Mozilla will spin off a new company, seeded with $3M and headed up by Dr. David Ascher, currently CTO and VP Engineering of ActiveState. The new internet mail platform will be based on, and retain the name, Thunderbird.
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/press/mozilla-2007-09-17.html
It would be truly incredible if Mozilla could collaborate with Yahoo! on this, fresh off its acquisition of Zimbra. A server that married Zimbra’s flexibility and “soft client” (browser-based email client), with Thunderbird’s “fat client” (for those of us who don’t like web-based email) would be a clear winner. I don’t think it will happen, but it would be impressive…
E-mail is so XXth century-ish, it is almost dead, crashed by the outstanding weight of spam (70%? 80%? 90%? 95% ?)...