What is the future for Thunderbird?

[ankupan]

Please add The Bat too. http://ritlabs.com/

[Mugwhamp]

Using Airmail 2 on Mac powered by FastMail IMAP.

[emoore]

Originally Posted by filbert

I have seen reports that Mozilla is dropping Thunderbird and hoping that 'the community' will take on its development.

The chair of the Mozilla Foundation stated that Mozilla will stop developing Thunderbird in a July 2012 post that has been widely mis-interpreted as meaning Thunderbird is dead. Part of the bad PR was caused by people not being aware that the community had already been doing a significant amount of the development, and that the community did not agree with his conclusion that "it is already pretty much what its users want and mostly needs some on-going maintenance". Many people are also unaware that another project survived after Mozilla stopped development. SeaMonkey was formed 8 years ago after Mozilla stopped releasing new versions of the former Mozilla Application Suite. It is now a thriving community-driven product.

Thunderbird is not dead. The community took over adding new features and bug fixes for Thunderbird several years ago. Mozilla continues to provide the infrastructure (both the Mozilla add-ons web site and the servers used to build, test and distribute new versions), and add stability/security fixes. The pace is slower, they now have one major update a year (last one was June 2015) with new features, and minor updates every 6 weeks. Thunderbird 38.6.0 was released February 16, 2016.

The TB planning digest has had posts about finding a new legal/financial home, how to deal with changes in direction in AMO and Gecko support, how to deal with Mozilla planning to drop support for XUL (its used by most add-ons), and shifting to different technologies so that Thunderbird can also support smartphones for about a year. N1 is an example of a email client (a real desktop application, not a "app") using the technologies that they are considering. One of the issues in shifting to using just Javascript and HTML5 is what widgets do you support, for example you want to be able to have real folder hierarchies rather than display them flattened like many apps do. Another issue is how to make it as easy as possible for existing add-on developers to adapt to the new model.

The Pretty Easy Privacy project (PEP) has offered to help fund Thunderbird. They and the Thunderbird council recently decided that it would be easier to assess how to work together after several key milestones has been reached, such as a fiscal home for Thunderbird being chosen, a new Thunderbird council being chosen (there is a election this week to confirm the current leadership), and a alpha version of a PEP/Enigmail addon being available.

[Berenburger]

In a nostalgic mood, I would sometimes fly with Pegasus.
Last update: Jan 2016!

[kijinbear]

Originally Posted by emoore

shifting to different technologies so that Thunderbird can also support smartphones

I really hope they stay away from that path. There are plenty of good mail clients in the mobile space, some of which are even open-source. Thunderbird should try to become the best desktop mail client ever, instead of getting all distracted and ending up a mediocre mail client for all form factors.

[arjoni]

Originally Posted by kijinbear

I really hope they stay away from that path. There are plenty of good mail clients in the mobile space, some of which are even open-source. Thunderbird should try to become the best desktop mail client ever, instead of getting all distracted and ending up a mediocre mail client for all form factors.

You said it right!!