After reading a bunch of negative comments here, let me add a little on the bright side. I've been using Thunderbird for many years, currently both at home and at work to manage gmail accounts, pop at home, imap in the office. It works great for me, with a few annoyances but nothing serious.
As for the donations, Thunderbird seems to be somehow apart from Mozilla now, so I don't think much about specific org structure and will gladly donate.
Maybe on paper there're dozens of alternatives, but when I consider my specific requirements, I haven't found anything better, YMMV.
I use Thunderbird from the beginning when it was still named Firebird (I switched from Outlook Express). I think that it's a good product because it continues to do the job since more than 20 years. Me too I don't understand the negative comments. It's free (MPL license), it's packaged by Debian. All good. I don't care about Mozilla.
Just donated. Have been using Thunderbird for years. I once donated to Wikipedia - and they have billions I heard - so might as well donate to another important piece of software for my digital life.
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...
Mozilla Corporation may have enough money, but they don't develop Thunderbird. If you used the donation form on this page, you didn't donate to Mozilla Corporation, but to the company developing Thunderbird. So all is fine.
Campaigns like this need more info. This page doesn't answer any basic questions.
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?
If you press the browser’s back button on the donation page, they send you to a page pestering you for your email address so they can send you a reminder to donate later. Talk about a dark pattern.
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?
The Mozilla Corporation then picks and chooses what it finances within the Mozilla Foundation. Their financial statements don't break down how they spend on software development within the Foundation, it only lists out employee salaries, specific directors' salaries and grants to outsiders... but it would seem Thunderbird doesn't get much if they're out begging.
- $66,396,000 from paid services (e.g Pocket, VPN) and advertisers
- $15,782,000 from donations
And it spent:
- $290,448,000 on programmer salaries
- $163,516,000 on manager salaries
- $36,358,000 on servers, cloud, etc.
- $20,258,000 on consultants (e.g. branding consultants)
- $9,573,000 on travel
- $2,192,000 on grants and fellowships
So overall, it didn't spent that much on the stupid doomed side projects! It spent a lot more on flying managers and marketing consultants to nice soirees.
But the real question, not answered by this financial report, is how much programming labour was spent on Thunderbird, versus other Mozilla projects?
> MZLA Technologies Corporation is a wholly owned for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation and the home of Thunderbird.
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?
I don't see them begging anywhere, I only see someone sharing a link to their donate page.
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.
> For what it's worth because legal names are confusingly similar, this is a legal subsidiary of Mozilla that is specific to Thunderbird
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'm definitely not involved with any of them to know for sure, but my guess would be that's because non-profits come with a lot more regulatory overhead in comparison to for-profits of a similar scale. Not saying that's bad in any way, but for a team that just wants to build the damn thing, for-profits are absolutely less of a hassle.
Not that it answers your question, but the move happened in 2020 to "hire more easily, act more swiftly, and pursue ideas that were previously not possible".
What do they do with all that money? According to wikipedia, they had about 750 employees. That's a lot of employees for the amount of useful products they have.
I wish there was a system that lets users put up a donation that is released once a specific bug is fixed or a specific feature is implemented.
Wouldn't that be cool? The company would have a list of tasks with a dollar amount next to it.
I for one have been dabbling with a bug in ThunderBird for days now that drives me mad:
I recently created a folder in Thunderbird and called it "archive". No way would I have expected that this will lead me to a bug and will take hours out of my day: There seems to be no way to get rid of this folder anymore.
Things I have tried:
"Keep message archives in" in "Copies and Folders" is disabled. I tried temporarily enabling it, setting it to some other dir and disabling it again, that did not help.
I have disabled it in "subscribe".
I cannot rename it.
There is no "archive" folder in the web interface of my email provider, so if it Thunderbird somehow created it on the server, there seems to be no way to see, let alone delete it again in the web interface.
I tried deleting archive.msf on disk. That makes the folder disappear after the next start, but it is recreated after about a second.
I deleted folderTree.json and folderCache.json, that did not help.
