8 votes

Thunderbird's donation-driven revenue rose 21% in 2021 to $2.7 million

7 comments

  1. [7]
    tomf
    Link
    i’m surprised Mozilla hasn’t made a proper effort in the email provider space. having a good client plus a provider (pricing comparable to Zoho or so) would be a great. use it purely to fund the...

    i’m surprised Mozilla hasn’t made a proper effort in the email provider space. having a good client plus a provider (pricing comparable to Zoho or so) would be a great. use it purely to fund the client and ditch all of the seductive ad temptations.

    3 votes
    1. [3]
      stu2b50
      Link Parent
      At the moment I'd imagine they're at capacity putting out fires and maintaining Firefox given the heavy layoffs they had, so probably not much money for expansion projects like an email service....

      At the moment I'd imagine they're at capacity putting out fires and maintaining Firefox given the heavy layoffs they had, so probably not much money for expansion projects like an email service.

      In the past, there are a decent amount of "premium" paid email services now, so perhaps they are economically viable, but it is a fairly non-trivial product. Setting up an SMTP server is not that hard - setting up an SMTP server that doesn't get sent to the spam folder of gmail is another thing entirely.

      4 votes
      1. JXM
        Link Parent
        Mozilla is a trusted enough provider that I suspect they'd have very little difficulty getting added to the "safe" list that governs most spam blocking, even as a new provider. While a lot of it...

        Mozilla is a trusted enough provider that I suspect they'd have very little difficulty getting added to the "safe" list that governs most spam blocking, even as a new provider. While a lot of it is heuristic based, a good portion is still agreements between the large providers to treat one another's messages as non-spam, as long as they follow the correct DNS verification policies.

        3 votes
      2. tomf
        Link Parent
        well, I figured they'd just rebrand a service from another provider and take the difference -- like $2/m to fastmail and charge $5 or whatever it costs. It could be a way for one of these email...

        well, I figured they'd just rebrand a service from another provider and take the difference -- like $2/m to fastmail and charge $5 or whatever it costs. It could be a way for one of these email providers to support Mozilla without having to sign a cheque.

    2. [3]
      Pistos
      Link Parent
      Just speculating here, but maybe they've deemed it too hard or too costly to do right. (sufficiently secure, private, featureful, scalable)

      Just speculating here, but maybe they've deemed it too hard or too costly to do right. (sufficiently secure, private, featureful, scalable)

      3 votes
      1. [2]
        dblohm7
        Link Parent
        There wasn't any discussion (that I knew of, at least) about being an email provider while I still worked there, but in addition to what you've said, I could also see potential concern over...

        There wasn't any discussion (that I knew of, at least) about being an email provider while I still worked there, but in addition to what you've said, I could also see potential concern over liability issues. Look what happened with Firefox Send.

        2 votes
        1. cfabbro
          Link Parent
          Firefox Send was explicitly meant for file sharing, so I can totally understand why it had serious liability issues. But I would think that an email provider has a lot more privacy and private...

          Firefox Send was explicitly meant for file sharing, so I can totally understand why it had serious liability issues. But I would think that an email provider has a lot more privacy and private communication laws it could rely on to reduce their liability. Is that not the case?