Thunderbird 3.0 to begin ascent next month

The Thunderbird development community aims to release the first alpha of Thunderbird 3 next month. Plans began to take shape yesterday during the very first Thunderbird weekly status call meeting, at which developers discussed potential features and other issues of relevance.

Early plans for Thunderbird 3 first emerged last month when the Mozilla Foundation announced the official launch of Mozilla Messaging, a new subsidiary that will focus on communication software. Although the Mozilla Messaging team is still getting situated in its new nest in Vancouver, CEO David Ascher has already jumped into action. He announced the status call meeting in a blog entry on Monday, and expressed interest in taking the first steps towards the Thunderbird 3 alpha.

"Tomorrow at 9:30 AM PST (1730 UTC) is the first weekly status call for Thunderbird (well, first that I know of)," wrote Ascher on Monday. "It'll be chaotic and unstructured I'm sure, but we'll figure it out over the next few weeks. One of the big topics for discussion will be how to structure the work towards our first alpha of 3.0, which won't be feature complete by any means, but should be a good first step towards releasing a stable Thunderbird build."

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