An Untold History of Thunderbird
Hi, my name is Ryan Sipes and I run MZLA Technologies Corporation, the subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that develops Thunderbird. I have been working on Thunderbird for my day job since November of 2017. It doesn’t seem like that long ago, but looking at the calendar I see that it has been six years this month. A lot has happened in that time and Thunderbird is in a much different place than it was when I started. I’ve seen multiple people online share accounts of “the Thunderbird story,” and each time I’ve thought “that’s really great, but they missed some important parts.” It’s not their fault, we’ve simply never shared the whole story. So today, I thought I’d sit down and write that.
To tell the story correctly, we must go back to 2012. That’s when Thunderbird began to transition from a project that was funded and developed by the Mozilla Corporation, to a community run project. The reasons behind that move were sound and made sense given the state of the project at the time.