Thunderbird: Stability and Community Innovation

July 6th, 2012

Thunderbird provides an open-source, cross-platform email alternative for those of us who still use stand-alone email clients (and I am one). It’s trust-worthy, it’s under your control, and it’s built to reflect the Mozilla mission. Once again we’ve been asking the question: is Thunderbird a likely source of innovation and of leadership in today’s Internet life? Or is Thunderbird already pretty much what its users want and mostly needs some on-going maintenance?

Much of Mozilla’s leadership — including that of the Thunderbird team — has come to the conclusion that on-going stability is the most important thing, and that continued innovation in Thunderbird is not a priority for Mozilla’s product efforts. (For more information about the path to this conclusion, see the “Background Information” section below.) As a result, the Thunderbird team has developed a plan that provides both stability for Thunderbird’s current state and allows the Thunderbird community to innovate if it chooses.

In this plan, Mozilla will provide security updates through an Extended Support Release process. We will also maintain mechanisms for the Thunderbird community to organize for ongoing development. Here are additional details about this plan. If you are a Thunderbird user and are interested in more details, please follow the discussion at the two URLs above or in the Thunderbird online channels. If you are a Thunderbird developer, join the discussion in the Thunderbird development forums.

Thunderbird is an important product for many people — I am one of them. If you’re one of us and want to get involved in building Thunderbird, now is the time. For Thunderbird users, the Extended Support Release process will provide security maintenance updates.

Background Information

We’ve asked the question about Thunderbird and ongoing innovation a number of times. We’ve tried for years to build Thunderbird as a highly innovative offering, where it plays a role in moving modern Internet messaging to a more open, innovative space, and where there is a growing, more active contributor base. To date, we haven’t achieved this. The exception to this statement is the Mozilla localization communities, which contributes immense effort into localizing Thunderbird into many languages. However, the dedicated efforts of these groups have not been supported by an active contributor base in other areas. This puts great stress on a number of our localization communities.

The Thunderbird team has successfully updated the product and has built infrastructure for innovation in Thunderbird. It has ideas and projects under way. It tries to develop and welcome and nurture new contributors. Over the years we’ve tried a variety of things to encourage community development and innovation in the Thunderbird world. In the early days of the Foundation in 2003 the same team was developing Firefox and Thunderbird; then we created Mozilla Messaging for a focused development; and today the Thunderbird team is back in the main Mozilla product organization.

Most Thunderbird users seem happy with the basic email feature set. In parallel, we have seen the rising popularity of Web-based forms of communications representing email alternatives to a desktop solution. Given this, focusing on stability for Thunderbird and driving innovation through other offerings seems a natural choice.

Categories: Mozilla

392 comments for “Thunderbird: Stability and Community Innovation”

1
Ray M. said on July 9th, 2012 at 6:37 am:

Totally agree with @Eflop, they’re like twin sisters. Nearly all the people in the company use Firefox and Thunderbird together for work, if Mozilla stops one that may make people to stop using the other one, seriously.
2
djl said on July 9th, 2012 at 6:53 am:

As others have stated, cloud-based email is only convenient for those who need to check one account. I do NOT want to pipe all of my accounts through Gmail, for one. Thunderbird is an essential tool for me, and the idea that there’s nothing left to do with it seems borderline crazy (decent, easily synced address book? Ever?) I would be willing to pay to keep the product alive, but only if a firm structure was in place where we knew it would be supported for years.
3
Bas said on July 9th, 2012 at 7:28 am:

First I hear that my favourite Web Homepage was send lost, iGoogle.
Now I hear that my super favourite email-calendar-newsreader got struck by thunder. Poor little bird.

Right now all seems to be focused on some type of tablet or ‘smart’ phone. If it is not an ‘App’ it is not worthwhile investing in it any more.

However..
More and more people buy a ‘dumb’ phone as they still just want to call and SMS.
More people needs simpler to use personal computing device. For a part Apple rides on that demand (for a while…) Same for PC or any other personal device. Most of us udr only a few simple and easy to handle programs or applications.

