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State Of The Bird: Thunderbird Annual Report 2023-2024

We’ve just released Thunderbird version 128, codenamed “Nebula”, our yearly stable release. So with that big milestone done, I wanted to take a moment and tell our community about the state of Thunderbird. In the past I’ve done a recap focused solely on the project’s financials, which is interesting – but doesn’t capture all of the great work that the project has accomplished. So, this time, I’m going to try something different. I give you the State of the Bird: Thunderbird Annual Report 2023-2024.

Before we jump into it, on behalf of the Thunderbird Team and Council, I wanted to extend our deepest gratitude to the hundreds of thousands of people who generously provided financial support to Thunderbird this past year. Additionally, Thunderbird would like to thank the many volunteers who contributed their time to our many efforts. It is not an exaggeration to say that this product would not exist without them. All of our contributors are the lifeblood of Thunderbird. They are the beacons shining brightly to remind us of the transformative power of open source, and the influence of the community that stands alongside it. Thank you for not just being on this journey with us, but for making the journey possible.


Supernova & Nebula

Thunderbird Supernova 115 blazed into existence on July 11, 2023. This Extended Support Release (ESR) not only introduced cool code names for releases, but also helped bring Thunderbird a modern look and experience that matched the expectation of users in 2023. In addition to shedding our outdated image, we also started tackling something which prevented a brisk development pace and steady introduction of new features: two decades of technical debt.

After three years of slow decline in Daily Active Users (DAUs), the Supernova release started a noticeable upward trend, which reaffirms that the changes we made in this release are putting us on the right track. What our users were responding to wasn’t just visual, however. As we’ve noted many times before – Supernova was also a very large architectural overhaul that saw the cleanup of decades of technical debt for the mail front-end. Supernova delivered a revamped, customizable mail experience that also gave us a solid foundation to build the future on.

Fast forwarding to Nebula, released on July 11, 2024, we built upon many of the pillars that made Supernova a success. We improved the look and feel, usability, customization and speed of the mail experience in truly substantial ways. Additionally, many of the investments in improving the Thunderbird codebase began to pay dividends, allowing us to roll in preliminary Exchange support and use native OS notifications.

All of the work that has happened with Supernova and Nebula is an effort to make Thunderbird a first-class email and productivity tool in its own right. We’ve spent years paying down technical debt so that we could focus more on the features and improvements that bring value to our users. This past year we got to leverage all that hard work to create a truly great Thunderbird experience.

K-9 Mail & Thunderbird For Android

In response to the enormous demand for Thunderbird on a phone, we’ve worked hard to lay a solid foundation for our Android release. The effort to turn K-9 Mail into something we can confidently call a great Thunderbird experience on-the-go is coming along nicely.

In April of 2023, we released K-9 6.600 with a message view redesign that brought K-9 and Thunderbird more in line. This release also had a more polished UI, among other fixes, improvements, and changes. Additionally, it integrated our new design system with reusable components that will allow quicker responses to future design changes in Android.

The 6.7xx Beta series, developed throughout 2023, primarily focused on improving account setup. The main reason for this change is to enable seamless email account setup. This also started the transition of K-9’s UI from traditional Android XML layouts to using the more modern and now recommended Jetpack Compose UI toolkit, and the adoption of Atomic Design principles for a cohesive, intuitive design. The 6.710 Beta release in August was the first to include the new account setup for more widespread testing. Introducing new account setup code and removing some of the old code was a step in the right direction.

In other significant events of 2023, we hired Wolf Montwé as a senior software engineer, doubling the K-9 Mail team at MZLA! We also conducted a security audit with 7ASecurity and OSTIF. No critical issues were found, and many non-critical issues were fixed. We began experimenting with Material 3 and based on positive results, decided to switch to Material 3 before renaming the app. Encouraged by our community contributors, we moved to Weblate for localization. Weblate is better integrated into K-9 and is open source. Some of our time was also spent on necessary maintenance to ensure the app works properly on the latest Android versions.

So far this year, we’ve shipped the account setup improvements to everyone and continued work on Material 3 and polishing the app in preparation for its transition to “Thunderbird for Android.” You can look at individual release details in our GitHub repository and track the progress we’ve made there. Suffice to say, the work on creating an amazing Android experience has been significant – and we look forward to sharing the first true Thunderbird release on Android in the next few months.

Services and  Infrastructure

In 2023 we began working in earnest on delivering additional value to Thunderbird users through a suite of web services. The reasoning? There are some features that would add significant value to our users that we simply can’t do in the Thunderbird clients alone. We can, however, create amazing, open source, privacy-respecting services that enhance the Thunderbird experience while aligning with our values – and that’s what we’ve been doing.

