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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: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday December 02 2015, @12:40PM
My guess might be the death of push due to hyperspam.
There's just too much spam in the world to use a service where any jerk can push garbage at you.
Outside work I use email for some legacy email lists and occasionally corporations send me valuable non-spam. Oh look Digikey shipped my order. I got a new electric bill. How nice. But all of that is realistically better done by pull.
Even at work most "email" is better done with other tools. Ticketing systems always devolve at big corporations into metric generation systems and all the ticketing functions move off into email. The metrics are more important than actually doing the job so don't mess up the ticketing system by using it, use email instead, keep the ticketing system for manipulated metric generation. I've only seen that anti-pattern a couple dozen times across many employers. But in theory a decent ticketing system combined with management that doesn't suck would result in using the ticketing system as a ticketing system not using email as a bugtracker. The spam emails from HR about having diversity carrot cake in the lunch room at 11 that nobody really reads anyway belong on an internal blog or twitter-like feed. Idiots trying to send DVD ISO images via email show most morons are better off with file servers than trying to use email attachments. Plenty of business that used to be transacted in email is now text message and IRC-clones. I'm not really seeing email as business-critical anymore. Its nice, sure, but ... Its kind of like desk phones, which are nearly dead where I work. Everyone has a smart phone as their electronic leash / ankle bracelet so nobody uses desk phones. I believe mine is being taken away at the end of the year; I'm cool with that, I haven't used it in maybe 3 or 4 years. Email will be the same way.
My guess is Apple will let Siri poll RSS feeds and then we'll be permitted (because we can't do things until Apple lets us) and I'll just have a dedicated customer RSS feed from digikey and from the local electric company and WTF else and I'll subscribe to those rss feeds (In newsblur not siri obviously) then bye bye email.