Thunderbird gets financial wings

Author: Phil Cogar
Published: 19th September 2007
Comments (11) Stumble
Thunderbird will be getting a larger development team thanks to the £1.49 million injection into a new company to handle it.

Thunderbird will be getting a larger development team thanks to the £1.49 million injection into a new company to handle it.

Thunderbird is finally stretching out its wings and leaving the nest. The Mozilla Foundation announced today that it has injected £1.49 million into a new, unnamed subsidiary to handle the project and focus on "innovations in the email and communications areas."

The majority of the £1.49 million will be used to build a small team of people to develop future versions of Thunderbird.

Back in July, the future of Thunderbird looked uncertain as Mitchell Baker, CEO of Mozilla Foundation, outlined three directions that the program could head in and asked community members to leave their opinion on which one they would like to see happen.

Well, it seems that option number two was the popular choice amongst those that expressed their view.

In a new blog post, Baker outlined the goals of the new for-profit company as:
  • Take care of Thunderbird users.
  • Move Thunderbird forward to provide better, deeper e-mail solutions.
  • Create a better user experience for a range of Internet communications — how does/should e-mail work with IM, RSS, VoIP, SMS, site-specific email, etc?
  • Spark the types of community involvement and innovation that we’ve seen around web “browsing” and Firefox.
Should this new company be successful, then the presence of Thunderbird is likely to grow much in the same way Firefox's did.

As it currently stands, Thunderbird has taken a back row to its browser sibling and hasn't received quite as much attention from the internet community. A further push on the email client could take away some of the market from Microsoft's Outlook/Express offerings and webmail based clients.

Still use Thunderbird, or do you prefer Outlook or something more obscure? Drop us your thoughts in the forums.
Quote Duste 19th September 2007, 12:14
I still really don't see why it couldn't have remained at Mozilla instead going to this new company. :/
Quote steveo_mcg 19th September 2007, 12:22
FF is handled by a subsidiary also (i think) it's probably a tax issue (dodge).
Quote Leitchy 19th September 2007, 12:49
Love Thunderbird and being using it for past 2 years or so. I reckon it handles large Mail inboxes better than Outlook, currently have over 21gig of emails in Thunderbird, and my colleague who uses Outlook with similar email sizes finds the client really really sluggish!
Quote bilbothebaggins 19th September 2007, 14:07
Use thunderbird at home and love it.
At work I have to use outlook, but I'm using TB to read newsgroups, because outlook is utter crap for that.

It's easy to just switch over to FF at work and at home, but since many people have to use Outlook at work I guess they just stick with what they're used to.
Quote Anakha 19th September 2007, 14:37
All my mailing is done through gmail, but if I was using a POP/IMAP account (IMAP for GMail? Yes please!), I'd be using TB with it.
Quote GoodBytes 19th September 2007, 15:56
Some companies has their e-mail system where its unable to work with anything else other then Outlook. So employees are stuck using it.
Quote xtroid22k 19th September 2007, 16:28
Hi,

Well, I love thunderbird. The performance is just out there. I support outlook at work and the problems we run into are just insane. I am a hardware pheme at heart so when it comes to application support; I don't enjoy it as much. I do fix it though. Also I haven't really studied thunderbird indept though but personal folders are handled much better. .pst files run the risk of corruption when you they approach 2GB, but thats part of the problem my office has; but thats another story.

Man I just love thunderbird, been using it for sometime and I would highly recomend it. Just switching your browser and e-mail client increases your computers security, les vulnerable to mal-ware, and more stable from what I have found.

Thanks
Quote Spaceraver 19th September 2007, 17:08
Quote:
Originally Posted by Anakha
All my mailing is done through gmail, but if I was using a POP/IMAP account (IMAP for GMail? Yes please!), I'd be using TB with it.

GMAIL does POP.. :D
Quote evilgreenie 19th September 2007, 19:04
Quote:
Originally Posted by CardJoe

The Mozilla Foundation is injecting £1.49 million into a new company that will handle the development of Thunderbird and develop other email innovations.

Presumably this part of the huge wodge of money that Google "invested" in Mozilla. I'm still concerned that Thunderbird has been spun off into separate company.. Anyone else thinking "So long and thanks for all the fish"
Quote proxess 19th September 2007, 21:59
In the end I just use Evolution.
Quote speedfreek 21st September 2007, 02:20
The spinoff worrys me little. I would like to use Thunderbird to sync with my smartphone however.
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