Thunderbird Pro and Thundermail announced

General News
41

The value lies in making the project sustainable. Thunderbird mail client relies on donations to pay the bills, monthly payments will allow them to make income projections more accurate.

They have reduced the Early Bird price to $6/month, found on their page. That includes 60GB of file storage and 30GB for mail.

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42

Mailbox.org is “fine,” in that in the years I’ve been using it I haven’t had any major crises or issues. But there are a litany of annoyances and ways it falls short, and the pace of development is glacial to nonexistent. For instance:

  • They only very recently implemented real 2FA. It took them years of development for this standard feature!
  • The online interface has improved substantially after a recent refresh but is still somewhat slow and clunky. I use my email via IMAP, but I still have to dive into the online interface for things like setting up filters, managing aliases, etc.
  • The spam filter is bad. It was letting spam through, so I followed their documentation on how to strengthen it a bit, and it started randomly rejecting legitimate emails. When I contacted support about it they acknowledged the false positives issue and told me to revert it to the settings that were letting some spam through.
  • They advertise having a whole office suite but many of the features are half-baked. Fortunately I don’t really need or use many of them but it’s worth being aware of.

Altogether it’s not been a nightmare but it has left me wanting something better.

43

For me, the value is not there. Between the pricing structure and what you get in return, I would pass on it pretty easily. But I also think you may be taking the wrong angle if you think a new email service is pointless. Competition is fantastic, no matter what shape it comes in.

I would love to see Mozilla double down and create an ecosystem that can compete with Proton and bring in more normies. Maybe they could finally build services people care about and get away from Google’s grip.

44

I think it will be like duckduckgo vpn. Informed people will wonder why they would pay so much for a VPN given the other choices, uninformed people will rightly think trusting duckduckgo is smarter than going with their uninformed opinion, and a subset will just want to support the company they like.

45

DuckDuckGo plus/pro essentially gives you multi-model AI access for half the price of a single premium AI subscription, then throws in the VPN and identity services on top.

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46

That sounds great! Any more info on when it’ll launch?

47

I have had access to the closed beta for the last couple of weeks, however I was signed up to the wait list immediately after it went live.

Some initial info that could be subject to change as they are still developing the product, this is all publicly available information.

If you’re curious about what they are working on there is a public roadmap:

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48

Do you get to use it for free during the beta? Any way for me to get in?

49

Can’t speak for others but I definitely don’t get it for free during the beta lol

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50

LOL! I wouldn’t mind paying just to get in. Any other way to get in?

51

I can only speak for the pricing in Australia, it was $100 AUD (~$72 USD) a year. You can’t test it for free unfortunately.

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52

Thanks for clearing that up. :ok_hand:

53

Thanks for sharing your perspective. I do believe making the project sustainable is likely to benefit existing Thunderbid users (although one could argue that this benefit might be neutralized by the corresponding focus shift / expansion), but in order to make this a succes, I fear the offer towards potential paying customers should be a lot more substantial. As I mentioned before, I like Thunderbird a lot for managing both my private and work mail, but I don’t feel the urge to switch email addresses (last time I did, it took me about two years to fully migrate).

54

Even with their most lenient settings, they constantly block legitimate emails. I think I read somewhere that their philosophy is basically, “This is our infrastructure, and poorly configured email servers don’t have an inherent right to use it.” Some of their green initiatives might be behind it.