this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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823
Mozilla Thunderbird Challenges Gmail With Its Own Email Service (www.forbes.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 27 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Thunderbird Pro will apparently be:

This email thing plus Thunderbird Send (which is basically https://send.vis.ee/), Thunderbird Appointment - a scheduling tool and Thunderbird Assist, which is:

"...at least for now, being cautiously labeled as “an experiment” that will allow users to take advantage of AI features within their email. However, the goal is to be lightweight enough that the language models can be run locally on a user’s PC in the interest of privacy. This service is being developed in partnership with Flower AI, which leverages Nvidia’s confidential compute to provide private remote processing in the event a user’s PC isn’t powerful enough. Sipes emphasizes that any remote processing features attached to Thunderbird Assist will always be optional, in the interest of ensuring complete user privacy."

So AI shit that nobody asked for or wants.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

This covers my thoughts about damn near every "helpful" feature this side of auto-complete email addresses.

[–] mke 12 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

They said it will be opt-in and are trying to make it local-first. Their provider(?) apparently allows fallback to nvidia cloud compute when the hardware can't handle it.

I'm not using AI to write my fucking emails, regardless. Just wanted to let people know.

p.s. Sorry, I'm dumb, skipped over quote in parent comment. Point is, there's more to the service than optional AI bullshit, and you shouldn't have to disable it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

"[...] This service is being developed in partnership with Flower AI, which leverages Nvidia’s confidential compute to provide private remote processing in the event a user’s PC isn’t powerful enough. Sipes emphasizes that any remote processing features attached to Thunderbird Assist will always be optional, in the interest of ensuring complete user privacy.”

That's a lot of words to say "we made an AI that totally won't suck up your data, trust me bro"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

"nvidia's confidential compute" had me choke when reading it. Sure bro, sure.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago

This sounds like proton except I haven’t heard a thing about cost or encryption which leads me to believe you will pay with your data and there will be no encryption.

Proton is the bare minimum for email services. Email should be fully redone at its core.