[HN Gopher] Thunderbird Is Thriving: Our 2022 Financial Report
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       Thunderbird Is Thriving: Our 2022 Financial Report
        
       Author : ktosobcy
       Score  : 74 points
       Date   : 2023-05-09 21:17 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.thunderbird.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.thunderbird.net)
        
       | waboremo wrote:
       | An average of $21 is very impressive considering Thunderbird's
       | position. I believe Wikimedia averages to about $15. Although I
       | suppose its position is probably a large part of the comfort to
       | donate more.
        
       | neilv wrote:
       | When you follow the link on that page to donate, select monthly
       | recurring donation, and go to enter payment info, they then try
       | to upsell you (with a checkbox checked by default) to "Cover
       | transaction costs".
       | 
       | (When you click the info icon: _" When you cover our transaction
       | costs, you're covering both our processing and donation platform
       | costs."_)
       | 
       | It's easier for a non-profit charity to be pushy about fund-
       | raising, because it's for a good cause. But that's not Mozilla.
       | Facets of Mozilla are run more like a for-profit tech company,
       | including layoffs of engineers while executives still demand high
       | compensation. Pushy comes across differently.
       | 
       | People want to tip the waiter, and would feel positively about
       | that, at the same time they'd feel negatively about a restaurant
       | owner trying to sneak a made-up fee onto the bill.
        
         | robocat wrote:
         | I suspect it is a "industry" trend in donations - I saw this
         | yesterday when donating which I don't do often - I think they
         | asked for $17.50 "transaction costs" on a $150 donation.
        
       | ktosobcy wrote:
       | (if only Firefox were getting funding directly...)
        
         | Multicomp wrote:
         | I was about to say, if this is _too_ successful, Thunderbird
         | may find themselves with a target on their back, so Mozilla
         | doesn't have to keep fielding questions from users about how
         | they can fund Firefox directly instead of general donations.
         | 
         | Only joking (I hope).
        
           | yamtaddle wrote:
           | Maybe Thunderbird will spin off a light, snappy little web
           | browser with excellent quality-of-life features and a no-
           | nonsense UI.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | throw7 wrote:
       | Implement jmap then!
        
       | fswd wrote:
       | Please fix search. It's completely broken and unusable IMHO.
        
         | j1elo wrote:
         | I still receive the occasional email from this bug report,
         | about being able to force excluding undesired noise from search
         | results:
         | 
         | https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=752844
         | 
         | It's been open for, I don't know, 5 or 6 years? ( _checks the
         | link... yup, actually 11_ )
         | 
         | Another one I'm subscribed too, also related to search and
         | discovery, is this one about using boolean operators:
         | 
         | https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=297852
         | 
         | I commented in a recent thread about GitHub at last being able
         | to search for "WORD" and finding "-DWORD" in results, they took
         | somewhere around 6 years since I had the need, so it was a
         | welcome improvement... so maybe 2023 will be " _the year of
         | search on the desktop_ " and Thunderbird will start improving
         | its UX for searching emails? Who knows.
         | 
         | Meanwhile, it's been my go-to email client for ages, despite
         | this shortcoming which I had to learn to live with. The UI for
         | searching past emails is very bad, so ironically I ended up
         | changing habits to avoid having to search at all (not the ideal
         | outcome of using a tool, but here we are)
        
         | krastanov wrote:
         | While we are complaining about search-related issues: I
         | constantly end up with messages that I know I have received,
         | that the search might or might not list, but that then can not
         | be opened until I run "repair folder". Happens with multiple
         | accounts with different providers.
         | 
         | Still better than all alternatives I have tried though :D
        
           | tapper wrote:
           | They are working on a big UI over hall so this mite get fixt.
           | you can test it out in the beta
        
           | prox wrote:
           | I use Postbox which basically runs on Thunderbird I believe
           | but has some professional tooling : https://www.postbox-
           | inc.com/
           | 
           | I started using it when Thunderbird went under the previous
           | time.
        
             | krembo wrote:
             | After reading your comment I went into their website and in
             | 2 minutes I'm convinced that I'm not going to consider
             | postbox at all. If they couldn't find a single female for
             | their hero video, as a male I'm embarrassed, and I'm out.
        