You can do that. It's called a restricted donation. If you make a donation with a cover letter or a check memoizing a specific purpose and the nonprofit accepts it, then by law they're legally obligated to follow through and use that money for that purpose. With bugs it's probably easier because you can just write the bug ID on the check.
Interestingly, I used Thunderbird for years, it was really the best client for some times on Linux. But as the development stalled, I moved to Gnome Evolution, the nice integration with the general Gnome desktop made the switch less painful (at the start, it was hard, Evolution was not that good). But Evolution improved nicely, less bugs, faster, still well integrated into the desktop and I see no reasons to switch back to another tool.
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 :-)
I wish I could use Thunderbird at work now that it has Exchange support . Unfortunately we're mandated to use Microsoft Outlook. Outlook feels like it has completely been forgotten by Microsoft. I don't recall the last time they updated anything meaningful in the product (at least on macOS), it's quite a mess of a product. Wishing Thunderbird all the best it's the competition we need.
You know what is nice? If you have clients that get automatically switched to "the new Outlook" and loose all imap connections (and they don't work anymore, period).
Took me so long to learn that the fix was to switch back to the old Outlook.
IMAP works in outlook. Its just horrible to set up and half broken. Click "Add account". Then type in your email address, click "Choose provider", select IMAP, then click "Sync directly with IMAP" (dark pattern hidden button). If you don't click that last button, outlook uploads your IMAP email credentials to their own MS Cloud instance, and that proxies all your emails via microsoft's cloud servers. Do they read your email messages for advertising? Nobody knows!
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.
There's also two different applications which are both "Outlook for Mac".
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.
How is KMail and Evolution at this point? I have not tried them in like 10 years. Are they actively maintained and a real alternative for serious email use?
Mozilla is such a weird company, asking users to donate and keep one of their projects alive, while dumping billions in useless initiatives is really dishonest.
I use Thunderbird on both Linux/Android as my sole client for personal email. I'm mostly pretty happy with it, aside from search. My use case is mostly receiving email rather than sending email however. I would be much more amenable to donating if I knew that my donation would be going to support Thunderbird specifically and not rolled up into the parent MZLA Technologies Corporation, but I understand that's usually impractical.
Made an account just to say that I will not support the bloated mess that is Thunderbird that pushes on you a new way to configure it, a new layout and new workflows with every major update, makes it difficult to set up text-only mail and messes up line breaks every so often with no way to properly configure it, which should be developed by Mozilla, which is flush with money but rather spends it on theming their software and executive salaries.
I switched away from Thunderbird about a year ago and couldn't be happier I have made the change.
After reading a bunch of negative comments here, let me add a little on the bright side. I've been using Thunderbird for many years, currently both at home and at work to manage gmail accounts, pop at home, imap in the office. It works great for me, with a few annoyances but nothing serious.
As for the donations, Thunderbird seems to be somehow apart from Mozilla now, so I don't think much about specific org structure and will gladly donate.
Maybe on paper there're dozens of alternatives, but when I consider my specific requirements, I haven't found anything better, YMMV.
I use Thunderbird from the beginning when it was still named Firebird (I switched from Outlook Express). I think that it's a good product because it continues to do the job since more than 20 years. Me too I don't understand the negative comments. It's free (MPL license), it's packaged by Debian. All good. I don't care about Mozilla.
I really like Thunderbird, it's the only truly cross-platform mail app, with K9 also now on Android.
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?
Just donated. Have been using Thunderbird for years. I once donated to Wikipedia - and they have billions I heard - so might as well donate to another important piece of software for my digital life.
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...
Mozilla Corporation may have enough money, but they don't develop Thunderbird. If you used the donation form on this page, you didn't donate to Mozilla Corporation, but to the company developing Thunderbird. So all is fine.
I'm just using Evolution. Switched from Thunderbird a few weeks ago. So far, so good.
Mozilla and Mozla are two different corporations though both under the mozilla foundation.
Campaigns like this need more info. This page doesn't answer any basic questions.
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?
If you press the browser’s back button on the donation page, they send you to a page pestering you for your email address so they can send you a reminder to donate later. Talk about a dark pattern.
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?
> Where do the billions of dollars from Google go?
