How much money do you currently get? How much money do you need and how will you use it? Does it even go directly to Thunderbird development or will be used up by Mozilla for other projects?
Mozilla has really gone off the rails. An organisation who claims to work on behalf of the user and who makes a web browser, actively hijacking the user experience to peddle for a few dollars?
Why the heck is Thunderbird “fully funded by financial contributions from [their] users”? Where do the billions of dollars from Google go? All the stupid doomed side projects which no one asked for nor wants and are abandoned after one year?
Works perfect, I even migrated my Windows install to Linux just by copying the data folder, absolutely seamless.
Not sure why people are hating on it so much here. Point to an alternative with the same features?
I guess I don't understand why the open-source email client with zero revenue potential is managed by a for-profit subsidiary, nor why that for-profit subsidiary is begging for donations.
Shouldn't this whole thing be managed by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation?
For what it's worth because legal names are confusingly similar, this is a legal subsidiary of Mozilla that is specific to Thunderbird, as in if you give it money it goes straight into Thunderbird. Many people here pretend to wish to be able to give money directly to Firefox, yet when they can do that for Thunderbird, people here are still finding bullshit reasons not to do so. Pick a lane.
Right, I get that, but why is it for-profit? Fund raising is hard enough for nonprofits, convincing people to donate their hard-earned cash to a for-profit is on a whole different level.
I switched away from Thunderbird about a year ago and couldn't be happier I have made the change.
Thunderbird had consistently (Windows / Linux) a bad performance for me and feature and UX wise it has always only been okay for me.
Still important that a few FOSS solutions for email exist, though.
Took me so long to learn that the fix was to switch back to the old Outlook.
In my testing, the local IMAP client implementation quite frequently launches a DoS attack against your IMAP server. It'll send the same query requesting new mail messages in a tight loop, limited by the round-trip latency. But luckily, almost nobody uses IMAP via outlook because its so difficult to set up.
If you go into the "Outlook" menu in the app, there's a "Legacy Outlook" button, which relaunches outlook using a completely different binary. The two outlook implementations have different bugs and all sorts of different behaviour.
Outlook For Mac is free but "legacy outlook" requires a MS365 subscription for some reason.
Outlook is also not to be confused with Microsoft's "Web Outlook" client, available at outlook.live.com. It all seems totally insane.
The only change in my workflow is that now, I am also using in parallel a stupid command line tool "vibe coded" in Python to read my emails. It allows me to quickly check my emails out of VS Code in a Claude Code session, a bit like when I was doing my emails directly in Emacs :-)
Now that I read the comments I find out Mozilla might have enough money and a CEO taking in millions. Any recommendations for a good email client on Linux? Just as a backup for now...