The Thunderbird Blog

We are pleased to report that Thunderbird usage, as reported though the standard Mozilla metric of Active Daily Inquiries (ADI), has surpassed 10 million users per day on Monday November 30 2015 for the first time ever.

ADI is a raw measurement of active users, and is taken by counting the daily requests from Thunderbird users for updates to the plugin blocklist. This measure under-counts active users for a variety of reasons (such as firewalls, or users that do not use Thunderbird everyday). Based on more detailed studies with other applications, a typical multiplier applied to ADI to estimate total active users is 2.5. So the best estimate of current active users is 25,000,000.

Thunderbird Celebrates its 11 Birthday

Eleven years ago, on December 7 2004, Mozilla announced in a blog post the birth of Thunderbird. Happy Birthday, Thunderbird!

String-freeze for Thunderbird 45 on December 14

The Thunderbird development team is working hard on the next major release of Thunderbird, version 45, which is due for release in March of 2016. String freeze for new features is this weekend. Over 1000 code commits have been done to the main Thunderbird code repository in preparation for this release (in addition to the tens of thousands of commits to the Mozilla platform repository that Thunderbird uses as its base).

Mozilla Foundation as (Temporary) Thunderbird Home

Coincidentally on the same date as the new ADI record, in a post to a public Mozilla discussion forum, Mozilla Chairperson Mitchell Baker outlined some upcoming changes in the relationship of Mozilla to Thunderbird.

In the administrative part of that post, Mitchell announced that the Mozilla Foundation under Mark Surman has been working with Thunderbird to provide at least a temporary legal and financial home for the Thunderbird project (which we have been sorely lacking for several years). At the same time, a formal process will be undertaken to determine what is the best long-term home for Thunderbird, which might be Mozilla or might be some other entity.

Practically what this means is that in 2016, Thunderbird will finally be able to accept donations from users directed toward the update and maintenance of Thunderbird. In the long run, Thunderbird needs to rely on our users for support, and not expect to be subsidized by revenue from Firefox. We welcome this help from the Mozilla Foundation in moving toward our goal of developing independent sources of income for Thunderbird.

In the technical part of that post, Mitchell reiterated that Mozilla needs to be laser-focused on Firefox, and that the burden this places on Thunderbird (as well as the burden that Thunderbird places on Firefox) is leading to unacceptable outcomes for both projects. The most immediate need is for the Thunderbird release infrastructure to be independent of that used by Firefox, and Mozilla has offered to help. In the long-term, there will be additional technical separation between Firefox and Thunderbird as a continuation of a process that has been ongoing for the last three years.

In the last few weeks, I’ve had several interesting conversations concerning email encryption. I’m also trying to develop some concept of what areas Thunderbird should view as our special emphases as we look forward. The question is, with our limited resources, should we strive to make better support of end-to-end email encryption a vital Thunderbird priority? I’d appreciate comments on that question, either on this Thunderbird blog posting or the email list tb-planning@mozilla.org.

In one conversation, at the “Open Messaging Day” at OSCON 2015, I brought up the issue of whether, in a post-Snowden world, support for end-to-end encryption was important for emerging open messaging protocols such as JMAP. The overwhelming consensus was that this is a non-issue. “Anyone who can access your files using interception technology can more easily just grab your computer from your house. The loss of functionality in encryption (such as online search of your webmail, or loss of email content if certificates are lost) will give an unacceptable user experience to the vast majority of users” was the sense of the majority.

In a second conversation, I was having dinner with a friend who works as a lawyer for a state agency involved in white-collar crime prosecution. This friend also thought the whole Snowden/NSA/metadata thing had been blown out of proportion, but for a very different reason. Paraphrasing my friend’s comments, “Our agency has enormous powers to subpoena all kinds of records – bank statements,  emails – and most organizations will silently hand them over to me without you ever knowing about it. We can always get metadata from email accounts and phones, e.g. e-mail addresses of people corresponded with, calls made, dates and times, etc. There is alot that other government employees (non NSA) have access to just by asking for it, so some of the outrage about the NSA’s power and specifically the lack of judicial oversight is misplaced and out of proportion precisely because the public is mostly ignorant about the scope of what is already available to the government.”

