Thunderbird's future may look like this

Mozilla's announcement that the Thunderbird desktop email client would be moved to the bottom of the organzation's priority list came as a shock to the community as it was one of the two programs - the other is the Firefox web browser - Mozilla is best known for. The reason for the move was to use resources for other projects, especially web and mobile projects like Firefox OS.
Mozilla at Mozcamp last week outlined how Thunderbird's future could look like. Paid-staff that is contributing to the Thunderbird project will be reduced to a minimum in almost all development and support sections. Only security & privacy, and release engineering will be maintained by paid staff members, with release management the only other section where paid staff members participate equally. All other sections are moved towards a contributor powered system if it has not been that way all along.
It is the community that will take over code reviews, feature development, web development and marketing for the most part, like it does already when it comes to localization, documentation, support and QA.
The release of Thunderbird 17 on November 24, 2012 marks the beginning of this new development process and focus. The new release and governance model falls in line with the release of Thunderbird 17 ESR, an extended support release of the email client.
New versions of Thunderbird will still be released every six weeks to stay in sync with the release schedule of the Firefox web browser. Thunderbird will however use ESR versions, that is 17.0, 17.0.1, 17.0.2, instead of the currently used major version updates. There won't be a Thunderbird 18, 19 or 20. The emphasize lies on security and stability updates for the email client, and not feature updates. In fact, the majority of Thunderbird releases from version 17 on will not include any feature updates whatsoever.
Mozilla aims to bring the next feature update to Thunderbird 24 ESR which is expected to be released on September 10, 2013. There is still a chance that features will be integrated earlier into the Thunderbird email client, but that depends on solely on community contributions.
To sum it up:
- Thunderbird Extended Support Releases get released once a year
- The community adds features and improvements to the release
- Thunderbird mainstream is released once or twice a year
- Thunderbird updates every six weeks with security and stability improvements and fixes.
It needs to be noted that this is currently in planning stage and not confirmed as the way to go forward. It is however likely that this is how it is going to be. (thanks Sören)
Advertisement
You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?
I think its thunderbird
It is Mozilla Thunderbird.
Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.
If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.
THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!
Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…
Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.
This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)
Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.
You are a god – thank you!
thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)
Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers
Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
Thank you
Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)
Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.
I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!
Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007
Great tip! Thanks!
Worked for me, too – thank you!!!
It’s Worked for me, too
thank you very much!
I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!
Thank you so much. Solved!
Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
Thank you again. M
This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.
Thanks.
Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.
Thank you, this worked !!!!
Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!
Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!