Thunderbird Unncertainty

The future of Thunderbird is uncertain. Thunderbird has been my favorite email client for about four years now, though I now mirror my email on Gmail purely for the search.

15 thoughts on “Thunderbird Unncertainty

  1. I avoid Gmail because of the privacy and copyright strangeness that is Google. Thunderbird has been my client of choice for several years. I have tried the others and it simply was just the right fit not to mention that even though they are independent pieces of software the UI and design always felt like a glove after using Firefox. Hopefully they find a model that doesn’t leave Thunderbird stranded.

  2. The future is uncertain only in terms of organizational structure. I’ve had various conversations with developers over the past several years, and recently… There is still dedication for the product. The future of the product is pretty certain. It’s going to continue to be developed. The question is what organization will oversee this effort.

  3. I used Thunderbird for years but recently switched to Apple’s Mail app to try it out. I rather enjoyed both but there were some issues with Thunderbird that I haven’t experienced with Mail.

    I would like to see Thunderbird stick around though.

  4. As an avid (although slowing) “distro-hopper”, I’ve been doing webmail for quite some time to get around setting up my email client every time I install over what I had been using. So, I’ve been using Gmail as well for an email client. I had been using an IMAP solution for a while, but web seems to work for me. If I ever had to consider a client again, though, I’d probably go to TB, as I do like the way it works. Its a great progression from the old mail client.

  5. I like Thunderbird a lot as well. I hope they don’t do something drastic like discontinue development. It’s been one of the best open source applications for quite a while, and I don’t think other open source email clients as good as Thunderbird. The next best, according to me, is KMail, and it’s a distant second.

  6. I’ll probably keep using Thunderbird for some time after development is dropped. However, since I only use it as an IMAP client, it’ll be fairly simple to switch to another client.

  7. I really like Thunderbird too but have also gone the Gmail route all my domain based email forwards into Gmail at one point or another. For my purposes having mailed tied down to one machine with Thunderbird really isn’t all the useful.

    Let’s call a spade a spade; Thunderbird has always been the red headed step child of the Mozilla family, it gets just enough resources to stay alive. Firefox 2.0 was out way before TB 2.0 and according to Mozilla’s own documentation, TB 3.0 possible release date is questionable: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/roadmap.html

    Endora is going open source too, perhaps they’ll merge?

  8. On linux using KDE I got stuck with kmail. But regarding windows, Thunderbird has grown to be my favorite. Anyways – No matter what happens to thunderbird – Hope they do not mess it up.

  9. But what are your opinions on the “call to action”? It seems that choices offered don’t include a Option 0: Keep TB with the Mozilla Foundation. Which would be my personal choice. What about you?

  10. Man, that really sucks. I’ve been using Thunderbird for a couple years now.

    Well, I hope Thunderbird continues to flourish and succeed as a project even after leaving Mozilla.

    This better be good.

  11. I wouldn’t say its totally dead. More like its at a point in its development life where they think it needs its own priority focus. Rather then the after thought of the team working on the browser.

    Or at least thats the way I read it.

  12. I too have been using gmail for a while now and I feel that desktop clients such as TB are soon to become extinct. Downloading mail from the server was invented so people could close their dailup connection and then read it. Nowadays, having your email stored online and being able to get to it from your phone/pda/work PC/whatever is just so much more convenient.

    IMHO, Thunderbird should look at perhaps becoming the WordPress of email. A lightweight solution that people can install on their server to avoid the “privacy and copyright strangeness that is Google”.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS