After over 2-years of essentially being on the back burner and with virtually no one in charge of the project, momentum has shifted for Thunderbird. Recently Mozilla held a summit in Toronto for the Thunderbird Contributors. From the Mozilla Thunderbird Blog:
At the Summit, we made a number of key decisions:
- A group of seven individuals were elected to comprise a Thunderbird Council with the authority to make decisions affecting Thunderbird. I (Kent James) am currently the Chair of this council.
- For our next major release, Thunderbird 38 due in May 2015, we set this roadmap:
- Folders: allow >4GByte mbox folders, plus finish support for maildir
- Instant Messaging: Support WebRTC
- Calendaring: Merge Lightning into Thunderbird as a shipped addon
- Accounts: Merge the New Account Types binary addon into core, allowing new account types to be defined using addons in the future.
- IMAP: support OAUTH authorization in GMail.
- We agreed that Thunderbird needs to have one or more full-time, paid staff to support shipping a stable, reliable product, and allow progress to be made on frequently-requested features. To this end, we plan to appeal directly to our users for donations.
- The Thunderbird active contributors are proud to be part of Mozilla, expect to remain part of Mozilla for the foreseeable future, and believe we have an important role to play in fulfilling the goals of theMozilla Manifesto.