So in summary, the problem is much bigger than the average person realizes, and other email vendors don’t care about it.

There are several projects out there trying to make encryption a more realistic option. In order to change internet communications to make end-to-end encryption ubiquitous, any protocol proposal needs wide adoption by key players in the email world, particularly by client apps (as opposed to webmail solutions where the encryption problem is virtually intractable.) As Thunderbird is currently the dominant multi-platform open-source email client, we are sometimes approached by people in the privacy movement to cooperate with them in making email encryption simple and ubiquitous. Most recently, I’ve had some interesting conversations with Volker Birk of Pretty Easy Privacy about working with them.

Should this be a focus for Thunderbird development?

We’re happy to report that Thunderbird usage continues to expand.

Mozilla measures program usage by Active Daily Installations (ADI), which is the number of pings that Mozilla servers receive as installations do their daily plugin block-list update. This is not the same as the number of active users, since some users don’t access their program each day, and some installations are behind firewalls. An estimate of active monthly users is typically done by multiplying the ADI by a factor of 3.

To plot changes in Thunderbird usage over time, I’ve picked the peak ADI for each month for the last few years. Here’s the result:

Germany has long been our #1 country for usage, but in 4th quarter 2014, Japan exceeded US as the #2 country. Here’s the top 10 countries, taken from the ADI count of February 24, 2015:

Country Rankings for Thunderbird Usage, February 24, 2015

The Thunderbird team is now working hard preparing our next major release, which will be Thunderbird 38 in May 2015. We’ll be blogging more about that release in the next few weeks, including reporting on the many new features that we have added.

In October 2014, 22 active contributors to Thunderbird gathered at the Mozilla office in Toronto to discuss the status of Thunderbird, and plan for the future.

Thunderbird contributors gather in Toronto to plan the future.

As background, Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, posted in July 2012 that Mozilla would significantly reduce paid staff dedicated to Thunderbird, and asked community volunteers to move Thunderbird forward. Mozilla at that time committed several paid staff to maintain Thunderbird, each working part-time on Thunderbird but with a main commitment to other Mozilla projects. The staff commitment in total was approximately one full-time equivalent.

Over the last two years, those individuals had slowly reduced their commitment to Thunderbird, yet the formal leadership of Thunderbird remained with these staff. By 2014 Thunderbird had reached the point where nobody was effectively in charge, and it was difficult to make important decisions. By gathering the key active contributors in one place, we were able to make real decisions, plan our future governance, and move to complete the transition from being staff-led to community-led.

At the Summit, we made a number of key decisions:

• A group of seven individuals were elected to comprise a Thunderbird Council with the authority to make decisions affecting Thunderbird. I (Kent James) am currently the Chair of this council.
• For our next major release, Thunderbird 38 due in May 2015, we set this roadmap:
  • Folders: allow >4GByte mbox folders, plus finish support for maildir
  • Instant Messaging: Support WebRTC
  • Calendaring: Merge Lightning into Thunderbird as a shipped addon
  • Accounts: Merge the New Account Types binary addon into core, allowing new account types to be defined using addons in the future.
  • IMAP: support OAUTH authorization in GMail.
• We agreed that Thunderbird needs to have one or more full-time, paid staff to support shipping a stable, reliable product, and allow progress to be made on frequently-requested features. To this end, we plan to appeal directly to our users for donations.
• The Thunderbird active contributors are proud to be part of Mozilla, expect to remain part of Mozilla for the foreseeable future, and believe we have an important role to play in fulfilling the goals of the Mozilla Manifesto.

There is a lot of new energy in Thunderbird since the Summit, a number of people are stepping forward to take on some critical roles, and we are looking forward to a great next release. More help is always welcome though!