Episode 820 transcript

FLOSS-820

Jonathan: Hey folks, this week I talk with Ryan Sipes about Thunderbird, it's history, it's future, and more. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. This is Floss Weekly, episode 820, recorded Tuesday, February the 4th. Please don't add A. I. Clippy to Thunderbird. Hey folks, it's time for Floss Weekly, that's the show about free, libre, and open source software.

I'm your host, This is Jonathan Bennett. We've got something really fun today. We're talking with Ryan Sipes about Thunderbird. That's the email client that you, you should be using. And in fact, a lot of us are using. And it's, it's, it's pretty good. It is part of the Mozilla suite and you know, one of the things I've talked about for a while, I was told by a little birdie that it almost became part of the LibreOffice suite.

And so I'm going to ask about that. Cause I'm really curious about how that story went down. But I am going to go ahead and bring Ryan on. Mr. Ryan Sipes. Well, welcome to the show. It's so good to have you.

Ryan: It's good to be here. Thank you for having me.

Jonathan: Yeah, Ryan and I've been chatting before the before the recording started and we talked about a couple of different things and it's like, oh, put a pin in that.

We need to make sure and get back to that. Oh, put a pin in that. When they asked me about that during the show. So let's, let's start with the overview. What, what is Thunderbird? Why does it exist? What's the problem it's trying to solve?

Ryan: Sure. Thunderbird is an email client, first and foremost. It's an email, calendaring, and contact management client.

Those aren't in vogue right now. They, I mean, maybe they're coming back into vogue but for the longest time, folks were like, well, I'm just going to use webmail, which would be like Gmail or the Outlook online experience. Right. What Thunderbird's main difference between everyone else and us is, is that we are open source software, free and open source software, and we really value our users freedom, whether that's freedom of choice, freedom to change Thunderbird to meet their needs and just freedom to own their email we have free your inbox, that's our kind of tagline right now.

And we sincerely believe that that's a worthy cause. And, ultimately, we want people to control their communication experience. We want people to control their own personal communication information. And that's what Thunderbird strives to do in the world.

Jonathan: This Thunderbird, I've, I've, I've used Thunderbird for a long time.

And I've played with multiple features over the years. Does Thunderbird also do chat to support some of the chat protocols? It does have

Ryan: IRC built in and it does have Matrix, although the Matrix one is currently under development. It doesn't have every feature that you, all the other Matrix clients might have.

But yes, it does do chat. It also does tasks. And it kind of follows the CalDAV standard to do that. Tasks is a part of the CalDAV standard. And so if you have a CalDAV calendar that's, that can play nicely it'll do, it'll connect to that to do tasks. Or you can just do it locally on the client.

The tasks and, and chat are going to be seeing some love over the next couple years to try to make them a, More competitive experience versus what else is out there.

Jonathan: Yeah. So let's see, there's, oh, there's so many directions I want to go. Let's, let's talk about, let's talk about the LibreOffice thing, right?

I tease that. Let's just go ahead and dive into that. So I, I've, I've said this for the longest time that, and it's, I say it less now, cause things have changed, but there for a while, Thunderbird. But, well, I mean, it's just, it sort of struggled as part of, as part of Mozilla, right? And I know there was a conversation had when OpenOffice forked and became LibreOffice under the Document Foundation.

There was a conversation that was had of, well, why don't we just pull Thunderbird in as part of the LibreOffice suite? You know, Microsoft and their suite has all text editor and, and spreadsheet and an email client, so why doesn't Library office have the same thing and that didn't happen and for a while.

I said well, maybe that should have happened It might have been a better place for it And then obviously Thunderbird has sort of had a resurgence of sorts at at Mozilla, which we'll talk about that, too But but let's let's go back and cover some of that history maybe even why Thunderbird struggled at Mozilla Why it was not moved into LibreOffice.

Like, there's a whole, there's a whole thread of a story through here, I think.

Ryan: Yeah, so, we, to, to talk about this, we have to go back. We have to go way back. Way back. We can go back as far as 2012 to really set the stage. There's this TechCrunch article which I put in My presentations that I've given at FOSDEM and other places that it's an article that says that's it for Thunderbird And it's our logo, but it's got X's over the eyes.

Oh, I remember that. I remember that. And it declares the death of Thunderbird because Mozilla Corporation in it shares that they're not planning to actively develop it. They're gonna find some other way forward. for the project. And that began Thunderbird's time in the wilderness. Where a bunch of different things were tried in order to make it sustainable.

And if you, if folks have heard me before they'll know that when you're talking about an open source project about starting one, about continuing one, I think a conversation that developers don't have often enough, right from the outset. is how is this going to be sustainable? Let's say we get users, or maybe you already have users, who rely on the the software.

Okay, well, that's great. How are we going to ensure that we continue to develop the software into the future? And the problem with Thunderbird was that no one had found A good way for it to sustain itself. It didn't have a Google contract, search contract. It didn't have anything like that. Not for lack of trying, just folks didn't find a suitable way to sustain the software.

And So, by the time, I think it would have been, oh gosh, I don't know the exact year, 2014, maybe 2015, conversations I think were happening, this might be a year off in any which direction, conversations were happening with other homes, other potential homes for Thunderbird because Mozilla actually was and still is a good steward for the project, so much so that they were saying, Listen, you know, yes, this, this is a piece of software that we've spent a ton of resources building, developing, but we need to find where it's gonna be able to thrive.

And so to their credit, they were, there were discussions with a variety of organizations who thought that they could carry it forward. One of them was the Libre Office folks. And ultimately there was an elected Thunderbird Council that participated in those conversations of the contributors.

It, they elected seven representatives who participated in those conversations. And ultimately that group was the one who made the decision that they wanted to stay with the Mozilla Foundation. And so it became a Mozilla Foundation project. And. I know that there were a variety of reasons for that. The biggest one is probably they just felt like they were still a part of the Mozilla community.

And still, that the Mozilla manifesto and its values were perfectly aligned with the project. Which made sense, because that was the organization that developed it. And so they, they stuck around there. And Even I had some questions, I came on in 2017, and it was still, this conversation was still fresh in everyone's mind, and I came on as community manager, and so I spent some time getting up to date on what had happened, why we were where we were, and what we were planning to do, and what I found was that folks thought there was still a story to tell, Within Mozilla.

And at the time that was I was like, I don't know. Like, let's, let's see if that's actually true. And and it turned out to be right. No one knew how it was gonna look, but there was a lot of faith that the community would figure it out.

Jonathan: And so, and so what, what happened? Where did, where did the sort of the corner get turned where you went from?

We want to be part of Mozilla Foundation, but we don't know, we don't know how to pay rent for our developers, essentially. Yeah. To Well, there

Ryan: was

Jonathan: Yeah.

