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Welcome to the debut episode of the Thunderbird podcast, which we're affectionately calling the ThunderCast! It's an inside look at the making of Thunderbird, alongside community-driven conversations with our friends in the open-source world. We can't wait for you to listen!
Here are some of the highlights from Episode 1:
Here are some of the highlights from Episode 1:
- What to expect on future episodes of ThunderCast
- We're hiring!
- Is Thunderbird still part of Mozilla?
- Alex starts a band, Ryan is building a keyboard, Jason's island adventures
- 4 years of "invisible work" to prepare for Supernova
- Thunderbird on Android... and iOS
Creators & Guests
Host
Host
What is ThunderCast?
An inside look at the making of Mozilla Thunderbird, and community-driven conversations with our friends in the open-source software space.
Jason:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to a little
show we are calling the Thunder Cast.
I am Jason Evangelho.
I do marketing and a lot of the content that
you see on the Thunderbird website and
newsletters and social media.
And I am joined by my awesome colleagues on
this and hopefully every episode.
Ryan Lee Sipes.
Hello, and Alex Castellani.
Hello. Hello.
Let's talk about why we're here.
I know that this is this is a show that
we've been wanting to to produce for months,
maybe almost a year.
And I think one of the first conversations I
ever had with Ryan, I don't remember exactly
what he said, but he had the name Thunder
cast, like ready to go.
And I said, I heard the name Thunder Cast
and I wanted to create a show just based on
the name. Yeah, it was too cool of a name
and we had to do it the way that we're kind
of framing. This is an inside look at the
making of Thunder Bird, but also community
driven conversations with all of our friends
in the open source software space.
So in this first episode, we kind of want to
set the stage and and talk a little bit about
Thunderbird's history and the milestones
that we had in 2022 and what's coming in the
future. But then after episode one, we're
going to have guests and guests from Matrix
and guests from the Document Foundation and
and it'll be a little bit less, you know,
Thunderbird promotion and a little bit more
kind of general discussion.
So why don't we go around and talk a little
bit about ourselves, starting with Mister
Ryan?
Ryan:
Sipes Yeah, so just in general, uh, probably
most people who listen to this will have
heard of me, even if they don't realize it.
I've been in the open source Linux space for
a long time.
Um, I have been contributing to projects
from my first projects, which were I was in
the Ubuntu community and really early on
and, and a few others that don't exist
anymore like Mandrake and Mandriva.
And uh, I've just been around never early on
was I was a teenager, so this was like 2004,
2003, 2004, 2005.
So wasn't really contributing that much
other than just lurking in forums and stuff,
answering questions, things like that.
It wasn't until, um, I was actually out of.
College and starting on my career that I
started actually contributing in any
meaningful way.
And then most people know me, or at least
originally heard about me when I started.
Mycroft The open source Amazon Echo.
But that was before Echo was actually out,
so the world was still wide open for this
type of voice assistant.
I went on from there to System 76, where I
was the community manager and de facto PR
person, and then crazy enough, kind of on a
lark, took a job at Thunderbird as a part
time community manager and ended up working
My way up to my title is Product and Business
Development Manager, which in our little
organization means that I make all the
product and final say on product and
business decisions for Thunderbird, which is
a lot. But I'm really glad because when I
came on, Thunderbird was super small.
We had two people when I came on working on
it and I was part time and the other person I
think was full time. Yeah.
Jason:
I have to interrupt you. So what year was
that?
Ryan:
It was now five plus a little over five years
ago.
Yeah. We and we had donations, but at that
time it was so much different.
We couldn't even get Thunderbird to build
every day.
That was coming off of a couple of years
outside of Mozilla.
And the and while the community was working
really hard, it was just very hard to keep
Thunderbird going.
I'm I'm going to try to make this super
brief.
Jason:
It's a it's a podcast though so we can make
this like 3.5 hours if we want to.
Yeah. People it can be like the podcast that
people fall asleep to and that's kind of a
badge of honor.
Ryan:
Yeah, hopefully they're not falling asleep if
it's just the middle of the day right now.
And I'm sure we'll talk about this more in a
little bit.
But long story short, got to take a lot of
previous experience and you know, my startup
background and and and open source just all
the projects I've been in apply that to help
us raise more money so that we could hire
people to work on Thunderbird.
And now we're in a very healthy place.
We've got 20 some people working on the
project and the future looks bright.
So this is the longest I've been anywhere in
my professional life.
Jason:
People who read or listen to the conversation
that I had with Alex in the first Meet the
team post, which you can find at the
Thunderbird blog blog, dot thunderbird.net.
They already know the answer to this, but
Ryan, I'm really curious, especially since
you seem to have such a long history with
Open source.
What initially attracted you to the open
source movement and why did you why did you
continue to stick with it?
Ryan:
You're going to laugh at my answer and you
should.
Um, I saw Beryl Compiz for the Linux
desktop.
So the the.
Jason:
Is that like the cube, the.
Ryan:
Cube and.
Jason:
Like the.
Ryan:
Burning down windows and things like that and
the wobbly windows.
Yeah. And I was definitely a hacker.
I was making video games at the time, you
know, in high school like that was what I
spent my free time doing and I saw that and
something clicked to me like before that, the
desktop experience, the experience you had
on a desktop computer, which was pretty much
the only computing experience you had at the
time, was immutable.
You couldn't change some things like that.
You couldn't make it behave in a different
way than what was then what, you know,
Microsoft and in my case at the time, you
know, wanted the desktop experience to be I
mean, there were some things you could do,
but you you didn't really have the freedom to
arbitrarily change things.
And something about seeing that and then
getting it loaded on my machine and messing
around with values and, and changing how it
behaved.
It, it hit something in a special part of my
brain where I was like, Oh, this now my
computer, I can make it do anything that I
want.
I was so enraptured by this Linux that I
went to the computer lab at school after
hours. My mom was a teacher so I could run
around the school after hours and I thought,
I'm just going to install Linux on all
these, like, you know, like no one, no one's
gonna, no one's gonna notice.
They're not going to notice.
Oh, no, I made it look like windows.
I used like a theme to make it look like,
you know, and tried to arrange things so that
because I just. I just had.
I was convinced and I was old enough to know
better, but I was convinced that this was
happening. Like everybody's going to be
using Linux.
I'm going to I'm going to use this as like a
test.
Case to see if anybody even notices.
And then I was in class the next day and
immediately, like everyone noticed.
Jason:
And hey, sometimes we don't outgrow those
kind of behaviors.
Just last year I made Linux mint look
exactly like Windows XP.
It was impossible to tell the difference
until you actually started really digging
into the OS.
But I still love doing stuff like that.
It's so much fun.
Ryan:
I never took credit for it, you know?
They were like, Who did this?
Alex:
Like, Oh, really?
They didn't. They didn't catch.
Ryan:
You? No, no.
I just kept my mouth shut, you know, It was
I mean, now they know if if anybody if any of
the school staff listen to this.
But they're all retired now, so it doesn't
matter.
Jason:
Well, Alex, tell us a little bit about
yourself and what you do with Thunderbird.
It's my.
Alex:
Turn now. How do I follow up that?
Uh, well, similar to Ryan, maybe people are
sick of hearing my story of who I am,
especially if they follow Thunderbird.
