14 DAY TRIAL // The announcement that Mozilla was stopping development on Thunderbird came as quite an unwelcomed surprise to a lot people.
Given that the desktop app has over 20 million users, there were quite a few that were upset and confused. Mozilla clarified some details in the days following the announcement and has now answered some of the lingering issues.
Mozilla did say that it would continue to support the software with security and stability fixes, but that new features would come from the community exclusively. But it did not lay down a clear deadline on this, possibly because it didn't have one yet.
To put worries to rest, Managing Director of Thunderbird, answered a few questions that users had. For one, he assured users that Thunderbird will get full support for at least another year.
"We have a solid plan to support Thunderbird until the second half of 2013 and are discussing how we support it beyond that date," he said.
This means that features the team was working on will continue to be developed and completed.
This includes "cool innovations landing such as Thunderbird Chat (instant messaging), additional Thunderbird Filelink and personalized email partners, as well as new community-driven features. Beyond that, Mozilla will accommodate community-contributed features when they become available."
Mozilla believes that Thunderbird is fine as is, which may sound like a cop out, but is probably true. Thunderbird users want to be able to manage one or several email accounts via a desktop app. They want to be notified when new messages come in, work with attachments, forward messages to groups and so on and so forth.
All of these features have been available in Thunderbird for a long time. There's not much else to do other than completely revamp the product, but that's what the web-based email clients are doing. The only big feature that might be missing is built-in chat and that's on its way.