Hacker News: ryanleesipes

No, we rely on PGP encrypted email. What I'm talking about is the latter. Emails are encrypted with your public key before being stored in the database. (Our stack is based on Stalwart, you can read about how it works here: https://stalw.art/docs/encryption/overview )

New comment by ryanleesipes in "Help Keep Thunderbird Alive"

ryanleesipes — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 22:40:55 +0000

Protonmail = privacy at all costs. Thundermail = freedom at all costs (open standards, use w/ whatever client you want, upload your own encryption key and "go dark")

New comment by ryanleesipes in "Help Keep Thunderbird Alive"

ryanleesipes — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 22:39:50 +0000

Will support custom domains out of the box. Getting real close to launch. Join waitlist at https://thundermail.com

New comment by ryanleesipes in "Help Keep Thunderbird Alive"

ryanleesipes — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 21:06:36 +0000

What percentage of their money do they spend on developers? If it is more than 50% on "non-charitable activities" (of which software development is not considered) - they may be on the wrong side of the IRS.

New comment by ryanleesipes in "Help Keep Thunderbird Alive"

ryanleesipes — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:57:56 +0000

New comment by ryanleesipes in "Help Keep Thunderbird Alive"

ryanleesipes — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:41:19 +0000

That's right. We've long had Microsoft account users across Exchange, Office365 and Outlook.com complain about having issues using Thunderbird. So we're trying to account for all protocols from MS.

New comment by ryanleesipes in "Help Keep Thunderbird Alive"

ryanleesipes — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:15:44 +0000

Thunderbird lives in an entity called MZLA, created by Mozilla and the Thunderbird Council (the elected open source community leadership) to be the legal and financial home to Thunderbird.

MZLA, which I lead, receives only money via donations from donors. We are a for-profit because the IRS is very skeptical of nonprofits who develop FOSS software (someone down below linked to a bunch of great links on this topic). We, do, however publish tons of information on what we are doing on our blog, and we are open source and a community run project, so if you really want to go deep on this - come join us in making Thunderbird.

Great links:

https://blog.thunderbird.net

https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/participate/

New comment by ryanleesipes in "Help Keep Thunderbird Alive"

ryanleesipes — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:07:38 +0000

CEO of MZLA (the Mozilla entity that develops Thunderbird). One point of clarification, we don't get money from any source but our donors. After years of funding issues, MZLA was created by the Mozilla Foundation and the Thunderbird Council (our community governance body), to provide a legal/financial home for Thunderbird.

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*

New comment by ryanleesipes in "Help Keep Thunderbird Alive"

ryanleesipes — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 19:52:08 +0000

I am the CEO of MZLA (the Thunderbird entity). This is a large part of the reason. ^

I know you don't want them to want AI, but

ryanleesipes — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 11:51:26 +0000

Article URL: https://www.anildash.com//2025/11/14/wanting-not-to-want-ai/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45936788

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

Thunderbird 115 “Supernova” released with major UI changes

ryanleesipes — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 00:34:34 +0000

Article URL: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/07/thunderbird-115-released

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36689013

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by ryanleesipes in "Thunderbird 115"

ryanleesipes — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 18:34:02 +0000

Product Manager here. The answer is because we are tied to the ESR release cycle we have to release at a certain time (we are working on changing this). So we're shipping all the work that is done and stable. There is still work to be done to the front-end and as much as people want to trivialize it, it's not so simple. To make the changes we did, we had to rewrite a very complicated front-end with some code that has been there for 20 years and had entire systems built upon it. We are going to get to what the mockup showed. But we're going to build it right, and that means rewriting large pieces of our codebase. We'll ship the remaining stuff when they are ready.

New comment by ryanleesipes in "Our plans for Thunderbird on Android"

ryanleesipes — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 14:56:28 +0000

Thunderbird Product Manager here. We have no intention to replace the backend or most of the components. It will not be a different app. It's still run by the K-9 project maintainer. The difference? We didn't want to see K-9 die because of a lack of funding, and our visions were aligned - so it made sense to work together. That's it. Thunderbird is community run (unlike Firefox, our community representatives approve our team's budget and goals), so our aims are just to provide for our users and community what they want. And they want to use email on their phones as well as desktop.

The way you present it sounds devious. But we're just truly trying to work together in the open source ecosystem the best we can and put our resources to their best use.

New comment by ryanleesipes in "Thunderbird 91.0"

ryanleesipes — Thu, 12 Aug 2021 19:06:27 +0000

That's pretty much it. Can confirm, as I am Ryan Sipes. We (Thunderbird) are still 99.9% donation supported, so every bit helps.