- cross-posted to:
- opensource@lemmit.online
- opensource@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- opensource@lemmit.online
- opensource@programming.dev
No matter how much I hate Mozilla’s new path, companies like this challenging big tech are bold and have a lot of courage. If I set aside my personal op opinions about Mozilla, I actually admire them for this. They can actually dent big tech with funding from big tech itself.
I keep hearing a lot of negative comments about Mozilla lately. I’m wondering if this move is more in line with then just turning into another google rather than disrupting the marketplace.
yeah, might seem good to have yet another choice, but it’s an illusion
.
For now, they’re better than Google. I have some bad opinions about them, but anything better than Google competing with Google is an improvement.
Yeah it’s not even close.
…and then join the big tech at some point.
It’s a saturated market and email is starting to disappear (it’ll take years, but the signs are there).
They’d be better using it on the browser and ditching other products.Email isn’t going anywhere. It’s the ipv4 of communication. You can list 100 things bad about it and none of it matters, too many things are now built on top of it, no competitor can possibly have a chance without first reimplementing email, and then they’re just adding extensions which everyone else ignores, and email continues.
The more plausible threat to email is that it gets siloed into the top 5 or 6 providers and everyone else gets filtered out as spam (ie you need gmail, hotmail, etc or your emails will never reach anyone)
The big providers problem is already true, but DMARC and DKIM mitigated that problem.
No its never going to disappear. If you are referring to people using slack and chat apps, those are locked in walled gardens where your messages cant ever leave.
Email can be moved anywhere easily.
On top of that, people still use email to sign up for these gardens. Technically, you could use your phone number too. I wonder how far could you take this idea of living completely without email.
Job applications, and several other sign ins still depend on email, so that’s going to be a bit of a hitch.
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Oh, that’s a very good point! Makes you look at this proposal in a completely different way.
Email won’t disappear sooner or later. It’s a huge part of communication between companies, nonprofit, state, etc. It may be less between people or with consumers. But, it still is widely use otherwise.
I’m curious, not bashing. What signs have you seen that lead you to believe email is dying?
It’s insecure by default and Kids These Days™ prefer messaging apps, which have boomed in the last decade.
Time will tell.So… Exactly how it was 20 years ago. Kids Those Days used AIM and Yahoo Messenger instead of slack and discord.
What do you make of the use of email in the business world? You’re right that quite a bit of that has turned into instant messaging as well, ie I text my boss instead of sending them mail but it definitely feels like that’s going away a lot slower if not expanding
Email is a must for between businesses. Having said that, lots of internal communication is findingther channels, like Teams, Slack, and so on.
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Any business2business or consumer2business communication will likely still happen over email for a very long time
If this works out it might be a nice place to migrate to away from my self-hosted e-mail provided they eventually let you bring your own domain. Just sucks that e-mail is essentially the most secure thing you need to have since compromising that can compromise every account attached to the e-mail. That’s a lot of trust you need to instill in your e-mail host.
You say you’re self hosting your email, how are you doing that?
I meant hosting wise, at home or using a VPS? How did you get a fixed IP/ what are you using for a proxy?
VPS, I wouldn’t run a mail server from my home network. If you go with mailinabox you don’t need to set up a proxy, it’s pretty simple.
Whatever their doing, it’s not worth it.
I have fond memories of self-hosting a qmail setup for a long time, then eventually migrating to a postfix configuration, back in the day.
Keeping up with spam filtering finally did me in.
I was thinking ab this being april fool bcz it’s posted on 1st…
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.
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.
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.
Labels are displayed as folders on IMAP, which means that a single message could appear in multiple folders. Are there any other problems you’re talking about?
One of the problems that annoyed me in the past is the complexity and ambiguity of deleting an email over IMAP. Depending on whether it’s the last label of the deleted email, deleting an email from a label’s directory either removes a label from this email, or actually deletes the email.
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.
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.
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
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.
If its not zero access its just more ameritech bullshit.
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.
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.
From my understanding thunbird is somewhat separated from this. From the article linked by OP it says:
What’s crystal clear is that Thunderbird’s ever-increasing donation revenue (currently its sole source of income) is allowing for some explosive growth that’s long overdue. To add some context to this, Thunderbird received $2.8 million in donation revenue during 2021. Two years later, in 2023, it received $8.6 million in donations. I’m told that total financial contributions for 2024 were even higher, though the final amount hasn’t been officially released.
I should donate again. As someone who still depends on gmail, I keep forgetting how annoying it was to get ads every time I refreshed my inbox, before I switched to their app. Glad things seem to be working out.
It is extremely easy to switch email providers these days. I’d suggest start by setting up a forwarded mail box between Gmail and whatever new mail provider you choose. Then slowly but surely start using the new email address instead of Gmail and change the most important accounts to the new one.
I looked at this but it asked me to download it. Can I access it through a browser like I can Google?
Archive link for anyone else for whom that article crashed their tab.
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Yet thunderbird still can’t single click open an email in a new window. If I recall correctly the request has been filed in 2014 or smt 💀
Nope, still requires double click.
It’s almost like you didn’t read my comment and went straight to angry. This has been suggested for years with 0 response from Thunderbird team and there’s no way to extend it without forking and patching everything yourself.
If you’ve done nothing but complain for 14 years then I’m glad you still have to double click.
Lmao sure buddy i should have forked a web browser, learn their front end and patched everything myself! Ir you know fuck right off to a billion other email clients that don’t ship literally the most complex piece of software in the world with it 🙄
People still use Email???
the entire world.
If only they could develop a federated short message system.
Messenger/WhatsApp/slack messaging style but federated like email
Matrix is one example of such a system.
check out deltachat, it’s an email client with an interface like an instant messaging app
Matrix is pretty much that already.
Email was originally one of the first federated systems. Anyone can host a server and send messages back and forth from other servers with a set standard. That basically is federation.
Email is federated, it’s just not really a medium people want to limit to 500 chars…
Nothing at all stopping you from writing a client that only allows 500 char messages in and out.
Someone even built a chat system that used email under the hood.
Tf else would you you even use
I sent three faxes today 😎
“The fucking blockhain” - some cryptobro
Xwitter?
You are like those people that always say “Do people still use INPUT SOMETHING”. Do you text or call only? What about your work? you call or send a text instead of email ? maybe drop of some files instead of emailing them? I have so many questions.
The people who dont are usually old as people who dont need it anymore or kids