Ryan: Yeah, yeah. There was a little bit of money coming in, through donations. Mm

Jonathan: hmm.

Ryan: And it was just enough to hire me, and I think there was one other person on when I first came on.

Jonathan: Okay.

Ryan: But They were part time contractors, including myself. And my funny contribution to the story is, I saw that there was a listing for this part time, and I said, you know what, I could spend evenings, you know, helping out as a community manager on this project. And so I applied, and I, I came on, and as I worked on it, I started to realize How much untapped potential was within Thunderbird.

We had 20, we had over 20 million users. We, and those were users who were dedicated. They opened Thunderbird almost every day. And when I would interview users, I would ask, how, how long do you have the application open? And they said, well, the entire workday. It's like six to eight hours. Yeah, of course. And so you know, my background was Mycroft.

I started Mycroft. I worked at System76. I did some other stuff in there. And I remember thinking at, at, in my previous experience to have users use your thing every day and to use it for most of your day, that would And to have 20 million of those people would be, it's shocking. You know, that's a to use a word, I'm not sure I like exactly, but it's a sticky application.

That means it's, it's sticky in people's lives. They love it. And they, they need, they rely on it. And so the thought I had, and what I started talking to the Thunderbird council about was how. How are we, how is this thing that's so important to people just going to like, slowly die? Because that's kind of the glide path

Jonathan: it

Ryan: was on.

It, it was not necessarily growing all that much. And there were a lot of issues. Like we couldn't actually build the product most days. It was in an unbuildable state. And the technical debt was drowning everyone. Yeah. But. What we were able to do and my kind of contribution was, I told folks, we've got to get out in front of our users and we have to tell them what's happening and how they can help.

Because when I interviewed our users, I asked, you know, I just said, tell me what you know about Thunderbird. Tell me what you know about Mozilla. And most of our users who are just polled like that randomly said they thought that Thunderbird was supported by the Firefox money. By, you know, search contract money.

Or they didn't know, but they thought it was a very A very lucrative

Jonathan: project. Yeah, Google's involved there somewhere. You guys are, yeah. Like that story I told before. You guys are getting the big Google money, right? Yeah, exactly.

Ryan: But the truth was that it wasn't. It wasn't. It was just like pennies from the couch.

You know, the project was coming up with. And and once, it took a while to convince folks. Once we, once we managed to convince the folks in the community, the folks in the council, the folks in who, the other folks who were working there, Hey, this is actually a problem that we need to address.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Ryan: Well, we started really making some, some headway. Mm hmm. The, the turnaround, I, I hate to say it because a lot of open, open source, Folks, which I include myself in, cringe about the money thing, but even the infrastructure to build and distribute Thunderbird is

Jonathan: expensive.

Ryan: If you have, in any given year, I don't remember the exact number, but we have I think 10, we can have 10 million downloads in any given year or more.

Jonathan: Yeah. It's huge

Ryan: Distributing that is just expensive. Mm-hmm . And the, and so not having the money to even, to like, just barely sustain that, which is what we had, just barely the money to sustain. That meant we weren't addressing. Problems, because there were, there was work that we couldn't pay people to do.

There was technical debt work that people were like, I don't have the time for that. It doesn't sound interesting to me. It just sounds like a grind. And so, we knew we needed to be able to pay people to get us out of the hole that Thunderbird was in.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Ryan: And ultimately the turning point was getting in front of our users, telling them that we needed money and having them give money so we could hire.

Developers to help us improve the product and pay down our technical debt.

Jonathan: Yeah Okay, that's that's interesting. I'm reminded of I don't know if you've followed like linux desktops, but kde Did something that sort of sounds familiar? It's similar to this. And it's the dreaded request for donations, right?

And what kde did is they I think it's like once or twice a year. They have it built into their code I think it's twice a year now. So like christmas and then july It'll pop up and say hey We need money to be able to keep this thing going. Click here to donate. And they, they brought in like a hundred thousand dollars in a month by doing that.

It was ridiculous.

Ryan: I know about that because I was, because somebody came and talked to me before they did it. To ask me questions about what we did. And I told them, get right in their face. Because that's what we did. We ultimately popped up a big notice that just said, Thunderbird needs you to survive.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Ryan: And we explained. All the things that I just laid out. We pay for expensive infrastructure to distribute Thunderbird. We have to pay people to triage bugs. We have to pay people to, you know, develop the code and, and ultimately it worked. Was, was there any,

Jonathan: how much pushback did you get from that?

Like, was there, did you get angry emails? Did people picket at Mozilla headquarters?

Ryan: Yeah, so what I tell people is If you imagine I had to bring people along at the beginning. People didn't like this idea when I first raised it. They said it's just, it just seems gross. To ask people for money. And And, and they also said, well what if they just decide to uninstall Thunderbird because we asked for money?

There's a few different threads to pull on here.

Jonathan: Fewer downloads you have to pay for, in that case.

Ryan: Yeah, well, one of which is, One of which is, and some people are really going to hate this, but, You need your users to, to want to support the software. However they can. If you have users who are just taking and giving nothing back in return, From a sustainability perspective, those users are actually a, a cost, only a cost.

And, I mean, there are ways you could say, like, okay, well, by using it, they're potentially marketing it to others. That's true. There are a number of ways in which they help the project. But, from a, just at the end of the year, like you said, like, they downloaded. You know, that's, that's just a cost and we're not getting back anything in return.

Now, that's not to say it's not good to have folks who just use the software and do nothing in return. But, it doesn't make for a sustainable project. What we weren't doing was giving users who didn't, who couldn't dedicate time, an avenue, a clear avenue, to dedicate something to help the project. We weren't letting folks know that we needed support.

And so they weren't even having the opportunity to say, Okay, I get value from this. I'm gonna give some of that value back to the project. And the truth is, is that a lot of the people I talked to said, Oh yeah, well, if people want to support us, they can come develop the software. But I was like, most people don't have either the time nor the expertise to actually come and do that, so we have to give them another avenue to participate, even if that's just, send us five dollars.

And then, once we did that, the pushback we got was super minimal because people don't even see the full screen appeals that we make. And what I mean by that is that they're so used to seeing advertisements and appeals from software that the other software that they use that says pay for our monthly thing, pay for our, you know, I think of Evernote, every time I opened Evernote, I saw like, you need, you should pay.

And it was, and that they actually just like, they're either going to give or a lot of them. They don't even see it. It's just like a

Jonathan: reflex. Yeah.

Ryan: Yeah, and so don't

Jonathan: ask me again. Just look for that button and press it Okay. Yeah, exactly. Yeah,

Ryan: and so We do get some pushback, but it was very minimal, you know, we hit 20 million users We may be you know over the past we've been doing this since what was the first year we did it really big 2021 maybe we have gotten A random email every once in a while, just saying like, I don't want to see the appeal anymore.

