It seems as if Mozilla’s Firebird project dies not yield the results it is
supposed to. So officially, Thunderbird will no longer be actively
developed and equipped with new features. Features are now only
included when users bring in the necessary program code.

However security patches are so far not affected and will still be published every 6 weeks in order to warrant a certain safety and stability.

This statement is, however, irritating:

Umm… let me get this straight. The Mozilla team actually thinks, that web-based surfaces are more comfortable than a local standalone-client which is independent from any browser or engine? Okay. One thing may be true: The client has to be compiled for the different OS platforms. But yet I guess it’s less of a hassle compiling an xServer-Version and a Windows version than checking if Browser XY supports web standard YZ. Especially when you compare IE, FF, Opera and Safari against each other, there may be slight differences.

Be it performance-wise or HTML-tagsupport-wise…

I still prefer a LOCAL program with a LOCAL database to store my mails at. If I ever should need a mobile copy of that, there are good alternatives for it. For example a Firebird Portable version and a replication of the mail database which can be easily done using copy commands and the like…

If you ever used the rather sluggish online mail interface from Unitymedia mail services, you may know what I mean…