They go to the Mozilla Corporation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances
The Mozilla Corporation then picks and chooses what it finances within the Mozilla Foundation. Their financial statements don't break down how they spend on software development within the Foundation, it only lists out employee salaries, specific directors' salaries and grants to outsiders... but it would seem Thunderbird doesn't get much if they're out begging.
https://stateof.mozilla.org/pdf/Mozilla%20Fdn%202024%20-%20A...
So, as an example, in 2024, it got:
- $498,218,000 from royalties (e.g. Google)
- $66,396,000 from paid services (e.g Pocket, VPN) and advertisers
- $15,782,000 from donations
And it spent:
- $290,448,000 on programmer salaries
- $163,516,000 on manager salaries
- $36,358,000 on servers, cloud, etc.
- $20,258,000 on consultants (e.g. branding consultants)
- $9,573,000 on travel
- $2,192,000 on grants and fellowships
So overall, it didn't spent that much on the stupid doomed side projects! It spent a lot more on flying managers and marketing consultants to nice soirees.
But the real question, not answered by this financial report, is how much programming labour was spent on Thunderbird, versus other Mozilla projects?
LibreWolf should have no reason to exist. It does because Mozilla’s values are largely marketing.
Thought the same..
I don't think it's a dark pattern. Just a common marketing thing. Not "everything that annoys me" is a dark pattern.
> MZLA Technologies Corporation is a wholly owned for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation and the home of Thunderbird.
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?
I don't see them begging anywhere, I only see someone sharing a link to their donate page.
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.
> For what it's worth because legal names are confusingly similar, this is a legal subsidiary of Mozilla that is specific to Thunderbird
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'm definitely not involved with any of them to know for sure, but my guess would be that's because non-profits come with a lot more regulatory overhead in comparison to for-profits of a similar scale. Not saying that's bad in any way, but for a team that just wants to build the damn thing, for-profits are absolutely less of a hassle.
Not that it answers your question, but the move happened in 2020 to "hire more easily, act more swiftly, and pursue ideas that were previously not possible".
https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/
Please no. The Mozilla Foundation has lost their way. I don't want them messing with my favorite email client.
Mozilla brings in almost $700 million per year, they have more than enough money to sponsor MZLA/Thunderbird development.
Mozilla tried to kill Thunderbird in 2020. They've been talking about not sponsoring it all since 2015.
They might have the money, but they don't really seem to want anything to do with the project.
Mozilla doesn't have the willpower or vision to do anything with anything.
What do they do with all that money? According to wikipedia, they had about 750 employees. That's a lot of employees for the amount of useful products they have.
Mozilla is so sad. They have a lot of money and they could fund the development of both Firefox and Thunderbird.
Yet, they decide to waste almost $7 million per year to pay a CEO and God knows what else.
like all Big Tech
Wasn't Thunderbird Pro the avenue for extra project financing? Why does it take so long to launch an email service?
Was going to say it's here, but it's not indeed, you can join the waitlist: https://www.tb.pro/en-US/
I wish there was a system that lets users put up a donation that is released once a specific bug is fixed or a specific feature is implemented.
Wouldn't that be cool? The company would have a list of tasks with a dollar amount next to it.
I for one have been dabbling with a bug in ThunderBird for days now that drives me mad:
I recently created a folder in Thunderbird and called it "archive". No way would I have expected that this will lead me to a bug and will take hours out of my day: There seems to be no way to get rid of this folder anymore.
Things I have tried:
"Keep message archives in" in "Copies and Folders" is disabled. I tried temporarily enabling it, setting it to some other dir and disabling it again, that did not help.
I have disabled it in "subscribe".
I cannot rename it.
There is no "archive" folder in the web interface of my email provider, so if it Thunderbird somehow created it on the server, there seems to be no way to see, let alone delete it again in the web interface.
I tried deleting archive.msf on disk. That makes the folder disappear after the next start, but it is recreated after about a second.
I deleted folderTree.json and folderCache.json, that did not help.
You can do that. It's called a restricted donation. If you make a donation with a cover letter or a check memoizing a specific purpose and the nonprofit accepts it, then by law they're legally obligated to follow through and use that money for that purpose. With bugs it's probably easier because you can just write the bug ID on the check.
