Apr 5, 2011 12:05 GMT  ·  By

Mozilla Messaging, the team responsible with developing applications like F1, Raindrop and mainly the Thunderbird email client, will be integrated in the Mozilla Labs project, as Mitchell Baker, Chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation announced the world through her blog.

To be fair, the Messaging team was already working inside the Mozilla Labs projects for quite a while.

The Messaging group is actually formed of two individual teams, one working on F1, Thunderbird and Raindrop development, and the second working inside the Mozilla Labs group developing identity, contacts and other related topics.

As Ms. Baker states it in her blog post, the first team will merge activity with the second and move to Mozilla Labs, mainly to increase effectiveness.

The old Mozilla Messaging group will be dissolved and the newly formed team will be lead by David Ascher.

The Messaging Group's goals will be kept intact, but under a new name and brand, yet undisclosed.

Regarding the Thunderbird project, its development and future, Ms. Baker assured users that the company won't take any drastic steps like stopping all development, but like any other projects in Mozilla Labs, this means that Thunderbird is not anymore in the main focus of the organization's future anymore.

While the Mozilla Labs project is known for being an incubator of new ideas like Personas, Tab Candy and Sync (formerly known as Mozilla Weave), projects retired to Labs usually get flat-lined or see less development.

Drawing the bottom line, Thunderbird has been a successful project for Mozilla, and while it hasn't been a commercially successful project like its sibling Firefox, it is one of the standards in desktop email client software.

“The Thunderbird team will continue to develop and release Thunderbird from its new home within the combined organization,” said Mitchell Baker, Chair of Mozilla Foundation.

“Thunderbird users and contributors should see no difference in their experience.  Email is a solid and foundational technology which retains immense value.“

“The Thunderbird team has re-made Thunderbird into a modern email client. Thunderbird now has a more modular architecture, vastly modernized codebase, effective add-on mechanisms, a vastly improved user interface, and incremental innovations that continue to evolve and move the product forward. We intend to continue our work with the Thunderbird email product to meet this need,” said Ms. Baker.

Indeed truthfully spoken. Compared to other email clients, Thunderbird is mature enough not to need constant development  anymore. Users should also rest assure that Thunderbird won't be black-balled any time soon as well.

This move also plays with the Internet's flow in recent years. Emails have slowly lost their grasp as the main communication means across the web, losing to more modern tools and services like social networks, instant messaging, data synchronization and peer-to-peer audio-video communications.

In late February this year, Cisco also made a similar decision when it decided to scrap its hosted email service, Cisco Mail.

A natural Darwinian decision from both companies since people are moving away from email clients and mailing in general to more hype products like mobile apps and browsers.

The latest version of Mozila Thunderbird for Windows can be downloaded here.

The latest version of Mozila Thunderbird for Mac can be downloaded here.

The latest version of Mozila Thunderbird for Linux can be downloaded here.