Mozilla is to beef up its open-source Thunderbird email client, and plans to develop its calendar and search capabilities.
To put some muscle behind the move, Mozilla on Monday launched "Mozilla Messaging", its "mail-focused subsidiary".
Mozilla Messaging will initially focus on the development of Thunderbird 3. A small product-development team, together with a community of contributors, will concentrate on integrated calendar functionality, search, easier configuration and "a set of other user interface improvements", Mozilla Messaging chief executive David Ascher wrote in a blog post.
"We're excited to renew the focus of our open-source community on the future of Thunderbird," said Ascher in a statement. "Each and every one of us is committed to building a great email product that people will love to use and that serves as the foundation for choice in a critical area of internet software."
Mozilla Messaging developers will also work on the backend architecture of Thunderbird, wrote Ascher in the blog post.
Thunderbird is built using the same open-source development model as Mozilla's Firefox web browser.
Talkback
When Qualcomm Eudora closed up shop last year, their web page said "An open source version of Eudora® is being developed by Mozilla and will be free of charge." (I just checked, it still says that...) Is there any sign of Eudora in the information about "Mozilla Messaging"?
they need to sort out multipart binaries from newsgroups and then it would be a killer app!
Your Talkback question was very timely, as we posted the story before I spoke to David Ascher, Mozilla Messaging chief executive, just now. (We couldn't speak before, as he is based in the US)
I read your Talkback to him, as it's an interesting question. He told me that Version 8 of Eudora, which is what the Qualcomm Eudora team is working on, is based on Thunderbird. They are also building a Thunderbird add-on.
Ascher said that it would make sense for Mozilla and Qualcomm to collaborate on building email search features, but that at the moment the products didn't look as though they headed in the same direction.
"We're happy to collaborate [with Qualcomm] on code, but the two products have different directions at the moment," said Ascher. "They are as interested in improving search capabilities as we are - we'll collaborate on that naturally."
You heard it here first.
Thanks!