Interestingly, I used Thunderbird for years, it was really the best client for some times on Linux. But as the development stalled, I moved to Gnome Evolution, the nice integration with the general Gnome desktop made the switch less painful (at the start, it was hard, Evolution was not that good). But Evolution improved nicely, less bugs, faster, still well integrated into the desktop and I see no reasons to switch back to another tool.
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 :-)
I wouldn't mind donating if they separate it from Mozilla and move it to Europe.
As a lot of people in this thread advise against Thunderbird, what do you recommend instead (preferably for Windows as I am stuck on that)?
I think they are just hating on Mozilla out of pure principles, but without any alternative.
> I think they are just hating on Mozilla out of pure principles
Please don’t assume bad faith when the reality is that you don’t know.
Outlook Express
[]->
Donated. I don't even use it, but we needed it for opening email archives from clients at my old employer. We need as many options as possible.
when i used windows i was happy with The Bat email client: https://www.ritlabs.com/en/products/thebat/download.php
Is that a Stripe screen? Set up american style to reduce friction, not supporting 3d secure, which means european credit cards will deny by default?
Fineprint says it's Stripe. My (european) credit card worked fine.
I wish I could use Thunderbird at work now that it has Exchange support . Unfortunately we're mandated to use Microsoft Outlook. Outlook feels like it has completely been forgotten by Microsoft. I don't recall the last time they updated anything meaningful in the product (at least on macOS), it's quite a mess of a product. Wishing Thunderbird all the best it's the competition we need.
You know what is nice? If you have clients that get automatically switched to "the new Outlook" and loose all imap connections (and they don't work anymore, period).
Took me so long to learn that the fix was to switch back to the old Outlook.
IMAP works in outlook. Its just horrible to set up and half broken. Click "Add account". Then type in your email address, click "Choose provider", select IMAP, then click "Sync directly with IMAP" (dark pattern hidden button). If you don't click that last button, outlook uploads your IMAP email credentials to their own MS Cloud instance, and that proxies all your emails via microsoft's cloud servers. Do they read your email messages for advertising? Nobody knows!
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.
There's also two different applications which are both "Outlook for Mac".
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.
< It all seems totally insane.
This is Microsoft we're talking about, right?
I really think Mozilla has run it's course. Just die already so there is room for something new.
I have actually bought a lifetime license for em Client.
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.
em Client has no Linux version though?
Not having a Linux version in 2026 is ridiculous.
By donating to MZLA Technologies Corporation? Then I guess I'll switch to KMail or Evolution.
How is KMail and Evolution at this point? I have not tried them in like 10 years. Are they actively maintained and a real alternative for serious email use?
Both are ok last time I tried (last year?) but Geary is default on Gnome distro's now I think [0]. Geary is much more minimal though.
I myself am pretty spoiled by Protonmail I think, really enjoying that.
[0] https://github.com/GNOME/geary
I used TB happily for years on Mac OS but its font rendering on Linux was one of the main reasons I never switched.
Sorry, isn't Thunderbird meant to be "true FOSS" and essentially feature complete?
Mozilla is such a weird company, asking users to donate and keep one of their projects alive, while dumping billions in useless initiatives is really dishonest.
I use Thunderbird on both Linux/Android as my sole client for personal email. I'm mostly pretty happy with it, aside from search. My use case is mostly receiving email rather than sending email however. I would be much more amenable to donating if I knew that my donation would be going to support Thunderbird specifically and not rolled up into the parent MZLA Technologies Corporation, but I understand that's usually impractical.
Anyone using Thunderbird was forced to see this, not sure we (or the well-funded corp) need another round.
Made an account just to say that I will not support the bloated mess that is Thunderbird that pushes on you a new way to configure it, a new layout and new workflows with every major update, makes it difficult to set up text-only mail and messes up line breaks every so often with no way to properly configure it, which should be developed by Mozilla, which is flush with money but rather spends it on theming their software and executive salaries.
I switched away from Thunderbird about a year ago and couldn't be happier I have made the change.
What do you use now?