Tech Over Tea - Reviving Thunderbird From Near Destruction | Ryan Sipes

Episode Date: January 5, 2024

Today we have Ryan Sipes the Business Development & Community Manager of Thunderbird on the show who was crucial to the recent funding increases seen by the project but has also been involved in the project for a couple years more than that and has a lot to say on the project. =========Guest Links========== Thunderbird Website: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-GB/ Ryan Sipes Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryanleesipes Ryan Sipes Website: https://ryanleesipes.me/ Ryan Sipes Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@ryanleesipes Thunderbird Twitter: https://twitter.com/mozthunderbird Thunderbird Mastodon: https://mastodon.online/@thunderbird ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm, as always, your host, Brodie Robertson, and today we have someone from the Thunberg Project on. Welcome to the show, Ryan Sipes. How you doing? Doing really well. How are you? Not too bad. I'm awake a touch earlier than I normally would be,

but I don't know if that's better than the normal time I record, which is often at 1.30 in the morning. So neither is optimal optimal but we're here anyways yeah see I'm on I don't know how old you are but I made the transition to what I consider to be an old man when I went from staying up late to waking up early and so uh it's not so crazy for me, but this is not abnormal for me because the Thunderbird team is very distributed. In fact, we have a few folks in New Zealand. And so, you know, scheduling across folks in Europe, US and New Zealand is extraordinarily challenging, but doable.

Your time, what would it look, what time would a meeting normally be or does it like shift around based on the specific meeting it shifts it shifts um it's accommodating everyone right or not maybe not everyone we really never have a meeting where everyone is present except for very special occasions yeah but uh accommodating all three time zones requires some creativity and and folks to be a little flexible and say okay yeah maybe i'll start work later and stay around at my desk later right right that sounds like an absolute disaster just getting two time zones to work is hard enough just add any more in that like that's why i typically don't do

three-person podcasts unless i know that like yeah the people i'm talking to are in a similar enough time zone it's like you know one's in mst one's in est like that's easy enough we can deal with that don't throw in like gmt in there i don't know what i'm gonna do I used to think it was a big weakness that we were so distributed but now I see as we manage to get more organized that it makes it forces us to write things down and share things with each other versus like just rattling it off in a meeting and that's actually helpful because then it's down on paper or you know in this case and in a doc but then everybody can look at it refer back to it instead of just something someone said offhand so it can be a superpower but it's it's it's a difficult thing to to navigate yeah i

have absolutely no doubt about that now i'm sure most people watching this like are aware of thunderbird but for anyone that isn't how about we just start with like what is thunderbird and why would somebody even want to use it in the first place yeah so how a lot of people would describe thunderbird is it's probably the not probably it's for sure the most popular open source email client on the planet measured by the number of users. We have, depending on how you do the math, about 20 million users. And it's been around for a long, long time. It's been around for 20 years in various forms.

And so it's by no means a new project and it's built that user base over a long time. But I would add an extra layer that folks probably don't typically think about when it comes to Thunderbird, which is it's more than just an email client because a lot of times i get we get compared to giri and other folks and those are great projects but they're not a one-to-one replacement for thunderbird because thunderbird has very extensive features around calendaring and around task management and around a number of other areas that you don't typically find in other clients. And so I would go a step beyond to say it's more like a communication suite

or something like that or a personal information manager. But for the sake of ease, most people, including us, describe it as primarily an email client right right so something like geary would be more akin to like outlook whereas this does that as well and then a hundred other things yeah yeah and it does it it it's the thing that i'm pitching this is my pitch to all all the folks listening who aren't using it currently like it not only does them but it's it's been around so long and it's had so many domain experts contribute to it that it does things in ways that are like incredible that have like the

problem space has been thought through so thoroughly in Thunderbird that like, when we look at other clients and we see how they're doing some things, it's like, Oh, well, there are going to be cases where that doesn't work. Right. Whereas in Thunderbird, you've got 20 years of,

of knowledge and expertise going into like, in this scenario, this needs to behave this way and this and i think about that all the time just with like calendaring and just handling different types of email accounts and and how robust it is so sorry that's my pitch to everybody but like um it's it's it really is apple to oranges and i would say that of the proprietary applications, you know, when I think about what's out there, like Outlook is probably the closest to what we are. And then beyond that, there are very few

that I think occupy our same space. This doing like everything is one of the, it's one of the great things about Thunderbird, but in the same vein, it's also one the things i often hear like criticized about thunderbird because yeah it does so much like you know if you're just looking for an email client it's a great email client i mainly just use it for that and a bit of calendaring but i can understand why for people like that like why for people like that like maybe something else does just that it that specific focus maybe better or maybe just as good without the rest of the extra stuff that you just don't you think about yeah i i think that it's a fair it's a fair point uh i will say that one

thing that we've really focused on and if you you go to our website, thunderbird.net, we really got into this lately, is we were talking about what makes Thunderbird unique. And one thing that we kept coming back to is, I see it all the time in talking to users. I see it all the time in talking to users. There are so many users with radically different Thunderbird experiences because the ability to customize is so extreme that, you know, I swear I've seen things that don't even look like thunderbird but they are you know

someone is heavily customized for the use case and what i would argue is like you don't have to use calendar and you don't even have to make that like that whole thing if you don't turn anything on in that area nothing is happening there no processes are running around calendar you're nothing is happening and like you can cherry pick you know what you want your experience to be and i'm very confident at this point that like you know folks should take the thunderbird and if they already have a tool that works in one area, like calendar, use it for email and stand it up beside your current email client. And like, give it an honest try, not just an hour, like spend a week with it. And I guarantee that you'll do and a lot more that you can tailor to your workflow than than anything else

yeah i've personally been using thunderbird honestly like three or so years because before that i just did the whole you know web client thing that which is what most people do. We'll get into the web client thing in a moment. And I, like for me at least, I use it in a fairly, I guess, normal way. I don't really do that much customization to it. I have all of my 12 different email accounts listed out in the sidebar. And for me, I guess it's just unlike the web client thing where you have to like swap oh like i'm logged into this one i'm logged into this one yep it's just all in one place i can go through all my emails like real quickly and for me just that by itself is convenient enough but on the topic of the the web client thing with web clients nowadays being like, you know, such a standard thing, no matter what email provider you're using, pretty much most of the major ones provide some sort of web client.

Why does an email client still matter? Yeah, it's a really good question. And a few years ago, it would have been not a few years ago. I've been at Thunderbird for a long time now. Like seven or eight years ago, this would have been a really challenging question for me. But having, there's many dimensions to this answer. One, data sovereignty. to this answer one data sovereignty i've now heard folks who have been locked out of gmail or their email provider over you know even if it's just a misunderstanding or some some some

just issue like there's many issues that can pop up but they get locked out okay they spend months trying to get back in and during that, they don't have access to their digital life. Or someone's like, oh, I need to find this. I need to read this email. Having the control of your data and having a local copy of your email is like very useful um in that respect uh and of course you know there are other people who are like well i love that i can be on a plane and not connected to internet and drafting emails or just reviewing emails and replying to them and then when i hit the ground everything goes and you know and so there's that too um and then i'll take another tact

to answer this question which is what does your email experience look like using these webmail platforms of course you know there are good ones but they're all but the main ones are bad good ones but they're all but the main ones are bad in in a few a few key ways um one is they're trying to monetize you and uh you know we've recently had your email client yeah that's exactly it yeah and we've had a lot of people come over who are just like i don't like that it doesn't feel good it doesn't it feels like you know it's not it degrades email experience and you know there are no ads in Thunderbird as we'll get to there are a couple of donation appeals every year but overall like but that doesn't show up as an email yeah that's just you know a separation yeah and that's

a problem actually too is um it i i it's hard because i i have a gmail account and i had stopped going to gmail for a while even though i try to make sure i'm going just to see what's what the experience is like but i there was this there was this time period where I didn't log in to the actual webmail and uh to check out what was what it looked like and when I went back maybe the ads were there the whole time you know but I saw them and and I saw them and I was like and they look look like emails. They're at the top. And I thought that was so gross. And so, and now Outlook's doing that too.

And so it's really not a great experience. I think it really does make the experience worse. And it's also a little tricky i know it says ad but you know like it it it's not clear separation and and i don't love that so i don't know i'm sorry i was gonna say i don't know how you like go through your emails but when you have like a hundred emails there i don't pay attention to the entire thing i'm like okay who's it from what's the start of the the subject say yeah and it's probably like some nonsense from some website i signed up to a mailing list for and just didn't realize delete delete delete delete i'm not paying attention to like the entire email line unless i'm already sure

that like that's an email i care about yeah and and then on that you know kind of related to that i'll make one more case which uh well no i'll make your case again which is uh you're not having to go up and click your little avatar to change accounts if you have multiple accounts this is something that on desktop is very helpful and and it and it's just maybe it's just invisible to me now because I'm so used to having all my, but with the addition to K9 to our family and me plugging in and really trying to get, make sure all my accounts are in there and everything.

