I for one see this as a very positive development. This is the way to make money without selling out your users but by making them your customers. Honestly I really didn’t want to use gmail as a mail provider, but I wanted to use my own domain for emails so I had to do complicated setups with MXRoute which normal people can’t do. I still have to pay MXRoute and because I’m using Thunderbird as my mail client both on desktop and phone, I might as well switch to Thundermail.

Compared to what is happening with Firefox, I think Thunderbird has been on the right track for many years now. And I’m not alone with this assessment, you can see it on the donations basically doubling every year.

Even their AI experiments they communicate that it will be running locally very cautiously, I’m telling you guys, this is the way. Not by alienating potential customers with a shift towards advertisers but instead offering them a solution to a problem they have (mail hosting) and which is really close to the core business and a natural fit.

Same with Thunderbird Send and Thunderbird Appointment, those are things around email which now are kind of hard to do for people and other clients have it build in like Outlook with Sharepoint and the build in scheduling assistant. With Thunderbird you need to know about something like Doodle and do it on the side manually.