Mozilla's conundrum: What to do about Thunderbird?

To better focus on Firefox and its other products, the Mozilla Foundation decided in 2012 to address the on-going stability of the open-source Thunderbird email client rather than new development, which was passed on to volunteer developers. 

The rationale for the decision was that in view of the growing popularity of Web-based alternative forms of communications, Thunderbird was not likely to be a source of innovation and was seen more or less as a settled product with a basic set of features that users were happy with.

"Once again we’ve been asking the question: is Thunderbird a likely source of innovation and of leadership in today’s Internet life? Or is Thunderbird already pretty much what its users want and mostly needs some on-going maintenance?" wrote foundation chair Mitchell Baker in 2012.

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