On mobile, it's just like a game changer. Like I just, I'm using the unified inbox. There are a lot of accounts in there. They're color coded so I can see what message the account is associated with. And it just allows me to really quickly manage my email versus Gmail where you're okay. You're in one account. Now click change the user account. And it's just not as fast. so that makes life simpler and and make and doesn't burn your time so much um but the last thing that i'll say is we we i talk about this with with the folks who contribute to thunderbird all the time like what what's another thing that separates us and that's

that a lot of my conversations these past two years have been around what's another thing that separates us? And that's that a lot of my conversations these past two years have been around what's actually healthy for a person. And I don't, not so many of those features have made it into Thunderbird yet, but you know what, we're not trying to manipulate your brain to do a specific thing that benefits our bottom line. Like there's no dark patterns.

There's no stickiness. Like let's get them trapped in their inbox or whatever. Like we're strictly trying to provide the best email experience, period. And honestly, I freaked out some folks on the team when I said this, I would like to find ways to help folks spend less time in their inbox, you know, and know that Thunderbird is the email app that actually helps me not spend, you know, four hours a day in my email, which some folks tell me that they do. And I'm like, that's not good. You know, like that's half your working day spent on email. That's there's actual work you probably should be doing. And, uh, and so, you know, a victory for me will be finding ways to promote wellbeing around email and around your inbox and helping you get through it so you can do the things that

You actually want to do with your time. I Definitely want to expand upon that if there's anything that you feel comfortable like saying publicly before it's actually done but before that the Gmail situation is actually the Good example of switching accounts like that's where it's not that inconvenient i started using thunder mail at thunder thunderbird i mixed i put canine mail and thunderbird here thunderbird when i started going to university because my university they use outlook and then you might have a job that uses something else and then i have my gmail so

you've got all of these yeah all of these different services none of the web mails connect to each other so you've got to like just jump around like okay what was on this service was on that service and it's just a giant nightmare to actually manage that then you have something like thunderbird and it's just like all there yeah the box and that's that's a good point and that's that's the that's a killer thing like i think about a family member and it's so funny because you're so deep in in it sometimes that you forget about the best pitches for it because i remember a family member being like they had their yahoo account they had their gmail account they had their whatever work account and they were like and we were talking about thunderbird and, and it wasn't right away.

It was like partway through the conversation. I was like, no, no, no. Actually, you know what? If you Thunderbird, you can have all these in one place. And they were like, Holy crap. I didn't, you know, like they didn't even consider that they weren't like super tech savvy, but they didn't even consider that there's a product that could save them that time of app switching and, and, and put that information in one place. And what's also cool about that is it's all in Thunderbird and all those accounts are searchable.

You know, whereas like if they're in these different data, they're in these different places. You can't search across them, you know, but in Thunderbird, you'll actually be able to say, actually, I don't remember if that came in on my junk email address or my real email address, but if I search Thunderbird, I'll find it. And that's a killer feature, too. I'm glad you're here, Brady. Yeah, a lot of people, when you are very into whether it be linux whether it be thunderbird whether it be any of these like really techie things it's easy uh easy to forget

the things that appeal to the regular person because you've been using it a long time you understand like the ins and outs of this system and understand like oh you know it's great to have my calendar directly load events that i send from an email like that's great but to someone who's just using a web client like just the fact that all the stuff is together is such a big appeal like that by itself should be the main focus yeah yep agreed and you know where we call that out to it in like on the website, which we have a new website is beautiful, but like freedom from chaos, and it and the like subtitles, waste less time finding browser tabs, which is like the whole thing like, like, we're going to consolidate this and we're going to make it, you know, awesome. And so you're exactly right. And not to jump ahead, but a lot of that was what drove this big rewrite that we did, which was like, we have all these really cool features,

but how do we make sure that everybody actually can discover them and use them and understands them and uh and so anyway we've been thinking a lot about that good point so what were you going to say before about like spending less time your emails as if there's nothing you want to say because you've not actually got it done yet we can skip over this topic but we've we've teased it a number of places one thing that i would love to see is i want on a per account level to on both my phone and my computer to selectively um put accounts into sleep or or make them go away at certain time periods or for or for certain time periods so like you know i we call it vacation mode or we called it like weekend mode where you know you're you're

done with work you still are like with canine it's still going to be in your pocket but you're like i don't really need to know if somebody sends a message at work at this point. I don't want that to disrupt my evening. So instead of having to turn off your notifications for that entire app, we're going to be more granular and allow people to say, this account gets snoozed. to say this account gets news if i go to it on purpose in the app you know obviously show me everything but otherwise you know don't like let that be invisible for this time period or when you're on vacation that's, with their attention and their time and, and being present. Cause I think email, as much as I make an email application and I love email, I also think it's an enormous distraction from when you're trying to do other things

yeah i'm bad at replying to my emails so for me it's not yeah but uh i let other things take up my time that shouldn't be like social media um so i'm not much better it's just i replaced one thing with another thing um right now you can obviously delete the entire email but that's not like the entire account from like thunderbird like that's not great because then you like you have to like re-add it yeah and can you manually disable it without like fully deleting it there are a number of ways to accomplish this but none of them are right there's no automatic way to do it but it's like hey i want, I want to snooze this between, say, your job where you don't have to answer emails out of work.

You're not an important person at the position. It's like, after 5 p.m., don't talk to me. It's like, okay, you can snooze it from 5.30 or whatever to whatever time you start the next day. Yeah. That would be really cool. Yeah. And there have been some other ideas where, you know,

that's the one that I think is most likely to make it in, in a reasonable timeframe that folks will see soon enough. But I think that the other ones are like still ideating, you know, there's a question of like, is the feature that does this, is it worth the time is it actually going to have that much of an impact i think a feature like that would i you know the other ones it's hard because you have to know people don't really use email the same way like a lot of people have a lot of different strategies for how they manage their inbox and so what you try to do is you try to figure out, well,

what are the workflows we can provide that hit the most amount of people? And that's challenging. So there are some other ideas, but none that I think are like as good as that one at this point. But I wouldn't be surprised if we have, you know, some real, like three to five really marquee,

like good wellbeing. I call them wellbeing features and annoys our, it annoys the Thunderbird community that I call them that because they, they have other names for them, but I, for me, it, they're wellbeing features.

They're features that allow you to put guardrails around how much of a distraction email is in your life. Hmm. No, I think that's... Wait, one thing, I don't know if you can do this already but obviously when you get an email you get a notification if the client's open can you set it up right now where you only get notifications from certain dresses that come in there's a there are ways to do it but they're not once again this is like where we can do a lot of good work and that's a good that's a good feature that's a good feature vip type feature yeah which is there are ways to do it but they can be approved so that everybody

knows right and can discover those easily and i think that's been the problem with thunderbird and and probably the thing that was the hardest when i came on is talking to folks and they're like, I wish I could do this. Or I, or the more common was I left Thunderbird because I couldn't do this. And me knowing like, you can do that, but that it's like, I'm in a menu and a menu. Yeah. And you have to poke around a while to figure out how to do it. And you have to poke around a while to figure out how to do it. And that really started to change.

That really started to tell me that we had to change the UX in order to make it so that people could see the power of Thunderbird. And make use of this, what is a power tool, without having to get through a wall of text to figure out how to do it. I guess that's one of the problems you have with something having so many features over so many years. There's going to be parts of the code base that were written 10 plus years ago that still work just fine today, but the UX they were designed with then

is not the way that you would go about it now. And going back through the history of Thunderbird, Thunderbird itself has gone through some crazy times. Because, you know, it was spun out in 2015 and to the community. And the community is why it's alive. to the community and the community is why it's alive. But during that time, the, there wasn't anybody working on it full time for a while. And so the,

the barrier to entry for making a patch that gets in was, did you make the right doesn't work okay put it in and i i'm sure that your audience given that they are familiar with open source projects they had all these people scratching their own itch but they're just like they're engineers you know they're like just put the button there it's fine like and like the is, it just got crazy. And a lot of our work, even though I get yelled at on the internet for it, is saying, like, this is a great feature. But, you know, where it is, it's a feature that needs people need to be able to discover or it's too prominent for having only a thousand people out of the 20 million who actually use it right and so you know that's that's a real hard thing and and you know when you change it you get those thousand people yelling at you like you know why isn't this like right in the main area of the app and it's like well it's because nobody uses it except for you so we put it in the settings because we still think it's important but

it's not important enough to warrant that screen space that that it took up before and um and yeah and do and and look at that over 20 years of all these different stages Thunderbird went to. And we've got a lot of not just technical debt, but I guess just UX debt and other things. There's so many dimensions that that exists in and that's probably our has been our biggest challenge too is coming into the project after 20 years and after a few years of not really having anybody who is working on it full-time and then having a lot of cleanup to do. So when did you get involved with the project? So I was around in some ways,

but not in a prominent way. When I was at System76 in 2016, I think I joined System76 in 2015 but I was around and I wasn't really contributing I was just kind of sharing thoughts with folks because when I was at System76

we would get a deployment of a bunch of System76 computers at like a university so our entire engineering computer lab might be like System76 computers running Ubuntu. And I kept getting this question from all these groups saying, what email client should we be using on these machines?

