(I know that doesn't directly answer your question, but it does articulate a necessary pre-condition, and one that is hard for businesses entering a new line of service to deliver--although not impossible, of course.)
I think the synergy part is what is great here. Imagine thundermail is a FOSS server app. Imagine they implement things like proof-of-work for senders, and no PoW means the mail goes into a quarantine instead of directly in the user's inbox. That could fight spam, without the centralization and loss of privacy we've had in email. That hasn't happened now, because of the chicken-egg problem. There's no client that supports it because there's no server that supports it because there's no client that supports it.
Thunderbird is a very big client. It could push email forward like nothing before. I may give Thundermail a try. I'd much rather self-host a Thundermail server... one that works around the port 25 block on every residential IP. Maybe my self hosted instance could receive messages relayed from the "real" thundermail server on something other than port 25.
Also the Thundermail service is based on Stalwart (completely foss). We'll open source any additional relevant bits.
We also released the supporting services:
https://github.com/thunderbird/appointment
That very much exists, and is issued yearly.
Consolidated Financial Statements 2024-2023:
https://stateof.mozilla.org/pdf/Mozilla%20Fdn%202024%20-%20A...
Expenses in Software Development (2024):
> 290,448,000
Total Expenses (2024):
> 588,215,000
Ryan Sipes, if you can read this, everybody online remembers the 2020 Servo team lay-offs, and the juxtaposition of the C level compensation.
If you are serious about winning back donors and trust:
- Allow for a transparent breakdown of expenses on things like external consultancy and also C level compensation
- Allow financial ring-fencing of donations. Such that my donation can only finance Firefox devs or Thunderbird devs. (Not teams, not products, not managers/VPs/Directors just developers. Everyone else's compensation should come from corporate donations or other means)
I love Firefox and Thunderbird, use both everyday, was also a yearly donor up to 2020 (now I just donate to Archive.org and KDE).
You have great products that people love but if you are serious about gaining back trust you need to show judicious spending on the top side of the org. Justifying it with we need to spend money to get fundraisers doesn't pass the community test.
We have 2023-2024 reporting via these two links:
https://stats.thunderbird.net/#financials
https://blog.thunderbird.net/2024/10/thunderbird-annual-repo...
We need to update the ratio for 2025, but it shouldn't be dramatically different.
https://stats.thunderbird.net/#financials
https://blog.thunderbird.net/2024/10/thunderbird-annual-repo...
So I'd love to use the feature, but modern corporate auth defeats it currently.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Thunderbi...
I strongly encourage you to provide that information on the page asking for donations. Even if it's just one sentence with a link and even if it doesn't fit with Mozilla's corporate policies.
https://stats.thunderbird.net/#financials
https://blog.thunderbird.net/2024/10/thunderbird-annual-repo...
Was it really too hard to say "I am the" or add "here" at the end? Instead we get this lazy "words hard less wrds good" manner of speaking.
I don't understand why they make it so hard to donate anonymously. I actually found their IBAN (DE05 5123 0500 0500 2158) on the Google results page, not on the page it linked to.
Annoying.
Launching Thundermail this year (an email service) which we hope to help provide even more funds for development, beyond just donations. Also serving a user need (lots of our users ask us to help them get off Gmail).
Lots of interest in how the money is spent - answer: mostly on devs, landed Exchange support recently (big for a lot of MS users), working on Graph support as well, JMAP after that. Updating the calendar (primarily UX/UI there), continuing to improve our Android app, working on a native iOS app and the aforementioned Thundermail service.
We publish yearly reports and will publish one again this year detailing all this.
Here is a 2025 recap: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/12/thunderbird-2025-review...
But the blog has a ton of updates across the different efforts: https://blog.thunderbird.net
Happy to answer questions and we are an open source project so feel free to reach out to us and engage if you really want to see how the sausage is made!
*Edit: More context on what Thunderbird Council is*