AND NOT: Constantly upgrade an OS or applications ; Be exposed to crashes of all kind ; wondering why you need a ‘next gen’ devices after 6-months. Smartphone, ultrabook, anything from Apple is also just at a too high price level. Including never ending investments in Apps.
The strong point about Apps is they do one thing at a time. But 10 * 7.99 still makes 80 bucks to get a couple of things done.

Ok I have to admit. I do have an iPad and I do like it for certain usage. The main reason is that it brings for me a simple portable laptop/netbook type of device. It starts works instantly. It does a few simple things and it even last thru a full day with one feeding. But the iPad is pricey for the concept I like.

Out of all 200 apps on my iPad (yes I have such device) how much do you think I use…. a maximum 5 App. Most apps you look at once and then they dust away. That is the same as having 500+ Facebook friends 😉 What are my most used Apps on my iPad: Safari (unfortunate NO firefox app) and the mail client (Unfortunate no Thunderbird like App).

What are my two programs across my laptops and PC. Both business and private. On Linux and Windows….. Firefox and Thunderbird. Two reasonable straight forward programs that do what they are meant to be doing well. And that for quiet a while. Consistency on usage and programs across my devices that is what I love too.

So were in the so called Post-PC era….. Doesn’t mean that everyone has or will have (only) an app-phone or tablet. (BTW: I do not know what is smart in the word smartphone). Was I planning to throw away my laptop or desktop? No… but all programmers are abandon the Starship PC. So at the end you drift alone in an empty galaxy.

Then ‘the Cloud’ …… a lot can disappear in the Myst of the Cloud. but that is another story.
But as long as you ignore the beacons of warning, let’s just throw everything in it.

I got lost already so let’s get back to were we started…

Outlook 2xxx just doesn’t cut it with Thunderbird.
Firefox left IE behind me ages ago.

Note: It is not that I dislike Microsoft, their programs just became big and unhand-able. At least lost me as a user . It is like a car manufacturer that start with a nice swift affordable model to easy hoover around in the big city( par example Paris) and gets you quickly were you want. Every next version then becomes bigger and bigger .. until it isn’t that swift any more … and more expensive.

For a lot applies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle

Very sad week…… for a happy camper with iGoogle, Firefox, Thunderbird.
4
Adminator said on July 9th, 2012 at 8:08 am:

Du blöde Tulpe, das nervt ohne Ende. Geh einfach sterben, Mozilla.
5
Adminator said on July 9th, 2012 at 8:11 am:

“Mitchell Baker is a lawyer. That explains everything.”

OMFG

This woman is the Death of Mozilla
6
alessandro simon said on July 9th, 2012 at 8:38 am:

Definitely not the end of anything. They will only give priority to stability and security, I agree because sometimes gets in the way a lot of eye candy, the old KISS principle, or Keep It Simple, Stupid prevailed.

Greetings to all.
7
klaus said on July 9th, 2012 at 10:06 am:

I’m really shocked and scared about this announcement – recommended this client to a lot of my customers as a relieable, stable, developing program. It had a lot of improvements the last time! I’m using Outlook too but Thunderbird was and is much better.

Try to find an alternative but I don’t think that this s gonna be easy….
8
Ray M. said on July 9th, 2012 at 11:02 am:

Thunderbird and Camino :,( next… Firefox? done!
9
Onno said on July 9th, 2012 at 11:03 am:

I’m dissapointed about this announcement, I believe that Thunderbird is a very useful mail client. There aren’t many free mail clients of high quality as Thunderbird is.

Personally I don’t like webmail at all: I don’t want to log in all the time on gmail.com or hotmail.com to check mails on my own computer.

Ik highly regret this decision.
10
John M. said on July 9th, 2012 at 11:03 am:

I’ll add one more vote in the sad and disappointing bucket.