Because like when we deploy Windows, the Outlook is what we encourage people to use. But you know, in this engineering department in this company, outlook is an option. So what should we use evolution? Should we use Thunderbird? Should we use, you know, what's the best thing? And it really bothered me because I was looking at them

and I was like, there were problems with each of the solutions, really clear problems. And so I actually had a hard time deciding what to recommend to folks. And then I saw in 2017 a job come up for community manager at Thunderbird. And I was like, yeah, that's a way for me to, it was only contract like part time. I was like, I'll just spend my after hours, after work at System96, just helping them get their stuff together.

And obviously that changed over time. I'm managing director of like the subsidiary that Thunderbird sits in now. And so my trajectory has been quite crazy, but that was in 2017 that I joined. And I was pretty clear when I joined, I remember like the interview process, which was all community members. Cause that's what was running the project.

And they asked, you know, like, what, what would I kind of like, what was my feedback or what would I change if I came in? And I just kind of went down the list of like things that I had gotten from my time at system 76 like there was like this these things prevent people from you know deploying it in these different places and they agreed and you know we and that started that out but um but then i i don't think people realize in saying that i don't think people realize when i came on just how close thunderbird was to extinction like it was in really really bad shape we couldn't consistently even get the product to build you know and um and we didn't have enough people actively working on it to prevent breakages because we're downstream from Firefox. We share a lot of the same code.

And the Firefox folks, which it isn't their fault, they shouldn't have to worry about breaking Thunderbird. and that's why that's part of the reason Thunderbird got spun out to begin with is they were having to make all these concessions that were slowing down the improvement of Firefox because they didn't want to break Thunderbird right and eventually they were like like Firefox needs to be that's our product that's used by hundreds of millions of people like we need to make sure that we can keep up with Chrome and, you know, the other browsers. And so they made a good decision. But and Thunderbird just was never in a position to take care of itself to keep up with those changes, let alone contribute back useful things. Like if you're not even able to keep up with changes,

you're not benefiting upstream, which is a good thing for a project to do. And so anyway, there were a lot of problems there. But what we talk about donations, and I know you did the video and everything and what my contention was, I kept thinking all the time, like, cause I had, I'd been in system 76, but before that I had started a startup called my crop, which was a open source, like alex yeah amazon echo type thing okay

right um and uh i remember thinking like 20 million users that's a lot of people yeah i would have like maybe this is this is not true but you know the thing i would say at the time is I would have killed for 20 million users you know on my product before but what I kept thinking is these users don't know that Thunderbird is in this bad shape and if it disappears it's going to cause a lot of people a lot of pain and you know there was actually an argument at the time because i kept kind of saying like hey we need to let our users know that what's what's happening and we also need to like tell them that we need their support so that we can hire some engineers to help us keep up with just the changes that are happening. What year would this be in?

What's that? What year would this be in? This would have been 2018. It started probably in 2018. I had the thought at the beginning, but as I learned more about how it all worked, I began to kind of think like, okay, well, what are we going to do? And what was funny is, and this, this is something that I know you want to talk about, is so many of the open

source developers treated this idea of asking our users to support us with money, as like the worst idea anyone has ever raised. And and and i understand that because my background is open source more than anything else like been in these communities since you know i was like 14 and like so i get i understand where they're coming from but you know at the same time like if the if folks can't if the community of folks who are volunteering can't actually maintain the software alone, then you need to figure out a way to maintain it. but they thought it was kind of maybe tacky or something to ask the users for money. I don't know if there's a better word for that, but they just felt uncomfortable asking for money.

Sure, sure. And so that, but that's what we ultimately did. We managed to get on the same page and I remember the first couple of appeals were like very small very like yeah i only saw it when like the web page popped up with the ui update like what were the earlier ones well we made it more prominent on the start page which is the thing that shows up before you actually like choose an email and um and that helped and then um we made when we updated i started including a donation link there on the

update page and it was small too but it it enough people clicked it that it made a pretty big difference and so we're talking about, you know, a few hundred thousand dollars to then, okay, we had our first like one point, why I don't remember what it was, $1.2 million a year. And that sounds like a lot of money. And I love that the community, I love that everybody's like, man, when that happened, like and i i was a

treasurer at the time on like thunderbird council too so i produced the reports for the donations and everything and i shared that out with the community and they're like they essentially they were like thunderbirds loaded and i was like well if you start counting up where that money goes, because it's not just like you have a million dollars. Now you can hire eight to 10 engineers or however many it is. Distributing Thunderbird costs money. All the infrastructure to do that is pretty intense. And there's all these just costs around distributing this much software that is just pretty big in and of itself. Well, just the fact that you have like if you had 700,000 and you were like some random terminal app like that, yeah, you would be loaded.

But you have 20 million users. Like, yeah, that by itself is expensive. Yeah. And just like bug reports, like we still get slammed for not keeping up with bug reports 20 million users produces a ton of bug reports and we we i we you know we have folks who comb through them individually and then we have systems that we build and constantly update to try and help us triage them and like that that alone is like to your point as an expensive activity yeah because you want to catch the stuff that's like bad like thunderbird deleted And like that, that alone is like, to your point, as an expensive activity, because you want to catch the stuff that's like bad,

like Thunderbird deleted an email that I didn't delete or, you know, things like that. But coming through all of the reports to get to that is, is a gargantuan task. And, but it worked and it allowed me to continue to pitch ideas to everyone. Like, can we do this? Can we do that? And the one, the golden place I wanted to get, which like let's show it in the application to everyone. Yeah.

And no one wanted to do that, like do a full page thing. And I understand that, but I thought, okay, but if we do that once a year, I mean, Wikipedia, you know, take a couple of times a year takes over your, before you can even scroll to the content of the article, you get this big appeal from, you know, Mr. Wales and it says, I need your help. And now I feel like they are. Let me have a look.

Yeah, they are. Yeah. But it's's like but i never felt angry about that you know that's why i was trying to tell folks is like most of the time if you see these appeals people don't get angry they just glance at it for a couple seconds and then move on or they don't like you're that those are the two things and and uh so ultimately fortunately folks agreed and because you know you in this community in this setting where the community has been running the project for multiple years you don't do anything by there's no bdfl i know the internet thinks that there is you know but there really isn't and uh so you you kind of have to bring everybody along and convince them and have these conversations and they're good conversations to have because you could be it could be terrible like you could really exhaust people by like doing all these

terrible pop-ups and things that annoy the hell out of people and we didn't want to do that obviously but and that that was a few years on that was in 2021 i think right no 2021, we did a more aggressive update appeal. So we made it larger in the here's the update. This is what you get, by the way, like donate. And then last year, 2022, we did a completely distinct. So we did the update one with the bigger, you know, it's like, here's your update, by the way, donate to support us. And then at the end of the year, we did, hey, Thunderbird needs you to stay alive and to provide a decent experience. And that was where

that was where we saw the big jump from like 2.7 million to 6 million yeah and uh and that was good i mean that was a good thing that we did in it and to say that it has fixed a ton of problems in thunderbird land would be a massive understatement. So back in 2017, where it says 736,000, what did that mean for Thunderbird? What sort of state was it in when it had that sort of funding? And then what sort of state is it in now where you have a lot more to work with?

Yeah, so when I came on, that at seven hundred and seven thousand that was there were a couple places the start page had a little appeal and then people there was a donate on the website but it wasn't it didn't we didn't ask like upfront you just had to click the button and donate and thank God people did it and like how far did that money really stretch with a project like Thunderbird? So we had three people. I was part-time, so two and a half, I guess. And then paying for infrastructure. And that ate a lot of the money.

Yeah. And in that next year, that bump up, like that allowed us to add a couple more engineers, which started to help us. Like we got to the point where at least we're not broken all the time. Right. Right. you see that go up is like a few more engineers a few you know less breakages that are holding back fixing bugs and and rolling out features but mostly it was that first category it's like as if we're not broken we can fix bugs and that was for multiple years and it wasn't really until the year before supernova 102 that i felt like we finally got to roll out some improvements to the actual way that thunderbird works so you're talking four years until we actually got to a place where we could look a little bit around and say, well, what can we fix?

What are the things that would improve our users' lives beyond just like real true bugs that shouldn't be happening at all? And I'm sure you've probably heard someone say, oh oh if you have 700,000 think about all of the engineers you could hire with that and obviously paying for the infrastructure as well like look you could hire way more people than that like just run it on run it on red just as close to the line as possible but I imagine the concern there would be is the funding going to be consistent like are we going to have enough the following year or do we have to just fire a bunch of people like can we actually do this people don't remember i did i have gotten that before people don't remember that you're talking about people's employments and their and their livelihoods and you have a responsibility when you start hiring people you know or even contracting to at least be provide some level of stability

not and not just for them actually for the project too because you can't make plans if you don't have some stability so you're right we we always tried to be sustainable sustainable and to not count on us being as successful the following year as we were that year. Now, everyone will tell you who has worked with me on Thunderbird that I'm incredibly optimistic. And I will gloat and say that I called every single, within a very small margin of like 2% every single year, our performance. And so on revenue and so that, but that was crazy optimism. And I admit that like lots of people told me you're crazy.

