- cross-posted to:
- opensource@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- opensource@programming.dev
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If this works out it might be a nice place to migrate to away from my self-hosted e-mail provided they eventually let you bring your own domain. Just sucks that e-mail is essentially the most secure thing you need to have since compromising that can compromise every account attached to the e-mail. That’s a lot of trust you need to instill in your e-mail host.
You say you’re self hosting your email, how are you doing that?
I meant hosting wise, at home or using a VPS? How did you get a fixed IP/ what are you using for a proxy?
VPS, I wouldn’t run a mail server from my home network. If you go with mailinabox you don’t need to set up a proxy, it’s pretty simple.
Whatever their doing, it’s not worth it.
Eh it depends. I’m fortunate enough to be in a good IP block so I don’t get my e-mails dropped purely on that. It’s been a good learning experience and I’ve leaned on my own server a number of times for troubleshooting at work since I can see the whole mail flow. The only problem I have is the free Outlook/Hotmail will not accept my e-mails. Everybody else seems fine. All that said, I don’t host anybody else’s e-mail so I haven’t had any spam come out of my IP, and I would never in a million years host e-mail for a customer.
It’s a colocated server. I provided the physical server and they put it into a rack in a datacenter with power and networking (static IP).
I have fond memories of self-hosting a qmail setup for a long time, then eventually migrating to a postfix configuration, back in the day.
Keeping up with spam filtering finally did me in.
The spam filtering is painful. I kinda work around it by giving a unique e-mail for everything and of one starts getting spammed I just rid of that e-mail. Tends to give you advance warning of data breaches too since you’ll start seeing the spam come in before the announcement.
deleted by creator
You imply OP knows how to read & they read the whole article and noticed the source. 💀
I went looking for something official but couldn’t find it.
Tbh because it was the one shared on Reddit. Though if you have the right browser extensions when I wouldn’t worry about it too much.
Upvoted for honesty lol.
Lol sure destroy all the trust with your users THEN launch an email service. Hard pass fro me.
I guarantee you they’re already planning to train an LLM on everybody’s emails, or at least sell them to AI companies doing training.
Yet thunderbird still can’t single click open an email in a new window. If I recall correctly the request has been filed in 2014 or smt 💀
Nope, still requires double click.
It’s almost like you didn’t read my comment and went straight to angry. This has been suggested for years with 0 response from Thunderbird team and there’s no way to extend it without forking and patching everything yourself.
If you’ve done nothing but complain for 14 years then I’m glad you still have to double click.
I hope to god one day the developers at Mozilla finally get tired of this shit and fork everything under a new org.
Fuck off with more services and give me my integrated FTP client back. No one who uses Mozilla software wants more cloud shit or online services from Mozilla.
No one who uses Mozilla software wants more cloud shit or online services from Mozilla.
I don’t think that’s unanimous. I’d like to use Firefox Relay, myself, and I’m willing to give thundermail a chance.
Used to think I’d go full Proton eventually, but leaning more towards a diverse set of service providers, nowadays. It’s also my hope that these services allow Mozilla to depend less on companies like Google, and more on the users they ought to serve, which would be healthier for the org and better for users.
integrated FTP client
Why though? SFTP is leagues better.
For transfers between systems you own yes, but when grabbing a Linux iso from a public server FTP works fine.
For years Firefox allowed you to crawl FTP sites natively.
lol @ ftp client
Doesn’t like 90% of Mozilla’s funding come from Google? At least expanding their paid services could be seen as trying to turn that around.
From my understanding thunbird is somewhat separated from this. From the article linked by OP it says:
What’s crystal clear is that Thunderbird’s ever-increasing donation revenue (currently its sole source of income) is allowing for some explosive growth that’s long overdue. To add some context to this, Thunderbird received $2.8 million in donation revenue during 2021. Two years later, in 2023, it received $8.6 million in donations. I’m told that total financial contributions for 2024 were even higher, though the final amount hasn’t been officially released.
I should donate again. As someone who still depends on gmail, I keep forgetting how annoying it was to get ads every time I refreshed my inbox, before I switched to their app. Glad things seem to be working out.
It is extremely easy to switch email providers these days. I’d suggest start by setting up a forwarded mail box between Gmail and whatever new mail provider you choose. Then slowly but surely start using the new email address instead of Gmail and change the most important accounts to the new one.
The anti-monopoly lawsuit against Google fixed that
Now Mozilla has to find a way to offset that loss, which would be attracting the non-Firefox market
Nice! Good for them.
