> We don’t have corporate funding
I thought you were owned by Mozilla? A corporation that has over half a billion dollars in yearly revenue? If they decided to allocate zero funding to you, wouldn't it be vastly more effective to start some sort of campaign/movement (either internal or external) to get that funding back, or to entirely fork and leave Mozilla to be your own independent project, than to ask for random donations?
Thunderbird lives in an entity called MZLA, created by Mozilla and the Thunderbird Council (the elected open source community leadership) to be the legal and financial home to Thunderbird.
MZLA, which I lead, receives only money via donations from donors. We are a for-profit because the IRS is very skeptical of nonprofits who develop FOSS software (someone down below linked to a bunch of great links on this topic). We, do, however publish tons of information on what we are doing on our blog, and we are open source and a community run project, so if you really want to go deep on this - come join us in making Thunderbird.
Great links:
https://blog.thunderbird.net
https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/participate/
MZLA is owned by the FOUNDATION.
However, MZLA is self funded.
Is "half a billion dollars in yearly revenue" still synonymous with "half a billion dollars in funding from Google" or did they pivot? Are mozilla still trying to reimagine themselves as an ad tech company?