I am both a home and business user of ThunderBird, and I rely on all of it’s capabilities; unix maildir, POP, IMAP, LDAP, Lightning with Exchange, Enigmail pgp integration. With thunderbird I manage all of mail mail/address/calendar needs in one place. Doing without a desktop mail client is not an option.

After Evolution was abandoned I moved to Thunderbird. What other client is there that does LDAP address lookups and Exchange integration for linux in the business environment?

Maybe I should get an iPad and labotomize myself with a pencil. (Yes, I still use pencils!)
11
Ray M. said on July 9th, 2012 at 11:35 am:

Why would Mozilla drop a successful product and leave all it’s loyal customers? only for trying to make something that has a complete unknown future called “Firefox OS”, the current market is already dominated by iOS, Android and coming Windows Phone, which the competitors are companies called Apple, Google, Microsoft. I don’t if it is a bright decision. I guess Thunderbird doesn’t make money would be the primary reason.

Look at the Mozilla projects page http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/projects/ No 1 Firefox, No 2 Thunderbird and followed by other small projects, As far as I know Camino might be dying as well. OK, what do you have then Mozilla?

Anyway, I really wish Mozilla the best! And thanks to all the people who worked on Thunderbird and the people who are going to carry on maintaining it.
12
N9 Rocks said on July 9th, 2012 at 12:02 pm:

Get rid of Thunderbird that we can build cheap mobile phones? Whoow!

As €flop said – kill Thunderbird you kill Firefox. Whats left? Nothing.

We need Exhange suppport build in – Use DavMail to do that. We need gnuGPG build in. Use Enigmail on that. We need full support fot Exchange calendar – there you have huge amount of work. You are far away from all features included build. You need next five years to do only that. Web based clients works fine only with ONE email account. You need a good client when using multible accounts (work, privete, hobby or multible all of those like i have). There is no Cloud witch can handle that. I don’t now that many friends having only single email account. Do you? Then we need more administrative mass managing tools for Thunderbird. This is one huge missing feature from Thunderbird AND Firefox. You should also build in IM support in Thunderbird (Jabber/Xmpp, AIM etc…) This is what we need in our office. Now we have Thunderbird and Pidgin, but rather having only one client.

So – wake up and take your head of from your ass and breathe! You need AIR to your brains. Killing Thunderbir is catastrophic failure. Like mr €flop said – our float is burning ( and then Nokia died waiting for Windows…) Just don’t burn your selves – please.
13
Ray M. said on July 9th, 2012 at 12:15 pm:

Here we go: http://www3.postbox-inc.com/?/blog/entry/an_awesome_alternative_for_thunderbird_users/
14
Adminator said on July 9th, 2012 at 1:28 pm:

@Ray:

Are you from the Postbox team?

If yes, pls. look here:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Talk:Thunderbird:2.0_Product_Planning#Major_Usability_Redesign_of_Folders_.26_Threads_.28in_4_Steps.29

Even more revolutionary future features for Postbox.
15
Ray M. said on July 9th, 2012 at 2:00 pm:

No, I’m not. Just saw that blog entry randomly and want to say, despite all of us felt sad about it. There are some companies or groups would take the advantage.
16
Adam said on July 9th, 2012 at 2:33 pm:

I’m greatly disappointed to read this announcement. To me Mozilla Thunderbird has many ways to improve and add functionality especially in the business side of things. I’m not interested in using online web based email clients. I want to remain in control of my data. I will continue to use Mozilla Thunderbird for as long as I can or until I can find a better alternative. To date for me I’ve not found a web based email client that does what I require for an email client. I greatly sadness me to see Thunderbird die off as I’ve been used it since Netscape days. To me there is more to email then just email itself, there is tasks lists and calendars that should all nicely integrate together. Other then GMail there is no really alternative that works and lets face it, GMail has many issues and privacy is the biggest one for me. Why have someone else process your email when I can just read it directly. I wish Mozilla good luck and I do understand but as I’ve said I’m disappointed :-(. RIP Mozilla Thunderbird.
17
vickyjo said on July 9th, 2012 at 2:38 pm:

Gutted.

