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In this Ars Technica article, Mozilla Corporation Chair Mitchell Baker discloses the desire to drop the Thunderbird email client altogether.
"Many inside of Mozilla, including an overwhelming majority of our leadership, feel the need to be laser-focused on activities like Firefox that can have an industry-wide impact." Baker writes. "With all due respect to Thunderbird and the Thunderbird community, we have been clear for years that we do not view Thunderbird as having this sort of potential."
Thunderbird has already been demoted to second-tier status, receiving only security updates since the summer of 2012. Baker's plan would turn Thunderbird over to a community product, similar to what happened with the Mozilla Suite a decade ago.
Is Mozilla's decision to laser-focus on improving Firefox going to stop their dwindling market share? Who else, besides the submitter, is still using Thunderbird? And where will you go once Thunderbird is no longer supported?
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday December 02 2015, @11:35AM
I've been a gmail user since the early days, but for my wife's business she likes a dedicated email program. Thunderbird is easily the nicest one around imho. Even 3+ years out of date it's still terrific. It'd be a shame to see it go, so I hope they at least continue to support the security aspect of it.
Your experience seems to be different from mine. I perceive Thunderbird as a terrible program. Slow, cumbersome UI (menus especially, but many other examples), bad mail format (mailbox). To me it is embarrassing that Linux does not have a decent email client. I do use Thunderbird but was always dissatisfied. Kmail used to be a total disaster in the 4.X days (X 10). I will probably give it another try. My solution for now is to have an IMAP server running locally (dovecot) and rely on the client only for fetching and displaying email.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday December 02 2015, @12:23PM
To me it is embarrassing that Linux does not have a decent email client.
There's no lack of email reading on Linux... Going back to the early 90s I used elm, pine, mutt for well over a decade, then gmail. Those are just the popular and reasonably usable UI clients. Emacs has (or had) a couple ways to read email, none very good. There was a phase, just before the explosion of "every noob writes a mp3 player" where "every noob writes an email client" almost all of which sucked.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2015, @02:38PM
What's wrong with menus?
Care to elaborate?