Unbelievable but true, not everyone likes Mail.app. Some Mac users actually like Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client. It’s been a part of Mozilla ever since, like Firefox before it, it got broken out of Mozilla proper. Now Mozilla is thinking about getting rid of Thunderbird. Allow me to excerpt a few lines with my bs filter.
However, the Thunderbird effort is dwarfed by the enormous energy and community focused on the web, Firefox and the ecosystem around it. As a result, Mozilla doesn’t focus on Thunderbird as much as we do browsing and Firefox and we don’t expect this to change in the foreseeable future. We are convinced that our current focus - delivering the web, mostly through browsing and related services - is the correct priority.
Firefox makes us a ton of money. No, you don’t understand. A ton of money. It comes in wheelbarrows. Thunderbird makes us zip, nada, zilch.
We have concluded that we should find a new, separate organizational setting for Thunderbird; one that allows the Thunderbird community to determine its own destiny.
We want to put Thunderbird alone on a ship and send it out to sea.
We’ve thought about a few different options. I’ve described them below. If you’ve got a different idea please let us know.
Option 1. Create a new non-profit organization analogous to the Mozilla Foundation - a Thunderbird foundation. If it turns out Thunderbird generates a revenue model from the product as Firefox does, then a Thunderbird foundation could follow the Mozilla Foundation model and create a subsidiary.
I’m basically telling you we can figure out how to monetize Thunderbird, which is exactly why we’re trying to get rid of it.
Option 2. Create a new subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation for Thunderbird. This has less overhead, although it still requires a new company that serves the mission of the Mozilla Foundation. In this case the Mozilla Foundation board and personnel would remain involved in Thunderbird. Thunderbird would continue to need to be balanced and prioritized with Mozilla’s focus on delivering the web through Firefox, its ecosystem and the Open Web as the platform. The Thunderbird effort may therefore still end up with less focus and less flexibility.
We end up still spending money on this. We’re only throwing this out there to make it look like we don’t want to abandon it completely.
Option 3. Thunderbird is released as a community project much like SeaMonkey, and a small independent services and consulting company is formed by the Thunderbird developers to continue development and care for Thunderbird users.
This is probably what we’ll do. We get to dump Thunderbird and it might actually survive, so we don’t look like bad guys.
We don’t know the best answer yet.
We want people to give feedback that we’ll follow (just as long as we don’t have to keep supporting Thunderbird) so we can always blame the community for what happens. (End translation.)
This latest development really makes me fear for the longevity of the Thunderbird project. Eudora’s already supposed to use it as a base, so if it folds up, there goes two popular email clients. We’ll be left with webmail and bundled email clients like Mail.app, Entourage, Outlook, and Windows Live Mail Desktop. Thunderbird is the last actively developed cross-platform desktop email client. It’s worth saving and Mozilla doesn’t seem motivated to do that.
[via Macworld]
Hey, I REALLY like apple mail. This always seemed buggier and less mac-like. Just my 2 cents.
Why anyone would want to use a thick client for e-mail is beyond me, but to each his/her own.. variety makes the world go round.
Another program leaving the Mac. Goodbye.
The moment you have to administer more than one mailbox you can throw webmail out the window as it becomes 100% useless. An e-mail client like Thunderbird gives you important features like moving mails between mailboxes with simple drag&drop. With Thunderbird using IMAP, I can administer several mailboxes on several computers (using different OSes) always using the same interface and the same data. NOTHING out there can replace Thunderbird in this regard.
Bummer. I like Thunderbird.
I liked Thunderbird, but felt it was still a few version away from prime time as competition against Outlook. If it goes, I'd be sorely disappointed.