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: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday December 04 2015, @09:42AM
I think you miss the point - you need to have encryption and decryption for the thing to work. So you need to get a majority of folks using encryption/decryption. So you want to get a few of the major email providers (gmail is the biggest nowadays I think) to make encryption the default.
Obviously, this means that google et al can read your email; but when encryption becomes standardised, everyone then implements encryption as standard, and all email is encrypted. So then, when you are sending email to not gmail et al, the email is encrypted. I am making a path for standardisation of email encryption, so that users can choose to use gmail and let google read their emails, or choose to use some other email provider (or set up their own mail server), and encryption is a standard.