But it's, to your point about KDE, we've only ever, at first we just did it once a year, and we recently moved to twice a year. You know, so twice a year you see, a tab pop up in Thunderbird that asks if you want to give, and you can hit X, and then you won't see it for six months. It's not

Jonathan: particularly onerous.

Ryan: Yeah. I mean, for what, for all the value, if you're one of our users who are using it every day, 8 hours a day, we're at, we take about maybe 8 seconds of your time with this appeal. If you give, you know, it's probably like a minute. And, and then you're, you're done. You don't, you know, you'll see, you'll spend another 8 seconds on it in 6 months.

Jonathan: And so what, what has the what is the positive response been like? How, how much how many, how many donations does that result in?

Ryan: So this last year, which we, we published a financial report, usually sometime in the middle of the next year on the previous year, once we've really had time to make sure that we have settled everything and we know exactly what the, everything looked like.

But. The, this year we in donations, we raised 10. 3 million.

Jonathan: Wow. That is impressive. Out of, out of a user base of how many? 20 million. Roughly.

Ryan: Okay.

Jonathan: So that's, yeah, that's impressive. That's really good. That lets you, that lets you hire a few more developers.

Ryan: Yeah. We're up to about 40 people.

Jonathan: Yeah. You know, you talk about sustainability, and I imagine that most of our audience realizes this.

And we touched on it briefly, but, especially at these scales, when you talk about that many downloads and that many users, like, bandwidth costs money. The ability to have a server somewhere costs money. Having a, having a continuous integration running costs money. And for a, for a tiny project, yes, you can use GitHub for those things and, and get away from most of those costs.

But the bigger a project gets, the, the less sort of tenable that becomes and you have to have some sort of infrastructure. And so, you know, I, I, and I say this because the, the term sustainability means different things in different contexts. And to some people it's kind of a It's a, it's a throwaway word that, you know, you tune out everything that comes afterwards because sustainability is sometimes what people are talking about.

But we're just, really what we're talking about here is the ability to pay your bills as, as a as an organization. And I'm, I'm, I'm thrilled that Thunderbird is in a better position now to be able to do that going forwards. Have you, where, have you peaked? Let me, let me ask that. Have you hit peak donation yet?

You know, like, was there a point where you You had more and then it's slowly tapering off, or is it still growing? What's the trajectory look

Ryan: like? We haven't. We, we, every year we've watched to see, because every year it's grown since I came on. When I came on, it was well, we, the, the track we were on was anywhere between 300, 000 for that year and 500,

Jonathan: 000.

Ryan: And we, And we, we already did some donation things in the first year that I was on. So, to improve that. So we actually ended, I think, at 700 and some. And then, but that was still, like you said, there, there were still So many infrastructure costs and things like that, that it's not as big as I've had smaller projects be like, that's everything you'd ever need.

And I'm like, yeah, well, distributing this on all platforms and all languages in multiple build types, it's, it's, it's not as much as you, as you think. But the, the yeah, the Kind of trajectory each year has so far gone up, and we, like, for instance, and you can see this on our blog, We went from, if I'm remembering right, we went from, what was it?

From three, so, from essentially just below three million, to six million, to eight point two, two three? To 10. 3. So those are the last few years. Yeah. So we, we were curious, we've been very curious about is there a peak, what is, I mean, there is a peak eventually, somewhere in there. What is that, when do we hit fatigue from people seeing these messages?

And, or, or the people who are going to give have already given and, you know. They don't want to give anymore. But what we've found is that so far our users respond to us just engaging with them and telling them what we're doing why we're doing it, and then what we need in order to do that. And so I think we've done a really good job of just Just bringing folks into the conversation who otherwise were just using the software and not thinking about any of this, to where now they realize, oh, these features that I want, these improvements that I want, I can get them by, and this is how I can participate.

Jonathan: Yeah. I am, I'm looking at the the, the Thunderbird. net slash donate page here. And a couple of things that, that, that stick out to me is you do have the recurring gift option. So like sort of, sort of the, the Patreon model where I'll give you 5 every month. And then it's not tax deductible, which is, which is kind of surprising.

Why is that? Why does Thunderbird not count as a charity?

Ryan: Well, there's a variety of reasons. At one point we were sitting in the foundation and we were getting big. We were starting to get big. Donations were going up and we were hiring developers in order to work on the software.

Jonathan: The

Ryan: IRS doesn't count development of software as a charitable.

activity.

Jonathan: Oh.

Ryan: And you can only have such a certain amount of threshold. You, a majority of what you do has to be this type of charitable activity. Charitable

Jonathan: activity, yes, yes.

Ryan: And there are a couple ways we could do that. We, we could find some way to spend a majority of the money on charitable activities, which could be Messaging about open source software and Thunderbird, putting on conferences, putting on other types of, you know, events, but, but that seemed kind of wrong.

Yeah. At some point

Jonathan: that would be a betrayal of your users. If you say, Oh, you've got to spend more than 50 percent of our money on stuff. That's not what people are paying us to do.

Ryan: Yeah, exactly. They were paying us to develop the software. And so, and additionally, and we'll talk about this here in a moment, there was more that we wanted to do.

Because how we look at developing Thunderbird is not about necessarily just developing an email client. We start from where are our values. What are the values behind the software? If we just wanted to develop an email client, we could be some proprietary, you know, nice email client that charges everybody ten bucks, you know, to use it or whatever.

What the, what we want to be, what we want to do is promote our values. And our values are open standard communication, open source software, whatever. And the freedom to choose how you communicate on the internet. And and so, in being a non profit entity, with the restrictions that we had, there were also things like, what if, what if we wanted to offer an email service that had those values at some point?

You know, how would we do that within the non profit model? It wouldn't be a It wouldn't probably be sustainable because you're going to want to Charge people for the server time and every, you know, for that service. And so there was also this conversation about, well, what else do we want to do that would enhance our users lives that we might be hamstrung by a 501c3.

And so for all those reasons, we chose to go the for profit route and Mozilla created an entity. That Thunderbird lives in and that's healthy, I think, because it also means that Thunderbird lives or dies on its own merits.

Jonathan: So I was gonna, I was gonna ask, I was gonna go here next, actually, and you're, you're, you're poking around the same question and that is, Is Thunderbird part of Mozilla Corporation?

Ryan: No. Thunderbird is not a part of Mozilla Corporation. That is another entity. That is owned by the Mozilla Foundation. We are owned by the non profit Mozilla Foundation.

Jonathan: So, when we see in the news that the Mozilla Corporation has re branded themselves and changed their logo and all of that fun stuff, that doesn't, that's not necessarily having anything to do with Thunderbird.

