Mozilla Messaging to improve Thunderbird e-mail

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Feb. 19, 2008

Months after its initial announcement, the Mozilla Foundation's new nonprofit branch Mozilla Messaging, finally opened for business for the advancement of the Thunderbird e-mail client on Feb. 19.

The commercial side of Mozilla, Mozilla Corp., had announced in July what was by then already an open secret: Its focus would be on the Firefox Web browser. That left open the question of what to do with Thunderbird. In September, Mozilla Corp. announced that it would be spinning off Thunderbird into its own company with the working name MailCo.

That plan may yet come to fruition, but for the time being, MailCo, now Mozilla Messaging, is a new nonprofit foundation. Its first job will be to advance Thunderbird's development. The next version, Thunderbird 3.0, is, according to the press release, being designed to, "deliver significant improvements, notably integrated calendaring, better search and enhancements to the overall user experience."

To make this happen, Mozilla Messaging has a small development team that will work with the open-source community. "We're excited to renew the focus of our open-source community on the future of Thunderbird," said David Ascher, Mozilla Messaging's CEO, in a statement. "Every one of us is committed to building a great e-mail product that people will love to use and that serves as the foundation for choice in a critical area of Internet software."

In the project FAQ document, Ascher expanded on what his plans are for the new Thunderbird. "In some ways we're re-launching Thunderbird."

In particular, the name change from MailCo to Mozilla Messaging reflects "both that this is a Mozilla company, and that we're focusing on the Internet messaging and communications space as a whole, not just e-mail."

—Steven J. Vaughan Nichols

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