web interfaces and MailMate (freron.com), all of which are so much better for my needs, the difference ain't even funny.
Seriously, a web interface and a desktop client made by one guy from Denmark are better than Thunderbird. Thunderbird basically needs a complete overhaul, but then ask its 25 million users how they feel about that, after all, if they wouldn't want the current Thunderbird, they would've switched to something else.
With the rise a Chrome and the fall of Firefox, I wounder why Google is still giving them money. Maybe the PR loss from pulling the plug would still be too big?
>The current Thunderbird is terrible. //
What cross-platform desktop clients are better [I note MailMate is Mac only]. I use a mix of webmail (Outlook, Horde on private server), and Thunderbird (connecting to IMAP accounts) and can't say it's that different an experience for me; it does seem very sub-optimal however.
How many full time devs work on TB?
It's not even in the top 20 of U.S.-based charities:
Mozilla’s consolidated reported revenue (Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla Corporation and all subsidiaries) for CY 2016 was $520M (US), as compared to $421M in 2015.[0]
The Largest U.S. Charities For 2016[1]
1. United Way Worldwide, $3.708 billion.
2. Task Force for Global Health, $3.154 billion.
3. Feeding America, $2.150 billion.
...
20. American Heart Association, $634 million.
[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2016/
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/williampbarrett/2016/12/14/the-...
You do realize that there are a lot of non-profits, right? I went to a meeting in Santa Barbara that was just people representing various local non-profits (or people who were thinking of starting a non-profit), and the room was packed. I remembered them saying something like "there are almost a thousand non-profits right here in Santa Barbara". I just did a quick search, and found a site saying that there are estimated 400-1000 non-profits in Santa Barbara.
So yes: it is (apparently, as demonstrated by your "rebuttal"), entirely fair to say that Mozilla "is one of the richest charities in the world".
That's the Mozilla Corporation. That's not a charity. It also explicitly does not work on Thunderbird.
The charity is the Mozilla Foundation. It has a lot less money than that.
The developer position in question is being effectively paid by the Thunderbird Council (but officially hired by the Mozilla Foundation, which has the infrastructure to do legal compliance like payroll taxes in place). The Thunderbird Council has even less money than the Mozilla Foundation.
> I can't actually believe this is something they're excited to post a blog about.
The Thunderbird Council is excited to post about this, because this is the first hire they've done as far as I know.
> seriously wrong with the way they allocate resources.
Well, "Mozilla" (both the Corporation and the Foundation) has decided to not allocate resources to Thunderbird, period, though some Mozilla employees contribute to Thunderbird in their spare time, like any other open-source project. You can disagree with what the two Mozilla organizations are focusing on, but it's a pretty deliberate decision, not something falling out by accident or something, or a result of the organization being a "shambles".
Firstly, if you bother to read the OP, Mozilla hasn't chosen to hire anyone:
"The Thunderbird Project is hiring for a software engineer! [...] Please note that while the Thunderbird project is a group of individuals separate from the Mozilla Foundation that works to further the Thunderbird email client, the Mozilla Foundation is the Project’s fiscal home."
Secondly, Mozilla is not "one of the richest charities in the world"; the Mozilla Corporation may have $300 million a year in revenue, but the Mozilla Foundation, which is the charity, has revenues that are a hundredth of that. And US law is very specific about what charities may spend revenue on, and developing email client software is not on that list (nor is developing web browser software, for that matter).
A typical startup might deploy anywhere from 3 to 15 engineers on a product such as Thunderbird. Considering the amount of legacy it's saddled with, let alone the competing interests around e-mail in general, hiring a single engineer to work on this thing sounds like a token move at best, and likely a terrible waste of that person's time.
So why is it being neglected? There is some history here; way back when Netscape was a kitchen sink, factoring the mail client out of the browser was an important and successful decision. The mail part, Thunderbird, became persona non grata for some; it certainly lost the bulk of the mind share to the browser.
However, I think the ongoing indifference is because there isn't a workable business model. Firefox is an advertising platform from which Mozilla earns hundreds of millions. It isn't clear how Thunderbird is supposed to earn.
Wow, I’d wondered about that for years as well. I think you hit the nail on the head.
