
Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time - azdle
https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2018/01/were-hiring-a-developer-to-work-on-thunderbird-full-time/
======
martinald
I have to say I think Mozilla is a complete shambles of an organisation. It
must be one of the richest charities in the world with the billions of dollars
of commission it earns from search from Google et al.

I can't actually believe this is something they're excited to post a blog
about. Charity with 9 figures revenue is hiring a developer (finally) to work
on a product which has 25 million users.

I think Mozilla's mission goals are fantastic but something is going
seriously, seriously wrong with the way they allocate resources.

~~~
bhauer
I was apprehensive of your comment at first since you start with fierce
criticism of Mozilla. But on reflection, I concur that regardless of the high
esteem I have for Mozilla generally, it is disconcerting how little attention
Thunderbird sees despite its regular use by so many people. I've never agreed
with the neglect it has received from Mozilla and, in fact, feel that Mozilla
is missing an opportunity to help resuscitate and modernize email.

Email, for all its faults, is among the most successful distributed protocols.
And as a champion of protocols over centralized services, Mozilla should be
emphatically in support of keeping email relevant, modern, and productive. Not
only is Thunderbird part of that, but I'd like to see Mozilla _expand_ their
email vision to include tackling client-side encryption (ala GPG, but made
user friendly).

~~~
confounded
Desktop native clients will be in declining use, and Mozilla will know this.

I handle most personal email on my phone, and corporate email increasingly
requires MFA via a web-client, for which there is no standard for native
clients.

I have native desktop clients for email installed, and prefer them, but in
reality I hardly ever use them.

Thunderbird is a great project, but relative to other things Mozilla have
their sights on, I can certainly see why it's lower priority.

~~~
bhauer
I don't want to discount your experience and preferences. I hear and
understand that you are using desktop email less frequently. I use desktop
email extensively, and I suspect others do as well.

I do not know where Mozilla sourced the metric of "25 million users," but
let's assume it is within the right order of magnitude. Even if that number is
projected to fall, it's sufficient to warrant significant resource investment.
I'd argue, as I did above, that the mission statement of Mozilla aligns well
with email, so from my perspective a healthy full-time development team seems
reasonable for this product category. I don't want Mozilla ceding desktop
email as it did desktop browsing; and I especially don't want Mozilla by way
of inaction helping cede email generally to centralized alternatives.

Your concern about desktop clients is an echo of Mozilla's challenge with web
browsers—namely, they can't achieve a solid foothold on mobile because mobile
is (currently) a walled garden. Until that is sorted out, Mozilla should
redouble effort in the desktop space, where it is strongest. But for whatever
it's worth, having not yet seen something like PAO [1] from Microsoft, I would
love to see Mozilla move in that direction.

[1] [http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao](http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao)

------
sachleen
With how unrealistic experience expectations can be for positions, It's nice
to see they're looking at junior and senior candidates and have this line:

B.S. in Computer Science would be lovely, but real-world experience is
preferred.

------
mconley
This title is inaccurate. _Mozilla_ is _not_ hiring a developer to work on
Thunderbird full-time. See below:

From the post:

" The Thunderbird Project is hiring for a software engineer!

...

Please note that while the Thunderbird project is a group of individuals
separate from the Mozilla Foundation that works to further the Thunderbird
email client, the Mozilla Foundation is the Project’s fiscal home. The
Thunderbird Council, separate from Mozilla, manages the Project and will
direct the software engineer’s work."

~~~
lucideer
Do I understand correctly by interpreting that to mean:

"Mozilla is allocating funding to The Thunderbird Project to hire a developer
to work on Mozilla Thunderbird"

i.e. the distinction is only relevant in terms of the direction of day-to-day
work on the project. Or are Mozilla not funding this at all?

The following quotes seem to indicate that the distinction isn't really
relevant in the context of the hiring process at least:

> _send us your resume with a cover letter to apply@mozillafoundation.org._

> _The successful applicant will be hired as freelancer (independent
> contractor) through the Mozilla Foundation’s third-party service Upwork_

> _By applying to this job, you are agreeing to have your applications
> reviewed [...] by staff members of the Mozilla Foundation._

~~~
buovjaga
No, the funds are Thunderbird's alone, originating from donations. Mozilla
Foundation is just their fiscal home. Thunderbird Council went shopping for a
new fiscal home for a while, even considering The Document Foundation, but
decided to stay with MoFo:
[https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2017/05/thunderbirds-
fu...](https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2017/05/thunderbirds-future-home/)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Isn't it Upwork are hiring a programmer to work a contract for Thunderbird?

Incidentally there was a post that was heavily critical of Upwork but is now
"dead", it included points like:

>Then they take a 2.75% cut from the client, a 20% cut from the freelancer //

It seemed, factual, apposite, and informed; definitely strange it was killed.

