How digitally independent are you?
Thunderbird is just a mail app, not a mail provider.
Gmail is a mail app, not only a mail provider ^^
While true in a technical sense, you’re gonna confuse everyone with this…
It was a joke reply, hence the emoji, but I see the joke was not appreciated here.
I don’t think Thunderbird is a direct alternative to Gmail. The best alternative is to own your own domain name and use your own email server, but that’s really impractical for most people. At the very least, owning your own domain name that you use for your email is way better than relying on a service that locks you in with their own domain name.
It’s not super easy to set that up, but it’s easier than most people probably think it is. A service with imap support will let you take all your old email with you if you switch providers.
My own email service, Port87, doesn’t have custom domain support or imap, but I’m working to add both of those features. Any service you use should have both of those if you want to be independent.