You know, you can give it a try, but I don't think that's gonna work. But what I always plan for in the back of my head is like, in actually budgeting it out, what happens if that doesn't materialize? What do I have planned already for if we do half that we did last year? for if we do half that we did last year. Because I thought there's always a chance that we've saturated the people who want to donate and that they're not going to donate next year. Because they're like, I already gave, they're fine.

Everything's fine. I don't need to give this year or i remember doing the budgeting when covid was just in china and i remember there were some headlines like maybe maybe it will get out maybe that this will be really bad and um i remember thinking when i was budging that you're like okay what if that kicks off some kind of bad really bad recession where folks don't they're like i've got enough problems i'm not going to donate to thunder like that's the last thing that happening and but what i and i and it says in the budget that year it says something like in the document itself like that i submitted to the council the thunderbird council is the

community governing body something along the lines of this accounts for, you know, the potential of a global recession from, I don't remember how I put it in there, but, you know, and what I was wrong in that we did have the pandemic, but people were stuck in their house in front of their computer which actually had i think the opposite effect where people were like staring at thunderbird for a lot of time every day and they're like they see these appeals or whatever and they're like yeah okay like sure like i'm i'm still working not everybody but you know a lot of folks who were using thunderbird forward where they're working they're like they're like i'm not spending my money i'm going out and stuff i can give thunderbird five bucks uh and that really helped um it but that's a long-winded way of acknowledging that you're right we always planned and we always had runway for one year and we still do for one year if donations completely stop we have one

year where we could where if zero was coming in we would have the runway to figure that out and uh to adjust the course. So, okay, we can see what the actual number is. A lot of people like to argue with what's actually happening based on their personal experience. When I did my video on the Thunderbird funding, I had a bunch of people saying, no, I hate this.

Why would anyone want this to be in another application? Because I suggested it maybe like kde could do something similar or gnome could do something similar and i obviously had people who were like no how that would be terrible what that no but like what community reaction did you actually see from this funding outside of the obvious it worked you can see by the numbers it's challenging because there's a lot of like great love it i'm glad thunderbird is gonna continue to exist and improve as a tool um there is not that much but some people who are like don't you know like spend the money this way don't spend it that way right and um but fortunately like if you actually look at the breakdown

which is in the financial support a financial report 80 of it is just essentially, I guess that we marked it as personnel. Okay. But like 90% of that is engineers who are actively contributing code to the project. So like most of the money is going towards, you know, what people want and and then outside of that if you look at the breakdown like uh between like general and administrative which is six percent and uh and professional services which is five and it or computer and tech, which is two. What is computer and tech in this context?

So computer and tech is actual equipment for folks to work on. Right, okay. As well as some tooling, some tool chain, like stuff that folks need in order to develop software or that we think we need. And then would infrastructure be like under general administrative? It's kind of split up depending on what kind of, because professional services encompasses like agreements that we have

with like Mozilla Corporation, who has a lot of infrastructure that instead of us building it ourselves, we're like, we just want to use what you have because we are building on the same technology. But of course it costs them time and money to maintain that and keep it running and so we pay for things like that and then general administration also includes that which includes other tools and things and frankly there is something that it doesn't it truly doesn't represent that much of the spend but when you get to a point where you have we're now up

to 30 people 30 people the just the cost of having that many people begins to be a significant thing yeah and me and and I don't want to say managing but just like the cost of just operating. Like just doing payroll and stuff like that. Exactly. Yeah. And so those are things that, you know, sometimes you get pushback from folks in the community. Like, why are you spending, you know, 6% on this stuff?

And it's like, well, you know, we spend the least amount that we can in that area and still be able to, you know, pay people and keep them contributing code. I'm sure the most annoying part is the 5.8% on donation processing fees. Yeah, you know, we have a really good deal on that. on that um we we've spent a lot of time trying to bring that low but also like not just bring it low but also provide a good experience because you you can provide a bad donation experience which we which when i started we had which was i want to donate okay I'm going to do a recurring donation. Okay, great. I want to cancel that recurring donation after a few months. Okay. Email me and I'll turn it off. I see. And so you eventually have to say like, oh, that's not ideal. Like you want folks to be able to do things without somebody actually

in the background like pulling levers and so you know while you can go cheaper but you pay a price in just convenience and man time and all of that stuff so right, right. But I will say going down that rabbit hole, that is not the majority of feedback. That is very rare feedback that we get of people hopping in there. And we're really, with this report, I try to be as transparent as we can and also respect people's time. I have encouraged people if they want to know more they can ping me you know i'm in the other community channels like and i will explain it to them you know if they have a if they have a good question but like we, we, there's no, there's no like back room.

Like we put everything in the report and we try to make sure folks know exactly where their money is going because we think we're using the money so responsibly that when they see that, they'll be like, okay, that's like, that's actually where I want. That's what I want it going towards.

Right. So. There's always going to be people to complain no matter what you do though. How do you find yourself filtering out the people who are just complaining for the sake of complaining and the people who have like actual legitimate concerns? and the people who have like actual legitimate concerns? I mean, you can pick that up pretty quickly. One thing that I do that I'm proud of,

but is not necessarily good for my mental health, is even if somebody comes out and they yell, you know, or they're kind of like saying things in a really confrontational way, I try to like set that aside and look like, are you, do you legitimately have like a concern or a question that I can try to address? I try to ask them to clarify what they're saying. Yeah, and if the answer is yes, I will do it. I will try to the best of my ability to answer that. When I have a lot of folks who, not a lot,

I shouldn't say a lot, it feels like a lot because any one bad interaction is like big, bigger in your mind. Right. But I have some folks who come back and they tell me what, what we're doing. And, and I'm, and you know,

that is the type of thing where I'm like, I'm like, I don't know what to tell you. Like I'm, I'm trying to engage with you. But if you're just going to tell me what we're, what we're doing, which usually isn't correct, like, they're like, they're like, Oh, well, you know, it's a lot of it comes from like, just like a Mozilla, you know, and they're like, the one that makes me the most upset is when folks are like,

like, why do you need donations? You have all this Google search money. I'm like, no. Literally, Thunderbird is in a different company. And it's still, yes, it's still owned by Mozilla, but there has been no investment from mozilla in thunderbird since 2015 and so like the so we're we are completely donation funded and if donations go away thunderbird goes away like there's no there's no and that's okay, we, as a community and as a project believe that we should be self-sustaining,

but what frustrates me is when folks tell me like, no, you have like Google ad money, like, you know, and I'm like, listen, like, I don't know what to tell you. Like, and that's, if there are frustrations, those frustrations those are it where folks are telling a story to themselves that isn't true but you know it's the internet so you

can only go so far in trying to convince someone of how things are yeah if you explain to someone how it is and they still don't believe you like at that point you cannot reason someone out of a and they still don't believe you like at that point You cannot reason someone out of a position that they didn't reason themselves into Yeah, and we have to release

If you go to the Mizzou website, we have to release Because we're owned by a nonprofit the nonprofit must release their tax returns They own MZLA which is where Thunderbird is so they release mzla's information too so you can see a lot there you can see the delineation and like what what we get what it's what you can see a lot of information about like what our business looks like and you know And, you know, you could, if they, for instance, like we're giving us Google ad or Google search money, you would see that in there, but you don't, you see it matches our revenue, you know, uh, and the other pieces, some folks are really skeptical of Mozilla period. And I can't say that. That's, I can't say that, what do I want to say here? It's okay, like they can have that opinion that they just, for whatever reason, have decided that they don't like Mozilla as an entity.

But I think for the open source community, it's really a sad thing because the people who make up mozilla in my experience talking to all these folks and i talked to a lot of folks in the foundation in the corporation they have the same values that a lot of open source members do around privacy open source software and and these did and and the freedom to use software the way you want and not be the product. And I have yet to meet anyone at Mozilla who doesn't share those values. And I feel like the community is harder on Mozilla than they are on the actual bad companies that do the bad things. And maybe that's because Mozilla holds itself to a higher standard and and when they mess up it's

like hip hop you know like hypocrisy but any organization or set of organizations in the case of mozilla that are as big as they are are gonna mess up occasionally and like but i feel the the other folks who frustrate me are folks who say like, Mozilla is bad, period. And it's like, and, you know, and then they're like, I don't use Firefox, I use Waterfox. And it's like, you realize like 99% of what you're using, 99.8% of what you're using is, you know, funded and developed in Mozilla. is you know funded and developed in Mozilla and like I do love when people argue like oh I don't

use Firefox I use an outdated version like yeah you can go in like half this is the problem with a lot of the browser forks a lot of them are browsers I'm sure you can you've spoken to people that work on Firefox a browser is very difficult to

maintain and when it's like three dudes who are just volunteers who are like forking off a project like even just doing that like that is going to be a massive nightmare to maintain and basically all of them you know i i don't think there is a big firefox fork that's actually successful there are a couple of chromium ones but on the firefox side yeah i think they're all basically just like volunteers and maybe a couple people have like reasonable donations but nothing's like actually keeping up well with the project and and and what's crazy is like the the firefox folks the you know, who are working on Firefox, they are like open source, like true believers. And so a lot of times they're actually like, like, OK, we've got this fork.