~~~
buovjaga
> Isn't it Upwork are hiring a programmer to work a contract for Thunderbird?

The Mozilla Foundation just forces Thunderbird to use Upwork as the channel to
hire people. I think it's obvious that if Thunderbird Council was able to
decide, they would never use Upwork.

------
carussell
The most important thing here is that there's now a serious plan in place to
move Thunderbird off of XUL and XPCOM. If Thunderbird builds can happen
without incurring the expense of building Gecko (and there's no reason that
shouldn't be the ultimate goal), then community contributions in the form of
code changes would likely increase several times over.

~~~
tomc1985
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo! XUL is really cool. Still one of my favorite GUI
kits. It is like electron (but actually native!) and had a good reason to be
slow (spidermonkey wasn't super fast) :(

XPCOM kinda sucked but it is still better than MS COM

~~~
sp332
It's not that XUL was bad, exactly. But priorities have changed to security,
battery life, and multi-threaded performance. The weight of XUL cruft that has
built up over time was holding the project back.

~~~
DonHopkins
Do you think using XML external entities declared in DTD files for
localization was a good idea?

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XUL/Tu...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XUL/Tutorial/Localization)

------
aniket_ray
>The successful applicant will be hired as freelancer (independent contractor)
through the Mozilla Foundation’s third-party service Upwork (www.upwork.com).

Not knowing much about Mozilla, is this the norm there?

~~~
theparanoid
It's a way to be cheap. And honestly hiring through Upwork is a terrible idea.

~~~
imglorp
Lobsters has a nice little rant on upwork's humiliating experience.

[https://lobste.rs/s/e0uh2y/we_re_hiring_developer_work_on#c_...](https://lobste.rs/s/e0uh2y/we_re_hiring_developer_work_on#c_hkbxw4)

~~~
GordonS
> For hourly contracts they take random snapshots of your desktop in 10
> minutes intervals and they measure your mouse movements and key presses to
> show your activity

I thought you might have been exaggerating, but that truly is utterly
_absurd_! I just can't believe people actually work under such conditions!

------
AlbertoGP
I'm considering applying for this as I use Thunderbird for all my email, wrote
a couple of XUL applications years ago, and have an Upwork account, and the
first thing I need to do is to see what the source code and build process
looks like: I've built Firefox and FirefoxOS before, and it was not trivial.

Their post has nothing about that, and the Thunderbird page at Mozilla also
has no "Developers", "Source code" or similar link anywhere. That should be
there at least in the page footer.

Ok, so here is the Mercurial repo and build instructions:
[https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/](https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/)
[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/Source_Code/Getting_comm-central)

That link should be part of the job description.

The directory size (du -sh) is 148 MB after "hg clone", and 5.4 GB after
"./client.py checkout".

------
tambourine_man
7 million lines of code, Windows, Mac and Linux support… looks a lot of work
for a single person.

~~~
AngeloAnolin
There is likely a team working on this. The job posting said for someone to
come on board.

And yes, hiring a single developer to work all alone by himself would be akin
to killing the project itself as just understanding the codebase, design,
technology and architecture would be too much for one person to handle.

 _We’re looking for an amazing developer to come on board to help make
Thunderbird the best Email client on the planet!_

~~~
sp332
Thunderbird was moved to "community development" with Mozilla providing only
stability and security updates.
[https://web.archive.org/web/20161003075603/https://blog.mozi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20161003075603/https://blog.mozilla.org/beyond-
the-code/2012/07/09/about-the-future-of-thunderbird/) In the interview it says
that employees might only work on the project part-time.

------
cookiecaper
I fully believe that people should be wary of "just rewrite it mentality".
However, in this case, when we've had a mostly-dormant Thunderbird for a long
time, based on what is now an outmoded development toolkit (the outmoding of
which supposedly had a non-trivial amount to do with security) backed by a
very complex and large upstream codebase, which is itself in the process of
being abandoned for next-gen solutions, is it really wiser to resurrect the
old code?

I've used Thunderbird off and on since it was announced and I know that it has
many advanced features. It's no slouch and I deeply respect that there's still
a local mail and news client that somewhat works and sometimes gets a little
bit of TLC. But the ecosystem is in shambles, and this is only going to get
worse as Firefox diverges.

