Thunderbird, Firefox maker Mozilla’s open-source e mail consumer, is aiming to reinvent itself as a extra complete communications platform.

Towards that finish, the event crew is within the strategy of rolling out a set of adjoining companies, a few of which can ultimately usher in income.

The storm fowl’s ecosystem growth marketing campaign represents an effort to counter the gravitational pull of business companies together with Google’s Gmail and Microsoft Workplace 365, which have been peeling off Thunderbird customers little by little.

“Thunderbird loses customers every day to wealthy ecosystems which are each shoppers and companies, reminiscent of Gmail and Workplace 365,” defined Ryan Sipes, managing director of product at Thunderbird, in a planning note final week for the event neighborhood.

Thunderbird loses customers every day to wealthy ecosystems which are each shoppers and companies, reminiscent of Gmail and Office365

“These ecosystems have each exhausting vendor lock-ins (via interoperability points with Third-party shoppers) and tender lock-ins (via comfort and integration between their shoppers and companies). It’s our aim to ultimately have an analogous providing so {that a} 100% open supply, freedom-respecting different ecosystem is out there for many who need it.”

These losses aren’t simple to measure since Mozilla doesn’t publish person numbers for Thunderbird. However monthly active installations have dipped from 17,706,777 on December 27, 2020 to 16,174,806 on March 30, 2025.

To bulk up and battle the behemoths, the Thunderbird crew, which continues to operate underneath the Mozilla Basis umbrella, is growing a set of net companies – some branded as “Thunderbird Professional,” alongside “Thundermail” – every in numerous phases of maturity:

  • Thunderbird Appointment, a scheduling software that lets customers share a hyperlink so others can e book time on their calendars.
  • Thunderbird Send, a rebuilt model of the discontinued Firefox Ship service from 2019, rewritten to assist extra direct and versatile file sharing.
  • Thunderbird Help, an unreleased non-obligatory AI service that may assist native inference, {hardware} allowing, or privacy-focused cloud inference via companion Flower Labs.
  • Thundermail, an e mail internet hosting service primarily based on the Stalwart stack, to enrich the Thunderbird consumer. Stalwart helps JMAP (JSON Meta Utility Protocol), supposed as a successor to IMAP (Web Message Entry Protocol).

Sipes says such companies might be expensive to run, so some people must pay – a supply of doubtless delight for Mozilla because it contemplates the way it might have to switch the millions it receives from Google if the US authorities’s Chrome-busting antitrust treatment is authorized by the courtroom.

“Originally, we plan to supply these companies totally free to constant neighborhood contributors,” mentioned Sipes. “Different customers must pay for entry. As soon as we have now a robust sufficient person base that the companies look like sustainable, we’ll open up free tiers with limitations, reminiscent of much less storage or the like – relying on the service.”

Customers even have the choice to host a few of these companies, reminiscent of Appointment and Ship, themselves.

Limits on free companies like file sharing are needed, Sipes observes, to forestall abuse.

“Thunderbird is exclusive on the planet,” mentioned Sipes. “Our concentrate on open supply, open requirements, privateness and respect for our customers is one thing that ought to be expressed in a number of varieties. The absence of net companies from us implies that our customers should make compromises which are usually uncomfortable ones. That is how we appropriate that.” ®


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