David will be heading up the new Mozilla foundation email and communications spinoff, the intent being to do with Thunderbird et al what spinning off Mozilla did for it/Firefox.
It'll be interesting to see what happens with this, and it would be cool if on the offchance it does produce a significant new email option in the same way that Firefox produced a much-needed new browser option. I'm particularly interested by the hints of integrating other sorts of communications facilities.
Though I haven't actually been following Thunderbird, the whole email client area is a long-standing interest, beyond the broader interest in collaboration tools. I remember reviewing some of the early MIME/AtomicMail papers, and trying out about every weird research prototype email system I could find in the early 90s. I also led a team working on one of the first commercial IMAP clients, including a complete rework of the user experience to better match the capabilities of this "newer" protocol.
Anyway, best of luck as "MailCo" gets going, and with any luck we'll be hearing many more good things.
Thanks! Would love to hear your thoughts along the way!
Posted by: David Ascher | September 19, 2007 at 12:03 PM