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: 4, Informative) by inertnet on Wednesday December 02 2015, @11:04AM
I'm not affiliated and I haven't tried it myself yet: http://www.fossamail.org/ [fossamail.org]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2015, @12:14PM
I have been using Fossamail since I dumped Firefox and Thunderbird. If you swapped out Thunderbird for Fossamail, and used their profile move tool, you wouldn't even notice the change. Except the application icons are different. The only drawback is that it does not update automatically, and you have to check for new versions once in a while.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2015, @04:09PM
The only drawback is that it does not update automatically
That is not a "drawback". It is a feature. I always disable any auto-updating BS on my system. But software makers continue to push that nonsense at me and make me black-list their auto-update websites and disable their dedicated updating program (which continues to consume my resources).
No one is automatically installing their spyware on my machine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2015, @10:10PM
It would be nice if you received the Toast pop-up saying that there is a new version available, even if you don't want to install it. A fixed number of notifications that there is an update would be great. Fossamail could add a setting to control the number of reminders, making 0 an option.