We are pleased to report that Thunderbird usage, as reported though the standard Mozilla metric of Active Daily Inquiries (ADI), has surpassed 10 million users per day on Monday November 30 2015 for the first time ever.

ADI is a raw measurement of active users, and is taken by counting the daily requests from Thunderbird users for updates to the plugin blocklist. This measure under-counts active users for a variety of reasons (such as firewalls, or users that do not use Thunderbird everyday). Based on more detailed studies with other applications, a typical multiplier applied to ADI to estimate total active users is 2.5. So the best estimate of current active users is 25,000,000.

Thunderbird Celebrates its 11 Birthday

Eleven years ago, on December 7 2004, Mozilla announced in a blog post the birth of Thunderbird. Happy Birthday, Thunderbird!

String-freeze for Thunderbird 45 on December 14

The Thunderbird development team is working hard on the next major release of Thunderbird, version 45, which is due for release in March of 2016. String freeze for new features is this weekend. Over 1000 code commits have been done to the main Thunderbird code repository in preparation for this release (in addition to the tens of thousands of commits to the Mozilla platform repository that Thunderbird uses as its base).

Mozilla Foundation as (Temporary) Thunderbird Home

Coincidentally on the same date as the new ADI record, in a post to a public Mozilla discussion forum, Mozilla Chairperson Mitchell Baker outlined some upcoming changes in the relationship of Mozilla to Thunderbird.

In the administrative part of that post, Mitchell announced that the Mozilla Foundation under Mark Surman has been working with Thunderbird to provide at least a temporary legal and financial home for the Thunderbird project (which we have been sorely lacking for several years). At the same time, a formal process will be undertaken to determine what is the best long-term home for Thunderbird, which might be Mozilla or might be some other entity.

Practically what this means is that in 2016, Thunderbird will finally be able to accept donations from users directed toward the update and maintenance of Thunderbird. In the long run, Thunderbird needs to rely on our users for support, and not expect to be subsidized by revenue from Firefox. We welcome this help from the Mozilla Foundation in moving toward our goal of developing independent sources of income for Thunderbird.

In the technical part of that post, Mitchell reiterated that Mozilla needs to be laser-focused on Firefox, and that the burden this places on Thunderbird (as well as the burden that Thunderbird places on Firefox) is leading to unacceptable outcomes for both projects. The most immediate need is for the Thunderbird release infrastructure to be independent of that used by Firefox, and Mozilla has offered to help. In the long-term, there will be additional technical separation between Firefox and Thunderbird as a continuation of a process that has been ongoing for the last three years.