Ryan: Yeah, I mean there are, we are siblings, and we frankly develop some of the same software, and there are a number of things that we collaborate on, for instance our build system. We share a build system with Firefox and we pay for our part of it. And doing that alone might be even harder than, you know, right now where we all collectively work together towards creating this thing that,

Jonathan: that

Ryan: makes Firefox and, builds Firefox and Thunderbird and, and all that's, those different languages and build types, whether it's ARM or, you know, whatever it is.

That is shared work, and I can't imagine I mean, I can't imagine doing it alone, but I think it's much better that, that we are these siblings that work together on the things that have shared value for both

Jonathan: entities. Yeah so, The question about, and again, I'm looking at the FAQ here on the donate page, and one of the last ones here is, well, doesn't Thunderbird earn any income?

And I am, I'm super curious about this. Like, is there, is there, it's mostly donations, I get that. Are there any other commercial things where Thunderbird brings income in? Obviously, you guys have explored that over the years you know, have, let's see, who, who would it, who would it be you know, has somebody thought about, well, let's take the, the Thunderbird code base and rebrand it and sell it, you know, you've got some open source projects make money that way has that just, has nobody stepped forward and wanted to do that?

Is there just not a

Ryan: Other companies did that. Postbox. That got sold to just, just this year, well, this past year. Got sold to EM Client, I think is what it's called. They were at Thunderbird, they were building off our code base and selling it. Which was, which was kind of a sad thing for a bit because when they were making more money than we were selling our software, they were adding things, they were adding some value, they were adding some features and things, but you know, the, the underlying work was, you know, enabled by us and we weren't getting a cent from it, you know, that was a rough period where you really have to look at the project and say, you know, wow, people are, you know, Actually making money off of this and we're, we're really not, not, we're not.

Jonathan: Yeah. And It's always, it's always a challenge as an open source project. That was tough.

Ryan: That was tough. But the, but yeah, we, we considered for a while you could get an email address from a provider. When you start up Thunderbird, you could hit, get an email address. And if you signed up with one of those providers, we would get a cut of your subscription.

But it was, It was miniscule. Yeah, yeah. And and ultimately we, we always partnered with providers who we liked and we thought were, shared our values, but it just, for the amount of just even maintaining the future, it didn't make sense for the amount of money we were getting because it, it was like, not, not much at all.

Right,

Jonathan: right.

Ryan: And that was because when that was That was because what the aim of that was, was not to make Thunderbird rich. I mean, maybe it was. It predated me. But it was it was to provide users with, if you're coming here and you need an email account, you know, here's what we recommend. And ultimately where we're at these days is, What are the value adds that we can provide to users?

And this is what we're looking at now. That will make the experience of using Thunderbird better, and will make our users lives better. That will also help support and sustain Thunderbird. And so that's probably, if we're going to make another jump, that's probably where the next jump is, which is, are there any services that we can offer that can help?

You know, require, we're not going to charge for anything that doesn't require running server infrastructure to provide it. If it can be shipped with the client, it will. But the, for free. But if there are things that enhance people's lives, then we're going to Look at what of those we can provide as a service to users.

Jonathan: Yeah. This goes right along. Is there anything that is in Thunderbird that is limited to people that donate or pay for it? And I kind of have in the back of my mind what Ardor does with this. So their code is totally open source, but to get access to their builds, particularly their Windows builds, is where it's tricky.

You, if you donate, you get access to the builds. And that, that actually works out fairly well for them. Is that something you guys thought about?

Ryan: We're not doing that We, we are starting to come up with things that are What's the, what's the word? Cosmetic? That we might offer folks? You know, it doesn't, it doesn't necessarily affect the experience at all.

It's just like, are there things in the UI that we can recognize that you're a donor? Are there, we're providing, donors are getting emailed a a wallpaper. A Thunderbird, a cool wallpaper that our design folks did.

Jonathan: Skin unlocks.

Ryan: Yeah, exactly. I think about it like Yes, it's like Fortnite. You can play Fortnite.

You know, you don't have to buy the skins and everything. But, and, so we're looking at things like that. But we don't really want to, I want the internet to hear this. We do not want to gatekeep people from a full Thunderbird experience based on whether or not they paid. We're still, we're, it's a part of our values.

That we, you know, we want everyone to have access to this communication experience we're providing. And we don't want it to be gate kept by subscription. Unless we absolutely have to.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Ryan: When we talk about the services, what we're talking about is if there's something that costs us every month.

Jonathan: Yeah, you've got to, you've got to pass that on.

Ryan: We need to, we need to at least cover our costs.

Jonathan: Yeah. Okay. So we do have some live listeners and mashed potato, one of our, one of our longterm listeners says, I hope dark mode won't go behind a paywall tier.

Ryan: No, it's not going behind a paywall tier. There you go. And dark mode, dark mode just got a lot better.

By the way, if you're using the daily builds now, when you're in dark mode, the emails. are made dark. And there's a little toggle now. So if you're looking at an email and something about the mechanism by which we use to make the email content dark just isn't working, something's hard to read, there's just a nice little sun toggle there where you can turn it on and see it, see the original, the content of the email in its original form.

Jonathan: Yeah, nice. Nice. I do not run Thunderbird. I do run Thunderbird. I do not run it in dark mode. I will have to look at that because that sounds intriguing. Yeah. Okay, so with some other open source projects, I don't know that this, this works here, but particularly when we talk about libraries and things that are dependencies there's beginning to be a bit of a commercialization change because Particularly the European Union has passed some laws about, you know, there have to be S bombs and, you know, you have to have, if you're selling this thing as part of a commercial product, you have to be able to, you know, give these guarantees.

And so, you know, every once in a while, one of these open source projects, they'll get reached, they'll get touched, talked to by a company that says, Hey, we need you to provide us an S bomb. And I am convinced that the correct answer for that is we will be glad to do that. Here is the amount that that will cost.

And that is a way that the company can then support the project financially because there's a give and a take here does that make is that something that's going to be? Part of thunderbird going forwards or because thunderbird is sort of that End product. Is there no one else at the end of the chain that's paying for?

You know, getting an S bomb and getting all of those things.

Ryan: Well, I think there's, there's so much wrapped up in that, first off. This is some place, this is an area where our relationship to the Mozilla Foundation is really helpful. Because some of this is when you have regulations. that regulate open source software without a real understanding that open, with, with a convenient forgetting that open source software exists and that some of these things don't make sense, regulations don't make sense when they're applied to open source software.

It happens really often across all countries. And what's kind of interesting is folks will reach out to us with all sorts of requests from, from, from governments or to participate. That, mostly like, we want to use this software in this context, but my region requires x, y, and z for that to happen. And, there's some level of education that goes into that, where we say, listen, you know, what, a lot of times what they're asking for is some kind of security

Jonathan: Some kind of security guarantee, right?

