Goodbye Thunderbird?
I am saddened by continued reports that support for Mozilla's email client, Thunderbird, continues to diminish. From DesktopLinux:
The Mozilla Foundation's press release focused on the Firefox 2.12 security fixes. The Foundation also reported, though, in its MFSA (Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory), that these same bugs had been fixed in the fictitious Thunderbird 2.12......Still, it is upsetting that Mozilla reports that these problems have been fixed in a version of Thunderbird that doesn't exist. The latest version of Thunderbird is 2.09.
Mitchell Baker posted last September the transfer of Thunderbird from Mozilla to a yet to be seen Mailco organization. Just as DesktopLinux mentioned in their article, I've seen little information about what we can with regards to Thunderbird's future. Perhaps, I'm just not looking in the wrong places?
All this leads me to conclude that with security updates not happening for Thunderbird, we may be forced to pull the plug on it at work...at least when running the software on our Windows XP systems. We were eventually going to adopt Microsoft's Outlook as our primary email client, but I had hoped to keep Thunderbird around a little longer. But if Thunderbird starts not to pass our quarterly security scans...we'll have no choice but to be a single email client shop. After using the Netscape/Mozilla/Thunderbird email client for so long, for us it is a very strange ending indeed.
Meanwhile, I will keep Thunderbird installed on my home PCs...and keep hope alive.
Lack of Clue
What the DesktopLinux people seem to be missing is that Thunderbird security releases generally follow a few weeks to a month after Firefox security releases. There were a number of quick turnaround releases for Firefox (because of security issues) and then the holidays, which is part of why Thunderbird hasn't released recently.
If they had looked on the public Mozilla wiki at http://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases, they would see that Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 is scheduled for release at the end of the month. I am one of the people working on QA for it and we get our first release candidates later this week. Firefox 2.0.0.12 only released last week.
Ah, the wiki!
Al Billings, thank you for the much needed reply. With the changes and transition in support for Thunderbird taking place, I suppose us Thunderbird users are more nervous these days than usual.
Perhaps DesktopLinux was looking at the same "old school" places I was for planned release dates...mozilla.org, Rumbling Edge...didn't think of the wiki. (Although, I saw Rumbling Edge was reporting a 2.0.0.12...they often just reflect version numbers in the nightlies which may or may not be released). Besides the wiki pages, what are some other places online that users and bloggers should be looking at for information on the present and future Thunderbird?
Personally, I haven't been so concerned about a Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 release. I have been concerned from what I rightly or wrongly perceive as less transparency then ever on what is happening with Thunderbird. The news regarding Thunderbird has always been overshadowed by Firefox news, even on Planet Mozilla. However, it just seems the information is more difficult these days with what we can expect for Thunderbird. I most definitely appreciate the quality assurance (one of the most unappreciated jobs in IT) but it is also communication assurance that I need.
David Ascher runs the new
David Ascher runs the new MailCo and he blogs quite a bit at http://ascher.ca/blog/. I would check there.
There has also been a lot of activity lately in mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird on Usenet. If you don't have Usenet access, you can access it through Google at http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.d....
There has been a large thread on Thunderbird 3 planning recently. See http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.d....
Newsgroups, blogs, and the wiki are the best bets to follow things. I'm sure there will be more official information as things progress with MailCo.