"Thundermail" will be part of a suite of Thunderbird Pro services, as the team behind the venerable Mozilla email client begins building a complete ecosystem.
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.
If they’re user funded, their incentives are fundamentally different from Google’s. Even thinking as a business, it makes no sense to enshittify the way Google does. It’s a different choice, even if it’s not the choice you wanted.
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)
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.
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.
Yeah and then we can really go hard destroying the lives of people without phone access.
I work for a healthcare company that serves the under privileged and right now in most cities it’s easier to guarantee someone has email than a consistent phone number thanks to free WiFi hotspots. You can miss a phone payment and still read your email even if you’re cut off from cellular service.
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.
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
We actually heavily rely on connected channels to talk to most of our vendors now. Once you are on enterprise level support pretty much every vendor gives you a dedicated slack or teams channel.
It’s great since people come and go and we don’t lose our vendor comms history in random inboxes or have someone not CCd on. Any vendor we have linked is also one less vendor someone is likely to be phished talking to the wrong person on the wrong email. For support tickets there’s no wrapping and encrypting shit steps to send critical info over email, we use the slack channel. It really solves a lot of BS
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.
yes but this takes time. its great to have alternatives in the meantime.
Google only checked out and cashed in after getting a monopoly. Mozilla let themselves fade into irrelevance.
yeah, might seem good to have yet another choice, but it’s an illusion
If they’re user funded, their incentives are fundamentally different from Google’s. Even thinking as a business, it makes no sense to enshittify the way Google does. It’s a different choice, even if it’s not the choice you wanted.
different, yes. but by how much and will it be different in ways that truly matter
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.
Yeah and then we can really go hard destroying the lives of people without phone access.
I work for a healthcare company that serves the under privileged and right now in most cities it’s easier to guarantee someone has email than a consistent phone number thanks to free WiFi hotspots. You can miss a phone payment and still read your email even if you’re cut off from cellular service.
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.
We actually heavily rely on connected channels to talk to most of our vendors now. Once you are on enterprise level support pretty much every vendor gives you a dedicated slack or teams channel.
It’s great since people come and go and we don’t lose our vendor comms history in random inboxes or have someone not CCd on. Any vendor we have linked is also one less vendor someone is likely to be phished talking to the wrong person on the wrong email. For support tickets there’s no wrapping and encrypting shit steps to send critical info over email, we use the slack channel. It really solves a lot of BS
Any business2business or consumer2business communication will likely still happen over email for a very long time
The fuck it is lol, do you have any idea how much email is used in literally everything? How old are you?