I’ve been using Thunderbird since I upgraded from Netscape Mail, and have been delighted with the calendar plugin, along with some community developed tools. I’ve also liked that I could boot into an OS of my choosing and access my mailbox data from a shared partition with the same client.

I had been hoping that Mozilla would bring out a version for Android.

I’d happily pay a subscription for Thunderbird, as I already do for other services e.g. if the pricing was similar to flickr.
18
Dou! said on July 9th, 2012 at 2:57 pm:

There is no excuse for idiotism – this just goes far beond it.

Did you hire anybody from Microsoft or Nokia? Just asking because everything looks like you have. If anyone asks for matches – please don’t give any. You never know if there is pyromaniac deep inside of Mozilla witch uses Outlook as mail client in her new Nokia phone. (You could use this as an hint to find the bug inside Mozilla)

Jus one word: DONT!
19
Pete said on July 9th, 2012 at 3:42 pm:

Anyone who thinks “the desktop” is dead is either a child or doesn’t work in the business world.
20
Infernoz said on July 9th, 2012 at 4:10 pm:

This is such a stupid decision given web mail is quite inferior to aggregated email on a desktop
Some serious work still needs be done on Thunderbird to bring it up to the standard of Microsoft Outlook e.g for Scheduling as integrated functionality, not the half-arsed attempt with Lightning.

I use Thunderbird to collect many POP3 accounts, several IMAP accounts including a VERY secure one and have a masses of RSS feeds which many dedicated RSS clients would just choke on.

I make heavy use of filters too, and want lots more enhancements.

No email is not obsolete it is used for non transient communications for which there will always be a need! The web maybe fashionable but it will never be as good as native apps due to all the stupid compromises made.
21
Fitzcarraldo said on July 9th, 2012 at 8:14 pm:

I’m saddened to read this blog post. Although Thunderbird is an excellent application, there are still improvements to be made to functionality and features.

I think the decision is based on a falacy: WebMail does not make e-mail clients obsolete, or even less important. I’m a constant user of Thunderbird, and would be lost without it. WebMail may have its place, and indeed by used by a large number of people, but a good e-mail client is indispensable for many users, especially professionals. I have multiple e-mail accounts (not by choice) and even use DavMail to make it easy for me to send and receive e-mails from a couple of companies that use Outlook Web Access. Handling all these different (and different types of) e-mail accounts in one e-mail client makes life so much easier and more productive. Thunderbird is also a great way of storing and organising e-mails, plus it enables me to search through large numbers of e-mails quickly and easily.

WebMail, even the most sophisticated WebMail I have seen, does not hold a candle to a decent e-mail client.
22
Martina said on July 9th, 2012 at 11:38 pm:

It’s the problem of immiserizing growth. Mozilla is one of the commercial success stories and they try to kill their other flagship, Thunderbird, by draining its resources. That is because business logic is always about killing products. By this logic Mozilla would be dead from its very start because it took so long to become a competitive product. To kill a product simply get new developers involvement, add more management, bully longterm contributors. The ultimate solution to kill development: Hire Stephen Elop or leave maintenance to IBM.
23
baz said on July 10th, 2012 at 12:56 am:

noooooooooooooooooo… We need Thunderbird! Clients are not dead, and TB is the best one!
24
Ali said on July 10th, 2012 at 1:59 am:

Hello

im Sorry but you are on the wrong way i think.

i am using Thunderbird on a lot of Laptops because with the change from Windows XP to Windows 7 Outlook Express is not any more on the System.

Now i must look for an other Email Client for my users.

