Two years ago Mozilla decided to move elements of the Firefox browser into a separate corporation, which allowed them to focus entirely on the project at hand. Mozilla has now decided to the same with its e-mail client Thunderbird. While Firefox has been a huge success claiming more than 20% of the web browser market in recent years, the progress of Thunderbird has been lackluster in comparison. The move will dedicate several programmers to full-time focus on the open source client, but also more money and this will, amongst others, be used to hire more people to work on Thunderbird.
One of the first and most important steps Mozilla will take is to make it even easier for developers to create plugins for Thunderbird. Some of the plugins that are in the center of attention at the moment is Webmail, which allows for downloading e-mails from web-based mail accounts (such as Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail, Lycos, mail.com, AOL, etc.) and Enigmail, which makes it possible to encrypt and authenticate e-mails through GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG).
There are already plenty of extension available today, and more are coming all the time.
Overall, this was the move we were expecting, but most of all hoping for. All we have to do now is sit back and enjoy the ride, at the least 5 million of us that are already using Thunderbird. A figure that looks to increase if Mozilla handles this well.
