Privacy @lemmy.ml yourFanatic @sh.itjust.works 3d ago

Is Thunderbird Mail safe to use privacywise?

I have 2 concerns:

I recently read the firefox Terms Of Use paragraph that people are posting which doesn't sound nice in terms of privacy.
Back when Mozilla had their own Mastodon instance called mozilla.social, every time I signed in I would be blasted with trackers according to uBlock Origin.

I'm no expert in these things and I want to ask if anyone recommends that I switch away from Thunderbird Mail and if so, which open source email client? Thanks in advance.

20 comments

Mozilla's telemetry change in Thunderbird Android makes me say "find a different client."

Generally, you should pick and choose your battles. Mozilla on the whole isn't a company whose software I trust anymore.
Yes, fully open source. If you don't trust Mozilla, use a fork like Betterbird.
- Does Betterbird even remove telemetry from Thunderbird? From my knowledge they only add a few Bugfixes and recompile the binary. Never heard them talking about telemetry, tracking etc. Does anybody know?
  
  This section of their website says no telemetry reports are submitted:
  
  https://www.betterbird.eu/legal/index.html?ref=news.itsfoss.com
  
  It does also say that some data may be submitted to Mozilla.
- If you don't trust the source, how is a fork built from the same source going to help?
  
  You think they only renamed it?
  
  It's not really not trusting Mozilla but more what they do to their products, telemetry and else
  
  The same source with patches if you prefer that
- Thanks, that was my question. I use betterbird and wasn’t sure if this had anything to do with it.
This doesn’t bode well at all: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/about/

Thunderbird operates in a separate, for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation.

A free mail client from a for-profit company? What’s the revenue model? Sounds like I must be the product somehow.

The Thunderbird for-profit entity, MZLA Technologies Corporation, is distinct from the Firefox for-profit entity, Mozilla Corporation, and both are wholly owned by the non-profit entity, Mozilla Foundation.
- MZLA (Thunderbird) is funded by user donations, you can see the public stats https://stats.thunderbird.net/#financials
- That’s odd
What else is there to use on my Samsung galaxy s23 ultra?
Yeah I'm just in the process of moving to Evolution from TBird on my desktops for this reason. Not sure what to use now Moz bought K9
- I keep having to log in on Evolution. If I knew what I was doing I would stay on it but for now I'm on Betterbird.
  
  FairEmail is a good switch for Android.
- FairEmail has a good reputation.
  
  This!! FairEmail is amazing!
  
  Awesome. I'll take a look, thanks
What's a good alternative?

20 comments