Mozilla To Shaft Thunderbird Next Week

[Melcar]

Well this blows ass. Seriously, what the hell. I guess I need to find something else to use. And I just convinced the office to use TB. Well shit.

[smitty3268]

I use TB, and I can't bring myself to care much about this

Community support should be just fine to port current TB onto new libs as needed.

The only thing Mozilla devs would have been needed for is if they intended to make it into a serious corporate mail suite - by adding a calendar, better Exchange integration, etc. And personally i don't really need anything the current version doesn't already provide.

[1c3d0g]

Well this blows ass. Seriously, what the hell. I guess I need to find something else to use. And I just convinced the office to use TB. Well shit.

We must maintain calmness in the midst of perceived chaos. Relevant:

http://mikeconley.ca/blog/2012/07/06/no-thats-not-it-for-thunderbird/

So you can sleep well tonight knowing Thunderbird won't be left abandoned anytime soon.

[MrRtd]

Unfortunate

I have been using Thunderbird for years, and it's a great piece of software. Why they never integrated the lightning calendar add-on is beyond my comprehension. I can only compare Thunderbird to Outlook on Windows, and Kmail/Kontact on Linux, and Outlook to me isn't any better than Thunderbird, and Thunderbird is far superior than kmail for stability and ease of configuration.

[RealNC]

People have switched to Chrome by the masses, and the Firefox OS doesn't serve any real purpose. Without TB, Mozilla doesn't have anything left. They're throwing out the only thing that's actually still useful. How smart of them.

[smitty3268]

People have switched to Chrome by the masses, and the Firefox OS doesn't serve any real purpose. Without TB, Mozilla doesn't have anything left. They're throwing out the only thing that's actually still useful. How smart of them.

TB's popularity is nowhere near Firefox's, that's crazy talk.

[Xake]

Internet message access protocol (IMAP).

Still few IMAP-clients (and servers as well) supports setting up server-side filters, so you may have to mirror your filtering rules on every computer you connect from.

[m_gol]

I don't think I'll ever use webmail. Not until I'm provided a way to backup my email onto hard drive and restore whenever I want.

That's exactly why, though I use webmail on a daily basis, I regularly open Thunderbird to back everything up using IMAP. The best of both worlds.

[m_gol]

That's because you are using Adblock to hide the really huge advertisement in the top post.

You're wrong.

[aceman]

I am a Thunderbird community contributor. I can confirm that TB is not dead. Mozilla is only going to reshuffle the release cycle again and reorganize the paid stuff working on TB.

For those that are happy with current TB features: you will continue to use TB as always and there will be periodic stability/security releases as usual.

For those that want new features: paid mozilla stuff will work a bit less on new features, but they are now more open to new features contributed from the community. AND there are already some big features done, that are not fully exposed, like maildir-like message store (instead of mbox), sending of big attachments via file-storage services, Instant messaging integration, Australis theme changes, etc. You can expect that in stable releases soon.

And even if the community will not be able to produce big new features, it can at least do bugfixing and nice polishing. Many people welcome this as they are only bothered by the regressions big features bring with them.