On 10/28/20 12:47 AM, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting John Crisp via Dng (dng@???):
>
> [snip much-appreciated picture of behind-the-scenes management
> folderol at Thunderbird Project:]
>
>> The problem is decent alternatives are not great [...]
>
> Just in case people have lost track of this, the long-term nub of the
> problem is: revenue model.
>
> Firefox brought in money. Thunderbird did not. When all is said and
> done, Mozilla Foundation is an appendage of Mozilla, Inc., which as a
> for-profit corporation is bound to a depressing pursuit of quarterly
> earnings targets as a primary objective. From the corporate
> perspective, Thunderbird development resources are deadweight, a
> dispensible community sponsorship that earns nothing.
> ...

The risk is that SMTP/IMAPS become deprecated and/or coimpletely
marginalized.

Google appears to be doing what it can to cut off not only MUAs like
Thunderbird but also competing mail providers. At least that is the
impression I get. It's really hard to connect Thunderbird to GMail.
You also get a lot of messages on an ongoing basis instructing how to
turn off/block IMAPS, worded with scare words about 'security' and
without mentioning either protocols or MUAs. If you mess with the
accounts interface it is very easy to accidentally turn off Thunderbird
/ IMAPS access but very difficult to find how to allow it again. etc.

Thunderbird probably cuts into their income. I suspect that when the
microsoft proxies are forced to end their antitrust actions against
Alphabet[1], Google with go ahead and finish capturing the market for
e-mail and deprecate SMTP/IMAP.

It's increasingly hard to exchange e-mail between lesser known providers
or even self-hosted servers and GMail accounts. Getting sorted into
spam is one method, but increasingly the messages are tagged by Google
as being dodgy or unsafe.

This isn't meant to be a rant about Google / Alphabet, it is meant to
bring attention to the risk of losing e-mail globally and having it
replaced by a single company's proprietary alternative.

/Lars
(writing hypocritically from a gmail account)

[1] Both can be true. Proxies are agitating against Google to take heat
off of other companies, while at the same time Google /does/ appear to
be abusing its monopoly positions in several markets. The relevant one
here is e-mail.