Mozilla’s Thunderbird team announced plans earlier this year to launch Thundermail, their own email service and premium Thunderbird Pro subscription backed by a suite of enhanced, if entirely optional, features.

This week, MZLA Technologies Corporation gave an update on their plans – plans that could finally let viable open-source, privacy-minded solutions square up to and challenge the Google-Microsoft duopoly in personal productivity.

“For users who opt in, the goal is for these services to be smoothly integrated into the Thunderbird app, providing a natural extension of the familiar experience they already enjoy, enhanced with additional capabilities they may be looking for”, the company says.

For more details on the services and add-ons aiming to take flight soon, read on.

Thunderbird Pro Plans

Thundermail is a planned email service with full support for IMAP, JMAP and SMTP protocols (so it can be used in other compatible e-mail clients). The @thundermail.com and @tb.pro domains will be offered to subscribers, with support for custom domains too.

Many were asking: where will Thundermail’s e-mail servers will be located? Jurisdiction dictates oversight and requests for access. Some are concerned. Now we have an answer. To begin with, Thundermail servers will be based in Germany.

“Thunderbird’s investment in offering an email service reflects our broader goal of strengthening support for open standards and giving users the option to keep their entire email experience within Thunderbird,” they add.

Thunderbird Appointment will be a service integration in Thunderbird, enabling users to create, plan and link to events (Zoom calls, in-person meetings, etc) when composing e-mails. No need to zip between different tabs, or open different apps.

Since distributed teams may need to edit and plan schedules, something that current calendar protocols aren’t designed for. To address this, MZLA is investigating open standards like VPOLL in an effort to cater to be “consensus scheduling” needs.

A repo for Thunderbird Appointment is on the Thunderbird GitHub.

Other Features in Thunderbird Pro

Do you recall Firefox Send? It was one of Mozilla’s ‘actually useful’ experiments, but canned as part of the First Great Feature Cull™. Well, Thunderbird Send adds similarly convenient file sharing inside of Thunderbird, implemented as an extension.

Subscribers to Thunderbird Pro users get 500GB of storage space, and no restrictions on individual files sizes, plus support for chunked uploads and encryption. Like Thunderbird Appointment, Thunderbird Send will support self-hosting, so those who want control over their data can have it.

Other “Pro” features are being considered — nothing committed to — to flesh out the “Pro” offering, including a markdown-based note taking tool, and potentially even collaborative document editing tools a la Google Docs.

Beyond those updates, Thunderbird Assist is in the pipeline. This will add (optional) AI capabilities for Thunderbird, but the plan (for now) is not to make them part of Thunderbird Pro. Research into what kind of capabilities users may want is ongoing.

So When?

For now, there are no firm dates on when Thunderbird Pro and Thundermail will launch, but the waiting list is open for sign-ups should you want to be among the first to do so.

This is all worth keeping an eye on. Thunderbird will remain free to use, these paid-for ‘extras’ are just that: extras, and aren’t without their own costs (hosting, storage, and so on).

And when announced in April, they emphasised their commitment to open-source, open-standards, and interoperability, but noted “the absence of Thunderbird web services means that our users must make compromises that are often uncomfortable ones. This is how we correct that.”

Thunderbird’s revenue has ballooned since it launched a user-facing donation drive in 2022 — a model other open-source projects have since adopted — but the additional capabilities have their own ongoing costs.

A suite of paid-for ‘pro’ services on top should help deliver further investment to keep the venerable open-source e-mail client, and the many libre technologies which underpin and sustain it, moving full-speed ahead for many years to come.

More details are available in their blog post.