I´m sad 🙁

Ali
25
Diego Betto said on July 10th, 2012 at 2:23 am:

damn…. I hate this bad news…

I put my hope in the community
26
Jay States said on July 10th, 2012 at 6:08 am:

I count a lot of mad/sad users and I’m one off them. I don’t see email dying anytime soon and I assume this was a difficult decision. I’m will be using Thunderbird as my main email client until it stops working with new releases of (insert any new) OS.
27
Kay said on July 10th, 2012 at 6:16 am:

I was very disappointed to read that Thunderbird desktop is being dropped. Hopefully your web client will circumvent the cloud until it can truly be secured, and not keep logs. As an activist I’ve used encryption w/the desktop client to prevent undesired snooping. Appreciated having a robust mail client with which to do this and am saddened by this move.
28
Kirk M said on July 10th, 2012 at 8:12 am:

Suddenly I feel like it’s 2007 all over again when Mozilla announced that they were spinning off Thunderbird and it’s developers into it’s own little company so Mozilla could concentrate it’s efforts on Firefox. There was a lot of “giving it to the community” back then too. Suddenly it was “OMG! Mozilla is abandoning Thunderbird!” all over the place, just like it is now.

It’s an email client. A damn good one where all sorts of features can be added via extensions. Extensions which have always been developed by “the community”. I doubt that’s ever going to change for the foreseeable future. Right now, Thunderbird is lean, stable and reliable with plenty of built-in features. It has years of development behind it and it’s right where it’s supposed to be.

The Thunderbird team and Mozilla have understood this and are going to a stabilizing model of updates rather than innovative and that’s fine. Once again. it’s an excellent, mature email client with years of development behind it. But you can only do so much with an email client. It’s not an HTML or CSS editor nor should it ever be.

The only uncertainty now is, will Mozilla keep it’s word? Will they continue to provide stability updates (bug fixes, security updates, etc) like they say or will they just dump it altogether in the near future. So far, they’ve lived up to what they say and I’m betting this won’t change.
29
shahryar said on July 10th, 2012 at 9:21 am:

I don’t know why Thunderbird did not get extended to include abilities such as in Evernote in document managment, and combine it with PM and calendering as in several available online apps. There is still lots of opportunities with such customer base to incorporate Client+Cloud features in DM and PM which make sense as the extensions of current thunderbird. And I guess subscription for extra cloud space would finance this open source initiative.
30
Harold said on July 10th, 2012 at 11:33 am:

I want to ad my name to the people disappointed by this news, I have been a very happy TB user for many years and have recommended it to many friends and colleagues, but I do realize there is no such a thing as a free lunch and that Mozilla must fight for survival due to the competition from Crome and the web being consumed on mobile devises. After learning this news I went searching for alternative email clients, I actually have outlook but prefer TB, and I also again looked at Gmail. I again came to realize why I prefer TB to other alternatives, features like tags, creating filters by right clicking on the email address, tabbed email, and many more. I hope Mozilla realize they have a very good product in TB, with a very loyal user base, and don’t allow it to slowly fade away. I for one would be willing to pay in order to use this product.
31
CC said on July 10th, 2012 at 3:21 pm:

Don’t stop… It’s the best mail program I found between all the other garbage.
32
Mark Rosenthal said on July 10th, 2012 at 6:07 pm:

I’m extremely disappointed to hear this. One poster wrote, “No body wants a desktop email client anymore.” That’s nonsense! It demonstrated the poster’s ignorance of just how dangerous it is to willingly hand over physical custody of your data to third parties. That’s really what “the cloud” is all about — handing over control of what you create to some large corporation who do not have the incentive guard it as carefully as you do.

I have something like 30 years of archived emails in my local filesystem! It’s under MY control, not the control of some mega-corporation. It’s all in mbox format or something very close to that (Thank you Thunderbird for sticking pretty close to mbox format.), so I can search it with simple command line utilities.

Unlike comments posted to a social networking site or emails received at gmail or yahoo, I’ll be able to carry this data around from computer to computer as long as I’m alive. And some of the stuff I get reminded of when I search my ancient email threads turns out to be quite valuable.

