The primary fear, it seems, is that knowledge that the largest open-source email client was still receiving regular updates would impel its userbase to agitate for increased funding and maintenance of the client to help forestall potential threats to the open nature of email as well as to innovate in the space of providing usable and private communication channels. Such funding, however, would be an unaffordable luxury and would only distract Mozilla from its central goal of building developer productivity tooling. Persistent rumors that Mozilla would be willing to fund Thunderbird were it renamed Firefox Email were finally addressed with the comment, "such a renaming would violate our current policy that all projects be named Persona."
