Surely, many people were surprised after reading the title of this news to find out that Thunderbird actually still exists, and what’s more, it remains one of the most remarkable email clients in this more diverse market. and more abundant than many people think.

This is actually quite understandable because with the rise of e-mail services over the web there are many people who haven’t used an email client for years, but they connect directly to the website of the service they use (Gmail, Outlook, etc.) to check and send email. And many others directly use a client that includes their operating system by default, whether it’s desktop or mobile. Thus, the use of applications such as Thunderbird these days is limited to people who want more control over their communications.

Be that as it may, Mozilla Thunderbird has been a reference for many years, but the truth is that it has hardly evolved for a long time. So much so that even if we go to its download page today, the latest Microsoft operating system choice shown in the selector is Windows 10, despite the fact that it’s been over a year since its successor, Windows 11. now available to users.

Of course it does a feeling of apathy, abandonment, as if Mozilla had given up and therefore decided to keep Thunderbird on its own device, a cue that many foundations acted upon in 2012 when it announced that Thunderbird would become a community driven model. However, and to the delight of users of its desktop version, it seems that won’t be the case. On the contrary, Mozilla has very interesting plans for its mail client.

So as you can see in the video and expand on the official blog post, Mozilla will make some pretty deep changes to Thunderbird, with a new interface, but also with substantial modifications in its “guts”. In other words, when the mail client is 20 years old, they were thinking from the beginning to repeat it to, they say, guarantee that it will be around for at least another twenty.

In the ambitious three-year work plan, the foundation therefore considers the following three points:

Over the next 3 years, the Thunderbird project focuses on the following main goals:

• To make the codebase more agile and reliable, overwrite the old codeEliminate technical debt.
• Rebuild the interface from scratch create a consistent design system as well as develop and maintain a highly customizable and adaptable user interface.
• change to pmonthly release schedule.

These are no small words, of course, and if plans go well, it’s more than likely that Thunderbird will emerge from the impoverishment it has mired in in many ways for years. However, he will have to face the ballast of public opinion, which in many cases does not know of its existence, in others it is aware of it, but associates it with the decadence it has been experiencing for many years, so the challenge is great.