What happens to my emails on gmail or yahoo if one of them goes out of business or gets acquired. I know it seems inconceivable right now that Google could go out of business, but for over 150 years it seemed inconceivable that Lehman Brothers could go out of business — and then 2008 happened and Lehman Brothers is no more!

What happened to the data people stored on Megaupload? Whether or not you can get your data back has been an open question. Now Computerworld reports that the thieves who call themselves U.S. federal prosecutors want to charge people to get their own data back! (See http://www.techworld.com.au/article/427341/megaupload_users_want_their_data_they_re_going_pay/)

Large corporations play on our desire for convenience to lead us down the garden path, leaving them in control of data that we create and that we own.

I’ll never trust my email to a system that stores it exclusively on someone else’s servers. Mozilla may have a legitimate argument that Thunderbird is mature software and doesn’t need additional features. But the general public will see this as Mozilla end-of-lifeing Thunderbird. And someday when business, legal, or political forces cause them to lose their data, and the public finally wakes up to the dangers, if Thunderbird (and any other local mailreaders that store their data in easy-to-understand ascii) has long since ceased to exist because it stopped being fashionable, they’ll have nowhere to turn!
33
Rich said on July 10th, 2012 at 7:09 pm:

An interesting, historical read

“Posts Tagged with “Thunderbird””
https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/tag/thunderbird/

Among many other tidbits there re: Tbird,

“… It’s got millions of users who care vigorously about Thunderbird and mail. It’s looking at an enormous and fundamental aspect of our online lives. It’s got great challenges, great responsibility and even greater potential.

I’m personally thrilled to see this happen. I am exceedingly eager to stop thinking so much about how to organize the Thunderbird / mail effort and to start seeing all that energy go to improving our product. That day has come. We have the tools to make email much, much better. I hope you’ll join me in celebrating. And then join the Mozilla Messaging effort and help make interesting things happen. …”

So, since 2008, did it get “much much better”?

Read the rest, draw your own conclusion. In any case, it’ll lend an interesting light — or pallor — to the current state of affair.

I’ll certainly grant them this — what’s being done NOW is certainly … “interesting”.
34
Frank George said on July 11th, 2012 at 1:01 am:

Very sad, hope that this is not a irreversible decision. Thunderbird is the only independent multi-platform mail client worth using for work and serious stuff. Have you tried moving your ‘mail’ to a new PC with offline backed up locally? So easy with Thunderbird and so a very positive experience when typically this sort of action is happening because of stolen or crashed hardware.

Matching development and release cycles with Firefox last year seemed to imply it was being brought into the fold for greater integration. Now alas it seems other plans are afoot.

I evangelise to many about Thunderbird and Firefox, in fact Mozilla as a whole as I’m old enough to have used Mosaic way back when.

Seriously disappointed, but hopeful of a stay of execution.
Best
Frank George
35
Andres Misiak said on July 11th, 2012 at 7:55 am:

I’m shocked. I have loved Thunderbird since 0.6 when I started using it, and I’ll continue using it.

I think I understand Mozilla’s point, and I’ll support them always, is just that I love so much Thunderbird that is so dificult to read this news.

Good luch guys.
36
sean bean said on July 11th, 2012 at 9:04 am:

What part of “on-going stability is the most important thing” are most of the commenters above not comprehending… in my mind that means there will be ongoing technical changes & support as more Mozillians move to Windows 8,9 or 10…

The Register UK article was ladled w/sensationalism in search of eyeballs…

Since i have no trust in the many cloud storage solutions for my private e’mail exchanges, I’ll always remain a faithful; Seamonkey and/or Thunderbird user…

Ever grateful to the entire Mozilla Team,

Sean Nathan Bean
37
Ramonsao said on July 11th, 2012 at 4:38 pm:

Really bad news, hope they change their mind.

It’s a great tool, it has been improved since the beginning, so it’s very mature now, I can’t believe their creators are giving up to some silly social network product. What can be done for mozilla to change its mind?

Regards.