The services that we’ve focused on are: Appointment, a calendar scheduling tool; Send, an encrypted large-file transfer service; and Thunderbird Sync, which will allow users to sync their Thunderbird settings between devices (both desktop and Android).

Thunderbird Appointment enables you to plan less and do more. You can add your calendars to the service, outline your weekly availability and then send links that allow others to grab time on your schedule. No more long back-and-forth email threads to find a time to meet, just send a link. We’ve just opened up beta testing for the service and look forward to hearing from early users what features our users would like to see. For more information on Thunderbird Appointment, and if you’d like to sign up to be a beta tester, check out our Thunderbird Appointment blog post. If you want to look at the code, check out the repository for the project on GitHub.

The Thunderbird team was very sad when Firefox Send was shut down. Firefox Send made it possible to send large files easily, maybe easier than any other tool on the Internet. So we’re reviving it, but not without some nice improvements. Thunderbird Send will not only allow you to send large files easily, but our version also encrypts them. All files that go through Send are encrypted, so even we can’t see what you share on the service. This privacy focus was important in building this tool because it’s one of our core values, spelled out in the Mozilla Manifesto (principle 4): “Individuals’ security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.”

Finally, after many requests for this feature, I’m happy to share that we are working hard to make Thunderbird Sync available to everyone. Thunderbird Sync will allow you to sync your account and application settings between Thunderbird clients, saving time at setup and headaches when you use Thunderbird on multiple devices. We look forward to sharing more on this front in the near future.

2023 Financial Picture

All of the above work was made possible because of our passionate community of Thunderbird users. 2023 was a year of significant investment into our team and our infrastructure, designed to ensure the continued long-term stability and sustainability of Thunderbird. As previously mentioned these investments would not have been possible without the remarkable generosity of our financial contributors.

Contribution Revenue

Total financial contributions in 2023 reached $8.6M, reflecting a 34.5% increase over 2022. More than 515,000 transactions from over 300,000 individual contributors generated this financial support (26% of the transactions were recurring monthly contributions).

In addition to that incredible total, what stands out is that the majority of our contributions were modest. The average contribution amount was $16.90, and the median amount was $11.12.

We are often asked if we have “super givers” and the refreshing answer is “no, we simply have a super community.” To underscore this, consider that 61% of giving was $20 or less, and 95% of the transactions were $35 or less. The number of transactions $1000 and above accounted for only 56 transactions; that’s effectively 0.0007% of all contribution transactions.

And this super community helping us sustain and improve Thunderbird is very much a global one, with contributions pouring in from more than 200 countries! The top five giving countries — Germany, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Japan — accounted for 63% of our contribution revenue and 50% of transactions. We believe this global support is a testament to the universal value of Thunderbird and the core values the project stands for.

Expenses

Now, let’s talk about how we’re using these funds to keep Thunderbird thriving well into the future. 

As with most organizations, employee-related expenses are the largest expense category. The second highest category for us are all the costs associated with distributing Thunderbird to tens of millions of users and the operations that help make that happen. You can see our spending across all categories below:

The Importance of Supporting Thunderbird

When I started at Thunderbird (in 2017), we weren’t on a sustainable path. The cost of building, maintaining and distributing Thunderbird to tens of millions of people was too great when compared against the financial contributions we had coming in. Fast forward to 2023 and we’re able to not only deliver Thunderbird to our users without worrying about keeping the lights on, but we are able to fix bugs, build new features and invest in new platforms (Android). It’s important for Thunderbird to exist because it’s not just another app, but one built upon real values.

Our values are:

If you share these values, we ask that you consider supporting Thunderbird. The tech you use doesn’t have to be built upon compromises. Giving to Thunderbird allows us to create good software that is good for you (and the world). Consider giving to support Thunderbird today.

2023 Community Snapshot

As we’ve noted so many times in the previous paragraphs, it’s because of Thunderbird’s open source community that we exist at all. In order to better engage with and acknowledge everyone participating in our projects, this past year we set up a Bitergia instance, which is now public. Bitergia has allowed us to better measure participation in the community and find where we are doing well and improving, and areas where there is room for improvement. We’ve pulled out some interesting metrics below.

For reference, Github and Bugzilla measure developer contributions. TopicBox measures activity across our many mailing lists. Pontoon measures the activity from volunteers who help us translate and localize Thunderbird. SUMO measures the impact of Thunderbird’s support volunteers who engage with our users and respond to their varied support questions.

