Thunderbird Finds New Nest

By Greg McNevin

February 21, 2008: The popular open source email client Thunderbird has found a new home, with the Mozilla Foundation announcing on Tuesday that its new Mozilla Messaging mail subsidiary is open for business.

With the commercial arm of the Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla Corp., announcing last year that it would be focussing on the Firefox web browser, Thunderbird’s future was put somewhat in question.

The company was planning to spin the open source email client off as a new company, and with the establishment of Mozilla Messaging as a non-profit under the name MailCo. While the name has gone in favour of a hint at a broader communications strategy, this plan appears to be otherwise coming to fruition.

“We are excited to renew the focus of our open source community on the future of Thunderbird,” said David Ascher, chief executive at Mozilla Messaging.

“Every one of us is committed to building a great email product that people will love to use and that serves as the foundation for choice in a critical area of internet software.”

The company is planning an ambitious set of updates to the client with the release of Thunderbird 3.0, which it claims will deliver “significant improvements, notably integrated calendaring, better search and enhancements to the overall user experience.”

If the new features are as slick as its new online roost then Outlook could be in for some more pressure from open source.

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