Yeah, exactly. I can send you an email with a problem and you'll get me a security fix within 72 hours.

Ryan: Yeah, well what usually they want is like, have you gone through X, Y, or Z?

Jonathan: Oh,

Ryan: okay. And what they're asking makes sense when it's a SAS product. Or when it's a product where you can't see what data they're taking off of your machine, out of your use.

And sending it up to themselves. And they're looking for like, hey, is my data safe essentially? Like, and what we've been doing is pointing them at our audit, providing, you know, figuring out what the regulation is, and providing information on this is why it doesn't apply here. Because ultimately, there's a lot of cases where The regulation doesn't necessarily apply to our software.

Or, if it does, and we don't think that's right, we then raise that issue to the Mozilla Foundation and to our peers to say, do we need to contact, you know, regulators in this, in this jurisdiction and tell them, hey, you didn't actually account for Open source software here, and that is actually, that is actually created, that has resulted in real changes to laws and regulations as a result, and I think that's important, like a small software, open source software project can't do that, but Mozilla scale can do that sort of thing, and so when you see people online, kind of denigrate Mozilla, You know, and some of the stuff that they're doing, whether it's around policy or other things like that, you have to remember that that's some of the work that Mozilla does that's vitally important for open source software to be able to exist and be competitive in some of these areas.

Jonathan: Yeah, we've talked about this several times on the show. People in, the, the legislatures in Europe and the United States and other places, they don't necessarily understand how software works. They don't understand how open source works. And so there is, there's a desperate need for, like, people that get it to go and try to help educate, explain why, you know, we understand what you're trying to do to make things more secure, and that's great and all, but here's where there's a disconnect from reality.

And so yeah, that sort of thing is, is super important.

Ryan: And at least in, in, My experience talking to folks in government, generally, they want to do the right thing. They're ultimately trying to make it so that, I mean, this isn't always true, of course. And not true of all countries. But, but let's say, like, in Europe.

In Europe, I've gotten a distinct, and in the US, but in Europe especially, I've gotten a distinct from talking to the folks who I have, who are trying to do like the DMA, the and other stuff like that, that they do want to ultimately help make their, the users in their countries. Privacy be respected.

Mm-hmm . They, they, the, the outcomes they're shooting for are ones that I think most folks in the open source community want, but unless there's someone in the room from our community sharing how it affects the software that we make, open source software broadly, then you can have misses where they don't account for, you know, what they, they're thinking of it oftentimes in a.

This is provided by a business that sells it, you know, what is, what are we going to do around that? And so it's good to have someone in the room saying, Hey, you, but think about how this affects this software developed by a community of people. Yeah. Yeah.

Jonathan: Is, is there a future that you can imagine where, you know, someone can pay for some ISO certified copy of the Thunderbird software?

Ryan: The questions. Keep coming up, and I do think we're going to find a way to do that, probably in the context of an enterprise support contract of some sort that will come with additional things, which would be important, such as help deploying at scale help with specific problems that folks face when they're running Thunderbird in an organization.

This is something we've discussed quite a lot. And I think it's really important because who, in Thunderbird's context, who, what else do you use instead? Well, you use Outlook. And Outlook and Microsoft have a very, you know, complete offering around deploying in large organizations and trying to solve their problems.

And so We have to, if we want to be truly competitive and, and also a good alternative, we need to develop some of that capability as well to be able to support, you know, those environments. And I think that's another thing where, when folks think about Thunderbird, they think about it as, oftentimes, one guy choosing to use it.

On his personal computer. But actually, we have entire governments that use Thunderbird at scale. And so, when we think about supporting our users, we don't just think about the individuals, but also, how do we support these large organizations that use Thunderbird, and what their requirements are. And it can be complicated.

Jonathan: Yeah, so this is probably a good question a good time to get this question in One of the guys that co hosts on the show from time to time David Ruggles He says he wants to know about support for office 365 email Especially multiple accounts from different tenants. So this is one of the backends for email backend.

So obviously Thunderbird is great with pop and IMAP. If you want to use one of those two, we're, we're good to go all day. What about, what about the, that, that other backend from the company that shall not be named?

Ryan: This was a enormous, your, your audience is going to love this. This was an enormous argument in our community because I.

Tried to give Thunderbird to a few people in my family to use and they were going oh, they were like looks great I like the customizability. I like the ability to you know The Thunderbird has a lot of competitive great features and the interface, you know Especially folks who are coming from the ribbon interface of Outlook.

We're like, this is much better and Then they went to add their Outlook or office 365 account and they had issues What a bummer, right? And to them, to us, it's like, Oh, your administrator doesn't have the IMAP setting turned on. To them, it's, this is email. It's an email client. Why can't, why doesn't it just work?

The community, we had this discussion about whether or not we should support closed standards. And I can understand why someone would argue that we shouldn't. I was on the other side of that, in that if we can't, if we can't let them in the door, we can't then bring them to our way of thinking. If they can't even use the product to begin with, then they can't begin to understand why open standards and open source software is important.

They're just gonna go use Outlook, which is what they have done, which is what my family members had to do. Eh. And so we've actually been on a couple year long quest to support EWS. And that's the protocol that will allow us to connect Office 365 accounts.

Jonathan: And that's, that's Exchange, right? That's like the Exchange backend?

Yeah.

Ryan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's exactly right, and it's complicated because it's not an open standard,

Jonathan: So there's You mean, you mean Microsoft wrote a, a, a server protocol that's not straightforward and clean and isn't just great to work with?

Ryan: It's not intended for, it's not intended for Thunderbird to use in order to connect to their service.

In fact, they would prefer that No third party connected to their service.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Ryan: But we, we made a lot of progress. And I really truly believe that by the end of 2025 majority of users using Office 365 or Outlook. com or any of the Microsoft accounts will be able to connect to their accounts and use it alongside their other accounts.

Jonathan: Very good. Very good. Has there been any even an attempt? at convincing Microsoft to make this an open standard? Has that been a conversation that you guys have tried to have?

Ryan: Earlier on, we've had some informal conversations. I do think, I do think we need to go back to them now that we've done work in this area and we understand the problem space more as far as they're concerned, and talk with them.

I don't think, I don't think it makes sense to Not try and convince them to either turn these into open standards or to have them at least in the future think about how other software projects will interact with their services.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Ryan: So, and, and, so my answer is yes, we will talk to them. We're now getting to a point where we actually can talk to them.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Ryan: Before, I feel like we were, we just didn't have the bandwidth to carry on a ongoing conversation with them about collaboration. But I think, I think now we're at a size and, and I know some folks are going to, hair is going to go on fire when I say this, but Microsoft does seem like They're more and more interested in engaging with communities.

That's

Jonathan: exactly the direction I was going to go. You will have a better chance of making this happen with Microsoft of today than the Microsoft of even four or five years ago.