I've been talking about this for many, many,
many times in the blog post and YouTube and
so on. But yes, um, I'm Italian.
Uh, I lived, I was born in Italy and I lived
in Italy until I was 27.
And then one day I got super frustrated with
my country and the people around me.
So I said, I'm going to move to North
America and have a better life.
Uh, was not the easy dream and the easy win
that I was expecting to be, but things turned
out pretty well.
Um, challenging, but extremely rewarding.
I'm currently the product design manager at
Thunderbird.
I started as a designer slash developer.
If I remember correctly.
Ryan reached out to me on my private private
Slack channel.
He joined.
At that time I was doing like open source
application.
I was building things like Scholar and
started creating Akira, a UX design
application written in Vala for Elementary.
And Ryan told me, Hey, do you want to work
for Thunderbird?
Ryan:
Alex My my watching.
You went back quite, quite a ways.
I had asked him Cassidy a number of times
about you and I was always like, Well, what's
Alex doing? Because I was following a cure.
I was following Seckler and I thought I
thought these are just beautiful
applications. And and so I kept asking and
eventually I was just like, I was just like,
well, do you know what he's doing for work?
And he's like, I think he's working, you
know, at some kind of agency.
And I was like, I was like, I'm I'm just
gonna hop on a chat with him and just tell
him he should come work for Thunderbird.
Alex:
So that was, oh, thank you for doing that.
And that was an awesome, an awesome moment
in my life as you, um, I've been exposed to
like open source in general throughout all
my life.
I started when I was in university because
I, I talked a little bit in the blog post
that was released but I couldn't afford,
like especially all the software to do
architecture. They're very expensive, like
AutoCAD or Archicad.
They were like hundreds of euros at the
time.
I couldn't afford them, so I found Blender
for the first time.
I was like, Whoa, what is this?
And then it's completely free and open
source.
And then I saw some videos online on YouTube
about like blender developers, and I couldn't
understand what type of operating systems
they were using.
And it turns out to be Ubuntu.
I was like, What?
And as you like, I was running Windows Vista
at the time and then I saw a video comparing
the performance of Windows Vista.
The fancy aerial graphic interface with
Ubuntu jaunty jackalope was at the time I
think. Uh 1404 maybe with the compiz cube
and all these things.
And yeah, that blew my mind.
But yeah, Thunderbird even before working
always on windows.
That was the name before Outlook, before
Gmail, before anything else.
Thunderbird was the email client that you
had to use because it was the only one that
worked properly and allowed you to do
things.
So when you reached out, it was a sort of
like a dream come true.
I always wanted to.
I always dreamt about I wish I could
actually work on a cool open source project.
Like at the end of the day, of course,
everybody wants to make money.
Everybody wants to have a job that pays
well.
But especially in the tech industry, you
feel a little bit detached from reality every
time. Like you work on a startup that wants
to disrupt something specific, or you work
for clients that don't care about anything
other than I just want 20,000 websites per
minute and things like that.
But finding someone that is ethical and
makes you feel good when you work on it
because you know that it helps.
It enables people to do their work.
Yeah, it's extremely rewarding.
So I've been a Thunderbird for now almost
five years and when I joined we were five
people I think.
And it was funny because I joined and I was
like, okay, cool, we're part of Mozilla, so
let's let me see our design system.
Oh no, we don't have a design system.
Okay. What type of icons?
Oh no, we don't have icons.
Uh, what is the visual direction of
Thunderbird?
No, no, it's fine. It's just let's code it.
Let's maintain it. So it was interesting
coming from agency work where you have the
creative director and you do like meetings
to define prototypes and then you do MVP's
and then you go back and it's very well
structured coming into this.
It was kind of shocking.
Ryan:
It's taken a while for us to get to a place
where we actually have processes for doing
this and everything, but it would only work
with someone like Alex.
And I say this for folks who are listening,
who are maybe running open source projects,
it hopefully there are many folks can get
into a situation like Thunderbird is where
they have a reliable donor base or some kind
of business model that allows them to
actually put time beyond just their own time
into the app to their apps.
But it only works with folks like Alex who
get it and who have the passion to take an
open source project, apply a certain level
of love to it.
Jason:
It almost becomes a reflection of who you
are, right?
In some ways.
I mean, it's it's very much, you know,
there's that phrase garbage in, garbage out.
Well, the opposite also applies.
And, you know, especially when you're when
you're building communities, if you project a
certain type of mindset and attitude and
positivity, that is the kind of community
that you're going to build and see that
reflected back at you.
So it's yeah, it's the same way with with
Thunderbird.
It really does feel that way.
Yeah.
Ryan:
I think that having people on the team and we
have a lot of passionate people who bring
that passion into Thunderbird and don't just
accept, Oh, there's Outlook, oh there's all
these alternatives, you know, but, but
actually like no, we, we are different.
What we're making is different.
What we're making matters.
I think that goes a long way and what we're
making does matter.
It's the free and open source email client
and personal information management client.
And that's there's nothing like it.
Alex:
What shocked me first when I came in was the
the invigorating passion of the users using
Thunderbird coming from startup worlds and
agencies always the next thing, right?
Like you build a website for a client, you
know, in a couple of years they will need to
redo it because it's outdated now.
Or you build a product in a startup because
you want to disrupt a specific section of the
market so you can blow it out and you have
your exit strategy and make a quick buck.
And then the next project again and your
VCs, they change ideas every 20 minutes.
It's insane. Instead, you come into
Thunderbird and there's a passionate
community that have been using the same
product and they they love it for all its
flaws and all the things that are not
properly working, it doesn't matter is like a
solid user base that is always around.
And there is these underlying understanding
that this will not go away and it will only
get better and improve.
And there's the purpose to this product is
not just a product.
Now we kind of sound like a cult.
Jason:
But yeah, the same thing happened with me
because my my past experience was, you know,
doing marketing for AMD, which is a huge
company.
And besides just I was a fan of certain AMD
and Radeon products, but it wasn't, you know,
I didn't have I was a small little drop of I
was a small little speck of sand even inside
just the marketing team and.
You're like, it's it's it's really amazing
to be able to feel like I can have my own
voice. One of the highlights of my day is
engaging with everybody on Mastodon.
There is something extremely and I'm not
it's not my point to disparage anyone who
follows us on Facebook or Twitter or
anywhere else.
But there is something special about the
collective group of people on Mastodon
because they they just get it, you know?
I don't know. They just get it and they're
so supportive and you feel like.
You feel like you're actually having one on
one conversations there with people, whereas
on Twitter and Facebook, you're sort of
broadcasting out a message and that's that's
kind of it. But it feels it feels really
personal there and really, really uplifting.
So yeah, that's my little we've got our
mushy little stories and feel good feelings
and.
Alex:
We love what we do and we love the people
that use our product so well.
Jason:
I'll briefly, I'll briefly introduce myself.
My name's Jason Evangelho, and in a former
life, I was a tech journalist at Forbes who
discovered Linux in 2018 and then pivoted
180 degrees and started covering open source
and Linux at Forbes.
And in a more recent past life, I had a
podcast and YouTube channel called Linux for
Everyone. And Alex, I decided I got tired of
North America and I moved to Croatia.
So I'm like the opposite of a switch.