Thunderbird Pro will apparently be:
This email thing plus Thunderbird Send (which is basically https://send.vis.ee/), Thunderbird Appointment - a scheduling tool and Thunderbird Assist, which is:
“…at least for now, being cautiously labeled as “an experiment” that will allow users to take advantage of AI features within their email. However, the goal is to be lightweight enough that the language models can be run locally on a user’s PC in the interest of privacy. This service is being developed in partnership with Flower AI, which leverages Nvidia’s confidential compute to provide private remote processing in the event a user’s PC isn’t powerful enough. Sipes emphasizes that any remote processing features attached to Thunderbird Assist will always be optional, in the interest of ensuring complete user privacy.”
So AI shit that nobody asked for or wants.
"[…] This service is being developed in partnership with Flower AI, which leverages Nvidia’s confidential compute to provide private remote processing in the event a user’s PC isn’t powerful enough. Sipes emphasizes that any remote processing features attached to Thunderbird Assist will always be optional, in the interest of ensuring complete user privacy.”
That’s a lot of words to say “we made an AI that totally won’t suck up your data, trust me bro”
“nvidia’s confidential compute” had me choke when reading it. Sure bro, sure.
This sounds like proton except I haven’t heard a thing about cost or encryption which leads me to believe you will pay with your data and there will be no encryption.
Proton is the bare minimum for email services. Email should be fully redone at its core.
This covers my thoughts about damn near every “helpful” feature this side of auto-complete email addresses.
They said it will be opt-in and are trying to make it local-first. Their provider(?) apparently allows fallback to nvidia cloud compute when the hardware can’t handle it.
I’m not using AI to write my fucking emails, regardless. Just wanted to let people know.
P.s. I’m dumb, skipped over quote in parent comment. Point is, there’s more to the service than optional AI bullshit, and you shouldn’t have to disable it.
Archive link for anyone else for whom that article crashed their tab.
People still use Email???
Tf else would you you even use
“My ENTERPRISE runs on WhatsAppp/SquareTeams/Discord/Slack” etc etc…
Of course that works until that “enterpise” needs to send invoices, and get invoices.
“The fucking blockhain” - some cryptobro
I sent three faxes today 😎
fax
Xwitter?
The people who dont are usually old as people who dont need it anymore or kids
Tell me you have no meaningful impact on the world without telling me you have no meaningful impact on the world.
You are like those people that always say “Do people still use INPUT SOMETHING”. Do you text or call only? What about your work? you call or send a text instead of email ? maybe drop of some files instead of emailing them? I have so many questions.
the entire world.
If only they could develop a federated short message system.
Messenger/WhatsApp/slack messaging style but federated like email
Email was originally one of the first federated systems. Anyone can host a server and send messages back and forth from other servers with a set standard. That basically is federation.
check out deltachat, it’s an email client with an interface like an instant messaging app
Email still has it’s place. So changing the interface will likely make email less useable.
Ideally something alongside email but not email.
Matrix is pretty much that already.
Email is federated, it’s just not really a medium people want to limit to 500 chars…
Nothing at all stopping you from writing a client that only allows 500 char messages in and out.
Someone even built a chat system that used email under the hood.
Matrix is one example of such a system.
mostly people with jobs
I’d consider it. If they host things outside of the US/start moving operations overseas, it’d be a lot more interesting. I sub to Proton for email, VPN, and drive support. Still hoping someday for proper Linux drive support so Mozilla/Thunderbird can target that
Sounded great until the “assist” ai feature. I friggin hate Gemini in gmail so any other kind of ai is an automatic nogo for me
So the Mozilla Foundation is gonna waste google money on email infrastructure? Hmmm… 'k… it’s not like their browser could use some love…
Thunderbird’s corp (MZLA) does not get Google money so far as i’m aware. It is a different subsidiary corp from Firefox’s Mozilla Corp.
are you implying firefox is in a state of neglect?
No there yet but not getting the love it deserved either.
Maybe they oughta try asking for money like Wikipedia and KDE, maybe then they could become independent from Google and focus on actually developing a quality browser instead of making every app be about profit.You’re making no sense.
I personally would love profiles akin to how Chrome does it.
Edit: a word
No matter how much I hate Mozilla’s new path, companies like this challenging big tech are bold and have a lot of courage. If I set aside my personal op opinions about Mozilla, I actually admire them for this. They can actually dent big tech with funding from big tech itself.
It’s a saturated market and email is starting to disappear (it’ll take years, but the signs are there).
They’d be better using it on the browser and ditching other products.email is starting to disappear
The fuck it is lol, do you have any idea how much email is used in literally everything? How old are you?
Email won’t disappear sooner or later. It’s a huge part of communication between companies, nonprofit, state, etc. It may be less between people or with consumers. But, it still is widely use otherwise.
Email isn’t going anywhere. It’s the ipv4 of communication. You can list 100 things bad about it and none of it matters, too many things are now built on top of it, no competitor can possibly have a chance without first reimplementing email, and then they’re just adding extensions which everyone else ignores, and email continues.
