Project manager reveals the unknown history of the email software 'Thunderbird'

``There are a lot of stories about Thunderbird on the internet, but the important part is missing,'' Ryan Sipes, Thunderbird's project manager, said, ``Until now, nothing has been released outside. 'It's natural that no one knows about it because it doesn't exist,' he said on his official blog about the unknown history of Thunderbird.

An Untold History of Thunderbird

The origin of ``Thunderbird'' is ``Mozilla'', a package (internet suite) that bundles a web browser, email software, news reader, HTML editor, etc. After that, due to the decline of Internet suites, the packaged software was divided, and the web browser part became ``Firefox'' and the email software part became ``Thunderbird.'' The official version of 'Thunderbird' was released in 2004.

From then until 2011, Thunderbird had up to 20 million users but was not generating commensurate revenue. As a large-scale project, development, maintenance, modification, and distribution costs are high, so attempts have been made to move the management organization to Mozilla Messaging, a spin-off from the Mozilla Foundation, in order to make the project sustainable, but these efforts have not been successful. Could not.

In 2011, Mozilla Messaging was integrated into the Mozilla Foundation's Mozilla Labs, and Thunderbird was also switched to rapid release similar to Firefox, but without success, Mozilla decided to lower Thunderbird's development priority. In 2012, new feature development will be community-driven.

Mr. Sipes joined Thunderbird in 2017. Around this time, enough donations were raised to hire three people, and community manager Sipes was added to the team, along with developers and infrastructure maintenance personnel. At that time, the team was too small to deal with the challenges Thunderbird was facing, and was overwhelmed with maintenance, and there was no vision or guideline to aim for.

Mr Sipes, who became the council's treasurer shortly after joining Thunderbird, said that at the time Thunderbird was not in a sustainable state and was likely to become unsustainable within a few years.

Mr. Sipes thought, ``Software with this many users will really die if it continues like this. We need to tell the users that we need help.'' Mr. Sipes defined a vision and drew up a roadmap. The chaotic state was improved to 'organized chaos.' At the same time, we consulted with users on how to communicate the crisis, and added a message on the start page that appears when the software is launched saying, ``We are made up of donations from users'' and ``Please consider donating to help us survive.'' I set it to display.

The effort was a huge success, with users making generous donations to support Thunderbird. In addition, the project itself has been transferred to MZLA Technologies Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, and the team has been organized, and the issues that have made Thunderbird development difficult have been resolved. 'I could write a book about this,' Sipes said. 'It was really hard to solve all the problems, but the good news is that everything worked and we were able to do it faster and more efficiently. Now we can do more in a different way.”

Among the many things you can now do is integrate the K-9 Mail Client. Mr. Sipes had a chance to talk with Mr. Cketti, who is working on K-9 Mail Client, and thought, ``If Thunderbird had an Android version app, it would be something like K-9 Mail Client.'' It seems like it is. During the discussion, it became clear that the K-9 Mail Client also faced sustainability issues, and Mr. Sipes discussed this with the Thunderbird Council and decided to include the K-9 Mail Client as an Android version of Thunderbird. I decided.

However, parts of Thunderbird's 'ancient' code from 20 years ago remained, making it difficult to fix bugs and add features. For this reason, we have made a major overhaul in 'Thunderbird 115' released in July 2023. The update, dubbed the 'Supernova' project because it had to 'explode and rebuild', includes a complete overhaul of the front end, message list, and message display area.

In addition to releasing the Android version of the app as planned, the company plans to start developing the iOS version of Thunderbird by 2024.