[wott]

Well, Thunderbird has been taken over by people who aim at 2 goals:

* replace internals with more Web tech (I say more, because Thunderbird unfortunately already used some);

* 'modernize' the interface.

So you can abandon all hopes and regret the time it was supposedly unmaintained.

[blackhaz]

Will there be forks? I remember Phoenix forked from Firefox. 0.99 was awesome, then Phoenix became Firefox after they overloaded the browser with crap.

[stan_rogers]

Phoenix forked from Netscape Navigator 6. The renaming to Firebird and then Firefox were entirely about trademark conflicts.