Something's wrong with it. Like, how can we like let this person know or like fix it upstream and like get that patch down to them you know they care about those forks even though like you know some of those some of the some forks in the world of any project are kind of like you know upstream they're kind of like oh we do it better than upstream we don't like upstream but yeah it's it's sad because I have a couple of friends well well, one friend in particular, who is well-known on the internet and in the open source community, who really has it out for Mozilla. And I've had a number of conversations with him saying like, what do you think is happening within Mozilla?

It's like the complete opposite. When you're actually sitting in the rooms and you're listening to folks, like what they're talking about, first and foremost, are like, how do we how do we produce something in line with our values? And any other consideration, money, whatever, is a distant second. And it is sad whenever you see folks who are criticizing the organization, who are in this community, who, if they actually met the people who are working on it, they would not do that. They would be like, oh, this is a really good person who, you know, is trying to do, like, the right thing i can't speak for corporate but from the engineers that i've seen out there you know just in the foss world just like with red hat the engineers they're all great people like they're all doing great work you might have issues with the way the company is run

specific things that corporate is doing but people like you need to separate the people who are doing the groundwork from the company that you may have issues with yeah but even the i've spoken now to every member of mozilla leadership i think and they all say they if you ask them, like, how did you end up here? It's all something like, well, you know, in my career, I worked at Google. I worked at Microsoft. I worked at Twitter. I worked at whatever.

And their list goes on and on. Depending on how old they are, too, it's a different list of companies. And they're like, I felt like I was compromising my values in some way when i worked there and i wanted to come to a place where i could bring my talent but but in support of the in support of values that i thought were good and i agreed with and and uh and usually And usually, in fact, almost everyone I know in leadership has a background in open source, in activism around like digital rights to privacy and things like that. And they are giving up opportunities at places where they could make a heck of a lot more money to, to try and do good. And, and I think that,

I think that some of the criticism that I have seen on the internet is just kind of unfounded. Cause like, I don't, there's no one in it. There is no one period that I have met at Mozilla who is there for money. There are just the amount of talent you need to work on the products at Mozilla and their competitors you're competing against. Like, if you're good enough to work on a browser that's trying to keep up with Chrome and Edge

and Safari, doing a stack that is completely Mozilla, because Gecko, even though the rendering engine is is also completely in-house it's the only independent one left on the planet like to do that is like so hard that if you're capable of doing that you can go somewhere else and make more money uh so anyway i'll get off that soapbox. But the folks who are working on Thunderbird, who are working on Firefox, who are working on the different products that Mozilla creates, are doing it because they love open source, or they love, or they're, you know, a big proponent of privacy, of digital data sovereignty,

all these different things that Mozilla stands for. So, end of rant. So one thing we didn't really touch on earlier is what does the relationship between Thunderbird and Mozilla actually look like at this point? Well, you know, we're so Thunderbird is a project. Right. And then you have to and that is community run. There is a elected council who have what we call module ownership over the whole project. And they appoint module owners under them who manage the different parts of Thunderbird who are kind of the leader in each of those areas. So one would be like mail,

another one would be calendar, et cetera, et cetera. Those aren't always, and in fact, right now, I don't think most of them are employees of MZLA, right now I don't think most of them are employees of MZLA, which is just the legal home for hiring people who work on Thunderbird. Now, our relationship back to the foundation is that is that NZLA is obviously owned by the foundation as a subsidiary. They help us solve problems that, frankly, even for a team our size, we're still kind of small in that. We encounter problems sometimes. For instance, a company in China just disputed our trademark.

Oh, that's cool. You know, in China just like disputed our trademark. Oh, you know, in China. Okay. So like we're mostly engineers in MZLA. So we don't have the actual ability to like sort that problem out. And so, you know,

the foundation and their expertise helps us sort that out. And, and they do a number of things for us like that. And they own the trademark for for thunderbird and they have a trademark for firefox um and then uh what else should i say the mozilla corporation who makes firefox um is we collaborate on the things that we share, which we share quite a bit of things. And they're really helpful for solving problems at scale

that are difficult for us to solve because they're operating at, you know, depending on what we're talking about, a 10 to 100x scale so when when we're successful and we're like oh my gosh we're successful and we're encountering this new problem they're like oh it's okay like we know we've dealt with this problem before we know how to solve it so i guess that's like the the way i would think about all these things. And now we're at a point where we fix problems in Thunderbird that also fix problems in Firefox.

And of course, they fix problems for us too. Sometimes they create problems because we're downstream for them. But that's not really their fault. They're building a product. And the last thing I'll say, and we can talk a little bit about Supernova because it's relevant, is we have done a lot of work Supernova because it's relevant. Yes. Is we have done a lot of work to decouple from the breakages, you know, because a browser is not a web, it's not an email client.

Yeah. And we were reusing a lot of things from the browser that frankly, we should have built ourselves. ourselves and so stuff was breaking that was like well really if we stopped using the browser component for that and we just made a component that's for email or calendar or insert you know feature here it wouldn't break because we would we would it would be purpose built for what we're doing and so like i said it's not their fault their fault. It's just a matter of being downstream from somebody. So, I guess Supernova then. But one thing before Supernova, there actually was a period where I was considering

not using Thunderbird. Because before the update came out, I had this weird bug where if I deleted, I think, like five or six emails at once, it just crashed every time. I don't't know why I never worked it out soon as the update came in problem gone I can delete a thousand emails it's all good yeah I mean email is hard you know we're talking about donations, even 6 million, like there are so many email providers out there and our users like, you know, are using them. They're using them. And like you,

there is a standard. IMAP is a standard, but not everybody follows the standard. Right. And so, and and and by not everybody i mean like a lot of people and like so so we're constantly finding issues with how folks are doing things and there are two kind of ways to approach that which we do both simultaneously one contact the provider say hey you're doing this weird thing did you mean to do this and they they either say no and we've had some really large providers say no and fix the problem on their end or they say yes at which point we have to do we have to just say like okay well what are we going to do to accommodate this weird way that somebody's doing this and so i you

know that bug could have been us but but there are so many layers of interaction that it's kind of difficult to say but you know the the i guess the good thing is is that and we'll we'll talk about this in a moment in the past you know we had this esr i mean that is what we are on right now like we do a yearly release we do point updates but those can't have to be by the very nature of limited in what they do because you can't backport some things and um and that has been a challenge because sometimes you have things that aren't quite working right and you have to put a band-aid on it because you're like we have the fix in the esr, but because the next ESR, but because the problem is maybe too large in scope, we have to like, figure out how we're gonna solve it and then come back and do the big

thing that solves it in the in the right way. But next year, we're moving to a monthly release, people will still be able to get the ESR if they need that yearly cadence. But we're going to encourage most of our users to move to the monthly release because it allows us more freedom in how quickly we fix things and how we fix them, which will be really great for solving problems like yours, I would assume. Yeah, I don't know what the problem was. It could have been any number of things. It was on Gmail.

I don't know what the problem was. It doesn't happen now, so I don't even need to think about it anymore. Yeah. When did the UI rework become an idea that started, like, getting floated around? And, like, how long did it take to get done? 2018 was when we produced, you know. Wait, so when the project was, like, barely dead? Oh, barely alive?

Yeah. Okay. Well, you know, I came on and I was going around as a community manager, which I also did social media and stuff, and I was just asking folks, like, especially folks who came and used it. And then they said something in whatever channel to say, like, I used it and I left. And I would reach out and I'd say, why?

What were the problem areas? And a lot of folks said, you know, like, the user interface, it's cluttered, it's hard to navigate, it's overwhelming. And when they would describe what they were trying to do, I was like, yeah, yeah, I understand that. And so we were like, okay, we should at least come up with an idea of what what this would look like to fix it and so our ux architect at the time now he's the our uh head of product engineering but uh at the time he was the earth's architect alex um that's alessandro castellani he came up with a really amazing um they're mock-ups but they're more than mock-ups because they they actually have like if you look at all of them they have the complete flows and everything so you

can kind of play around as if you're using the application and see what that ux would be like and what's hilarious and i'm not accusing microsoft this, but what's hilarious is that got released and then a year later, the new Outlook pictures got released and they looked remarkably similar. So that was fun. We released that, but as we went into figuring out

what it takes to do that, we found out there are a ton of architectural issues and technical debt that prevent us from making that change in any reasonable timeline. And that was depressing for me. That was like, you know, you're thinking like, I'm going to come in, I'm going to help make a really big impact. And then having to take a step back and say, well, what if it takes me three years to make that impact versus a year? You know, am I ready to hang on that long and like, try to get through that? And, and the answer turned out obviously to be yes, but it was, it was tough to have to go through 20 years of code and essentially like

audit, like, what do we, what do we have to change in order to do this? And it was not trivial. Mike Conley is a principal engineer on Firefox, but he started, it was a little Thunderbird back when it was in. And he's amazing. He produces a video series called The Joy of Coding, where he teaches folks how to, you know, how to be essentially develop, you know, but using Firefox and using other projects in the mozilla verse to to uh show that and uh he's just a lovely man but he he said what you guys did was akin to moving an apartment building with people in it from the cliff side to a new location in town

without everybody dying or you know something really bad happening and uh and that's what it felt like doing it it's like you know like we are changing these massive parts of the application that we rely on in many places. And if we screw up and we don't catch that screw up, really bad things could happen to people's email data, which is not ideal. But we did succeed. And we did finally ship at least the first iteration of the UX improvements that we have planned. And then next year, so June or July 2024, we'll see what I think are going to be... It's never final, but what it should be where I will sit back and say, okay, I'm pretty happy with this yeah I

when I first saw it was like wow this like it felt familiar but like what's a good way to put it like familiar but polished I guess a good way to put it yeah we said a Thunderbird user who's been using this for 20 years should look at this and feel comfortable, but it needs to have a UX, it needs to ultimately be a UX that is better and helps people be more effective at the tasks that they're trying to do.

