Not very encouraging for the mail client preferred by most...

More @ http://www.ghacks.net/2012/07/07/mozilla-thunderbirds-not-our-priority-anymore/

Indeed, very sad. And disappointing.

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I can see how they are backing away from it because it's likely not a major breadwinner for the company, but I think working with the browser "ThunderBrowse" plugin something could be worked out to get search revenue from Google. If things come to a dramatic halt, I guess I'll cross over to Sylpheed, but I definitely would miss many TB features.

There's also the lightweight, very configurable Claws Mail, but nothing portable yet.

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When last I tried this (http://www.claws-mail.org/win32/) I came away convinced that it was almost portable; the dificulty lied with untangling it from GPG4Win (not that I don't want to use it, but I would like to keep the portables separated...)

Mozilla expressed its intentions to leave Thunderbird's development in other hands about five years ago.
At that time, OpenOffice.org showed interest in integrate the email client (with Lightining or Sunbird) to the suite, to better compete with MS Office and Outlook.
The scenario has changed and the future of Thunderbird is uncertain.
And what will happen with Seamonkey?

Is this really a big issue? It's not like there have been any major changes in how email works. It's not like web browsing where things are constantly evolving. They wioll still be releasing security updates and bug fixes.

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As Robert Kaye observed: "When no one makes a decision that impedes progress. Sometime continuing work depends on someone making a decision which could affect downstream work. In order to avoid throwing work away, people will wait until a decision has been made." (This is true for just about any organization, not just OSS projects).

For Thunderbird, this means that if the leadership changes due to former developers only working maybe a few hours a week, the project hierarchy may get convoluted and thus the project may slow down or stop.

The hope [edit: my hope] was that Mozilla would challenge Exchange and Lotus Notes and over time. It had been adding more and more features that indicated it might push into that territory and I much prefer the interface to both of those clients. Without strong organizational and monetary backing, moving into corporate/enterprise territory is unlikely to happen. That said, the open source productivity tool LibreOffice seems to be doing pretty well independent of its former corporate sponsor so who knows? Hopefully Thunderbird will gain at least some financial support from elsewhere the way LibreOffice did.

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Supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation | DuckDuckGo user | My GPG key | Projects donated to: VLC, CubicExplorer, Ditto, Greenshot, TrueCrypt

But most people do not want anything but a simple mail program. You start adding lots of things people don't need and you start losing users. I thought there were add ons like lightning that made Thunderbird more like you desire?

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Possibly but choice is good and the only open alternative to Outlook seems to be Zimbra.

Additionally, Firefox pushed its way into corporate environments with a lightweight and extensible structure and relying on plugins for additional functionality. Although its gotten a little bulky in the last few years, I think there may be a way to do something similar with Thunderbird. Lightning is at the very edge of what Thunderbird needs to compete with other collaborative offerings like Exchange and Lotus Notes. A flagging system, todo list, collaborative meetings, etc. would help it push further in into that space and the plugins so far have only taken than part-way.

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Supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation | DuckDuckGo user | My GPG key | Projects donated to: VLC, CubicExplorer, Ditto, Greenshot, TrueCrypt

Thunderbird has flags though just that they call them tags. Pretty sure there is already at least one to do list extension.

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