Contributor & Community Growth

Thank You

In conclusion, we’d simply like to thank this amazing community of Thunderbird supporters who give of their time and resources to create something great. 2023 and 2024 have been years of extraordinary improvement for Thunderbird and the future looks bright. We’re humbled and pleased that so many of you share our values of privacy, digital wellbeing and open standards. We’re committed to continuing to provide Thunderbird for free to everyone, everywhere – thanks to you!

45 responses

Enrico wrote on

Way to go, MZLA! Thunderbird is a real success story of Free Software.

NIGEL CAVEY wrote on

I’d be far more impressed if I didn’t now find that my Thurderbird program can no longer send emails using my Hotmail account, even though the Inbox is still operative. In fact, I despair, having tried everything to cure this insoluble problem.

Joel wrote on

WAY TO GO, GANG! Keep up the good work. Usually send a small donation, near the end of the year.

Alexey wrote on

Nebula was a rare UI update that made me think: “yes, this is undoubtedly better.” I especially appreciate the attention given to the information-dense layout.

MartinNK wrote on

Thanks to the Mozilla Thunderbird Team for their work and all contributors.

Georg wrote on

Extra thanks to the people in Germany for donating so much for Thunderbird – exemplary!

Flixerine wrote on

Been waiting on Thunderbird Sync for a while now, but better to wait and have a good thing I guess, than a rushed release. But would it be possible to get some more insight on the current state and issues with Thunderbird Sync?

Ever since I started using sync on the firefox browsers it has been my go to for switching between devices, it’s great. With Thunderbird it would be nice to be able to sync files/emails as well and not just connection settings, if that is somehow possible.

Either way good job with Thunderbird!

antonio raiano wrote on

lo tenuto x diversi anni , fino ha quanto non a funzionato più.

Wayne Whalen wrote on

You need to get working with Microsoft again ASAP.

Wayne Whalen wrote on

I should have said syncing MS servers. They are fighting back and not allowing me to get my email.

Juan L Kindelan wrote on

I have been using Thunderbird longer than I can remember, it is a great system. easy to use and fits my needs perfectly. Keep it up gang!!

Robert Hatcher wrote on

How about about the ability to attach a note to an email for filing. I managed to use X note to record a description of my purchases on Paypal emails. They have all now disappeared thanks to aTB update. Otherwise TB is a great product.

John Samuels wrote on

TB has been my prime mail handler for many years and I appreciate the continuing work to upgrade it. What seems to be missing, however, is the native ability to sync my contacts/addressbooks/CardBook with Google, so that I can sync them with my Android phone. I keep reading of convoluted ways to do this, but most are beyond my technical abilities. I have TbSync and Google-4-TbSync installed but they are not syncing my contacts and the Details instructions are mostly Greek.

PATRICE BERNARD wrote on

Vivement thunderbird pour Android.
Bravo à vous.

eMeM010NL wrote on

It is very refreshing to see the Thunderbird community flourishing as it does.
Proving that Open Source as a principle still stands after more than 3 decades.
Small may be compared to Big Tech, but spread around the globe and committed to move forward.
This all reflected in the State of the bird 2023-2024.

Well done Community and Team!

Jim Dully wrote on

I have had an Apple MAC COMPUTER FOR OVER 13 YEARS and before that Windows computers and have always used Firefox and Thunderbird. Thus I as you can tell very happy that I have.

Jeff Farrington wrote on

Very impressive, thanks

Aad wrote on

Congratulations, Mozilla! I am a fond user of Firefox and Thunderbird.However, allow me one comment about Thunderbird conversations: it is switched on by default and there is no easy way to switch it of completely.
I really don’t want conversations, and I dearly miss a simple switch to switch off conversations overall.

Adhama wrote on

I believe in Mozilla and Thunderbird. Thanks for your work and keep on pushing!

OhWeh wrote on

Thank you! TB is my mail client since Netscape. 🙂

Mike wrote on

7,6% for donation processing fee – significantly high.
Did you consider to reduce it?

Colin wrote on

As a long-time user, I recall well that moment some years back when the future of Thunderbird looked uncertain. Thrilled to see how much the situation has improved and how the pace of development continues. Am looking forward to seeing the Android version shortly. Keep up the great work!

Frances Heaton wrote on

I do contribute to TB, and used to find that the email experience – transferring files to folders, deleting etc were immediate. I use TB Nebula, and these days find that transferring, deleting etc take much longer. My account is IMAP, and I keep very few emails, deleting everything I do not need. For me the upgrades have not been successful unfortunately.