And if you're on the UX team at Thunderbird, you hear me say things like, I'm sure they get annoyed by it, but like contextual. Like in Thunderbird, it used to be that you had all the options everywhere. And so you right click on something and it's still not great. We're going to, you know, but like right click on something and you have like this, this right click menu that was like, it went on forever. And there were things in there that you really couldn't even do in that context but it's but you know maybe there was some way to do it with some settings on and and what we ultimately decided was like well we can look and see what what is actually like relevant in this moment make sure that those are there

and then if somebody has a more complicated use case, you know, we can expose that, but, but like make sure that the things that people need when they need it is there for them. And not like an option out of a hundred, but an option out of like the actual most relevant things. And we have heat maps. So we don't collect any personal data whatsoever but we do have interaction heat

maps so we see what points in the application buttons menu items people are clicking on and what that has allowed us to do it was really funny because you talk about arguments on the internet. Like when we were moved, I remember we, we didn't remove, we moved a couple of options in the menu and folks were like, why did you move that? That's, that's like, everybody's using that. That's like a perfect place for it. And, and I remember having being like, I'm so glad i have these heat maps i showed it to them and it's like 20 million people over the course of a year clicked it like three times and it's like it's like that might just be you like you know like the you know like this is not uh this is not a used area of the application.

And so adding that cognitive load of putting options there that no one's going to use is just making life more difficult. And we as technical users think about things a little differently than most of our users who are, everybody thinks that most of our users are technical Linux users that's not true at all at all in any way most of our users are our Windows users firstly and and when we go out and we try to randomly interview our users a lot of them are just normal people you know they're tax guy yeah yeah you know

whatever whatever yeah i learned that my stepdad's computer the other day he's got a a mac uh what do you i mac from like five years ago he's always run firefox always run thunderbird he doesn't know he works on a farm he's just like a mechanic on a farm yep and we have a lot of people like that and when they encounter options that they don't understand it burns time for them because they're like is that what i want you know and like ultimately if what we talked about earlier if if we're keeping something around for a small, small handful of users who use that feature in a way that it's not intended or something like that,

well, that's not really a good reason to have that there. If folks want to have that there, there's customization options to have it behave that way, but we're not going gonna make it the default. But Supernova, really hard, but turned out really well and laid a fantastic groundwork for all of the remaining changes we need to make for I feel like us to in earnest

actually compete with the applications like Outlook. And I want to live in a world where folks don't use open source as a crutch, where they don't say like, I use Thunderbird because it's open source. That's a great reason to, that's a great thing. That's great for Thunderbird. It's great that it's open source. That's a great thing. That's great for Thunderbird. It's great that it is open source. But I want people to say, I use Thunderbird because it's the best tool for the job.

Like Blender, for example. People don't care that Blender is open source. Blender is incredible. Yep, exactly right. And I feel like I've had people try to convince me the other way and say like, yeah, but you know, it's open source. So like, you don't like trying to convince me to not try to create the best product because, because of a disbelief that it can be. because of a disbelief that it can be. And I don't buy into that at all.

I think open source is the enabler for us to be the best product. And we shouldn't be happy with being second best. Oh, but we're open source. We should be like, no, because we have this, what I consider the right way to make software we're able to build the best thing yep i think this goes back to what we were saying before where when you're trying to like sell whatever term you're trying to want to use for you just try to like get someone to use a program like Thunderbird. It's great that it's open source,

but those other things, like having all your email accounts in one location, that's so much more important. The fact that it's open source to someone who doesn't write a line of code in their entire life, they don't even know what source code is. It doesn't matter that it's open source to them. The fact that it's free probably matters a lot more, but the open source really only matters to the people that already

care about open source. This is a problem that I've brought up with the FSF with their messaging. They're great at shilling to free software people and nobody else. People who already agree with you, they agree with you you don't need to convince them yeah the problem one problem we have in the open source community too is our developers not all of them not most of them but some of them and this is true at every community. And it holds back good open source software. They're making these arguments like, every user is like them. And what I try to kind of help folks see is like,

in this mailing list for developers, we're in a bubble. Yeah, yeah. Just the fact that you're on a mailing list puts you in a bubble. Yeah, exactly, exactly. in a bubble yeah just the fact you're on a mailing list puts you in a bubble yeah exactly exactly and it's like and it's like trying to say like i acknowledge the point you're making but if you actually go and you talk to the normal thunderbird user they're just what you're pitching is just doesn't work doesn't work for them and and so you know i i see this a lot in open source software where they're they want they say

things like we want to be more successful with your normal user but then they build for the power user. And, and what I think about that is that you should enable the power user to do what they want to do. But if you really want to reach just normal folks, you know, build the defaults to those people and then enable the power users to, cause they, they're going to learn how to do it. They're going to figure out how to do it. They're going to figure out how to do the crazy stuff.

You can make it easy for that to happen, but, but you know, like for Thunderbird, we're too far down this road of, we have 80% of 80, 90% of normal, you know, folks who aren't developers using the application, like we need to build for them. And then, by the way, like we are going to make sure that everything that we build has the ability for you to customize it

to meet your special needs. So that's, yeah. So you want to have a streamlined core feature set. And then for people who want to expand out from that, have those tools easily accessible, but not in a way that overwhelms someone who's just trying to do that like basic functionality. Yeah. I mean, most people want to see their emails on thunderbird apply to

those emails and write new emails you know that's what they that's what they want to do if you happen to use for business i guess also make a new event and that's pretty much yeah that's probably it yeah yeah yeah and and so for us it's, let's make those activities work really, really well. And then the other activities that folks tell me that they're doing, let's make sure that you can do them. But that's not going to be, you know, a significant part of our time trying to figure out how you can do. I wish I had good examples. They're all very interesting but very obscure you know anything involving rss already puts you into the weird category yeah or you know it's like it's

like i'm not actually using a mail server i'm connected to you know the mail direct the mail in actually like system folder in you know my lin my Linux installed, you know, you know, it's like, it's like, I understand that you're using this tool for that purpose. But that's not the main use case that we're focused on. Like, that is something where, like, we really, we really are going to spend 99% of our time on these main use cases and then we will help you if you want to help us make improvements to this use case. So what has been the reaction to the new UI? Because I personally really like it.

But obviously considering the old UI has been around for a while, there's going to be a lot of nostalgia for, like, what it was. And there are a couple of Reddit posts I've seen, like, how do I revert back to the old look? Like, what happened to the old look? What has been, has it been, like, a general positive reception to it? Yeah. So there's a few indicators, because we were really worried about that.

There's a few indicators that we use. One is obviously what do we see? What do people tell us? What do people write us? What do people post? It's challenging because most people who like it don't go out of their way to post on Reddit. And people will always – change is hard. And we're not oblivious to that. In fact, we've talked a lot about that.

We wanted to make it so that folks would have the same experience or a very, very similar experience when they update it. The car view is new, but there's still the list view, and we don't change that. If you're on list we if you're if you're the car view is new but there's still the list view and we don't change that if you're on list view you're on list view when you update and and the other thing that i looked at really closely was frankly um the pings the daily active user pings. We don't see any information about the user, but we do get pinged when you start it, the client asks for an update, things like that.

Are these numbers changing? And the answer is not really at all. If the changes were very detrimental, no one really left, you know? And so, and in fact, it looks like we've gained users. And so the thing is like, I kind of like take everything with a grain of salt. I listened to the concerns about

you know the changes we made but then I also like leverage that against are we seeing any behavioral changes as a result and if the answer is no and I have to say let's try to address these problems that people are raising but But on the whole, I don't think we've made a mistake here. And in fact, what I've heard a lot of folks say, so the changes were for our existing users, but they're also based on a lot of feedback from people who came and used it and left. And we didn't want to be an application that also based on a lot of feedback from people who came and used it and left.

And we didn't want to be an application that before this, we had this user number and it would go down slightly year over year. Very, very slightly. But still going down. And we were like, okay, we're not gaining new users we're we're retaining users and just slightly losing them but you know i i i made perhaps the morbid observation that maybe our users are dying like they they're, you know, like, because the, because it was so gradual. You have to be an optimist.