R
38
Erik said on July 11th, 2012 at 4:42 pm:

This is so sad. Mozilla develops a mobile os that will not be used by anyone and drops development of thunderbird that’s used by many. SAD, SAD, SAD.
39
Mrs.Muneton said on July 11th, 2012 at 9:29 pm:

I want to get involved with developing thunderbird, I have lots of vision and programming experience… proud php dev =)

I need someone to be accountable to, can you find someone and have them email me. I studied other languages in college and I really really would like to contribute back to the open source software that raised me. But between the desire and doing is the bridge experience. Is someone who has experience I could chat with?
40
rikhard said on July 11th, 2012 at 9:49 pm:

i am deeply dissatisfied with this.

why wasting time developing a bastard browser for apple’s ios (it’s not even gecko based) instead of focusing on what are mozilla’s jewels?
41
Kirk M said on July 12th, 2012 at 8:25 am:

Where in the above post does Mitchell state that Mozilla is dropping development of Thunderbird? Answer? They are not dropping development. Not at all. Mozilla is, in so many words, not adding any new features for the foreseeable future and is now focusing on stability and security updates only to an already mature and finished piece of software. It’s almost a “Debian Stable” type of decision and I, for one, think it’s a good decision.

The “Add-on” environment for Thunderbird is alive and well and going strong so all the extra features you might need for now can be added via extensions. With Mozilla responsible for keeping Thunderbird stable and reliable and the open source community providing new innovations to the the email client (vetted by Mozilla no doubt), you get the best of both worlds. Some of the world’s most popular Linux distributions work along the same lines. And why should Mozilla consider abandoning Thunderbird when Ubuntu (as well as Linux Mint, both Ubuntu and Debian based editions) for instance, has recently dropped Evolution and chosen Thunderbird for it’s default email client?

Thunderbird isn’t going anywhere and 30 years of experience in the field of computers and software tells me that over the coming months, certain user generated innovations will probably make it into Thunderbird as core features by Mozilla themselves as long as these new features don’t add an instability or bloat. This is the way the open source community works these days and it’s very good at it.
42
Tim Chambers said on July 12th, 2012 at 10:28 am:

I have always been and am still a fan of Thunderbird. I was inspired to add my comments because today I am finally admitting that I am completely dependent on Microsoft Outlook for business communication. For over a decade my employers have made it impossible to maintain resistance to the Borg of Redmond. I did use Thunderbird as my primary desktop email client for seven years in the workplace, but the more my job had me tangling with corporate tentacles, the more I had to settle for co-existence with Microsoft’s “embrace and extend” email strategy (the Exchange server and Outlook client). In 2010 I went to Outlook exclusively. I still occasionally use Thunderbird for personal email when I’m at my personal workstation, but I use GMail on all my mobile devices for personal communication. In my life, whoever owns the mail storage owns the client. Outlook is irresistible at work,but only because I don’t have to buy it. GMail is irresistible because Google is so clueful about how communication is evolving on the Internet. That leaves Thunderbird languishing on my personal workstation. So today I just want to say thank you, Mozilla, for making Thunderbird what it is. The ESR model is, to me, a satisfying next step. Thank you for giving me 1/20,000,000th of your attention. I look forward to your continued innovation along other lines, especially Kilimanjaro. One last thing: The elegance of Firefox Sync amazes me every day!
43
Mauricio said on July 15th, 2012 at 5:11 am:

Come on! This is not bad news.

You guys want Thunderbird to make coffee? It’s a email reader! This job it does very well.
I think Mozilla made the right decision. Thunderbird is on a very good stage in terms of functionality. It just needs security and stability.

Also, I understand the point that Mozilla wants people to join development for a long time, but it simply didn’t happen that way. It’s too much things for it to take care.
A well thought decision. Congratulations.
44
Christians said on July 16th, 2012 at 2:23 pm:

The length of and the emotion within this thread is amazing! It seems we all do LOVE Thunderbird and cannot believe that the most productive desktop email client has been parked.