Mozilla likes to paint itself as a charity but it won’t even allocate .1% revenue to a non-profit project that it created and millions rely on.
But what you can do is have a _for profit_ company that makes T-shirts and sells them for $10, and then a charity which _owns_ the for-profit company and receives all of the profits as a donation from the for-profit. That's legal.
So, Mozilla has a corporation to do all the stuff a charity isn't allowed to do, and then a foundation which owns the for-profit corporation. Getting paid a pile of money by a Search Engine to make their engine your default is not a charitable donation, because there's a quid pro quo, so the Mozilla Corporation takes all the Google money, for example.
That places limits on what sorts of commercial agreements the foundation can make, among other things.
Mozilla isn’t trying to tax dodge like certain other companies; the Mozilla Corporation is taxable, hires engineers, and enters into search agreements.
The corporation being owned by the foundation means it is obligated to follow the foundation’s public benefit goals.
Care to elaborate? Genuinely interested.
Maybe Mozilla ought to change their mission statement to "Maximize revenue" then: neglecting Thunderbird does not jibe with "Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all." The Internet is much more than the web - email is a huge part of it. Maybe I'm being naive, but IMO, money ought to be a means to an end for Mozilla, not the end unto itself.
Also, how much money did Mozilla get from IoT/FirefoxOS? I think it's close to $0, and yet they spent way more money on it than Thunderbird. I don't think your theory holds.
Deleted Comment
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
B.S. in Computer Science would be lovely, but real-world experience is preferred.
Deleted Comment
From the post:
" The Thunderbird Project is hiring for a software engineer!
...
Please note that while the Thunderbird project is a group of individuals separate from the Mozilla Foundation that works to further the Thunderbird email client, the Mozilla Foundation is the Project’s fiscal home. The Thunderbird Council, separate from Mozilla, manages the Project and will direct the software engineer’s work."
"Mozilla is allocating funding to The Thunderbird Project to hire a developer to work on Mozilla Thunderbird"
i.e. the distinction is only relevant in terms of the direction of day-to-day work on the project. Or are Mozilla not funding this at all?
The following quotes seem to indicate that the distinction isn't really relevant in the context of the hiring process at least:
> send us your resume with a cover letter to apply@mozillafoundation.org.
> The successful applicant will be hired as freelancer (independent contractor) through the Mozilla Foundation’s third-party service Upwork
> By applying to this job, you are agreeing to have your applications reviewed [...] by staff members of the Mozilla Foundation.
LOL. Last time I checked you still couldn't make an image fill the available space while keeping its aspect ratio :D
Well it is only a six month contract for a single developer.
1. https://www.colbyrussell.com/2017/08/06/contributors-dilemma...
XPCOM kinda sucked but it is still better than MS COM
Did you know that "decomification" was a word?
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194385
Not knowing much about Mozilla, is this the norm there?
Looks like there was a downside to staying with MoFo after all.
https://lobste.rs/s/e0uh2y/we_re_hiring_developer_work_on#c_...
Their post has nothing about that, and the Thunderbird page at Mozilla also has no "Developers", "Source code" or similar link anywhere. That should be there at least in the page footer.
Ok, so here is the Mercurial repo and build instructions: https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...
That link should be part of the job description.
The directory size (du -sh) is 148 MB after "hg clone", and 5.4 GB after "./client.py checkout".
And yes, hiring a single developer to work all alone by himself would be akin to killing the project itself as just understanding the codebase, design, technology and architecture would be too much for one person to handle.
We’re looking for an amazing developer to come on board to help make Thunderbird the best Email client on the planet!
I've used Thunderbird off and on since it was announced and I know that it has many advanced features. It's no slouch and I deeply respect that there's still a local mail and news client that somewhat works and sometimes gets a little bit of TLC. But the ecosystem is in shambles, and this is only going to get worse as Firefox diverges.
It would obviously take time for a serious revamp to reach parity, but Thunderbird needs a total skeletal reconstruction to pull it off life support and get people excited again. This is just upping the cholesterol meds.
All the other "client-side email software" applications in recent memory have been Electron apps. Surely Mozilla can do us one better, and build a revitalized Thunderbird with staying power on an appropriate modern stack? This seems like a great pilot project for a serious Rust-based desktop toolkit.