Yeah, but we were so gradual that like, it was like, I'm sure it's a number of reasons to get a new computer. Sure, sure. Things like that. But, and then we roll out this update. And like I said, one of the things you look at is like, what are people doing? Is activity going up? The answer appears to be yes. So, okay, that's a good indicator across what data we do have. people you try to ask both your hardcore people and your normal folks as much as you can randomly to see like what do you think and on the whole my conclusion and and those who have done these this get data gathering with me have concluded that folks generally like the changes with any change.

There are things that you, that you learn or that whether it's on the user side, they learn. And then they're like, you know, okay. At first I didn't like it, but after a month I got my muscle memory changed and now I like it.

Or they say, this is still a problem and we go back and we look and we say okay like do they have a point if the answer is yes then we fix it and you'll see with the new update this new year you'll see fixes for things that we learned like okay we know how we got there but folks had issues with that so we changed it one thing i have noticed reading through some of the comments like none of these threads like super popular but one thing i have noticed in a lot of these threads and i'm sure you've probably seen people complaining about this things like readability because their theme is terrible. Like, they don't realize that the theme is what is causing the problem, not the actual design itself.

Like, it'll be, the theme will have, like, a slightly mismatched colors, and, like, it's setting an icon to be black when the background is also black, when it has nothing to do with the application itself. Oh, man. Yeah. Oh man. Yeah. Welcome to the world of difficult interactions where you're getting these bug reports and you're like, what is this person seeing? need to upload a screenshot you need to see and then you realize that it's something that like you have limited control over and then and then we try to and yeah we try to address that by reaching out both to the like for instance i've i know because i've experienced this now this exact

problem a few times reach out to the theme developer. Say, hey, you know, Ryan here, like, we got some reports that your theme looks messed up on the new version. Do you, you know, do you want to update it? We can provide some feedback. And then also going to user and being like, you know, yeah, cool theme, but you may want to change to a different thing to have a better experience. And, and that that's difficult.

And, and Thunderbird is so old and has so many add-ons and stuff like that, that, that you, you find that like, there's a lot of cases where you're just like, you're just like, well well it says in our support stuff go into safe mode which is the version that loads without custom add-ons okay is it still broken all right but you know that's just playing that's just part of the game and making big changes and like we talked about big changes come with consequences and you never really, you don't test against a 15-year-old thing in your testing. Maybe you do, but we do have a lot of testers in the community who have interesting setups, but stuff slips through

where you're like, we just didn't, that wasn't even remotely on our radar. Right, right. Yeah, you can't really do anything about a theme that just hasn't been updated. Like, that's, you can design the UI in a way that it makes sense for the major themes. Like, you know, that's understandable. But, like, there's so much out there,

and then there's in like there's users making their own themes like you you can't address every single use case you've just got to like make it clear like if you are reporting a problem like what is a problem with us and what is the problem with someone else and i guess that's that's sort of why there is that whole like don't uh but don't theme my apps thing that was coming from some developers like i understand that from the developer side like you don't want to deal with this like this is not our problem but i i don't yeah we my the ux in ui team you know are honestly all but one are linux users but if you ask them like what is the most annoying thing it's like random linux user who's using a really really crazy theme and like the amount of time spent for a very small amount of users trying to trying to contact the people who

can help fix that problem is like just unfortunate but you know it's a price we it's a price you pay for being a really versatile customizable app and we're willing to pay that price and what i would ask anybody you know who's posting already is just like we didn't try to break you but we will try to fix you if you help us understand what it is you're seeing and and what your setup is um we do we do in earnest try to fix folks but i i do feel for the folks who say don't theme my app because i feel that way a lot of days where i'm like well you're you're using this theme i've never heard of and i'm trying to understand like who i need to contact to try to fix this you know like and uh just bear with us

yeah because we'll try to help you but help you, but we can't capture everything. But on the whole, I'm really happy with Supernova. And I know what the team is. And I know, you know, I think that, you know, overall folks will want to get used to it. folks will once they get used to it you know even the folks who are posting in these threads and stuff and they have concerns i think we're dealing with 20 years of muscle memory and just habits and stuff once they see that this, once they get used to it, I feel like they'll be like, okay, yeah, this does make me faster, more capable of managing my email. And frankly, the stuff we changed was technology that was, a lot of it was old and it's not used

anywhere anymore. And it was breaking. And a lot of the bugs people wanted us to fix, we just couldn't fix because it's like that will require ripping all of this out. And, you know, I remember one person in particular telling me they hated the changes. But then when I talked to them about the bugs that they had reported and, you know, we're constantly bringing up, I was like, this is what had to happen to fix those bugs. Like there's the, before the stack that we were using was the cause of these bugs. So, you know, it is what it is. Pretty much. Um, one thing we haven't really touched on we like briefly mentioned it uh the mobile version of thunderbird the uh how did the whole stuff with canine mail come about like what's still there i was going to fosden and i wanted to talk to Keddie who maintained K9 male because I thought,

well, at the very least, K9 male looks like what I think Thunderbird on Android would be. And so I said, at first I started talking to him thinking, you know, we'll become sister projects, know, we'll, we'll, we'll become sister projects, not not in the same organization or anything, but just will push users there who want to use something on mobile. And they can say, if you want to do something on desktop, go here. But as I started talking to Kenny, it comes back to the sustainability thing. He was like, I shouldn't say anything he wouldn't say. But he was like, And he was like, I shouldn't say anything he wouldn't say, but he was like, essentially, you know, this was a project, a passion for him and not something that paid the bills.

Right. And, you know, he was looking at, I'm not going to do this justice because he would explain it better, but he was kind of looking at like, what am I going to do, you know, in order to actually pay the bills and then like what's what's gonna happen to k9 as a result and and I'm sure he would have continued maintaining it but it just maybe wouldn't have been as much of a focus as it had been right and I And I thought, what a shame, like, you know, we could try to help this project become more sustainable. And we started talking about that. work in these silos when frankly we could just combine forces and try to bring these two products in line with each other and these two communities which are focused on all these same problems like you have to solve the same problems in both spaces so at least coming together and working on these problems in both in both projects at the same time made a lot of sense and just as we talked it became clear that we should come together and and and work

together and um and i'm glad that i was really worried about our community's reaction to me coming to them and saying maybe we should adopt canine but ultimately when we sat down and we really talked it through everyone agreed like yeah this makes sense and a lot more sense than us trying to build something from scratch on the platform right because you're saying that it's it's basically what you wanted to do anyway, so you'd just be like duplicating effort for the most part. Yep, and 90, what is it, I have the stats somewhere, 98% or 99% of email users, it's some insanely high stat, using all of their phone. There's a lot of people who just don't really use computers.

Especially if you're growing up now and your first computing device is a phone. A lot of people... It's going to get worse. There's going to be more people who just don't use computers. It's going to just be phones. Yeah. And the Delta...

I wish I had the stat here. It's one thing I didn't bring with me to this conversation. But the Delta, I wish I had the stat here. I didn't, that's one thing I didn't bring with me to, to this conversation, but the Delta is, there's a lot less people who check their email on their desktop and check it on their phone. Right. Right. And so I also thought like, if we don't, if we're not doing something in, in the mobile space, I think will kind of fade into obscurity. And I was kind of, I was just worried about that. And frankly, phones are, like you said,

they're the computing device that's most used. And so if we're going to create software And so if we're going to create software that has our values, that touches the most people, we need to be there. And K9 was so closely aligned with what our values were and what we believed in as far as all these things, customization, freedom, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That we were like, if we bring our expertise and our talent and our developers to this project, we can rapidly improve K9 and that turned out to be true. And, and if you watch the K9 development pace, it's really picked up this past. What is it year in change? I I'm sort of the opposite i i cannot stand checking email on my phone i don't want it i my phone exists as like a youtube box basically and occasionally i will use like facebook messenger because that's what my family uses but i get the fact that people want to do that like it's not for me, maybe I'll give it a try

I just don't really tend to find that to be a I don't like typing on my phone, that's the main thing for me so if I'm going to look at emails, I'm probably going to be replying to emails and I don't really want to reply on my phone so it's not what I'm going to do yep

yep makes total sense it's makes total sense it's makes total sense it i was looking at the um the play store score for k9 and it seems like it there's always like i don't know how much weight you put on play store reviews because it seems like whenever anything changes like it just gets slammed a bunch of one stars. You also have to look, you know, the changes they're complaining about were from before, you know, K9 was a part of us. And the thing is, K9 has been around for a very, very long time as well. It was a fork of the original Android email client not the group not the google like

android oh okay and um and so we're talking about reviews for you know forever i mean like for a long time you can go and look i i i can't think of what the earliest one is off the top of my head but i bet it's like probably more than 10 years old easily and so you're talking about so many versions of the application that the score exists against and honestly what we're going to do is we're going to keep that store play store listing open and deliver updates to it but we're we're renaming canine thunderbird on android and we're creating a new because we we don't think first off we don't think that reflects it and secondly there's just a lot of um i guess what we've done over this past year and what we'll continue to do to Thunderbird on Android's release is we've just really defined like what

makes an app Thunderbird on Android. And that is going to be a different set of things than what has made K9 K9. Right. I think it will be improvements. And I think that folks will appreciate that K9 usersine users, but it is a different set of things. And so folks can try out what's happening today with canine and you can even opt into the beta on the Play Store. and you can even opt into the beta on the Play Store. But you'll see throughout the first half of 2024

some pretty big changes, and then Thunderbird for Android as a result of that. And I'm sure the sort of UX design principles that go into working on a mobile device are very, very different from what you would do on desktop. They are, there are some similarities, but there are some key differences. You know, fortunately people get that.

