Thunderbird Launches Open Source Services to Rival Gmail and Office365

Ok, this part is pretty cool:
Thunderbird Assist will also be available. This experimental feature, developed in collaboration with Flower AI, offers optional artificial intelligence functionalities for users who want them while also addressing privacy concerns head-on. On devices robust enough to handle AI models locally, Thunderbird Assist processes everything on the user’s own machine.
However, for users on less powerful hardware, the development team has integrated NVIDIA’s confidential computing to keep any remote processing secure. Rest assured, those who prefer to skip AI services can continue using Thunderbird without these extras.
I've been unwilling to touch cloud based AI, much less expose my emails to it as there's no guarantee of privacy, but being able to run a local model allows you the functionality without the risk. Haven't used Thunderbird in years, but this is tempting me to give it another shot.
- Why on earth would I want AI integrated in my email?
  
  Do you want a serious answer or are you just being flippant?
  
  “AI” or as they were called for the longest time machine learning algorithms can do things like spell check and help with grammar.
  The more modern algorithms that they started really calling AI can help format your ideas, can fix sentence structure, and can even translate into foreign languages
  Email is probably the most useful place for AI as most of the ones we talk about today are really good at language formatting but don’t really have any intelligence
  For example you can write an email cursing out your boss saying “as I fucking told you yesterday” and then ask the AI to rewrite your email in a professional tone so that it says “per my previous email” like sure you can obviously do that yourself but it’s a lot faster to word vomit your thoughts into a computer especially when it’s trivial work related garbage and save your mental energy for your personal time
  
  Eh. You might not, but the "normies" might. Expanding the userbase is always a good idea for open source projects.
  
  I would love a daily digest if it was actually trustworthy.
  
  I think I'd be pretty pleased with that actually, so long as it's on my local machine. That's because I often find myself wanting to locate a particular email that is along certain lines, or on a certain topic, or involves an organisation's name that kinda sounds similar to this one word but isn't actually that word or things like "the email where they mention they've had a kid" but I can't actually recall either what they called their child, or what gender they were, or when the email was received. Or actually, even better, in that last example "What's Dave's kid's name again?" and just getting a 1 word, correct response, with the ability to open the email it found where this was mentioned for additional context if I want it. Or things like "how long has it been since we moved out of that house?" and instead of finding the earliest email I can on the topic of moving house and reading emails to surmise when we discussed leaving and then finding which one might have mentioned that actual date we moved out, I could just get an answer, in English again hopefully with a link to the email or emails that provided the rationale for how the answer was arrived at.
  Often in those simpler search situations I mentioned where I just need to find a specific email, keyword searches don't always cut it. I have an absolutely appalling memory so figuring out pertinent details to things happening now based on what was going on in my inbox at some point in the past are a very important way that I get by. If I could achieve this more easily by asking relatively vague, English language questions that will help direct search efforts that are being done for me would be really helpful. Sure, theoretically all existing means of filtering and searching email should eventually find me that message but they'd likely be more effort than just asking directly like you'd ask a person tasked with digging through a filing cabinet for you, and sometimes even after extensive filtering by all kinds of clues: date, senders, keywords, labels, subject lines, emails I remember around the same time that I can find; I just for whatever reason can NOT dig up that email only to discover it later when it's too late to be useful to me anymore and get to see what obscure reason it was none of my clever search methods caught it..
  
  You don't, neither do I. why the hell are they pushing this?
  It the jingling of the keys that may sound good to some investors?
- They don’t list which stolen data Flower Ai was trained on. Ai slop is Ai slop and will only lead to less critical thinking from the general population: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/lee_2025_ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf
  
  Your points are valid, but I look at AI as an unavoidable trend in the tech space, which is why I experiment with local models. I'd rather understand how they work (and how to protect oneself from them) as I believe avoiding them isn't really possible in my field.
  Thus far, the local models I've worked with have gotten a C- on coding, but an A+ on bullshit. I think the tech still has a long way to go before it lives up to the hype, both negative and positive.
  
  I keep saying this. As if humans aren't dumb enough and lazy as hell without AI... I've met maybe 1 younger person out of hundreds that actually shows interest in learning and work ethic (the good kind, not boomerism). I'm not even old, but it's looking like a dark road for humans. Now Fuck You, this is Carl's Jr!
- What’s that NVIDIA’s confidential computing?
  
  NVIDIA’s confidential computing
  https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/what-is-confidential-computing/

Finally, Mozilla is finally doing something innovative for once. Stalwart is freaking awesome.
- Inb4 Mozilla dies because the lead of the AI development division is the ex-ceo who followed up massive layoffs with doubling her multi-milion salary every few years.
- Thunderbird is going hard on Rust all of a sudden. Recently they started using it in Thunderbird and now they're starting a whole service in Stalwart (written in Rust).
  Super awesome.
- Next I hope Thunderbird'll restore the GTK/Qt theming support they removed two years ago...
- Collecting more data to sell to 3rd parties?
  
  If you're referring to that fuckup with the ToS or whatever, that's not what they've started doing. You can verify this by their Privacy Policy, which hasn't changed in almost a year.
  But if you are pointing to other examples, I'm open to learning.

This is great news, and I might be tempted to use it if I had some reassurance that the mail servers (and the organisation that controls them) weren't subject to U.S. jurisdiction.

I already have tuta and libreoffice
- How the uptime with Tuta these days? Was hearing some negative reviews about extended outages a while back.
  I want to leave Proton, but I fear for the day I need a 2FA code and I can't get it.
  
  What’s wrong with proton?
  
  I am trying to outrun evil techbros but it's impossible...
  
  I, personally, didn't have any concern so far.

I asked this before but it might have been buried. Can I run this in a web browser because when I go to the site it wants me to download.

Well, I wouldn't like AI in any communication client of mine. Perhaps if it's local to my box I would like that, but this solution really seems cloud based, meaning one could have an AI crawling over one's data, to do whatever it wants with it. And local solutions usually are not as "good" as the cloud ones for whatever reason (hardware availability, data, and so on):
for users on less powerful hardware, the development team has integrated NVIDIA’s confidential computing to keep any remote processing secure. Rest assured, those who prefer to skip AI services can continue using Thunderbird without these extras.
There's still tuta, or even /e/ (now a days murena), which still seem safer privacy wise than this new thunderbird option.
I'm really hoping for a "librewolf" kind of fork oriented to privacy, and betterbird doesn't offer anything like that. The phoenix project has a safer user config for both firefox and thunderbird, but that doesn't get rid of components (well perhaps it could possibly turn them off, though to make sure they better get ripped at build time).
Does any one know if this new TB service would offer caldav and carddav services as well? I didn't see anything on stalwart advertisement.

Tempting

Do one thing and do it well...or compete with one of the largest computing firms in the world to develop a 💩version of commercial software. Captivating...

Anything for people to avoid using services like Proton Mail. They'll ask for a Mozilla webmail, an X web mail, but won't use an objectively more secure service. Baffles me 🤷‍♂️
- Didn't I just hear some shady shit from them like last month?
  
  As a matter of fact, you did
  https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-trump-republicans/
- Nazis
  Also email privacy is basically made up. How many of your email recipients have protonmail? Maybe 1? That's how many people you can securely email by default then. For everyone else you need their cert, at which point you can use any email service. Protonmail is marketing. Same with their VPN. Its not snake oil by any stretch but it's generally not that valuable.