Mozilla Takes Care of Thunderbird 3.0 with Mozilla Messaging
The Mozilla Foundation has opened Mozilla Messaging, a new subsidiary focused on developing its free, open-source Thunderbird e-mail software.This new company will take up the development of Thunderbird 3.0 to coincide with the release of Firefox 3.0. Being a separate entity, according to the Mozilla Messaging team, will allow them to better focus their efforts in creating a terrific email client to compete with Microsoft’s Outlook client, and IBM’s Lotus Notes, another popular business email client. The new version of Thunderbird will feature integrated calendars with greatly expanded functionality, improved searches, and many other user interface and performance improvements. Mozilla Messaging has staffed a small product development team who will work as part of a community of contributors from around the world. David Ascher, CEO, Mozilla Messaging explained on his blog the new goals of Mozilla Messaging, which has big ambitions for Thunderbird. Thunderbird 3 will build on the great base that is Thunderbird 2 (and the work already performed in trunk by the current and past contributors), and add some key features, such as: integrated calendaring (building on the great work done by the Mozilla Calendar team and their Lightning add-on to Thunderbird), better search facilities, easier configuration, and a set of other user interface improvements, Ascher wrote. David Ascher is the CEO of Mozilla Messaging and sits on its board of directors, which also includes Christopher Beard, vice president and general manager of Mozilla Labs, and Marten Mickos, CEO of open source database vendor MySQL AB.