You know, I was kind of worried that our folks who came from the Thunderbird community start commenting on the Android stuff might not always get that but everybody got it and everybody understands like you're dealing with limited screen space you're dealing with a totally different set of ever just everything you know and so like whether it's interaction or connection things like that so there's just a lot of different uh considerations that go into how you build a mobile client and i think we've done a really good job

and i i have to just say like the canine community too is just an is an awesome community and and i expected some pushback when ketty shared like that this is what he wanted to do he thought was best for the project to join thunderbird i didn't get i don't remember getting any negative feedback that might not be true but i don't find something big far enough i'm sure you can too but like as far as like people who are active in the community you know they just were like yeah like let's do it well that's that's awesome to hear like it's great to hear that people were just like you know what let's just see what happens like you know obviously people might be a bit worried, like, okay, what's gonna change here? But before anything's really, like, been done, it's weird to just, like, instantly have a negative reaction to it.

Like, Thunderbird's been around for a long time. It's clearly been, like, a successful email client. And especially now with the whole, like, massive increase in funding. Like, Thunderbird have clearly shown that they know what they're doing so let's just see what happens with k9 you know it it could go badly if it does well you know something new could be tried but there's no point just you know ditching the idea just it's not like you know microsoft comes along we're like we're gonna work on k9 now like that that's it's not that it's it's someone it's a it's a proven open client

let's just see how it goes yeah um that's exactly and that's exactly what we got and that's i'm i'm really grateful that that is what we got. And like I said, from the other side too, Thunderbird folks were like, you know, we should tell a story on mobile. Let's do it. Well, hopefully that ends up going well in the long run. Because right now it's what, it's only been a year or so? Not even that?

Yeah. Well, it's going to look, I think it's only been a year or so? Not even that? Yeah, well it's been a little... I can always get these things wrong when I don't have them in front of me, but it's just been a little over a year and it's been going very, very well. The blog post came out in June, but I don't know if there were things happening before the blog post where it was announced. Maybe it has been, unless... It feels like it's been a while. I'm sure there were discussions happening before like it was publicly announced so it might have been an idea with that.

Like I said this was this came out of conversations over I think two or three years at FOSDEM and so you know it's just like we just picked it up every time we got together and talked it through. So for me, it's like, goes way back. But yeah, jumping out of Android, and unfortunately, I'm running out of time. Yeah, no, that's all good. I wanted to wrap this up soon anyway.

Yeah, but, you know, we also want to do something in iOS. And we have a ton to do something in iOS. And we have a ton of users who use iOS. And we, unlike with canine, we haven't been able to identify an open source email client and in this maintained, and that's, you know, in good shape. And, and frankly, it's very hard to even just find any period. We're going to have to build something new there. But I think that'll be a really cool opportunity for folks to get involved who are using iOS devices and they're like,

hey, I'd love to have my say, shape the future of what is going to be built here and I think that'll be a lot of fun to just build something I would say from scratch I don't really want to use the word from scratch because I know there are good open source libraries

that we can leverage to take care of some of the stuff we have to do in the iOS world. But yeah, it'll be great to build something from scratch and to be able to think from the very beginning, like versus K9 and Thunderbird, which are existing. If we were just starting fresh, which we are, how would we do this? How would we architect this?

How would we build it? So that'll be a lot of fun i think we'll start that work i mean i know we'll start that work at the beginning of 2024 the question is you know how long does that work take to actually get into the hands of users yeah and uh unless they're on like unless they're downloading it and using it whatever the alpha you know is like because it will be open source but like i don't know it'll probably i would guess it would be 2025 when we actually get normal people using it well hopefully that goes well um and since you need to head out let's uh

wrap it up here unless there's anything quick you want to mention. I will mention that, you know, there are a couple of things coming down the pipe that I guess is a good way to close it that I think folks will find interesting. We, when we were looking at Outlook and we were looking at the other folks in this space and kind of like trying to figure out how we fit or stacked up against them one thing i didn't love is you know outlook and and gmail which is a different story but they have these really slick features around whether it's setting appointments with

folks in an automated way or doing things, you know, these complicated kind of cloud things that are really useful. But, you know, if you're just Thunderbird running on somebody's machine are hard to pull off in a way that's actually good. Right. to pull off in a way that's actually good. And so we've invested a little bit of our time and money into trying to build open source tooling around that stuff

that we're going to run in the cloud as a service that will allow people to do this, but also folks can run on their own if they're interested in having that be under their control. Fortunately, they're all built around privacy respecting, whether it's end-to-end encryption or these other ways in which we make sure that their personal data isn't just like sitting in our hands and so you know that's so hopefully folks will feel comfortable using the servers we spin up to do these things but if they don't they can run it and that's all fine but that's something that

i expect to also roll out in 2024 at least least some initial services to see, do people love this? Do they hate it? And then that will inform what we do going forward. to actually offer a competitive experience, we're gonna have to do some things not on device. And it'll be completely optional. People don't have to use any of these features, but if they want to leverage, you know, what can be done off their computer, they'll have the option to do that. And then, so that's my tease for you and your audience. But, and I will share,

and I'll share it with you when it's time, an early access signup form that folks can go and sign up and get pulled into, I guess, a closed beta. That sounds really cool. It is. It is. I can't, I don't feel, I don't want to tell anymore yet until we are closer to open sourcing everything because I feel bad like saying this is what we're working on,

but you can't look at it today. The reason being is we want, we know when we open source it, everybody and their mom is going to have an opinion so we want to make sure it's good before we do that at least good enough and then the last thing that I'll say is

you know we right now we have this big campaign at the end of the year fundraising around you know we're trying to reach a certain goal to make it so that we have all of the resources we need to do android and ios to like the level we want to do it at and um it's it's like we're so close to that goal. And so what I would encourage your folks to do in your audience, based on your YouTube views,

if everybody who was in your audience went and gave five bucks, we would crush our goal for this year. And what that means is more developers working on the mobile clients you know and we're not we're not in a position where we have to say like okay well this is just going to have to take longer because you know we just don't want the people to move as fast as we want to so that's my closing thing is if you love Thunderbird or if you're interested in the direction we're going or you aren't happy with your mobile clients,

please consider going over and donating to Thunderbird because we're going to be so close to having exactly the amount we need for next year in order to do all the things that we hope to do and um it doesn't mean we're not going to do them but you know if we hit that goal then we can we don't have to make compromises so um that's my closing thing is like if folks like what we're doing or interested in it please go and donate and help us have another great year so we can do all the things in 3D and box. Where can they go to donate?

What do they need to go to? Just go to Thunderbird.net. There's a donate button right at the top. Hit that. And like I said, literally five bucks. If folks get five bucks, it will go a long, long way. Or our average is $17, which is great. That's a pizza.

If you're willing to cook for yourself tonight and give what you would spend on a pizza takeout or whatever, you can help us get so much closer to this goal and we might hit that goal anyway but it just i would love to just at the end of the year be able to say yes thank you everybody you we did it we're gonna be able to do the things that we had decided are important and you know we've got the resources to do well when some of this fun stuff starts coming out i would definitely do this again chat about it um i i it sounds like you got some cool things in store and hopefully hopefully they they all come together yeah so i'm gone i was just gonna say we this is the side note or maybe the extra footnotes we as a community and we as a as a folks working on thunderbird also more cool stuff is going to come because when we learn when we learn and we grow we learn how to do new things we learn about other new cool things that we can also do

so it's yes it's this flywheel that just keeps going and going. Okay. Well, if there's anywhere else you want to direct people to, let them know, and then we can do my sign-off. No, I just want folks to go to Thunderbird.net, download Thunderbird if you're not using it today, donate if you are, and download K9 if you want to see where we're going with the mobile app. Awesome. That's it. Okay, so as for me, if you want to see where we're going with the mobile app awesome that's it

okay so as for me if you want to go watch my gaming stuff i stream on brody on games twice a week right now i'm playing through probably neptune assists versus sisters and uh neo the world ends with you so have fun with that one lots of anime garbage um if you want to see my linux videos might talk about thunderbird there. I don't know. We'll see what comes up. That is Brody Robertson. I do Linux videos there six days a week. And if you're listening to the audio version of this, you can find the video version on YouTube at Tech Over Tea. If you're watching the video version,

you'll find the audio on any podcast platform. There is an RSS feed. You could put the RSS feed in Thunderbird if you want to. I don't do that, but the option is there. It's very possible. Give people the final word Thunderbird if you want to. I don't do that, but the option is there. Yeah, it's very possible. Give people the final word. How do you want to sign off?

Yeah, Ryan, check me out on Mastodon. Ryan and Mastodon does. Ryan Lee's site's at Mastodon, though, so sorry. It's starting to get late here. And then Thunderbird and Mastodon.online. Awesome. And that's the best place to follow us. That jazz light up. See you.