Email is an ancient service and, often left in the dustbin, the clients that support email are often left to digitally rot. Email service providers have embraced and extended email (example: Gmail) or decided they won't receive email from unknown email servers from unknown domain *unless* paid tens of thousands of dollars per month to "ensure" delivery. It's a racket and a scam.
Email is important to how the internet works. It is a universal service, owned by no one, capable of being delivered to almost any computing platform today from watches, to desktops, to phones, to tablets, to TVs and cars.
We need to protect and nuture email!
### "Modern" Thunderbird is Great
One of the applications continuing to innovate in an open and free way is Thunderbird. While in the past, under the neglect of the Mozilla Foundation, Thunderbird did *not* get the attention it deserves, it is now being maintained and improved in important ways. The team there is redesigning the application from the ground up to be very responsive, handle email, calendar, contacts, chat in a nice, unified interface.
Thunderbird is available on almost any desktop platform today (with the ability to move configurations between computers) and is coming to mobile this year.
You should give Thunderbird a try. It is a great email, calendar, contacts client, works well with [Federated Core](https://documentation.federated.computer/docs/client_applications/windows/thunderbird/), is fully cross-platform, and is working hard to protect a very important communications platform: email.