The more plausible threat to email is that it gets siloed into the top 5 or 6 providers and everyone else gets filtered out as spam (ie you need gmail, hotmail, etc or your emails will never reach anyone)
The big providers problem is already true, but DMARC and DKIM mitigated that problem.
I’m curious, not bashing. What signs have you seen that lead you to believe email is dying?
It’s insecure by default and Kids These Days™ prefer messaging apps, which have boomed in the last decade.
Time will tell.What do you make of the use of email in the business world? You’re right that quite a bit of that has turned into instant messaging as well, ie I text my boss instead of sending them mail but it definitely feels like that’s going away a lot slower if not expanding
Email is a must for between businesses. Having said that, lots of internal communication is findingther channels, like Teams, Slack, and so on.
We actually heavily rely on connected channels to talk to most of our vendors now. Once you are on enterprise level support pretty much every vendor gives you a dedicated slack or teams channel.
It’s great since people come and go and we don’t lose our vendor comms history in random inboxes or have someone not CCd on. Any vendor we have linked is also one less vendor someone is likely to be phished talking to the wrong person on the wrong email. For support tickets there’s no wrapping and encrypting shit steps to send critical info over email, we use the slack channel. It really solves a lot of BS
So… Exactly how it was 20 years ago. Kids Those Days used AIM and Yahoo Messenger instead of slack and discord.
No its never going to disappear. If you are referring to people using slack and chat apps, those are locked in walled gardens where your messages cant ever leave.
Email can be moved anywhere easily.
On top of that, people still use email to sign up for these gardens. Technically, you could use your phone number too. I wonder how far could you take this idea of living completely without email.
Job applications, and several other sign ins still depend on email, so that’s going to be a bit of a hitch.
Yeah and then we can really go hard destroying the lives of people without phone access.
I work for a healthcare company that serves the under privileged and right now in most cities it’s easier to guarantee someone has email than a consistent phone number thanks to free WiFi hotspots. You can miss a phone payment and still read your email even if you’re cut off from cellular service.
Oh, that’s a very good point! Makes you look at this proposal in a completely different way.
Any business2business or consumer2business communication will likely still happen over email for a very long time
…and then join the big tech at some point.
For now, they’re better than Google. I have some bad opinions about them, but anything better than Google competing with Google is an improvement.
Yeah it’s not even close.
I keep hearing a lot of negative comments about Mozilla lately. I’m wondering if this move is more in line with then just turning into another google rather than disrupting the marketplace.
yeah, might seem good to have yet another choice, but it’s an illusion
If they’re user funded, their incentives are fundamentally different from Google’s. Even thinking as a business, it makes no sense to enshittify the way Google does. It’s a different choice, even if it’s not the choice you wanted.
different, yes. but by how much and will it be different in ways that truly matter
Google only checked out and cashed in after getting a monopoly. Mozilla let themselves fade into irrelevance.
yes but this takes time. its great to have alternatives in the meantime.
I have a 20ish year old history in my Gmail account organized in labels and all that. I wonder if it will be viable to migrate?
Considering labels are very non-standard, which caused trouble over IMAP since forever, I wouldn’t count on that part.
Labels are displayed as folders on IMAP, which means that a single message could appear in multiple folders. Are there any other problems you’re talking about?
One of the problems that annoyed me in the past is the complexity and ambiguity of deleting an email over IMAP. Depending on whether it’s the last label of the deleted email, deleting an email from a label’s directory either removes a label from this email, or actually deletes the email.
Please archive shit. It’s OK to save old data, but not on the service. There are ways. Even banks, the most obsessive and legally strapped data hoarders keep their 5+ year old data in deep cold storage, away from the active services. 99.9^% of information that old won’t be looked at by anyone.
Not true.
It’s much easier to keep old data in active storage where it can be classified, searched, and have retention/deletion policies applied. Moving it elsewhere makes it more likely you’ll just hang onto it forever while not using it at all.
When was the last time you had to find a 20 year old email? Share your anecdotes.
I don’t disagree that you should set up retention policies to delete old email, I disagree that you should remove old emails from primary service/storage.
I actually did need a 15 year old email a few months ago. I don’t recall what I needed, but I then set up a retention policy to delete old stuff.
Warranty… Some are 15-20 years, but you need proof of purchase docs, which are often emailed data.
Why not having an archive of exclusively warranties? Emails can be downloaded, indexed and compressed. I agree on keeping archives of old stuff. But emails used as cloud drives are a huge problem for IT and security reasons. A legal is better and facilitates backup, encryption and much more accessibility.
I looked at this but it asked me to download it. Can I access it through a browser like I can Google?
