It looks as though some major changes are on the cards for Thunderbird – our favourite open-source email client. Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker published a blog post 2 days ago stating that:

Mozilla doesn’t focus on Thunderbird as much as we do browsing and Firefox and we don’t expect this to change in the foreseeable future. We are convinced that our current focus – delivering the web, mostly through browsing and related services – is the correct priority. At the same time, the Thunderbird team is extremely dedicated and competent, and we all want to see them do as much as possible with Thunderbird.

We have concluded that we should find a new, separate organizational setting for Thunderbird; one that allows the Thunderbird community to determine its own destiny.

Mitchell goes on to outline 3 possible options for the future of Thunderbird.

1. Create a new Thunderbird Foundation – similar to the overall Mozilla Foundation,
2. Make Thunderbird a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation,
3. Release Thunderbird as a community project.

Mitchell explains the benefits and problems with each of these approaches, and ultimately it sounds as though Firefox and Thunderbird could benefit from this separation in the long run.

Mail Client or Web Mail?

Currently it seems as though mail clients are undergoing a somewhat transitional period, with home users increasingly relying on webmail. However, there still seems to be a strong market for mail clients with power users, people on dial-up connections, and at an enterprise level.

Personally I have always preferred to have my mail located locally on my desktop, although in recent years I have ensured that all my mail is not only stored and backed up locally, but in addition it is all routed through a webmail account ensuring that I can access it from any computer.

Ultimately I hope that Thunderbird continues to grow and evolve, whatever decision is taken. For a long time I have recommended Thunderbird to people over Outlook Express¹, as it is a solid web mail client with spam blocking and a more intuitive layout.

Similarly I have suggested it as a replacement for Microsoft Outlook, which forms part of the Microsoft Office suite. In this case however, I have found that users of Microsoft Outlook want to hold on to the calendar and task integration which is not offered by Thunderbird out of the box². Another failing that crops up in the effort to move people away from Microsoft Outlook is that due its dominant nature there is almost universal support for PDA and mobile phone synchronisation. So despite the high costs of MS Office, a number of small business owners that I know have felt tied to purchasing it.

Perhaps Thunderbird can reach for the next level, looking to create a business model around enterprise-level support. This will require some major changes and functionality that rivals and beats that of the de-facto Microsoft Outlook, but I have confidence in this open-source community-driven effort that, through the Firefox web browser, has certainly improved my web browsing experience many times over and demonstrated that Microsoft’s perceived absolute hold was not as complete as everyone thought.

1. Outlook Express has been renamed to “Windows Mail” in Windows Vista
2. This kind of functionality is available for Thunderbird through the Mozilla Sunbird project as an extension called Lightning, but is not yet tightly integrated with the application