I'm an American in Croatia.
Yeah, I moved.
I moved here about five years ago, so and
I've been with Thunderbird, I think for about
nine months.
And it's a it's a dream job.
Like I know we're not maybe we're drinking
the Kool-Aid here, but it's a dream job for
me because it takes my love of open source
and it takes my experience, you know,
creating content and my experience building
communities and puts it all together with an
awesome team and it's great.
Ryan:
So yeah, maybe a good Segway Thunderbird is
hiring.
So if you want to join our team, you can go
to the Mozilla Careers page and you'll see
Thunderbird stuff listed there.
It'll say Thunderbird.
If you just type in Mozilla.org slash
careers, it'll it'll end up there and yeah,
we're, we're looking for a senior software
engineer and a full stack developer at the
moment. So if you want to be passionate
about what you're working on, please join our
team.
Jason:
Ryan you mentioned how there were, I think 2
or 3 full time people at Thunderbird and
probably not too many more.
Alex When you joined up, right, Yeah.
Alex:
Were 5 or 6 maybe.
Jason:
And now how many are we.
Ryan:
I think we're 24, 23 or 24.
We're going to talk about something else
here in a moment.
But we're just so grateful to our community
and our and our users and specifically of
those users, the people who donate to
support Thunderbird.
That is where all pretty much all of our
income comes from.
And and that is what we are completely
community supported.
And, and if you want to help support
Thunderbird and make it better than any other
email and personal information management
client out there like go over and and donate.
Jason:
Keep in mind for for everyone listening, just
keep in kind of the back of your of your
thoughts as we as we continue through the
through the show and we talk about last year
and what's coming up.
Bear in mind that all of these milestones
and all of these accomplishments and all of
this growth is directly because of our
supporters, our, you know, the people who
donate, the people who give to Thunderbird,
whether that is a one time donation or
whether it's a recurring donation, it
literally does make a huge difference.
It really, really is amazing.
Let's take a detour.
And we're all geeks.
It's no secret.
I want to talk briefly about what got us
excited over the last few weeks.
That isn't that doesn't have any thing to do
with work.
Like if I don't know, it's a hike or a trip
or a song or a movie or a meal that you
cooked or whatever.
Ryan:
Um, there's a, there's a couple things.
Although I'm a new father of twins, and so I
don't have near as much time to actually,
like, do the fun stuff that I discover.
So lately, the thing that I've been geeking
out over is it's twofold.
One, I figured out you can really cheaply
print boards that, that you can then turn
into keyboards, you know, like the the PCBs,
the main boards that that constitute
keyboards and then actually attaching the
components and everything is a lot simpler
than I would have realized.
So you can build your own keyboard for
relatively easy and there's enough there are
enough designs out there of boards that you
can kind of if even if you don't have a back
I'm not an electrical engineer, but I can
read through these and see them and
understand kind of their differences and
then kind of make my own decisions.
And also, you know, if you're having a board
printed, you can like get a transparent, you
know, like in case for it and then have them
etch in like art on it.
So I'm definitely going to make a
Thunderbird keyboard and I'm going to have it
be one of those split ones, you know, that
like Butterfly or whatever they call it.
Jason:
Thunderbird logo will be the super key.
The window.
Ryan:
Yeah, exactly.
Jason:
The meta.
Ryan:
Key. So that actually is the first project in
a while that I saw that I'm like, I'm going
to do that.
Jason:
That's neat. Keep us posted.
Yeah, keep us posted on that.
Ryan:
The other one that I've been working on that
I'll eventually share out is I've always
wanted to build an arcade cabinet and just
have it be an emulator that has like all of
the arcade games you could ever want legally
acquired, you know, Super Nintendo and all
the ones for the lawyers out there, all the
games that I already have, you know, load
them, load them on there.
Um, two projects that I've been building my
kind of pocket library with articles on, on
how to do the different pieces.
Those that's what's been capturing my
imagination.
Jason:
You know, we got to we got to stop letting
this guy go first because I can't even come
close to topping that.
Alex:
We to feed on your new passion on that I
don't know if you ever heard about the late
night Linux show is a podcast.
Um. Joe Redington.
Yeah there's.
Jason:
Shout out to Joe.
Alex:
I don't remember who, but one of them already
built something like that with a, um, a
Raspberry Pi put it in a cabinet and there's
an emulator that actually he talked about
this in one previous episode that simulates
the distortion on of the actual screen on the
sides and is like, so realistic.
Do you want.
Ryan:
To know what I was looking at?
I was looking at Crt's and then a HDMI two
to whatever the analog little screw thing and
they exist. So I'm debating actually having
it be a CRT.
But yeah, yeah, but I'm also a little
disgusted by that.
So I'm going to, I'm going to have to think
about that.
Alex:
Just do it and then we're going to come to
your place and just play video games like
Arcade. Yeah.
Yes, we.
Jason:
Are. That sounds so much.
Oh, yeah, that's.
That's been a dream of mine.
Not not something that I ever I really have
the resources or patience to accomplish but
always a dream to have an actual arcade
cabinet or I would settle for the Ms.
Pac-Man cocktail table.
Hahaha.
Ryan:
Yeah, that's.
Jason:
That's, that's the one arcade machine that I
want to own that are Super Street Fighter
two. So mine is not really geeking out, so I
don't know if we'll actually title this
segment geeking out, but I was most excited
about a my vacation.
My wife and I went to the Canary Islands and
specifically Tenerife, which is one of the
largest islands, and they were having
carnival up in the north part of the island
and you guys.
For an entire week in February.
Okay. It was spring weather.
It didn't deviate.
It didn't change. It was like 68 to 72
degrees, 1718 Celsius, something like that.
20 Celsius some days.
Just absolutely gorgeous.
Incredible food, incredible scenery,
incredible culture.
There we we one night we we went out to eat
some dinner and on one of the main roads, we
counted eight live bands on just like two
blocks And that that just absolutely
delighted me because I'm a huge music freak.
So the the really amazing thing about this
area is the second to last day, we we decided
to visit the volcano.
Now, that's that's a very harrowing story
because I decided foolishly to rent a moped
to go up the mountain and did not realize
that within 30 minutes it was going to go
from that beautiful springtime weather to
like zero to absolutely freezing.
Literally freezing.
But that's a that's a separate story.
I won't go into that. But it was the the
beauty and the and the contrast of of within
an hour going from, you know, wearing having
like Eggs Benedict on the beach in sandals
and shorts to driving a moped up to up a
mountain road and seeing the volcano that
formed the island and being in this
completely different like what's the word
biosphere or um.
Alex:
Ecosystem or something.
Jason:
Ecosystem, right. Completely different.
Snow everywhere.
Wow. And, man, like, just that little island
has everything.
I actually entertained briefly moving there
because it was so just stunning.
I mean, every everything there is just
absolutely stunning.
And it's surprisingly affordable for what
kind of feels like a tourist trap type of
place. Right.
But so that's that's what I was excited
about.
And I was reading this this new book by Rick
Rubin called The Creative Act the whole time.
And that like, all that scenery and that
relaxation and that book, like kind of
supercharged my creative juices.
And so now I'm making music again, and it's
just all good.
So what about you, Alex?
Alex:
I miss the vacation so much.
