E-mail client Thunderbird celebrates the wave of donations

The Mozilla project behind the email client Thunderbird 2022 received significantly more donations. More than 300,000 donors gave a total of $6,442,704. This is not only a new record, but 2.3 times as much as in 2021, and 8.75 times the amount donated in 2017. At that time the project was starving, but now it is financially secure. “This is nothing short of outstanding,” said Thunderbirds Business Development Manager Ryan Sipes in the project blog about the fundraising wave, “And we’re immensely grateful for the generous donations from our users.”

Mozilla Thunderbird has no significant income from sources other than donations. Incidentally, more than half of the annual income was only paid in December. Sipes attributes this to the first call for donations directly in the application. However, he wants to have laid the foundation for the whole of 2022, through frequent blog posts and newsletters and daily use of social networks – including the since April 2022 Thunderbird presence on Mastodon heard.

And of course there was the release of Thunderbird 102 in late June. Thunderbird spent $3,569,706 in 2022, reports Sipes. Almost 80 percent of this went as personnel costs – Thunderbird had 15 employees at the beginning of 2022, now there are 24. Almost seven percent of the expenses are attributable to administrative expenses, not quite six percent to bank charges for donations (3.2% of donations), a good five Percent on services such as personnel management, legal and tax advice, and a good two percent on their own IT.

Areas of investment are the development of a new user interface, fundamental architectural changes for the desktop version of Thunderbird and the transformation of the popular Android email app K-9 into Thunderbird for Android. Thunderbird will soon also put an iOS app on its roadmap. A corresponding employee is to be hired before the end of this year. Version 115 of the desktop client, called Supernova, is scheduled to be released this summer.

At the same time, the project is looking for other sources of income than donations. But “new tools and services to increase productivity” are in the works. In any case, the e-mail client Thunderbird itself will remain free of charge and will not lose any performance features, promises Sipes.


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