Ryan: And I think that, I don't know if you've seen this, but there are people from our community, from our wider open source community, who now work at Microsoft.

And so it's becoming easier too because it's like, Oh, I know that guy. Yeah, exactly. And you say, like, okay, can you, can you go talk to this person for me and tell them why this is important? And that's, that's a good thing. That's, that's a really good thing that that we have kind of infiltrated the, the, you know.

No, no,

Jonathan: cross pollinated. That's a better, that's a better term. We don't infiltrate.

Ryan: No, no, no, cross pollinated. That's right, that's right. And and haven't you heard, Microsoft loves open source now, so. I am

Jonathan: sort of starting to believe that when they first started saying that I was very skeptical and cynical about that It's like yeah, tell me that when you're no longer making millions of dollars from Android manufacturers from your patent wars But well, here's a long way.

Here's

Ryan: the thing and I think this is this goes back to something I said at the beginning when you develop a product what they teach product managers is Is before you Before you even build a product, when you're just in the ideation stage, Part of product management training is, How are you going to, what's a business model?

How is a product going to make money? And continue to exist? And what we have to do with folks like Microsoft is tell them, in part, This doesn't serve you or your customers to gatekeep this, to make it so that, you know, folks who run these accounts can't use third party email clients. And, that is not, we, you can already in your head come up with reasons why they wouldn't want to allow that.

So, you have to really think about it from their perspective. What is the, what is the, What do they gain out of this? And But, you know, corporations have people in them too. And sometimes those people are open source enthusiasts. So sometimes they can be brought around just by the argument of this is just better for the world, it's better for everyone.

Jonathan: I, I, I think there really is an argument to be made there, probably, probably privately, but An argument to be made that an open standard for exchange gives Microsoft one less frontier of antitrust liability.

Ryan: Yeah.

Jonathan: And that's, that is something that tech companies are starting to have to think about again.

Ryan: Well, with the Digital Markets Act and is that the only one? In Europe, this message interoperability thing has mostly been approached from a chat perspective. But there's an email piece there too. And and ultimately what Thunderbird doesn't want to see, what Mozilla doesn't want to see, is this Email shouldn't is like the best decentralized.

messaging platform we have. It has the highest amount of adoption. It, I email you, you email me, we have no idea who our providers are necessarily.

Jonathan: You don't have to know. You don't have to care.

Ryan: Exactly. And so we should preserve that. And, you know, the, we've seen as folks have moved to webmail that more and more of these providers have closed down.

Their connections with their ability to easily connect with clients or to essentially move your email and use it in the way that you want and So that's an area where We kind of have to push back so that at least the one really great decentralized communication platform that we have, communication technology that we have, doesn't ultimately end up a fiefdom, you know.

Jonathan: Haven't you heard? Email is dead. Spam killed it.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

That actually does lead right into a question about how Thunderbird handles spam. Surely this is one of your constant headaches, right?

Ryan: Yeah, we have a, a built in spam filter, and it learns, you know, from what you mark as spam. It does have some basic idea, and I think it does a pretty good job.

But, if you tell it, additionally, by just marking the little spam thing, when you see spam make it It learns from that. Providers also are doing a much better job of this across the board. And so they kind of automatically filter your spam to your junk folder. Right. And I've seen over time that's getting better and better.

For instance, phishing emails seven years ago, eight years ago, were much more likely to make it into your inbox than they are today.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Ryan: And so I think it's like A two way thing. On the client, we're going to continue to do more, and I think that now that we have these LLMs that can run on device, we can roll that technology in for spam detection, which I think will go a long way, but also the providers aren't sitting on their hands, and we see that they're getting better and better at detecting When a message is potentially harmful, and, or, or it's something that you don't want to see.

And putting it in the right place.

Jonathan: Yeah, so you said LLM, so we can all wipe that off on our finger guards. Yeah. No, so okay, this is, this is, this is an interesting kind of direction to go. There is a little, it sounds like there's a tiny bit of AI built in already. This is old,

Ryan: this is old stuff though.

Right, right. Well, okay,

Jonathan: so that's where I'm going with this, right? So, like, the current hotness, like, the bubble is, well, let's put AI in everything. And everybody is coming out with announcements of this version is AI enhanced! And, I can, I can legitimately, though, think of a couple of places in Thunderbird where better AI support sort of makes sense.

And I, I'm sure you can think of them, too, right? So, like, spam filtering is one of them. And then the other one that really comes to mind is automatic translation of incoming and outgoing emails. Are those things that are on the radar?

Ryan: Absolutely. Yeah. I get, I've, I still get pushback from, Folks around LLMs and small language models and AI in general.

There's a, there's, there's some corners of the internet where, including in the open source community, where they just don't want to hear anything about it. But the truth is, is if you, if you take a step back, and you just look at the technology for its own sake, don't think about the hype, don't think about the just what is, what is, Is the current state of it and what does it enable that I know I'm already getting comments

Jonathan: Please don't add a I clippy to Thunderbird.

Ryan: Yeah But in our testing for instance, we you know, we've been playing around since before the chat GPT we were playing around with with these AI models

Jonathan: and

Ryan: And seeing what they could do and they they fall flat on their face Yeah, it's it's true, but they also Can be very helpful. Some of the, some of the, even the smaller language models now do great translation.

And you sit, you sit there with a native speaker and you say, was that, is that right? And they're like, yeah, that's, that's perfect. And, and additionally, you know, the one I have spent some time on is trying to take your inbox, that day's contents, and trying to pull out the useful nuggets right at a glance.

And we, we see it just getting better and better so that when you're starting your day you can just potentially see a digest and decide from there what, okay, what is it, what is the thing that, you know, instead of, if you're me, you get a hundred emails before you even sit down at the computer. Yep. And so, that's a, a lot to Even if you are good and you can spend three to six seconds per email reviewing it, it's still 600 seconds.

That's a long time. It's ten minutes. And that's if you're fast and you don't get caught on one. That's

Jonathan: really fast. Yeah, that's not, that's not a practical, you cannot go through your entire inbox that fast. Yeah, so it

Ryan: is useful to have LLMs kind of comb through that and make sure that you're putting your, attention at the, at the things that have the highest priority right back.

They can't do it alone. It's a user experience challenge.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Ryan: You can't just say, throw an LLM in and it will fix everything. You have to build around it to provide an experience that does the right thing and does it consistently good. But I think that for us as an open source community, this is an opportunity for us to say, We don't want everyone who uses AI to have to use.

Google and open AI and whatever. Let's find ways to roll it into our, our technology, but in, but using models, you doing it either on device or whatever it is that makes it so that there's some ownership and some privacy around its use.

Jonathan: I will, I will echo though, what mashed potato says, please don't ever prompt me.