             | nitins_jakta wrote:
             | Too bad there's no Linux port.
        
         | JohnFen wrote:
         | That would be fantastic. Thunderbird's search is indeed pretty
         | much worthless.
        
         | hu3 wrote:
         | Do they use SQLite fulltext for search? If not, that would be
         | an opportunity.
        
           | wahnfrieden wrote:
           | useless for CJK
        
       | chrismeller wrote:
       | I'm always amazed at the staff numbers for these kinds of
       | projects. I'm glad things are going well for them, but that
       | really seems like a high employee count for such a simple
       | project.
        
         | ipaddr wrote:
         | From 15 to 24 this year for the entire company making best
         | desktop email? That's a reasonable number that could be higher.
         | 
         | Facebook had 80,000-90,000 employees before the purge
        
       | piecerough wrote:
       | Such a huge influx of capital with no mention of Generative AI
       | features reading & writing emails for you.
       | 
       | Impressive!
        
         | JohnFen wrote:
         | Heh, that didn't occur to me. Indeed, that's a cause for
         | celebration!
         | 
         | If they had included such goals, though, I'd be likely to stop
         | donating money to them.
        
           | flangola7 wrote:
           | I'd be kind of okay with it if the code all ran locally.
        
       | tapper wrote:
       | Why does there have to be a Android and IOS ports of Thunderbird?
       | Just stick to desktop. This happens all the time now.
        
         | ktosobcy wrote:
         | I guess they want to have "universal experience" and I don't
         | blame them. Though, in case of Android they are going to
         | rebrand k9-mail AFAIK.
        
           | tapper wrote:
           | May be it's just me, but I don't use email the same on my
           | phone as I do desktop. I have 5 accounts on my desktop but
           | just the one witch is my mane on my phone. Aps these days
           | cant just stay good at one thing like ff being good on
           | windows. They want to be good on Windows, Linux, BSD, Android
           | so on and so on.
        
             | ktosobcy wrote:
             | I have same accounts in k9mail and use it to quickly filter
             | mail - quite handy. Longer replies I do from the computer.
             | 
             | As for FX - i do use it on macos and it works perfect for
             | me.
        
         | parl_match wrote:
         | Why does there have to be a Thunderbird at all? The people
         | building Thunderbird are clearly motivated to build FOSS/Libre
         | communication tools for people.
         | 
         | As more and more people move to using Android and ios as their
         | primary computing environment, the existence of accessible
         | FOSS/Libre tools such as Thunderbird becomes more important
         | than ever.
         | 
         | So, if they're interested or dedicated to building open tools
         | for people to use, they can choose where to go, whether you
         | like it or not. :)
         | 
         | e: By the way, have you donated to Thunderbird? If you are able
         | to pay for the software you use, especially when it seeks to be
         | a force for good, then you should. Even $20 a year goes a long
         | way for an organization like this.
        
           | tapper wrote:
           | Yes mate I do donate to TB, NVDA and OpenWrt. NVDA is
           | different though as I cant use my computer with out it. It's
           | a screen reader for blind people.
        
         | waboremo wrote:
         | An android port is within top 3 requests as per Mozilla
         | Connect's Thunderbird section. Makes sense to me to work on
         | such requests when you're operating off donations.
        
           | tapper wrote:
           | I didn't know about Mozilla Connect's. If this is so then let
           | it be.
        
             | waboremo wrote:
             | Now you know and can get into voting for the suggestions
             | you deem valuable!
             | 
             | I don't know if there are any other public surfaces the
             | Thunderbird team uses to figure out what to work on
             | (outside of bug reports/telemetry and Mozilla Connect).
        
         | JohnFen wrote:
         | Thunderbird is my mailreader, and personally, I'd love to have
         | an Android port of it. But if it never happens, that's OK too.
        
           | Faaak wrote:
           | Ceki, from K9 mail, is working for Mozilla now
        
             | JohnFen wrote:
             | Even better! K9 is what I use on my phone right now.
        
         | mqus wrote:
         | Isn't the android "port" just the rebranding of K9?
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31727376
        
           | parl_match wrote:
           | Well, they also continued development.
        
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       (page generated 2023-05-09 23:00 UTC)