Back in October things were looking very gloomy for Thunderbird. It was a bit of a double-whammy when Scott McGregor, Thunderbird lead engineer and David Bienvenu, developer announced they were leaving Mozilla. These announcements came about a month after, then CEO Mitchel Baker announced the split-off to Thunderbird Mail Corporation (MailCo, now known as Mozilla Messaging). Finally, some good news to report about Thunderbird.

In his blog entry, Progress Update, David Ascher has announced Mark Banner (Standard8 on IRC) has signed on as a full-time on Thunderbird (effective next month).

One of the projects that Mark will finally have time to push on is to beef up the test automation framework and help drive better test coverage for the codebase, which is a crucial step to allow the refactoring we want to do, and facilitate a more agile development model.

Further, Rick Tessner has joined as a part-time build engineer. Rick will be helping with helping with build automation and release automation.