I see you're writing an email. Would you like some help? No, I don't want help writing my email. I would like spell checking. Maybe a little bit of grammar checking, but other than that, no, I don't want AISlop getting sent instead of the words that I actually wrote. I think that is the sort of thing that I think people, when they hear, we're adding AI to Thunderbird, which you didn't say those exact words, I know, but, you know, when they hear something like that, that's the sort of thing that a lot of us go, no, I don't want that, I don't want the LLM to rewrite the email that I wrote.

Ryan: Yeah, I, what I think is, what I think we should be doing, everyone, The folks in the chat is, is come help us figure out the best way to roll this out. Because, you know, I do think that there are ways that using these models can improve people's lives. Can help them churn through their email faster, you know.

Ultimately, I think it's a bad situation. When I talk to folks who use, who are heavy email users who say, I only really get about an hour of work done a day because I spend the rest of the time in my email client. Yeah. And I think, gosh, that's not good. What, what I see from this technology is an opportunity to help sift.

Continually, like we've already done this before with the models that I'm talking about the machine learning stuff for spam detection and things like that. This just allows us to go one level deeper and say, can we further sift the inbox so that you see the most important things first and you can deal with them first.

And then, you know, the other stuff kind of, you can get to that after, after you're done with the most important things and after you've.

Jonathan: Does Thunderbird have like an extension system? Some of these things sound like, you know, they are great tools for some users and then other users aren't going to want to have anything to do with them.

And so it seems like it would be a great candidate for here's the extension store, go look at our AI stuff, or don't if you don't want to.

Ryan: Yeah, so even with our current experimentation, it's been, it's not We haven't published a repo yet. We will, but it's been done as an extension because we know a lot of people won't want anything to do with it.

And so we're not going to shove anything down people's throats. And frankly, right now, the only way I would roll it out to everyone is if it, if I felt like it could be done privately on their device and most devices aren't capable of. Handling this yet.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Ryan: And so there are, there are devices that have these NPUs shipping, you know, with in the, in the machine, they can't handle some of the, some of the impressive models, but they, but it's not the time yet for, for that to be done and rolled out across all users.

And I'm not even sure we ever will. But the, but yeah, this is a perfect area for, for, for that An extension to fill the gaps, whether it's an extension from us or an extension from community members and developers who, you know, want to develop for Thunderbird.

Jonathan: Yeah, so something I really want to make sure and ask you about before I let you go is Thunderbird on Android.

I, I have recently gotten that and it's, it's kind of funny because I've used K9 mail. For the longest time, and then, you know, I got the notification that it was essentially getting rebranded. Man, we've been, we've been at this for, you know, quite a while already, so we don't have a whole lot of time. But I do want to, I do want to touch on this.

So what, like, what's the story there from, from your perspective? What what led to this, where we end up with, with K 9 male becoming Thunderbird on Android?

Ryan: Yeah, so it started at FOSDEM. I sat down with Like many good things do. Yes, I sat down with K9 developer, Kedi, and we talked through what the future of K9 looked like.

Because for me, that was, I was using Thunderbird on desktop, I was using K9 on my Android phone. And as he described the state, Of canine, it sounded a lot like old Thunderbird, you know, there wasn't very, there weren't many resources to develop it, you know, and, and it was kind of moving slower as a result.

And there were a lot of things that he wanted to see done for the qual to improve the quality of the application and, uh, but it was going to take forever to do. And so I invite, I just said, Hey, you should, this should just become a part of the Thunderbird project and we can accelerate its development.

And ultimately he agreed and the Thunderbird council agreed and we, we brought the project over. We adopted the project. Some people call it an acquisition. It was not an acquisition. There was, there was no payout. Sorry for Keddy and other folks who contributed to the project. But, ultimately, we we got it and we, so rebranding is a bit of a misnomer.

There will be a K9 for the foreseeable future.

Jonathan: Okay.

Ryan: But there will also be a Thunderbird and they share the same code base. But there are some features and some, some things that we're just not gonna turn on in K9. Not because We don't need the users to have it, but because we don't think it matches kind of the K9 experience.

And but if users tell us otherwise, we'll turn it on. But, yeah, the, in Thunderbird for Android, we really want to create kind of this seamless desktop mobile, you know, experience where you can jump from one to the other and back. And it feels like one cohesive story. And so that's where we're going with that.

And and I love K9. And I love Thunderbird on Android. It's a great experience and it's improving rapidly every day.

Jonathan: Yeah, I'm, I'm looking forward to, you know, some of those, some of those advantages, fixes and new things getting baked into it and rolled out. I'm sort of eagerly looking forward to that.

I think it's a neat potential crossover. Is anybody talking about Thunderbird for our iOS brethren?

Ryan: Yes. I think that we'll see at least an alpha this year, if not a beta release. I won't go as far as to commit to a full, fully fledged release. Only because K9, we had a, the great thing about K9 was we had a project.

Jonathan: Yeah. We had code. That was in, that was in reasonably good shape.

Ryan: Yes, exactly. The story on iOS. is pretty grim as far as open source email clients go. Yeah. And so we're going to have to develop a lot of that from scratch. And that's going to take time. And for, you know, a couple years ago I said, I think we're going to start on iOS.

And we didn't. Because the amount of just upfront investment to do that, you know, would have took away from some of the things we were doing on, on desktop and on Android where we really did. And we still do need to spend time and money and effort to do it. But, I think that it's been long enough, and we do need to give folks with iOS devices a way to have a open source email client.

And so, it's time, and I think we will get in front of people this year.

Jonathan: Yeah. Now, iOS is interesting in that, I think this is true of the email client as well, you don't get to write, you don't get to use Gecko, essentially. Everything web based on iOS is actually Safari, just with a different skin on.

And so that's, that's sort of a an interesting challenge there, isn't it? That you, you sort of have to, you're almost packaging Safari for looking at least HTML based email.

Ryan: Yeah, that's, it's really,

it's, it sucks. But the but what we've been trying to do with Thunderbird, and this is true of every platform we're on, we're trying to make it the best experience for that platform. And when we have conversations about, like, for instance, where we've rolled in. It's, this hasn't hit the ESR release yet.

But we've begun using native notifications on each platform. And that's a lot of work, but ultimately it was this idea that we should, when you use Thunderbird on Linux, it should feel like a Linux application. And when you use it on Windows, it should feel like a Windows application. And it shouldn't feel like some weird creature from another planet.

Right. Like, it should feel at home alongside your other applications. And so, As much as stuff like that frustrates me with iOS, our goal is to provide the best open source email experience on the platform. And so we're gonna, we're gonna Use each part of that platform, integrate as best we can, and make sure that users have a good, good time with it.

So, I can be frustrated, but we're gonna make it work, and people are gonna be happy.

