Mozilla Unveils Gmail Competitor

Mozilla, the company responsible for the Firefox browser, has tried to rethink the image of another of its products, the open-source email client Thunderbird, in conjunction with which they decided to build a comprehensive communications platform.

Image source: thunderbird.net

Mozilla has begun rolling out a suite of related services that could potentially generate revenue for the company. The Storm Bird ecosystem expansion program is an attempt to counter commercial services, including Google Gmail and Microsoft Office 365, that are gradually taking away Thunderbird’s audience. “These ecosystems have both hard vendor lock-in (due to the complexity of interoperating with third-party clients) and soft lock-in (due to the convenience and integration between clients and services). Our goal is to eventually implement a similar offering, so that a 100% open, freedom-respecting open ecosystem is available to anyone who wants it,” Ryan Sipes, Thunderbird’s managing director of products, told The Register about the project.

Mozilla sees no technical obstacles to providing end-to-end encryption of mail, but is in no hurry to do so because the task is not solved entirely on the server side – part of it is done on the client side, and the company wants to consult with the community on which approach seems optimal. At the testing stage, the data is physically located in the EU, but in the future, users will probably be able to choose the jurisdiction for storing their data. A whole set of web services is being developed:

• Thunderbird Appointment is a scheduling service that allows you to share links with other users so that they can book time in the sender’s calendar;
• Thunderbird Send is a redesigned version of the now-closed Firefox Send file sharing service;
• Thunderbird Assist is an AI service that can be run locally or on Flower Labs partner resources;
• Thundermail is a Stalwart-based email service that will complement Thunderbird; it supports JMAP (JSON Meta✴ Application Protocol), intended as a successor to IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol).

It won’t be cheap to support these services, so some users will have to pay — at the same time, the company will compensate for the damage from the termination of the contract with Google, which may be terminated at the initiative of American antitrust regulators. Users will be able to host some of the services, including Appointment and Send, on their resources.