So I'm, uh, dreaming about the weather.
Like here in Vancouver. It's been, like,
raining nonstop for six months, which is not
giving you a mild depression at all, but
it's fine.
So geeking out.
I'm a huge music geek.
I've been playing guitar my whole life.
Um, back in Italy, I used to have multiple
bands.
The the week before I moved to Canada, we
won a contest and we won it.
We were booked to play in Paris and I had to
tell my band, I'm sorry, I'm moving to
Canada. No.
Yes. My band, they were extremely, extremely
upset.
So after moving to Canada, I every time I
was going back to Italy once every two years
to visit my family, I was bringing back one
guitar every time.
And now I have five guitars back here, but I
always try to play again, but I couldn't find
any people. It was kind of tough.
And then last year after COVID, uh, I formed
another band and I had my first concert a
couple of weeks ago and it was incredible.
I loved it so much.
And alongside that I bought a new guitar
because of course you cannot have enough
guitars ever.
And I bought my first Gibson Les Paul, which
was always been a dream of mine.
I was never able to afford it.
I got it. And it's the heaviest thing I've
ever held.
But it the sound, it comes from angels and
demons altogether is so soothing and powerful
and smooth.
Jason:
And two obvious questions What's the name of
the band?
Alex:
We don't have a name yet.
Jason:
That's the hardest part of having a band is
giving it the name.
It is like bands will break up over just
naming the band.
Alex:
But related to that, because we wanted to
find a band name after every rehearsal that
we end up like finishing at 11 p.m., we hang
out to a pub that eats in front of the music
room and this pub is in a basement and
there's the Miss Pacman cocktail table.
Jason:
Oh, man, I'm moving.
I'm moving to Canada.
That's so cool. Well, I can't wait till we
can because I heard a brief snippet that you
shared in our matrix room, and it was pretty
cool.
And I'm looking forward to hearing some
music from you.
Ryan:
It's funny that actually I think the three of
us all have.
Musical background.
I know Jason is a musician, and I've told
you before, I think that that I was in a band
that toured for a little while.
What did you play?
I was a vocalist, but I.
But I. You can't see him because I'm not up
on the wall yet, but I play guitar, banjo and
a little bit of violin, but it sounds like.
It sounds. It can definitely go into like,
creepy violin, you know, easily, like.
Jason:
Like horror movies.
Ryan:
Yeah, exactly. I think.
Alex:
That works. For metalcore.
That's perfect. Come on.
Yeah.
Jason:
Why? So why aren't we making music?
Alex:
Thundercast can turn into a music band.
It's fine.
Jason:
I mean, okay, I'm ready.
All right. So let's talk a little bit about
the history of Thunderbird being kind of on
the front lines of all the chatter on social
media and and seeing how the outside world
perceives Thunderbird.
There is a probably the main confusion point
is, is like, are we a Mozilla product or are
we not a Mozilla product?
And I know that's a very tricky thing to
navigate.
So Ryan, give us some clarity to.
Ryan:
Understand Mozilla and Thunderbird, you have
to understand a little bit about Mozilla as a
company and I say that with air quotes,
people can't see it.
So Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit that
if I say Mozilla and if anyone really says
Mozilla, what you're talking about has its
roots in the Mozilla Foundation, which is a
nonprofit with the charter to just make a
better Internet for everybody.
The foundation owns the Mozilla Corporation,
which houses Firefox.
Um, there's a number of reasons for that.
The main reason is that just US law makes it
very hard to create software as a
nonprofit and actually hire all the people
that you need to, especially if you have a
very popular piece of software.
And I do think this has changed a little bit
over the years.
But I know that that in the past, you know,
the the IRS has kind of been like you're
hiring developers to make software that
doesn't seem like a charitable activity, like
you're supposed to use money that you
collect for charitable activities.
So so for the and I think like I said, I
think that is changing.
But it hasn't always been that way.
And it's been very difficult for, you know,
a government tax agency to grok that you
could be making software that's for the
public good that, you know, is not built
around some kind of traditional like
business model or whatever.
But but I say all that to say that
Thunderbird existed for quite some time in
the corporation.
The problem with Thunderbird was there
wasn't really a good funding way to fund its
development, so people loved it.
It was a popular application, still is, but
no one really figured out how to fund it.
So Mozilla put it into Mozilla messaging,
which was its own little house, and their
intention was to find a way to fund fund its
development and they weren't able to either.
It's not trivial to to make an application
as robust as Thunderbird.
It does a lot and it's expected to do a lot
and it's expected to do it well.
And I'm sure there are open source
enthusiasts who are listening who are like,
You don't need a company, you just need a
dedicated volunteers, you know, to make
things work. And and that's true to an
extent.
But but there's always the there's always a
problem of something is in a seriously broken
state. It's going to take months to sort it
out.
You know, like who's going to do that work
and who's going to show up every day to make
sure that the software is is fixed and and
those pile up over time.
Eventually, you have hundreds of projects
that no one really has the volunteer time to
take on. And so projects suffer a lot of
bitrot eventually they just die out.
So when I came on, it was a couple of years
after Mozilla had said Thunderbird is still a
part of Mozilla, but we're turning it over
to the community to maintain.
And the community formed a council, elected
individuals from the community to kind of
guide and steer the project.
And they hired folks like me with the
donations that they did have, which were
compared to what we have now, were somewhat
meager.
But they it was enough to hire a few people
and to maintain the application of course, my
role was to be community manager.
So to try and orchestrate, you know, how as
a community we would continue to support the
application. So our success, we were in the
Mozilla Foundation, so we were in the
nonprofit and that was great.
But due to a few changes, one of which was
just asking our users, finding good ways to
ask our users to support us.
We ended up getting a bunch of donations and
growing and we grew to be, just as we talked
about earlier, too big to fit maybe in the
foundation it was.
We were already facing all sorts of
operational problems because of how quickly
we were growing and it looked like we would
continue growing.
And so an entity called Msla was created to
house us.
And so that's where we sit Now.
I say all that because even though it's a
bunch of business maneuvering and stuff, I
have two really distinct thoughts on that.
One is oftentimes open source projects, kind
of push that into the background and say
like, let's not talk about that.
Which I think is a mistake because
sustainability for open source is a big
question. And it's one of the things I've
always had a big issue with with open source
projects is people think a lot, a lot about
how am I going to build the cool thing, but
not about how am I going to make sure that
this cool thing continues to be built and
continues to be maintained?
And we see that all the time.
We see projects that enormous companies like
Amazon and Google rely on, and it'll have
like one guy who doesn't get paid to do it,
like working on it.
And this is for folks who aren't in open
source world.
This is getting into the weeds a bit, but
there's a conversation that needs to be had
when you're starting an open source project
or you're or if you're like me, you end up
running an open source project.
You have to ask yourself like, okay, like I
love this project, it's beautiful.
How is it going to be maintained?
How is it going to continue to be supported?
Jason:
The big hurdle is, is that when you're
starting an open source project, you're
probably not thinking about that.
You're thinking about creating the thing,
right?
If you're if you're the one creating the
thing, you know, there are exceptions, but
there's a pretty, pretty strong chance that
you have the creative skill set to make that
project awesome.
But you don't. Maybe not.
