I think it’s incredibly important that people know, with absolute certainty, whether or not the new Mozilla/Firefox privacy policy in any way applies to / covers such a service.
I’m not saying I know the answer- What I’m saying without a concrete, permanently applied answer it’s not even considerable.
There is no email service that exists without a terms of use and privacy policy. I still feel everyone overreacted about Firefox. It’s funnier how many people said they switched to Brave because of it and all the super shady stuff Brave has done.
Firefox/Mozilla operated without any of the new additions for nearly the entire history of the internet until this year. If anything, “over”-reacting to the new policies was too weak a reaction. You do you and all, but I’ll agree to very strongly disagree.
What is it that you’re concerned about? Assume that I have no idea what either the new or old Mozilla privacy policy is, please. I tend to assume that all such are a pack of lies and everything is spying on me.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-firefox-i-loved-is-gone-how-to-protect-your-privacy-on-it-now/
That article says it better than I can in s short post. Firefox’s terms of use/privacy policy went over like a lead balloon last month.
Thanks for the link.
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 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. Sorry, 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.
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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.
You imply OP knows how to read & they read the whole article and noticed the source. 💀
welp I signed up for the waitlist.
I’ll use it for a disposable email at first, and if it endures and does well I’ll move my main shit off to it.
Here’s what I want… I leave a computer on at home and it checks my email. I get emails from it at my phone. No setup. Make it work like Sinkthing used to work. I don’t want cloud anything. Fucking backup nightmare where my shit ends up kidnapped by a company for monthly ransom.
if it’s anything like gmail, they’d offer imap so you can set it up in thunderbird and download your messages locally.
Sooo… where will be your email server then? On your home computer?
At home but separate computer with reverse proxy.
Oh You will have trouble getting your outbound mail delivered
It works I already tried. But I stopped short of jumping on board because its not the safest. No, what we need is some fedi style development. We need email on fedi.
Syncthing still works like that. It’s completely self hostable. I have it on a pi 1B+ lol
I have it but it eats up battery on the phones and the Dev left so it’s probably going to go caput at some point.
Aw man, I really love syncthing, especially across my computers/backup server at home. I don’t even know what I’d use instead
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.
lol @ ftp client
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.
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.
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.
Edit: I’m not being snarky, there are legitimate and more functional solutions.
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.
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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 folder is better and facilitates backup, encryption and much more accessibility.
So you don’t really want to archive in the technical sense, you want it offline for security, which is valid but extremely inconvenient for regular end users.
I’m listening…
But how is a small non-profit going to afford a free email service? Ads in every email?
Based on what I’ve seen in their forums it will be a paid service. I think it will be free at first for beta testers but I assume they are targeting people who currently use services like Proton.
Thanks for the info.
But I think they’ll still need an ad driven free version to gain acceptance.
nah. ad free paid emails are already a thing
If its not zero access its just more ameritech bullshit.
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Yes, sort of. Thundermail addresses, apparently, or bring your own. From the linked article you’re commenting on:
Users can send and receive email using new Thundermail accounts they sign up for. The service will also allow using your own custom domain (e.g. your.name@yourdomain.com).
You have always been able to use your own domain email with Thunderbird. The big news here is the fact that they are launching not only a web based mail service a la Thunderbird but also providing an email server for addresses of [yourchosenname]@thundermail.com. which is gonna be pretty great.
I assume they mean that you can use your own domain with their email server.
I.e point your MX records to them.
Of course you always could use your own domain in their email client. It would be a pretty shitty email client otherwise.
Yeah, but the Thunderbird client… ain’t great.
And yes, I’m a Linux nerd since 2003. Thunderbird’s client sucks.
That said, I hope this is successful.
I’ve been using Thunderbird for email for years. I use it with some SMTP servers on shared hosting platforms, a yahoo account and a few gmail accounts - one with calendars. I don’t have any problems with it. Runs stable, doesn’t crash or do weird things. My only complaint would be search is a little clunky, but it works.
I had to use Outlook client for year at another job and that client was hot garbage.
What client do you recommend instead?
For Linux, I can’t think of another user side client. I use web based.
So, I’m happy to see Mozilla get into that arena.
Depends what you’re after. I’m a Thunderbird user, but if user friendliness is the aim then Geary is quite good.
Whats wrong with the thunderbird client.
Even when I was on windows back on XP I used it. Never had a problem with it or its functionality, personally.
Nerds like us can figure it out.
But it’s hardly user friendly. I’m not going to get into the minutiae, but Joe Blow could probably get it to fetch, and send, but the user interface options like font size, etc., blows. Typical nerd “It’s good enough for me, RTFM, losers.”
And I’m too old to fuck with things for fun. I want it to just work, and I’m not paying Apple prices for that, or supporting Microsoft’s eventual SaaS subscription model, which WILL eventually happen.
I mean… It doesnt exactly take being hackerman, master of all hackermans to open a dropdown menu, bro.
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.
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.
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
Archive link for anyone else for whom that article crashed their tab.
I looked at this but it asked me to download it. Can I access it through a browser like I can Google?
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