It would obviously take time for a serious revamp to reach parity, but
Thunderbird needs a total skeletal reconstruction to pull it off life support
and get people excited again. This is just upping the cholesterol meds.

All the other "client-side email software" applications in recent memory have
been Electron apps. Surely Mozilla can do us one better, and build a
revitalized Thunderbird with staying power on an appropriate modern stack?
This seems like a great pilot project for a serious Rust-based desktop
toolkit.

------
Supersaiyan_IV
Here's how a Corporation like Ericsson fixes Thunderbird to make ends meet:
[https://github.com/Ericsson/exchangecalendar](https://github.com/Ericsson/exchangecalendar)

------
ttul
IMHO Mozilla is missing out majorly by constraining themselves to the
development of open source software, rather than services. With everything
moving to the cloud, why doesn’t Mozilla build an awesome email cloud to
compete with google but with perhaps better privacy and encryption features?

They could charge for this to recover operating costs and remain a “non
profit”.

~~~
Ajedi32
So... a ProtonMail clone?

~~~
ttul
Sure, why not?

~~~
Ajedi32
Seems like a lot of effort just to recreate something that already exists.

------
ronnier
This is good news to hear. I use Thunderbird daily and it's not a pleasant
experience.

~~~
davehtaylor
It really needs to have the ability to add arbitrary numbers of physical
addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers to a contact in the address
book, as well as give each field an arbitrary name. Every other address book
on the planet allows this. The fact that it can't makes it unusable for me.

It would also be nice to have a proper three vertical pane view. The way it
currently works is horrendous.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>a proper three vertical pane view //

What's wrong with View > Layout > Vertical view? Not my preference, just
curious what's different as superficially it looks like other such programs.

------
tzs
Did Thunderbird ever get the major rewrite that was talked about several years
ago?

I don't have any details. I just heard they were planning a major rewrite when
I reported a bug a long time ago (over 10 years ago) and in the bug tracker
the conclusion was that fixing it should be done as part of the major rewrite
that was upcoming.

For anyone curious, here's the bug (from memory).

I had a host with a POP3 mail server running on the normal POP3 port. That
host also had a second POP3 mail server on a different port [1].

I tried to set up two email accounts in Thunderbird, one for a POP3 account
for user tzs on that host on the standard POP3 port, and the other for tzs on
that host on the second port.

The second account could not be created because it said that I already had a
tzs POP3 account on that host. Thunderbird was using user/host as a unique
account key, rather than the more correct user/host/port (or the even more
correct user/host/protocol/port).

I reported this as a bug, figuring that this would be an easy fix. At worst
somewhat tedious but no challenge. Soon someone marked the bug as a possible
duplicate, linking to a bug from a couple years earlier that was also due to
user/host being assumed unique.

In the discussion one of the developers said that the user/host as key
assumption was hardwired into the code in too many places, but that was one of
the things being redone in the upcoming rewrite.

[1] The second server wasn't actually on that host. That host was using an SSH
tunnel to make my work POP3 server appear on my LAN.

------
DonHopkins
The most practical, logical, obvious move would to be to reimplement
Thunderbird as an Electron app.

But of course that would be untenable for Mozilla because it would be
admitting defeat to Chrome.

The problem is that Mozilla has no alternative to Electron. There are a number
of false starts and head fakes, but none of them have any buy in or support or
future.

~~~
wrinkl3
What would it take for Mozilla to build an Electron-like runtime with Firefox?

~~~
AlbertoGP
They tried: "This project is an Electron-compatible app shell for creating
desktop apps based on Gecko, the rendering engine used in Firefox."
[https://github.com/mozilla/positron](https://github.com/mozilla/positron)

but they failed: "As noted in the blog post Positron Discontinued [1], this
project has been discontinued. The source remains available, and you're
welcome to reuse it." [1] [https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-
discontinued/](https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/)

~~~
DonHopkins
That's exactly what I meant by false starts and head fakes.

In fact, xulrunner was another much earlier attempt at developing an Electron-
like platform, but Mozilla's heart just wasn't in it, and they didn't care
about or adequately support third party developers who were trying to develop
applications with it, like TomTom Home for example (which I worked on).

Xulrunner was never meant to be a platform for desktop or embedded apps the
way WebKit was -- its singular purpose was to support the desktop version of
Firefox.

Which is exactly how Thunderbird got into the hopeless dead-end situation it's
in right now. Its best move would be to switch to Electron, which is
impossible only because of the obvious political reasons.

There's no reason to expect Mozilla to ever support any other Electron-like
platform any better than they did xulrunner.

------
igorkraw
I wonder if they will oxidize(oxidate? rustify) it...