Maybe you don't have the skill set to market
that project and to, you know, work with
other there's so many, so many layers that
go into actually building and then sustaining
a project. It's staggering.
Ryan:
Yeah. And this is where I give Mozilla
credit.
Mozilla among especially the most hardcore
open source folks, they want Mozilla to be
perfect and to to always make the right
decisions.
But if you're if you're in charge of keeping
these big projects that serve tens or in in
Firefox's case hundreds of millions of
users, you have a ton of decisions to make
constantly all the way up and down the
stack, all with with every piece of it.
How do you from how do you fund it to how do
you actually maintain the the software and
everything? Even when Thunderbird was at its
worst state, the people I consider to be the
key stakeholders at Mozilla didn't ever
treat it like it was a zombie project, didn't
ever treat it like it was a dead project.
Now it was a zombie project in a lot of ways
for a little bit, but but they tried to find
ways to make sure that we could continue to
do what we needed to do in order to make the
application available for our users to kind
of bring it full circle.
We are Mozilla, we are a part of Mozilla.
We don't intend to leave Mozilla.
A lot of people say like Thunderbird should
strike out on its own.
We get a ton of value from Mozilla.
The people inside each part of the
organization, whether it's a nonprofit, the
the Firefox team and of course you know, our
own team.
People across each of these areas contribute
to our success.
And and we have a lot of people who help us.
And so we have gone on a circuitous kind of
journey to find how we are sustainable, how
we can continue to create a great product
and a great piece of software.
But it took a while, but we couldn't have
done it outside of Mozilla.
I firmly believe that.
I think it it had to be here.
So we still are Mozilla and Mozilla is a big
tent with a lot of parts.
Alex:
Yeah. To add to that, from a purely technical
point of view, we rely on a lot of resources
in Mozilla, like being able to deploy on
their servers and release daily or beta on
all the platforms and like all these
infrastructure that if we would be completely
independent we would have to pay and the
cost is very large, it would affect us, it
would affect our ability to hire, it would
affect our ability to actually focus on the
product and instead, like we would need,
yeah.
To spend a lot of time, money and resources
into the just the infrastructure that right
now we kind of get for free.
Ryan:
Alex, do you want to talk a little bit about
102 and what kind of what groundwork we we
laid? Maybe it will set the stage for
Supernova.
For some people, they saw some changes, but
maybe not as much as they were expecting last
year. And we can talk a little bit about all
the invisible work.
Alex:
So yes, the past year, 2022, but even before
that, um, a lot of things under the hood
started changing, especially like version
61, 78.
There were kind of like always similar.
And every time I speak about Thunderbird
because my main area of expertise and my main
effort is on the front end, I mostly
reference the front end, but also all the
things that we've been doing affect also the
back end.
What happens in the past couple of years
with Thunderbird is that we were trying, we
were growing, we were adding more developers
and more expertise in different areas.
So we had the chance and the possibility to
actually make some decisions rather than what
we've been doing before, which was literally
trying to maintain what we currently have as
a product and make sure that it releases any
builds.
Now we have the time, the capacity and the
resources to let's change things, let's
decide what new things we can implement and
how to fix and and rework it.
That wasn't easy and it's still not easy
because we found a lot of issues and
difficulties other than the code base being
not ancient per se, but in software
development, something that was built ten
years ago right now is ancient because with
the progress on web technologies and all the
things that change every year, things that
you write ten years ago are nowhere
comparable to what you can write today.
So the first hurdle was we need to start
cleaning up the code.
We need to make it more modern from just
coding standards and technology standards,
and we need to do that so it's easier to
update, it's easier to change things because
right now, every time we get in, it just
takes a lot of time to change every little
thing. And as soon as you change something,
other things in a completely different
section, they collapse because they were
tangled together 15 years ago and no one
remembers or there's no documentation about
it.
So it's a bit messy.
Jason:
I just I should I should point out at this
point that I'm not a developer.
And so I will always be kind of, you know,
asking the questions that maybe the audience
is thinking about.
And it seems like it seems to me that once
the code gets modernized and gets more
refined and cleaned up, that the existing
team that we have now could actually be so
much more productive when it comes to like,
yes, fixing bugs and addressing maybe, you
know, adding accessibility features and
adding other things.
Is that is that generally correct?
Alex:
That's exactly the goal.
And the purpose of the rework and the
rewriting that we're doing.
One of like a lot of examples that I can
make like one of the most glaring examples is
just of course like the user interface.
We weren't able to change anything because
in the past we didn't have the designers or
the front end developers to tackle those
things.
So we were just tagging along to what
Firefox was releasing.
Firefox uses toolbar buttons or uses XUL
menu pop ups uses all these toolkit widgets,
so it's easier for Thunderbird to just
repurpose those toolkit toolkit widgets.
But unfortunately Firefox, they have
hundreds of developers and they push hundreds
of changes per day and they change those
toolkit items to service them, not to service
Thunderbird. So every time they were making
a change, that change was affecting us and
the way that we use those interface and
those toolkit UI elements is completely
foreign for what they were originally
designed for.
If you think about Firefox, it's just
Firefox is a toolbar and then you have your
website and then the interface is just the
settings page, which is also another like web
page basically.
So there's not much UI and Thunderbird has a
lot of UI.
So trying to use what Firefox offers to our
benefit every time something changes in the
source, then we get affected and we always
add that rushing of once a week.
We need to pour things from Firefox, we need
to follow along, we need to fix it and we
could never have the time to let's create
something new.
Let's dedicate our time on these extra
project because things were breaking
constantly and this is not I don't want to
throw shade to the Firefox developers.
There have been like extremely useful and
they always collaborate with us.
But it's the reality of the fact there are
like 200, 300 developers.
We were five.
It was very difficult for us to tag along
and continue.
Three years ago, 178 came out.
That was the first step towards let's try to
decouple ourselves from the tool kit of
Firefox. Easier said than done.
Of course. It's been three years now and
we're still doing it.
And finally, after three years with the next
version 115 users will be able to see the
first actual wins and changes that we're
doing there and we're achieving.
Jason:
Before the development of supernova, at
least, let's say the UX and UI development
started. What were both of you most wanting
to introduce into Thunderbird?
115 Like what was the the feature that you
really wanted to get in there.
Alex:
Vertically outwas from me?
Ryan:
I mean, I was going to say the same thing.
It's actually since the moment I came on and
why I reached out to Alex Alessandro, it was
my intention to fix the layout.
We have many users who love the single line
message list, but for me it's always been a
challenge because it just looks like it just
looks so dense and and almost cluttered.
It just it's just too much at a glance.
And and so for me, it was always every
release I thought we would get here.
And so to see it actually come to fruition
is, is really amazing.
Alex:
It took us three years to reach this point
because of the.
Underlying architecture that we were using.
Our three the message list and the folder
panes were generated at the time, still today
in some parts, but at the time from like a C
plus plus interface that spit out a three and
that was not accessible.
It wasn't you cannot you couldn't inspect
it.
It didn't accept any variation of the layout
other than the table list.
And the complexity was the fact that that's
a marvelous piece of engineering because it
allows you to print and view millions of
emails without affecting your performance
because it just fakes the height and
recycles.
When you scroll down, it generates on the
fly.
