Friends/Thunderbird
Thunderbird is Mozilla's gecko-based Desktop e-mail client.
The six core Mozilla privacy policies and how they relate to Thunderbird:
No Surprises Only use and share information about our users for their benefit and as spelled out in our notices. We are increasingly trying to learn about our users in order to improve Thunderbird in ways that matter to them, so we're rolling out Test Pilot surveys. All data that's collected is opt-in, and anonymous, unless the user chooses otherwise. We also aggregrate data for things like misses on domain lookups for e-mail account setup, in order to identify which domains should be added to our autoconfig server. Limited Data Collect and retain the least amount of user information necessary and share data anonymously whenever possible. All our data collected is anonymous, and opt-in, and collected to improve the product. The information is less about the user and all about how they use the product, or how the product is performing. There is some "user data" that we would like to know, e.g., how many accounts the user has, how big their folders are, etc, but this information is used for aggregration, and is anonymous. Real Choices Educate users at the point that we collect any data and give them the option to opt out whenever possible. We don't upload any collected data until the user opts-in. We have UI for turning Test Pilot on and off, and for collecting telemetry information. User Control Innovate, develop and advocate for privacy enhancements that put users in control of their online experiences. In general, the user has less control over the e-mail they receive than which web-sites they visit, so we have to assume each e-mail is potentially dangerous. e-mail is also great virus vector. We default to privacy for things like remote content, particularly images, but we give the user the option of displaying remote content for particular users. We don't fetch remote content for messages that look like spam or phishing attacks unless the user tells us the messages are OK. We support S/Mime and PGP (the latter via an extension). One big issue is that other than cert-based encryption, e-mail is easily spoofed, and many users don't even realize this. Protecting users from Phishing attacks is something we need to work harder at. Solving the identity/trusted sender problem for e-mail in a less techy way than S/Mime would really help users. Sensible Settings Establish default settings that balance safety and user experience appropriately for each transaction. For setting up new e-mail accounts, we default to using TLS to talk to mail servers. On the other hand, for new accounts, we prefer IMAP to POP3, and for POP3, we default to leaving mail on the server. This leaves the user's e-mail "in the cloud" instead of just local to their machine, but the advantages of multi-machine access and backup outweigh the privacy concerns. Trusted Third Parties Make privacy a key factor in selecting and interacting with partners. We're starting to interact with a lot of partners - e-mail providers for our new account provisioning, search providers for our open web search, and cloud storage providers for our cloud attachment handling. Privacy is especially key for the first and third of these, since the user's private data is in the hands of the providers.