Thunderbird’s New Home

I admit that software needs some sort of upkeep to not fall to bitrot, but I simply don&#x27;t understand how we got to the near-falldown of Thunderbird a few years ago. You don&#x27;t have to add new features, keeping it alive and simply fixing critical bugs is fine. Basically everyone I know would prefer a stable mail client not getting any new features over a few new features and addons breaking.<p>I&#x27;m really happy Thunderbird hasn&#x27;t gone the way of the dodo.

I mentioned this in another thread... but Mozilla&#x2F;Thunderbird (not MZLA) should really concentrate more on feature-rich support. Specifically better calendar and provider integration.<p>Second to this, they should probably work on their own first class mail and calendar server as at least open core, and probably as SaaS as well. As much as I like some of the mail hosts out there, for some, the ability to self-host is big. The various pieces and software you have to cobble together are cumbersome, and even then, you don&#x27;t get anything close to what Exchange+Outlook gives you.<p>It would be nice to see Thunderbird fill this space, it used to be what I would consider a best of breed email &amp; newsgroup client, now, I&#x27;m not sure I would say anything close to that.

Does this mean I need to shift my donation?<p>I&#x27;ve been giving specifically to support Thunderbird development, not other Mozilla work [0] for the past few years because I think it&#x27;s vitally important that email remains an open protocol, supported by mainstream desktop clients. Without Thunderbird, I fear email will be lost to the Gmail &amp; Apple walled garden.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;give.thunderbird.net&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;give.thunderbird.net&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m still looking for help upgrading&#x2F;maintaining the Lookout add-on. This add-on allows opening the proprietary Microsoft Winmail.dat files<p>I don&#x27;t have as much free time as I used to, that and Thunderbird is removing legacy add-on support faster than I would like.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;TB-throwback&#x2F;LookOut-fix-version" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;TB-throwback&#x2F;LookOut-fix-version</a>

I switched back to mutt recently. I&#x27;ve tried to use and like Thunderbird, but I just can&#x27;t make it work consistently across platforms. I really think mutt is the ideal mail user agent. If TB would just become a GUI for mutt, it may be useful to me, but otherwise, it&#x27;s just not stable nor consistent.

I think it’s good to put a bit of separation between Thunderbird and the rest of Mozilla. Thunderbird may have a modest but sustainable future of its own, and ideally it shouldn’t be held hostage to the broader challenges and shifting priorities at the parent company.

Will this affect development any? Thunderbird recently broke my &quot;Virtual Identity&quot; extension, which I&#x27;ve been relying on for years. Not sure what to do now.

&gt; explore offering our users products and services that were not possible under the Mozilla Foundation<p>Can anyone offer insight on what this means? My assumption might be some sort of for-profit endeavor?<p>&gt; Ultimately, this move to MZLA Technologies Corporation allows the Thunderbird project to hire more easily, act more swiftly, and pursue ideas that were previously not possible.<p>Not sure how a different legal structure would solve what sounds like an organizational problem.

Why not a Thunderbird Corporation or similar, instead of another confusing 4-letters corp?

What problem is solved by creating a second corporate subsidiary? This post doesn&#x27;t really explain.

God I hope this goes better than Mozilla Messaging. I nearly joined MoMess, and was very sad to see where it went.

An email client from the 1990&#x27;s moves across two subsidiaries within the same company. Tada

Not Sure if Brendan Eich is Reading, wondering if he has anything to share.<p>You need to setup an Entire Separate For Profit Company for a different product?

Thunderbird is a great product, love it. Is there a way to follow Twitter users in &quot;Blogs &amp; News Feeds&quot; ?

I like the ENGMAIL plugin for GNUPG support. If I want to send encrypted messages to my friends I can do so with it.

&gt; More information about the future direction of Thunderbird will be shared in the coming months.<p>Why ? Months is an eternity on the Internet.<p>edit: aye, aye for the downvotes, that&#x27;s what karma is for, but would someone please explain why more information about the future direction of Thunderbird can&#x27;t be shared now ? Does it mean there are no plans at all at the moment ?

Anyone know if&#x2F;when Thunderbird will start providing native support for Gmail labels (rather than using the less than satisfactory IMAP folder system that is currently used)?

this should be upvoted more

Frankly, Mozilla should be rewriting Thunderbird with a completely clean slate. Focus on privacy (ie detection of email trackers) and integration with the big clouds (GSuite and O365), perhaps adding in some security features that are today only available in really pricey business offerings. I’d love to see this happen and for the next good email client to remain open and free rather than being acquired and strip-mined.

I&#x27;m baffled Thunderbird has to essentially be crowdfunded while Mozilla pays their execs millions and experiments with mostly useless things in Firefox. The only thing I remember worth anything was Container Tabs, and that&#x27;s mostly abandoned with little tooling and no sync support.