So it doesn't matter how long is your inbox,
it doesn't affect your performance, but that
comes from Firefox and Firefox created that.
That piece of engineering for the bookmarks
and the bookmarks list is just a column with
a link and that's it.
We took that and we extended it to have the
full message with the columns for the
attachments and the read and the spam and
the favorite and the dates and the locations
and the tags, and then the message that you
can expand it to have like the threads.
So we, we took that initial simple
implementation that works perfectly for
Firefox. We extended it to the point that is
now it's a nightmare to manage because it
wasn't intended to be that complex every
time something changed.
It takes years because of the technical
complexity, historical, technical debt and
making sure that what we release is on par,
if not better, to what it was before.
So yeah, all the releases 61, 78, 102 were
the testing ground of slowly changing things
and slowly implementing something that is
not immediately visible.
It happens in the background and and we're
sure, okay, it didn't implode.
It's not broken.
Still usable. Okay let's do something extra.
Something more.
And now, yeah, we're approaching 115, which
is going to be like a big change.
Jason:
Now, let's not let's not freak people out
when we say big change.
Because one of the one of the things that
that we recently highlighted is that while
there are some modernizations happening with
the the user interface, we we very strongly
believe in in retaining the type of workflow
and the type of visual layout that you're
used to that you've been used to for the
last 20 years.
And so when we say change, think of it as
additional options, not not as something that
you're going to be forced into getting used
to and having to change all your muscle
memory and and all that.
Yeah.
Alex:
When I specifically talk about like big
changes, I was referencing architectural
changes that will allow us to maintain what
the users love and are used to, but also
expose extra features for new users or users
that are tired of the current interface or
the current flows. And they want something
that is different or works differently.
It works more on par with modern
applications or like competitors.
Ryan:
It's making new ways of using Thunderbird
available, which we think and we don't just
think we we use a lot of heuristics and user
what we know about user habits and data to
try to improve the experience.
There are a lot of things that we've done
that should make Thunderbird more
contextually helpful.
In the past, the approach of Thunderbird has
been give a giant list of options at any
point for someone to interact with a thing.
And what we're trying to do is let's give
people the most likely stuff that they're
going to need at the moment that they need
it.
And then if they want, they can interact
with it in all these other crazy ways.
But let's not give them just like everything
all at once, let's give them like the most
likely things they're going to do.
And then if they want, they can do the other
things as well, which I think will make
people's productivity a lot higher.
I am a tag user, so I tag my emails to do.
I tag my emails important.
We're exposing tags so that you can quickly
sort email by tags, you know, from the folder
pane. And I think that it's all these little
things like that that will help unlock
people's productivity so they don't have to
hunt and peck around for the things that
they're trying to do, but actually have
those what I consider kind of no brainers
available when they need it.
Sometimes we have all this stuff available,
but it's it gets lost because there's just so
much that you're hit with.
If you right click on a message on
Thunderbird 102, most of our users listening
to this are on Thunderbird 102.
Right click on a message.
You can do everything with a message.
But all of that stuff gets equal billing
there.
So what you probably have 42 menu items
available to you there.
We can do a lot better.
We know a lot of how how you guys are using
Thunderbird and we want to make it easier to
use Thunderbird.
Jason:
Well, it sort of reduces the, the it reduces
the cognitive burden.
Right. And and you know, this is, this is
software that a lot of people are in all day
long and we want to make that as pleasant
and non stressful as possible for them.
Ryan:
You talked about cognitive burden, which I
think about quite a lot.
Let's let the content of the emails, let's
let the activity that the user is trying to
do be as painless as possible and let them
actually engage with like what the thing is.
So, oh, you know, like this report.
Okay, I want to read the report.
I want to respond to it and do that in a way
that's in my response is understandable
contextual to my recipient, maybe even
beautiful.
You know, doing that and focusing on that
will enable people who are using the
application to do more, to be more
productive, to be the email hero, you know,
in their organization.
And and I'm sorry if I'm going way out
there, but I feel like that's a job that we
as Thunderbird for a long time let slip we
were like we need to make sure that it does
X, Y, Z, you know, all these different
things.
But we didn't actually spend a lot of time
thinking, how do we make the person more
productive? How do we make them have more
clarity around what they're doing?
How do we make them, Yeah, reduce that
cognitive load so that they're not looking at
their email inbox and just stressed out.
Alex:
And I know we have a lot of users that they
love the super compact, all the information
all at once. I want to see all together and
that's perfect.
We will always maintain that.
We will never remove that.
But unfortunately there's been a lot of
researches in terms of UX, in terms of what's
your focal point, even the simplest thing
that your eye, even if you have the illusion
that I see 20,000 emails altogether, so I
can see everything, your eye will only have a
two millimeters of focal point in the
middle.
So it doesn't matter if you see 20 messages
or two.
If you're reading one thing, you can only
read one thing.
And for many users, having all that
information around in their areas that are
blurred, it's too much is just distracting.
You cannot focus on one thing at a time.
So why one type of user is right and the
other type of user is wrong.
Like all users are right or wrong, like it
doesn't matter.
There's always a flow that is perfect for
one person and it's horrible for another and
vice versa. So we need to be able to support
all these things because of all the things
that we've been releasing on social media
and all the great work that you've been
doing. Jason And just sharing all the
updates we do.
There's been a lot of talk about all the
changes that we're doing at Thunderbird, in
other media, in other podcasts, and there's
a recurring thing that I hear from users that
have been using emails for many, many years
and it's email is not broken.
Don't try to fix it.
Why are you changing things?
And if anyone has any experience in software
development, first of all, we're not trying
to change email the email protocol.
The email concept is not what we're trying
to change.
We're talking about our application, talking
about Thunderbird and an application is never
finished. If you don't constantly maintain
it, if you don't constantly update it and
refactor it, it will get stale.
As Ryan said, it will bit rot and it will
turn into a zombie.
We'll turn into Abandonware because things
change in the background, architecture change
and the release toolkits change and the
ability to run that application on an updated
operating system, which we cannot ask the
user, Hey, stay on Windows 7 because
otherwise Windows 11 is not supported
because we haven't updated, we haven't
changed anything because Thunderbird is not
broken, so we shouldn't change it.
Updating the architecture of Thunderbird to
make sure that it is sustainable,
maintainable and can be upgraded and coded
for the next 20 years.
It's also like one of the most important
things the fact that by doing so we gain the
ability to do all the extra cool things on
top.
It's mostly gravy and it's what the user
will experience.
But in the background, what we're trying to
do is trying to make Thunderbird sustainable
and fast and light for the next 20 years.
Ryan:
This is the last thing I'll say on the on the
front end stuff is this work is amazing and.
If you go and you pull down daily.
Bear in mind it's alpha.
So some things do act funky.
But if you if you load up the vertical
layout, which has the multi-line message
list, which if people don't know what I'm
talking about, it means that instead of just
a single line, that in your message list
that has all the information we actually now
can display over two or more lines, some of
the email content, the author, the subject,
you know, is it starred, is it?
Tags aren't supported at the moment, but is
it tagged?
You can immediately see and feel the
difference of the application.
And to go back to your original question,
Jason, and I know we spent a long time on
this, I think that this is the largest
change since Thunderbird was made, and I
think it will also have the greatest
positive impact on our users productivity and
experience of using Thunderbird than
anything that we've done or will do for the
next few years.
