Whilst trying to find more information about Thunderbird 3.3 Miramar, I came across the Mozilla Labs blog and an experimental add-on unofficially called Account Provisioner. A little background, it seems about 2/3 of the people who download Thunderbird are expecting to get an email address with it. Interesting, so the majority of people assume Thunderbird is an email client and provider. Doesn’t make much sense to me, but then I am use to having an email client and using it with an either an ISP provided email address or a corporate related email address. I would not have thought have Thunderbird as an email service provider like Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, etc.

So, as to not disappoint the users, Mozilla Labs has come up with this experimental extension which will offer the user the ability to sign-up for an email address based on their name. The addresses would either associated with a paid domain name through Tucows (a Canadian domain registrar) or free service such those mentioned earlier. If this extension works out, it is planned to be implemented as a standard feature with Thunderbird 3 Miramar, due out sometime this year.

Source: Mozilla Labs Blog