Mozilla Announces Thundermail and Thunderbird Pro Services

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,” Mozilla’s Ryan Sipes explains on the Thunderbird planning forum. “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.”

Thundermail is basically Mozilla’s version of Gmail, a web-based email service based on the open source Stalwart 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 thundermail.com 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 Flower AI 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.”