State of the Thunder 9: Answering Your Thunderbird Pro Questions

In the latest State of the Thunder, we're answering your questions about the upcoming Thunderbird Pro offerings and introducing our new head of Community Programs.

Michael Ellis is here to help us better serve our community, and he's placed a call for ideas on Mozilla Connect for ideas to improve the Thunderbird community: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/have-ideas-to-improve-the-thunderbird-community/m-p/100264#M38972

Question 1: With these new services, will there be less effort spent on desktop and mobile?
Answer: No! Lately we've added several new developers to our desktop and mobile teams. TB Pro is a collecting of projects (not products) that mean to coexist besides our core products and fill in missing pieces for users.

Question 2: Why is Appointment being developed as a stand-alone?
Answer: As a stand-alone, users can adapt it for their individual use, and core users don't have to use it if they don't want to. Also, this gives us time to help the underlying protocols add support for what Appointment needs to run natively.

Question 3: Can you deploy Appointment on your own infrastructure?
Answer: Yes! We know many of our users like to self-host and so we wanted this option. But offering to manage it on our own infrastructure is not only good for people who don't want to manage it themselves, but it's an opportunity to not only keep Thunderbird financially sustainable but to raise the resources to make it truly competitive.

Question 4: Are there plans to make Send part of the core Thunderbird app?
Answer: No, not for the foreseeable future. We'd like to have it as an opt-in system add-on. We still have Filelink, which has allowed us to build Send. Developing Send can possibly allow us to expand on Filelink's abilities!

Question 5: In Send, is there a file size limit for each file?
Answer: As far as we know, no. You'll have a limit of how much storage you'll have, which right now we're imagining will be 500GB for a normal subscription. Subscription costs will both pay for the storage itself and its management. As Send is open source, we'll have free options for folks who want to self host with their own storage.

Question 6: Will I be able to use Thundermail with another client?
Answer: Of course! As you can imagine, we're big fans of open standards! Thundermail will also support JMAP.

Question 7: Any plans for future Google-like products connected to Thundermail?
Answer: This is largely up to the community! We have no shortage of ideas how we could expand TB Pro into those spaces, but this depends on our success. (So be sure to sign up for the mailing list and use the service if you us to move closer to a fully featured suite.) For some of those services, stakes are very high, so before moving into them we'd want to be certain we could do them well.

Question 8: Do we have a public roadmap for these projects?
Answer: We've started a process to make a public roadmap, along the lines of our mobile roadmap which shows current and planned sprints. This will be done in collaboration with the Thunderbird Council and will help our community get involved with these projects.

Resources:
Call for ideas to improve the community: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/have-ideas-to-improve-the-thunderbird-community/m-p/100264#M38972
Consensus scheduling proposed standard: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-calext-vpoll/
Filelink info: https://support.mozilla.org/kb/filelink-large-attachments
TopicBox Mailing Lists: https://thunderbird.topicbox.com/latest
Thunderbird GitHub Repositories: https://github.com/thunderbird
Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/
Thunderbird Development Docs: https://developer.thunderbird.net/