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VIDEO: Talking MZLA with Ryan Sipes

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In this month’s Community Office Hours, we’re chatting with our director Ryan Sipes. This talk opens with a brief history of Thunderbird and ends on our plans for its future. In between, we explain more about MZLA and its structure, and how this compares to the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation. We’ll also cover the new Thunderbird Pro and Thundermail announcement And we talk about how Thunderbird put the fun in fundraising!

And if you’d like to know even more about Pro, next month we’ll be chatting with Services Software Engineer Chris Aquino about our upcoming products. Chris, who most recently has been working on Assist, is both incredibly knowledgeable and a great person to chat with. We think you’ll enjoythe upcoming Community Office Hours as much as we do.

April Office Hours: Thunderbird and MZLA

The beginning is always a very good place to start. We always love hearing Ryan recount Thunderbird’s history, and we hope you do as well. As one of the key figures in bringing Thunderbird back from the ashes, Ryan is ideal to discuss how Thunderbird landed at MZLA, its new home since 2020. We also appreciate his perspective on our relationship to (and how we differ from) the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation. And as Thunderbird’s community governance model is both one of its biggest strengths and a significant part of its comeback, Ryan has some valuable insights on our working relationship.

Thunderbird’s future, however, is just as exciting a story as how we got here. Ryan gives us a unique look into some of our recent moves, from the decision to develop mobile apps to the recent move into our own email service, Thundermail, and the Thunderbird Pro suite of productivity apps. From barely surviving, we’re glad to see all the ways in which Thunderbird and its community are thriving.

Watch, Read, and Get Involved

The entire interview with Ryan is below, on YouTube and Peertube. There’s a lot of references in the interview, which we’ve handily provided below. We hope you’re enjoying these looks into what we’re doing at Thunderbird as much as we’re enjoying making them, and we’ll see you next month!

VIDEO (Also on Peertube):

Resources

Tags: Office Hours

2 responses

Alan wrote on

As a donator to MZLA, I’m very frustrated by MZLA’s plans to develop solutions that duplicate existing services from ally organizations, instead of solving the many documented deficiencies in the Thunderbird desktop client.

The new offerings won’t retain or attract many new users, nor will they lead to many users leaving GMail and M365 etc. Most of us use those services because our work dictates we use them, and open standard email/PIM offerings from privacy focused companies in privacy safe countries already exist. What will retain existing users and attract new ones is a fantastic user experience, which at a minimum requires excellent support for GMail and M365 etc. because those services will remain the predominant email/PIM services for the foreseeable future.

Unfortunately, Thunderbird falls short of a great user experience today: for example, I have to workaround these issues daily:

– Zoho addressbook isn’t implemented
– Scheduling Google Meet meetings isn’t implemented
– M365 contacts and calendar aren’t implemented
– Dark mode is only partially implemented
– Proper conversation threading isn’t implemented
– Systray notifications aren’t implemented

(some of these are fixed in current releases, but flatpak is limited to ESR, so not available to me – another roadmap item not implemented). All of these issues require me to use another product or work harder to complete a task, daily. As any UX practitioner or product manager knows, these are red flags for customer retention.

So, if the goal is retaining existing and attracting new users, then the Thunderbird user experience has to be the focus. And this means the desktop client needs to be the top priority and making it a seamless experience with existing services as well as fixing long standing usability deficiencies is the solution. I don’t see where a MZLA developed online service fits in that problem statement/solution model – unless the plan is to abandon the desktop client and implement a cloud-based aggregation service – some transparency would be appreciated if that is the case.

I donate to support Thunderbird becoming an excellent, complete, multi-account email client for Linux, and I’m happy if Windows and Mac users also get those benefits. But, an excellent, complete, multi-account desktop client doesn’t seem to be MZLA’s primary goal any more, so I’m disappointed every time I hear the online services plan reiterated, while there is no mention of the plan to resolve long standing product deficiencies.

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

While unfortunately we don’t yet have support for the Zoho address books (you can also show support for this on a related Mozilla Connect suggestion: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/please-support-syncing-with-zoho-contacts/m-p/58978), there is a workaround, for now, with the Cardbook addon: https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/cardbook.

As far as the other things you’ve mentioned, full dark mode (with the new “Dark Reader”) has landed in the monthly release. Both M365 support and conversation view have been in the works for a long time and have required a significant overhaul on the backend. We continue to improve systray support, including for Linux.

The new services are to fill holes in the Thunderbird experience when compared to what is available via other clients. But the vast majority of our resources continue to go into the desktop client, and we are adding more developers as quickly as we can onboard them. We also recommend, in addition to reading our Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest, which provides update on Exchange support and the backend changes to the database that will enable conversation view, tuning into our State of the Thunder videos that explore the progress on our roadmap (https://www.youtube.com/@thunderbirdproject/playlists).

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