Mozilla's Thundermail wants to become Gmail's main competitor

Mozilla has unveiled its latest innovation, Thundermail, an open-source email service designed to rival Gmail and other major players in the email ecosystem. It would be a significant step for Mozilla’s Thunderbird team.

According to Ryan Sipes, one of Thunderbird’s execs, Mozilla’s broader strategy is transforming Thunderbird from a traditional email client into a comprehensive productivity platform, and the competitive layer only encourages the team to do just that.

The service is built on the open-source Stalwart Mail Server and supports modern protocols like JMAP, IMAP4, POP3, and SMTP. Thundermail also aims to provide users with a privacy-focused alternative to mainstream email services, ensuring that user data is not used for advertising or AI training.

In addition to Thundermail, Mozilla is introducing several complementary tools to enhance the user experience:

• Thunderbird Appointment: A scheduling tool simplifies meeting coordination by allowing users to share calendar links.
• Thunderbird Send: A secure file-sharing service inspired by the former Firefox Send, offering end-to-end encryption.
• Thunderbird Assist: An experimental AI-powered assistant developed with Flower AI, focusing on privacy and local inference.

For now, Thundermail is in its experimental phase, with a beta waitlist for interested users. You can find out more about it here.

It’s worth mentioning that Thunderbird would also find a serious competitor in Outlook. While Outlook email is not as popular as Gmail, the platform itself has many capabilities, and the Redmond-based tech giant is updating it regularly.