Looks like Mozilla has gone through with their promise and spun off Thunderbird to its own development team. I think this is a good thing so that Thunderbird can get the attention it needs to become its own awesome application. I also noted Spicebird is a fork of Thunderbird’s code as well. Looks like they just released another beta version a few days ago so I will have to keep an eye on that one as well. I use Thunderbird mainly as an email archiving application and use Yahoo Web Mail for most of my emails.
Mozilla Messaging is Spin-off for Thunderbird