Jonathan: Yeah. I am just, I'm looking at my Thunderbird install on my phone, and I realize I'm running the Thunderbird beta, which is not updated since December, which is not that long ago. Should I be installing the Well, you should check

Ryan: for updates.

You should check for updates. It might have an update now. Yeah,

Jonathan: it may. Let's see. Oh, okay. So I, I asked the, a few weeks ago when we had the other Mozilla guys here talking about Firefox, I asked them this on iOS, we are seeing, at least in Europe, they are required to support third party stores.

And I was asking is, is there a future where we see Firefox with the Gecko engine on the third party iOS stores? And so I'll ask you the same thing about Thunderbird. Do you, do you eventually see, and this probably is dependent upon what Do you see a Thunderbird internal fork, I guess it would probably be for iOS just for those third party stores?

Ryan: It's very possible. We've been, I've been, I've at least been following that really closely. And I would like to see on, on both the platforms, on Android and on iOS, Better competitors, I guess, to the existing app distribution, you know, Play Store or iOS or the App Store. And we're gonna pay really close attention to that, and if there, as, if that usage really grows, I think we're gonna continue to put more and more effort into building what we want to build for those platforms versus what we may be required to in order to, you know.

Exist on the, you know, App Store to use iOS as the example. And so, yeah, there's a lot of, I see that as a wonderful change and something that we're going to lean more and more into as, as it evolves. Hopefully it continues to evolve and, and folks actually use these other stores.

Jonathan: I would like to see it come to devices in the United States instead of just in Europe.

Ryan: Yep, yep, me too,

Jonathan: me too. We'll see, we'll see, hopefully. All right, man, we have covered a lot and we are basically out of time. I could definitely, we could definitely keep going. I do want to know though, is there anything that we didn't get to, anything just burning that you want to let folks know about?

Ryan: Sure, I just want to share kind of a high level view of Thunderbird here to close this out. If you're not using Thunderbird, friends,

Jonathan: you

Ryan: should, you should really consider it. It's a really powerful tool for managing your email, your calendar, and your contacts. And not only that, but by using it, you support open source software in this space, in a space that really needs.

Changes. We don't want everyone using proprietary Gmail webmail for email. That's just going to result in more and more stuff sitting behind the Gmail gate. It is a gate, because right now there are features that Gmail does that we can't tap into. Because it's, it's not in the API and it's, it's not something that we can even interact with.

If we don't If there are not more and more people using these clients, more, more is going to move that direction. And so I just encourage folks, you know I guess vote with your, with your software use. And use this and, and, and Google and other providers will know. Additionally, keep your eyes open on what we do in the future.

Because we're really focused on impacting this area. And that's all I'll say today, but I think we're going to offer some great stuff, products to folks that, well, at least you have choice.

Jonathan: Yeah. There, there is quite a there's quite a useful use case in, you know, even if somebody is using Gmail and likes the Gmail interface.

Getting a pop feed of it and throwing it into a local Thunderbird and opening it from time to time, just to have an offline copy of your emails. Like it's useful for that by

Ryan: itself. Yeah, I remember the, and then we can close. One story I, I saw was folks, there was a folk, a per, a guy, there were a few of these like back to back in the news, who erroneously his account got.

Suspended, and he shared that he couldn't access any of his email. And he, he had like a lot of important stuff in there that he was trying to reference. And he didn't realize how much of an inconvenience that would be to just suddenly have Google block your access.

Jonathan: Yes.

Ryan: And I, when I was reading that story I thought, if he was a Thunderbird user, you know, he would have had a, even if he was using IMAP, like, he would have a local copy.

On his machine that he could refer back to and you know, do you own your data? Do you own your communication on the internet and The answer is I just use Webmail, then the answer is no, you don't.

Jonathan: Indeed. Indeed. Alright, this has been great. We'll genuinely have to have you back in, say, six months or so to talk about how these things have shaken out.

Before I let you go, I am just about contractually required to ask you two final questions. And that is, what's your favorite text editor and scripting language?

Ryan: My favorite scripting language is probably Okay. Hold up. There's two different, there's two questions in there. What do I use? And what do, what do I wish I could use?

Yeah. Or feel more empowered to use? I use Python as my scripting language. I love Ruby. I have a deep love for Ruby and, and used to use it a lot more but, you know, really don't have the same opportunities as when Rails was taking over the world and so it's Python, I guess, but my first love is Ruby.

Jonathan: Makes sense. Makes sense. And then my text

Ryan: editor is sadly, I have moved over to Visual Studio. Code I, I have to say I was a big Atom user, and ultimately moved over. If anybody has any recommendations You know, I'm open to it, but I'm pretty happy with Visual Studio Code, so.

Jonathan: Yeah, the guys behind Atom are working on another editor.

I think it's going to be, yeah, I think it's going to be open source, too. I think so. I was talking with them about doing an interview. I need to go back. I don't think we actually did it. I need to go back and touch base with them again, see if we can actually make that happen. Yeah, I know some people are really excited about that one, so.

But, you know, VS Code, it's open source. Now, you might want to run VS Code EM instead of VS Code if you, if you. Come from a certain, you know, open source purist sort of mindset. But lots of, lots of people like it. Lots of people like VS Code and it's actually really, it's

Ryan: pretty neat. It's the, for me, it's the extensions.

Yeah. All the different extensions, you know, there's just moments when I need something and I go out there and I get what I need. I'm, I'm always surprised at just how much is out there.

Jonathan: Yep. All right. Thank you so much, sir. I appreciate you being here. It was a delightful conversation.

Ryan: Yeah, thank you so much.

I appreciate it.

Jonathan: Alright. So that was, that was Thunderbird. And that was Ryan Sipes. And had just a great time talking about it. And I, man, I'm excited even more now for the future of Thunderbird. Get, I'm, I've already installed the newer version on my phone. I think I was stuck on an old beta.

So maybe some of my little, little quirks and annoyances will go away. I'll get to get to the new stuff. But yeah, I am super excited for the future of Thunderbird as well. Also excited for the future of the show because next week it looks like we're gonna have the guys from CIQ, and that's the, that's the company behind Rocky, the Linux distro.

Looking forward to talking to them. And then after that, recorded on, February the 25th, and should go live on the 26th, we're talking with Simon Schocken about NAND to Tetris. And that is a really neat project. It's a, it's a university course, but it's also an open source project about taking the building blocks of literally transistors with the NAND circuit and putting them together and, you know, building, building precept upon precept, as you might say, to get all the way to a computer that can play Tetris.

And it's a really, really cool course. I'm, I'm very excited about talking with him about that. If you want to find my work, of course, over at Hackaday, we've got the security column that goes live every Friday, you can check that out. We've got the Untitled Linux Show over at Twit, and you are welcome there as well.

Appreciate everybody being here and we will see you next week on Floss Weekly.