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Thunderbird 3 on tap for development

The email and messaging division of the Mozilla Foundation opens with the lofty aim of fixing email, starting with development of Thunderbird 3.

"The joy that communication can bring is too often replaced by frustration, confusion, or stress. Furthermore, as we transmit more and more digital data, privacy and control questions become more and more troublesome," David Ascher. said on his blog.

"One common short-hand for the above is to say, somewhat flippantly, that 'email is broken'."

Good thing Ascher signed on to fix it. That job begins now, with Mozilla Messaging taking wing today.

First order of business: Thunderbird 3 development. Early news of this as posted at Mozilla should be encouraging. Witness these three key bits:

•  Thunderbird 3 will include calendaring, better search, and better overall user experience, much like Firefox 3. We’re hoping for a release in late 2008 -- the exact timing will depend on who joins this collective effort.

•  As promised in September, we’ve created a new organization with a laser focus on mail and communication. This new company, Mozilla Messaging Inc., is a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, just like Mozilla Corporation. Its website is at www.mozillamessaging.com. Its board of directors consists of David Ascher, the CEO, Chris Beard, VP and General Manager of Mozilla Labs, and Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL AB.

•  In some ways we’re re-launching Thunderbird -- it’s a project that has huge latent potential, and we’re there to catalyze community driven progress in the Internet communications space. The world of electronic communications is buzzing, with older technologies like email still crucial to our online experience, but complemented by other technologies like instant messaging, social networking, voice over IP, and mobile devices.

We think the calendaring news presents the most important aspect of Thunderbird, aside from its email handling. Microsoft Outlook has a strong calendar as a feature, one that makes it indispensable compared to the current Thunderbird 2.

Ascher's group will integrate Lightning, Thunderbird's calendar add-on, into Thunderbird 3. That should prove a key selling point in the future, as Thunderbird develops from great product to potential enterprise adoption.