~~~
maltalex
There need to be a very compelling reason to rewrite 7 million lines of code
in a different language. The fact that there were enough of those to rewrite
Firefox doesn't mean that it makes sense for other projects.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Does that 7 million lines include the browser? I know an email client is a big
project but even so that seems a lot.

------
s73ver_
It'd be nice if they mentioned how much the position pays.

~~~
DonHopkins
I asked around about that, and the consensus was: 'As far as paying
contractors, the answer is probably "not enough", since they generally seem to
consider "warm fuzzy feelings from working on the Open Web" to be part of
compensation".'

------
raverbashing
As much as I think the action is commendable I have my questions about the
role of an email client in today's market

Maybe they should think about how to make a mobile version of it. Still a mail
client is a "solved problem". Most of email's problems are behind the client,
not on it (like spam control)

~~~
tonyarkles
I'm asking this as a legitimate question. If it's a "solved problem", what's
the solution?

I'm personally a reluctant Thunderbird user. I use it, I don't mind it all
that much, but I can't say it's a delightful experience to use. But it does
give me access to my email when I'm offline, and it lets me do GPG for
sensitive email.

~~~
raverbashing
If Thunderbird solved your problem there's your solution

And I agree, it's not very nice to use

But at some point, there isn't much a mail client can do as it's limited by
the tech and the stack

A solved problem is not a sports car, it's the 10year old car that costs 1k.
Very few people want to pay for a mail client

~~~
izacus
Meanwhile paid email clients are probably the most successful group of apps on
macOS store...

But I'm sure you have analytics sources to prove your assertion :)

------
jordigh
Huh, I was going to post this story, but I thought it was not allowed because
it's a job posting and I had to wait until the Who is Hiring thread.

So, if posting jobs for working on free applications is ok outside of Who Is
Hiring, let me try to advertise this job for another free email client,
Mailpile, which got killed when I tried to post it earlier:

[https://www.mailpile.is/jobs/](https://www.mailpile.is/jobs/)

I currently use Evolution for email, which is ok and I've gotten used to its
limitations, but I would love a more modern client!

Edit: I guess it's not ok. I'm confused.

~~~
asmosoinio
I think the original article is ok, since it is generally interesting (news
about Thunderbird, opens discussion about Thunderbird, Mozilla, their
technologies) and not just a job ad.

I don't know of a rule against job ads in general. I would guess generally
such would be mostly just not interesting.

YC company job listings are a special case though, they appear on the front
page without voting possibility. This had been the case since the beginning of
HN.

~~~
gus_massa
Jobs post are not allowed. From the FAQ:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

> _Can I post a job ad?_

> _Please don 't post job ads as submissions to HN._

> _A regular "Who Is Hiring?" thread appears on the first weekday of each
> month. Most job ads are welcome there._ [...]

> _The other kind of job ad is reserved for YC-funded startups._ [...]

But IMHO this is an special case that deserve an exception. (Usually following
the rules the 100% of the time blindly is not optimal.)

This is a very big/popular project, and it is the first hire, so the are
changing the internal organization of the developers. (The #87 hire will not
be interesting.)

~~~
asmosoinio
Thanks - I was obviously too lazy to check our the FAQ.

------
shmerl
I switched to Kmail around the time Mozilla said they stopped actively
developing Thunderbird. Is it a change in their attitude?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Does Kmail have full support for sending html email yet? I stopped using it
when the dev response to requests to add it was "email should be text only".
Genuine question, I try to audition a new client each year, this year perhaps
I'll give Kmail another go?

~~~
shmerl
Kmail sends HTML just fine.

------
kuon
I now use em client, but I'd love thunderbird interface to evolve to go back
to it.

------
EGreg
Finally, a full time developer on Thuderbird? What was it all thsi time, zero
fulltime developers? Embarrassing!

------
capt_hotpants
Holy moly!

Maybe now we can finally have the bug fixed where Thunderbird displays random
stuff from the email body in the Inbox tree's From and Date fields (instead of
the proper envelope sender and MTA timestamp from the Return-Path and final
Received headers).

I hope they hire a full-time Firefox developer next. I'm going to upgrade to
Quantum (currently my apt-get is holding Firefox 54) as soon as accidentally
hitting CTRL-Q instead of CTRL-W on Linux doesn't activate a magical Linux-
only hotkey that blows up the whole Firefox browser and looses all of your
web-related work.