Jason:
What do you guys recommend if people really
want to check out some of the changes that
are already implemented, kind of a supernova
preview, Do you recommend that they check out
daily or should they stick to beta?
Ryan:
Probably beta right now.
Beta will, I think is is in a state where
we've never we've always had beta be very
sacred and not very experimental.
Right now it's for the first time ever since
I've been around in an experimental state.
But I think here in the next couple of weeks
if folks pull down the beta and they start
using it in the next couple of weeks,
they'll see beta, not next couple of weeks,
the next beta release, which will be, I
don't know when the next beta release is.
Yes, two weeks. So the next couple weeks.
Yeah. I think it will start to.
Really take form even more.
And by the time we get into April May, it
should be much it should be much closer to in
a state that I think everybody would expect
that they could look at that and probably say
this is really close to what we'll get.
Jason:
Because for for people who aren't following
the roadmap or kind of the, you know, the
inside baseball type stuff, the feature
freeze has already happened.
So the the takeaway there from from me as a
as a non developer, as a user is that
Thunderbird team is spending a lot of time
on Polish and on stability and on performance
and not, you know, we got to get this
feature in at the last minute and it might be
broken but that's that's on the roadmap and
we have to do it.
So that's I really respect that because not
only is it going to be such a really like a
breath of fresh air visually, but it's nice
to see the team allowing several months just
to just to add the polish.
Alex:
That, yeah, we broke the cycle a little bit
because as Ryan said, beta is always been
extremely stable.
Yeah, almost as stable as 1 or 2, but with
the ability to get once a month and four
updates every beta with like new releases or
new features.
A little bit earlier this time we decided
let's actually use beta to get some
meaningful feedback because our beta
population is very small compared to our ESR
population. So when we release a final
stable release, then we get a bunch of bug
reports that we never consider we'd never
seen because we're a beta population.
Wasn't that extensive, testing wasn't that
extensive on beta.
So this time we ramped up our social media
presence.
We started talking about supernova, we
started exposing when things will happen, and
then we decided, let's release all these
things that we built in the past four months,
five months from September to January, on
February beta.
We know that it's not super stable.
We know that it's unpolished and unfinished.
But since we're on Feature Freeze, we're not
building any extra news.
Like all the things that are in the codebase
right now are the things that we're shipping
in 115. So we're going to take the next five
months to just polish them.
And in order to highlight or find out all
the issues we need to expose to our beta
users and we apologize if some beta users
get upset because we they relied on beta for
many years thinking that it was extremely
stable, but it needed to be done in order to
have as much feedback as possible and expose
these new things to the users as early as
possible.
Jason:
And we're going to have, I'm sure, at the
wherever this is published, it'll be
published on the Thunderbird blog and in
other places.
But in our show notes we'll have a place
where you can leave feedback if you're a beta
user, maybe you haven't joined the mailing
list.
I'll we'll show you where that is and we'll
of course have links to links to Thunderbird
on the Fediverse and on YouTube and on
Peertube and all the other social network
places that you can talk to us and leave us
feedback.
Alex:
And a couple of things.
A lovely things happen for how many users
get upset.
And they were some like vocal discontent,
like very, very strong discontent on, on the
things that we did.
We got an equal if not higher number of
users that actually joined the beta willingly
and started participating in bug reports and
bug triaging and the participation of our
community. A lot of users just joined,
signed up into Bugzilla and started learning
how to use bugzilla and bug triage things
for us is incredible.
It's a heartwarming.
Jason:
I just want to say like if you're listening
to this show and you are someone who is
active on Bugzilla, you're filing bug
reports.
Props to you and thank you because let's not
beat around the bush.
It's difficult using bugzilla, actually, not
just bugzilla, but the majority of bug
reporting platforms that are out there are
not easy to use.
You know, it can be time consuming.
There's a lot of detail that goes into it
and I wish it was easier, but just know that
you're making a huge difference.
Alex:
The learning curve is pretty steep.
So we would have never expected something
like that.
We were expecting we're going to release
this beta.
Our community is going to be very upset
because things are not finished and polished
and stable, but at least we are going to get
some bug reports on things that are broken.
And instead it was completely opposite like
a lot of excited people.
Yes, we got some complaints, but a lot of
excited people.
Very detailed bug reports, people that are
every day in our matrix room.
And on Bugzilla helping us to identify
things.
It's incredible.
It's really like mind blowing.
Jason:
Now something that definitely deserves
mention here and probably in fact, I think we
will be giving it its own episode is K-9
mail.
You know, we it's it's a much lower profile
right now than than Thunderbird.
But for people who are not keeping pace, you
know, because it's it's a fairly recent
development. K-9 mail is an open source
email application for Android.
And it recently joined the Thunderbird
family.
And we hired the developer full time.
And in fact, we recently hired another
developer full time to work on K-9 mail.
And long story short, K-9 mail will
eventually transform into Thunderbird for
Android. So let's talk a little bit about
that before we close out the show.
Ryan:
Yeah, for a long time, especially, my pet
project was getting Thunderbird onto mobile.
It was definitely something that for ever
since the day I came on, in fact, when I
interviewed, I said one of my goals will be
getting Thunderbird onto mobile and it took
me years, but I finally got it.
If if I'm being honest about my own email
habits, I, I definitely read a lot more email
on mobile.
It might be equal to how much I reply to
stuff on mobile or desktop.
It's really important when we have these
supercomputers in our pockets that
Thunderbirds values are our thoughts on how
an email experience should be.
I thought it was important that we be where
our users are at, and that's increasingly
more and more in the mobile context.
And so I spoke with Katie, who is the
maintainer of K9.
He has been for a long, long time.
K9 itself is a fork of the original Android
email application that came out with Android,
you know, when Android came out.
Now, I don't even think you get an open
source email client out of the box.
I'm pretty sure on most phones you don't you
get Samsung, Gmail or Gmail.
So talking with Katie, we are the values of
the two projects were aligned.
K9 has been chronically underfunded.
That's not that's not a knock on the
community.
They have been funding the application, but
it's just I don't know, it's a matter of
scale of of just Katie being the only person
trying to both develop the application and
raise money for it.
And so the project and its key contributors
agreed that it should be a part of the
Thunderbird family. And so it joined the
Thunderbird family.
And this year, either slightly before or
slightly after 115 Thunderbird for Android,
which will be K9 AS But with all the
features we've identified that have to be
there in order for it to be Thunderbird to
be called Thunderbird will be ready to go.
Jason:
And what are those features?
That's the burning question, right?
Because I know, I know when people hear
this, they're going to think or they're going
to maybe hope that a lot of the like, power
user type of features move from desktop to to
mobile.
Ryan:
And that's that's really where, you know, K9
fortunately had quite a few power user
features and settings that I think that most
of our users appreciate.
And I think that a lot of our users who went
out to find the Thunderbird experience on
mobile found K9.
So, so the main things we focused on is a
few different things.
One is making sure that no matter what
account you bring to K9 to Thunderbird on
Android, it'll work and it'll be set up and
you won't have to hand jam a lot of settings
or whatever. Nice.
And so OAuth support for major providers
that, that, that was a big thing that we did.
