Breaking news

It was brought to my attention recently by reputable sources that the recent announcement of increased usage in recent years produced an internal firestorm within Mozilla. Key figures raised alarm that some of the tech press had interpreted the blog post as a sign that Thunderbird was not, in fact, dead. As a result, they asked Thunderbird community members to make corrections to emphasize that Mozilla was trying to kill Thunderbird.

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."