The non-profit has made it clear that they would prefer to stop supporting Thunderbird in order to devote more resources to Firefox. The largest downside to Thunderbird is Mozilla's wavering support of the project. The interface itself is a little dated, but perfectly serviceable and highly customizable. Because it is open source, there is a large support community that can help users who are having issues. Thunderbird is available for Windows, Mac OS and Linux. Like Gmail and Outlook, it searches for words like "attachment" and reminds you to attach a file if you forgot to do so. It also enables a number of add-ons that add additional functions, such as a calendar, to Thunderbird. These include smart folders, tabbed e-mail, powerful search tools and a simple e-mail setup wizard. However, the program retains key features. Thunderbird has not had substantial new features added in several years. It has many of the same features as its counterparts for the best price - free. I think that this would significantly improve this one single goal of email management by taking in the best of both applications, Thunderbird and Seamonkey.Overall Opinion: Thunderbird is a powerful e-mail client and an excellent alternative to paid, premium products. I think that spreading all these resources out is such a waste of time, so if Mozilla isn’t going to make Thunderbird a priority anymore, then they should get out of the way and let people who have been working alongside the project for years have a go at it. What I would like to see now is see Seamonkey take over the Thunderbird project entirely and merge it into Seamonkey’s mail capabilities. Firefox was getting all these UI changes and memory improvements while Thunderbird just plodded along and pretty much stayed the same aside from the occasional bug fix and the last couple of drawing board designs that probably wouldn’t see themselves in stable releases for years to come. But, I don’t think that many people could say they didn’t see this coming. This is quite a shocker to me, I was rather hoping to see some of the more recent features that were announced be improved and expanded. And while Mozilla plans to accept the help of community members to drive forward the development of the email client, it is not clear at this point in time if anyone will join the project to do so.įor some, it looks as if Mozilla is leaving the 20 million or so Thunderbird users left standing in the rain, while it is concentrating on its first mobile operating system Firefox OS and other mobile applications. Other features, for instance the recently introduced send large files feature will probably be put on ice. Some users might say that there is not really anything wrong with the move away from Thunderbird, as it is providing access to its core feature, emails, just fine. It appears as if Mozilla plans to put the desktop email client on the backburner to only release security or stability patches when necessary, and hand over the rest of the development to the community. To sum it up: Thunderbird will still be around, but existing and new users should not get their hopes up to high that a lot of new features will see the light of day in the client, nor that existing features that could use an overhaul or bug fixing will receive that. What this means is that some staff that is currently part of the Thunderbird team will be moved to other project groups at Mozilla.
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