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Email Client Thunderbird To Stay With The Mozilla Foundation, Sort Of (mozilla.org)
Philipp Kewisch, writing for Mozilla: The investigations on Thunderbird's future home have concluded. The Mozilla Foundation has agreed to serve as the legal and fiscal home for the Thunderbird project, but Thunderbird will migrate off Mozilla Corporation infrastructure, separating the operational aspects of the project. [...] The Mozilla Foundation has agreed to continue as Thunderbird's legal, fiscal and cultural home, with the following provisos:
1. The Thunderbird Council (see footnote) and the Mozilla Foundation executive team maintain a good working relationship and make decisions in a timely manner.
2. The Thunderbird Council and the team make meaningful progress in short order on operational and technical independence from Mozilla Corporation.
3. Either side may give the other six months notice if they wish to discontinue the Mozilla Foundation's role as the legal and fiscal host of the Thunderbird project. In a conversation with Slashdot, a spokesperson of Mozilla acknowledged that the general sentiment is "Thunderbird code needs to be modernized and the dependencies on the Mozilla code framework need to be reduced. This may include re-implementing or migrating features to make better use of web technologies."
(Footnote: Back in 2012, Mozilla announced that it would reallocate most of the paid project members to other projects, handing off the responsibility for the project to the volunteer community that had formed around Thunderbird. This group met in Toronto in 2014 to discuss the future of Thunderbird and formed the Thunderbird Council, a group of individuals that has the power to make business decisions going forward.)
1. The Thunderbird Council (see footnote) and the Mozilla Foundation executive team maintain a good working relationship and make decisions in a timely manner.
2. The Thunderbird Council and the team make meaningful progress in short order on operational and technical independence from Mozilla Corporation.
3. Either side may give the other six months notice if they wish to discontinue the Mozilla Foundation's role as the legal and fiscal host of the Thunderbird project. In a conversation with Slashdot, a spokesperson of Mozilla acknowledged that the general sentiment is "Thunderbird code needs to be modernized and the dependencies on the Mozilla code framework need to be reduced. This may include re-implementing or migrating features to make better use of web technologies."
(Footnote: Back in 2012, Mozilla announced that it would reallocate most of the paid project members to other projects, handing off the responsibility for the project to the volunteer community that had formed around Thunderbird. This group met in Toronto in 2014 to discuss the future of Thunderbird and formed the Thunderbird Council, a group of individuals that has the power to make business decisions going forward.)
Thunderbird is the best of a bad bunch, but it hasn't improved in ten years -- and it needs improvement.
Firefox is dead at this point. It can't even compete with Chrome and what does Chrome offer exactly? Multicore tabs so CSS and javascript can bring even i7's to their knees. Great.
My desktop feels like it's been standing still for the last ten years, where it hasn't been going backwards. This is across OSes, applications, windows managers and fricken monitor resolutions come to think of it. And suddenly wepages have iframes again. Tablets were a mistake.
The "problem" with Thunderbird is that it's a very mature product. It has quirks, yes, but it is very near the pinnacle of what an email client should be. It handles loads of messages (I've seen hundreds of thousands in a single folder) and accounts very well. It is easy to migrate from one machine to another. It is a cross-platform program in the sense that the exact same code base is used for all major platforms and behaves almost identically. It has calendaring and can integrate with Google services at no cost. It makes Outlook look like a piece of shit (hint: Outlook really is a piece of shit) and if there were some way to attach an Exchange account to it then Outlook would probably start to slowly die off.
Security fixes and minor updates to keep it from crashing as systems evolve are all Thunderbird ever needs. Thunderbird was a mature product a very long time ago (in software development terms) and the main reason it keeps getting updated is because it shares a lot of code with Firefox and Mozilla is an organization that simply cannot resist fucking with things for the sake of fuckery and little else. The absolutely retarded "Correspondents" column introduction is a prime example of Mozilla just not being a good company anymore. Mozilla has become the Lennart Poettering of Web software: stupid decisions are "features" and closed with WONTFIX or NOTABUG. I stopped using their feedback system because they don't ever listen, so why bother? The one good thing about Thunderbird is that Mozilla has largely ignored it and that's exactly what Thunderbird users want, especially after the Chromification of the UI. Chrome's UI and options panel are both utter shit. Luckily you can turn the menu bar back on in Thunderbird and get the full options and functionality back.
Someone above referred to how lame it is that there's no Thunderbird for Android. Check out K-9 Mail; it's a lot better than the stupid mail apps that come with phones and if Thunderbird ever made it to Android it wouldn't be far off from what K-9 is. Also K-9 lets you import/export your mail settings so you can migrate it to a new phone easily.