1153383 - Notice of use of Mozilla Thunderbird name on a Google Cloud Account for Thunderbird access

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Marketing :: Trademark Permissions, task)

Description

[Kent James (:rkent)]

Attachment: GoogleOauthThunderbird.png

This is more of a notice than a request for information or action. Or perhaps the required action is "do you object"?

In the process of setting up GMail with Thunderbird to be accessible with the OAuth2 authentication protocol, we needed to setup an account under Google Cloud Services that would be the official account for this authentication. Then when users authenticate, they will see a screen (provided by Google) that shows text "Mozilla Thunderbird Email would like to: View and manage your mail". (I've attached a screenshot of this).

Clearly Mozilla would object if anybody not authorized by the Thunderbird team would try to setup an account using the trademark in this manner, but this is being done on behalf of the Thunderbird team.

Initially I have setup as owners of this account myself ([e-mail]) as Thunderbird Council Chair, and Joshua Cranmer ([e-mail]) as Mailnews Module owner. Clearly the account belongs ultimately to Mozilla, so if there is some mechanism that we can denote this, please mention it.

Comment 1

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

One thing to be aware of is that the email address of the account that nominally owns the registration shows up if you click that down arrow thing.  So for the Firefox OS email app, my "[e-mail]" email shows up because I created the mapping.

I mention this primarily as a "way to avoid having your personal email address end up as a support address".

Having said that, there may be some "user confidence" advantages to having the email address involve mozilla.com or mozilla.org.   (But this ends up being false confidence since bad actors can also leverage this confidence since the "secret" is inherently accessible to all.  So there could be something to be said for it having thunderbird in it but not seeming overly official.)

Comment 2

[Kent James (:rkent)]

It sounds like what we really need is a mozilla email alias that could be used as the owner of the account.

Comment 3

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

That would probably be ideal.  I suppose my suggestion would be that if the Thunderbird Council has a private mailing list, to use that.  Or otherwise create one.  It won't be perfect because Google likes to bind to a phone number as well so it can be hard to really have a "party line" shared account, but if one enables 2-factor auth and takes a screenshot of the QR code so that multiple parties can have the 2-factor auth credentials to use with Google Authenticator/other TOTP things, it can be made to work, etc.

Comment 4

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

There's a [e-mail] mailing-list, not sure if moderation/blocking is on there though. 

I agree a mozilla email alias for this would be ideal, so the receiver can be changed that is ever needed.

Comment 5

[Liz Compton [:liz]]

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Will the [e-mail] email address work? If not, I'm not sure whether you're asking for the creation of a new alias, and if so, who would take care of that.

The image you attached made me think about the Thunderbird privacy policy that it references. I don't believe this has been updated in a long time. I've cced Mika from the Mozilla Legal Team who handles our privacy notices so she can work with you to make sure that is addressed.

Comment 6

[Liz Compton [:liz]]

Do you need anything more from Legal on this?

Comment 7

[Kent James (:rkent)]

For the record: we created a [e-mail] email account (actually a mailman list) and the Google accounts page now points to that. Legal has had no objections to this notice of the use of the Thunderbird logo, so I'll consider this closed.