TURBAN wrote on

Bonjour A TOUS
Bravo, à tout le travail fourni par tous les créateurs créatrices.
Félicitations
Dominique

John Metcalf wrote on

I have been a user contributer from the inception. I plan on being both.

John Metcalf wrote on

I love thunderbird. I have been a user and contributer since Thunderbird’s inception. I plan on using for the future.

Martha Jourdan wrote on

I know nothing about high tech stuff. I only know that Thunderbird is the best email provider I have ever had and I have had others. It is simple and straight forward for an old non-tech person like me. Have never had any problem with it. Also appreciate your updated info, such as this one. Thanks guys and gals. Will contribute next month (when my Social Security check comes in!)

Tom wrote on

Thank you for the report. Is there no information this year on the total expense and change in the number of employees, as in the past two reports? I would also appreciate an update on the iOS plans that were announced last year.

Barbara Jenkins wrote on

When will Thunderbird become available for iOS?

Jeff Green wrote on

I’ve bene using TB since, well, I ain’t sayin’ as that would age me. Suffice to say it’s been a long time. I do have complaints (the three minute load time and slow screen redraws), But, on the other hand I have many email addresses and having a place to tie them all together is a godsend. Keep up the great work!

Philip W Mobley wrote on

Thank you for your SERVICE..!

M-H wrote on

Bonjour
Sauf que je suis piraté depuis 2 mois et je ne peux pas m’en sortir, il me redemande systématique mon mot de passe……!!! ? si vous avez une solution pour sortir de ce problème merci de me dire comment faire, je suis débutant avec Thunderbird

Cordialement

Lars Olsson wrote on

My Tunderbird do not work together with Norton VPN. To recive e-mail I have to first inactivate Norton VPN.
What to do to get Tunderbird to accept Norton VPN.

Ron Gervai wrote on

Thunderbird usage makes this Canadian very pleased with the services provided.

Mr C Barnes wrote on

Thunderbird has been 100% reliable for my services over many years and I thank you all for the fantastic service you provide. Reliability is always more important than extra features, which for some just make things more complicated to use. You have kept the same basic template so that it is always easy to use, but there are the new features, if you look for them, in menu. I do and will donate from time to time. An independent provider such as yourselves must flourish. Thankyou again and keep up the good work!

Susan McMaster wrote on

I notice Canada is not on the list of supporter countries? I donate regularly…? I think. If I don’t please, let me know.

Berthold Kölbach wrote on

Bitte die Mails direkt in Deutsch übersetzen.

Dr. Daniel Zimmermann wrote on

Congrats!

brooke wrote on

Any chance there is going to be a TB for iOS?

Don Reba wrote on

I wish Firefox development was as open. It seems like for years they have been pushing minor incremental features with no explanation or vision. And, unlike Thunderbird’s, Firefox’s UI has been only getting worse over time.

Peter Beurle wrote on

How come the change in the reporting dates? It seemed to be in May previously. You don’t report the expenses and a surplus (deficit).

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Steven wrote on

I really love how the latest Thunderbird looks, but I think there are some improvements to be made for better user experience.

First, system-level push. I have to open Thunderbird and keep it running in the background to receive push notifications. It is possible to make it push without opening the application? The Mail and Calender app in Windows 10 is capable of doing so, and I think its a handy feature that Thunderbird can also think about.

Second, support Mica effect on Windows. The current Thunderbird already looks good, but just a little too plain with all the white and grey colors. With Mica effect, the interface will better blend into user’s wallpaper, which makes it look more immersive, integrated and attractive.

For users don’t want to have the above features, the developers can just make them optional in settings, so that all users can customize the Thunderbird to their hearts content.

Many thanks for your hard work!

Sherry Ryan wrote on

I’m truly impressed by the great work Thunderbird and all involved are doing! That being said, I am beyond upset that you changed the color tagging on your emails from being able to color-code the whole email line itself, to a tiny little tag at the right side/end of the email. My eyesight is very bad coupled with the fact that I color-coded all my emails in particular groups that were easy for me to see…so that being said, I feel you’ve taken a step back on your latest program update. If there is a way, that I can go back to the previous way we were able to color code our emails, would someone please send me an email to let me know, as I am a senior and not at all technically inclined to find out myself if there is a way I can go back to the previous way. Thanks for all you do, but not for this update regarding the color tagging.

Danny Goss wrote on

My only grip is the stupid “thread” and “unthreaded”! It should be easily selectable and apply to all emails. Somebody broke what wasn’t broken!

Comments are closed.