May I ask the lady with the lawn mower crew-cut to please add a Thunderbird entry to

http://mozilla.bluestatedigital.com/page/content/donate

so we can let everybody know how much we need you Thunderbird!
45
JimC said on July 17th, 2012 at 2:30 pm:

If development on Thunderbird by Mozilla does not continue, that will strike a huge blow to open source software in general.

So, may you burn in hell for supporting this nonsense.

Hopefully, community members will fork all Mozilla apps (including Firefox and Thunderbird), so that this kind of abandonment of support for applications by Mozilla will be unnoticed in the future, as Mozilla’s stewardship of these applications is obviously not in the best interest of users.
46
Nian said on July 18th, 2012 at 5:15 am:

Ok so let me get this right, the devs have lost touch with reality and are committing suicide?

As far as I can see, Thunderbird needs more development, not less or none at all. With the dramatic popularity of smart phones, I was expecting Thunderbird for mobile to be announced months ago… Add that with a synv feature between mobile and desktop and we would have had a massive winner.

Short sighted isn’t even the word for what your doing, brain dead is closer to the point.
Sure opensourse is freeware, doesn’t mean a service has to be free, tie in a nice secure backup and encryption service to thunderbird desktop and a mobile version.
47
Nate said on July 18th, 2012 at 6:58 am:

I’m shocked and disturbed by this. But I’m not surprised.
Mozilla has Firefox desktop, metro, mobile, and an awful beta on iOS. What does Thunderbird have? Desktop, and some metro designs.
Aside from the poorly implemented “tabs on top”; Thunderbird hasn’t had an interface overhaul in years, while Firefox’s design elements get changed more often than a baby with diarrhea.
Mozilla is always working to bring browsers to new places, such as the B2G project and the chromeless project. Almost all of their E-mail work is in Thunderbird and some really old incomplete stuff from the early 2000s.
Point is, Mozilla has always viewed Thunderbird as a second class citizen. The only difference now is that they’re openly admitting it.

Thunderbird is an excellent program which can still be improved, and the only thing stopping it is Mozilla admitting it’s not a priority to them. If there was ever a legitimate reason to fork Thunderbird, it’s this.
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Paul V said on July 18th, 2012 at 7:02 am:

This is eerily familiar to and reminiscent of when Eudora went under. I was a loyal user for years – too long, probably – and was overjoyed when T-Bird came along. I am another one who would happily pay for it, but I am not going to wait around. The ESR map shows an “end of life” state in a year and a half. Why wait?

It’s really sad. Also idiotic are the people who trash the idea of a local mail client. Aside from searchability and security advantages, nobody in this blundered, short-sighted world considers archival issues anymore. Much of the world’s history is built on correspondence. When you can no longer easily archive your mail or email. you lose something whose value is incalculable – your history, whether it be institutional or individual.

I suppose I’ll go to Mail.app and hope that Apple doesn’t apply their monomania for all things cloud to that app. I don’t see many other choices, especially after reading some of the reviews for Postbox on macupdate.com and after my own experience with Microsoft absolutely precludes me from using Outlook.

What a drag.
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Nick Mailer said on July 18th, 2012 at 12:26 pm:

This announcement is nothing more than the final and total corruption of the original mission of the Mozilla Foundation. Products, monitization and the feather-bedding of the organisation’s corporate vitality are considered more important than the very mission that led to its existence.

In abandoning Thunderbird (and let’s not sugarcoat it – this is what is happening), Mozilla’s tail is wagging the dog.

A profound shame.
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Thomas W said on July 18th, 2012 at 9:26 pm:

Has anyone at Mozilla considered integrating Thunderbird into Firefox? The oft-ignored fifth browser, Opera, has a built-in email client. Since Thunderbird is built on the same engine as Firefox, it seems like this shouldn’t be too hard at all. And then any update to the browser would be an update to the email client. Seems like it will solve whatever problem has caused them to ‘abandon’ Thunderbird to extended support.