Right now the new account setup is going
into K9, so that's going to allow K9 to use
Thunderbird's auto discovery stack, which
will allow if you type in a Yahoo account,
it'll know it's a Yahoo account, it'll do
all the right settings.
This is something that K9 didn't have.
So usually it would make the right guess.
But if you had a custom domain or something,
it it wouldn't always.
That has been a problem for new users of K9.
That's that's going to be resolved.
I imagine, this month or early next month.
There's a lot of UX UI improvements that
have gone into it.
You can actually see pretty much all of
those I think, that are going to get in maybe
minus a few little nits right now.
Jason:
In the beta, right In version 6.5500.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And by the time you hear this, that probably
won't be beta anymore.
I agree. But version 6.5 is what you want to
look for.
And if you, if you just want to see some
visuals, we have several screenshots on the
Thunderbird blog.
Ryan:
And what those for for folks who don't end up
checking that out, that looks like we have a
new message view.
So when you're viewing a message, all the
header information and everything is now
arranged in a better way.
If you at a glance you can get, I feel like
a lot better sense of the the message.
Like who is the message from what is what is
happening here.
But if you want to dig into the nitty gritty
of the message or if it's just a message with
a ton of recipients in the past, that would
just take up half of your screen and now you
can click on the message header and you can
see all these different all this recipients,
other additional information about the
message, which is really nice because then
that's actionable.
So if you see someone on the list, you can
just click on them and send a message
directly to them.
You can save them to your contacts.
Et cetera. Et cetera.
So that's a really great improvement.
The message list now has more options.
It's it's better laid out.
Much like with Thunderbird on desktop, it's
it's a little less just dense by default.
But that allows you to kind of better
understand your inbox at a glance.
Jason:
But but like with Thunderbird, you can make
it.
Compact, you can make it more relaxed or you
can just go with the default out of the box.
Ryan:
And the canine is really granular.
You can change it a ton.
So if you want if you want something that is
just hyper dense, it's very easy to set that
up. But you know, for those of you who might
have issues with text size and things like
that, there's options for making it even
larger and the content larger.
So that I know I have some users in my
family who they need it big, they need it
relaxed so that they can they can see what
they're actually interacting with.
Jason:
Will there be any kind of communication
between your Thunderbird desktop client and
Thunderbird for Android in terms of like
account settings or any other features that
both applications have, Will they be able to
talk to each other?
Ryan:
Well, here's the deal.
Some of these things like tags and filters,
are they don't exist in canine right now.
Like that concept doesn't exist that is
landing this year.
So folks will be able to set up filters, set
tags, tags is a it's an IMAP feature.
So it's not a something special.
You know, if you tag stuff, you know, on one
machine that that will automatically show up
as long as the client supports it.
So canine will support tags.
Syncing is something that we are going to
get done.
It will be done.
I can I'm pretty confident it will be done
this year.
I'm not sure it will be ready at the release
of Thunderbird on Android.
I'm not sure it will be ready with the 115
release, but I think that before the end of
the year I would expect users to be able to
sync their accounts between desktop and
mobile. That's something that we really hope
to have in time for the release, but I can't
make that promise at the moment.
Other improvements is folders on canine.
Right now it's you're not working with the
same space you have on desktop, so a big
folder list can be a lot.
So we've played around with some with some
ideas.
I know Kenny has has done a lot of thinking
on on how can we make folder management work
in canine and and we're getting there and so
so better folder management and better
ability to view and manage your folders will
be coming to canine and and that's something
that even Gmail for instance doesn't do that
well and so I'm excited to be able to bring a
better experience there.
But that's I think most of what we're working
on And then going into the future, we've
already started exploring.
You know, you're on mobile, you go for the
weekend to the cabin.
And one thing we're discussing is profiles.
So I have my work email, maybe my small
business that I also like run on the side, my
side hustle and my personal email in there.
We're going to be trying to we're going to
try to sneak in things like profiles so that
you can say on the weekend, no work, no side
hustle, things like that.
So and I think that would be a good feature
for Thunderbird desktop too.
But there are some mobile specific features
that we think will be good quality of life,
that stuff to look forward to after the
release.
But still things we want to tackle sometime
this year.
Jason:
It's a lot going on and that's not even
everything.
That's just what we've talked about in this
episode.
There's a lot more going on.
Oh man, that's going to be a good year.
Ryan:
We do get questions just to top off the
mobile discussion about iOS, we are hiring an
iOS developer to begin to lay the groundwork
for Thunderbird on iOS.
It's not as easy as with K9.
There's there's not any pre-existing clients
that are still maintained and still have
authors who are active in those.
I've looked and I have found some open
source iOS email applications, but they're
they're in worse. They're in really bad
state as far as I've found.
So we're going to have to lay the groundwork
and I'm not sure if anything will be
available this year, but I'm hoping at some
point next year we have we'll be able to
share something, even if it's a very early
build.
So if you're an iOS developer and you love
open source and you love email, just keep
your eyes peeled.
Jason:
Well, guys, we have covered a lot of ground
tonight.
Thank you so much for joining me and for, I
don't know, talking about.
Alex:
Thunderbird and open source and all the
awesome.
Things. Thanks Alex. That will come in the
future.
Speaker4:
Yeah.
Jason:
My my, my show host legs are a little a
little rusty and it's fine.
Alex:
We are also we are developers.
We are not showmen. So if this is a bit
rusty, it's okay.
We'll get better with time.
But yeah.
Jason:
Yes, yes indeed.
If you want to get the thunder cast, it
should be by the time you're listening to
this, it should be available in your
favorite podcast app.
You know all the major ones, All the small
ones.
It will always be on blog thunderbird.net
and we'll be sharing it, of course, across
all of our social media accounts.
And you can't miss it. If you follow us
anywhere, we'll make sure that you know,
there's a new episode.
Our plan right now is to do one episode per
month just so that we, you know, you want to
take a few days to listen to it in chunks.
You can do that. And that ensures that we
have the time to also sit together and record
a quality episode and get, you know, a great
guest as well, because the next the next
episodes after this, we'll have some some
friends in the open source community to talk
to. And if you have any direct feedback for
the show, you can email us that makes sense
at podcast@thunderbird.net.
Any, any, any last words, last words, any
parting, parting words or little.
Ryan:
Highlights of the future.
You know, we've talked about bringing on
friends in the open source space.
So if you're so so tune in again to talk
We'll talk to folks from other projects that
we think are interesting.
But also we're going to bring in some folks
who work on different parts of Thunderbird.
And so at some point, we'll probably talk to
Katie over at K9.
And I'm excited to talk to some of the other
core developers in the project who have their
own unique insights about all the the work
that goes into creating such a robust
application of Thunderbird.
Jason:
We really appreciate everyone who who uses
Thunderbird, who shares that they use it, who
contributes in any way, whether that's, you
know, getting it set up for a friend or an
in-law contributing translations, which is a
is a big deal.
There's, you know, Thunderbird is available
in dozens of different languages doing
testing. There are so many ways that that
our Thunderbird community makes a huge
positive impact and we think just thank
everybody immensely for, for doing that.
And yeah, anyway, thanks for being on the
Thunderbird journey with us and we'll see you
around for we'll see you for episode two in
about a month.