Mozilla to spin off Thunderbird Email Client as Separate Company

According to Mitchell Baker's blog, an entry posted Monday stated that Mozilla will create a separate company funded with $3 million to pursue the development of Mozilla's stand-alone email client called Thunderbird.

"...Mozilla is launching a new effort to improve email and internet communications. We will increase our investment and focus on our current email client -- Thunderbird -- and on innovations in the email and communications areas. We are doing so by creating a new organization with this as its sole focus and committing resources to this organization. The new organization doesn't have a name yet, so I'll call it MailCo here. MailCo will be part of the Mozilla Foundation and will serve the public benefit mission of the Mozilla Foundation. (Technically, it will be a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, just like the Mozilla Corporation.)"

Baker's blog also posted four goal for the new company:

• Take care of Thunderbird users
  
• Move Thunderbird forward to provide better, deeper email solutions
  
• Create a better user experience for a range of Internet communications -- how does / should email work with IM, RSS, VoIP, SMS, site-specific email, etc?
  
• Spark the types of community involvement and innovation that we've seen around web "browsing" and Firefox.

Baker is CEO of Mozilla.

We use Thunderbird as our general backup for Apple Mail and for one email account that uses a proprietary custom security certificate that Apple Mail does not work with. We like Thunderbird as an alternative to Apple Mail. [Bill Fox]