Thunderbird team vows faster, easier-to-use, more stable versions in the year to come

In 2015, Mozilla announced that it would turn Thunderbird -- one of the last freestanding, cross-platform email clients -- into a freestanding, independent project, and in 2017, Thunderbird became a community-overseen project with institutional backing from Moz.

It was an odd move at the time: the Snowden revelations and the news that Yahoo had provided the NSA with free access to user emails, along with the sputtering out of promising alternatives like Mailpile meant that there was huge, unmet demand for the stable, high-powered email clients that disappeared when Gmail and other webmails started to kill off the Eudoras of the world.

Since then, the Thunderbird team has made real, if incremental progress in stabilizing the old Thunderbird code. I'm a hardcore, daily Thunderbird user, someone who lives in email (if you're thinking of sending me an IM of any kind in the hopes that I'll respond to it, think again: send me an email instead -- realtime communications are productivity killers for me), and I've been very glad of this progress (I just donated another $100 to the project).

Now, Thunderbird has laid out its 2019 roadmap, and they're promising more of the same, and better, which is exactly what I was hoping for: more changes to increase the responsiveness of the UI (which has made real progress but has a lot of room for improvement), a UI/UX overhaul, and guidelines to make it easier for lots of people to contribute -- Thunderbird's eight full-time, paid contributors will grow to 14 in 2019, with volunteers and other free/open source contributions coming from the wider world. Read the rest