Thunderbird is what is called an "e-mail client". E-mail clients provide a way to access messages in e-mail accounts that are hosted on a server and to send and retrieve messages through and from those accounts. It does not replace those accounts. There is no such thing (yet) as a Thunderbird e-mail address. You can use Thunderbird in place of whatever you use to access your gmail account, but you would still be using your gmail account in Thunderbird. The only way to escape Google completely is to get an e-mail account from someone else, e.g., Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, Fastmail, or your internet service provider. Then you could use Thunderbird with that account.

Mozilla is the organization that makes Thunderbird and Firefox. Firefox is a web browser like Chrome and Safari. It is not relevant in a discussion about e-mail.

Mozilla is the organization that makes Thunderbird and Firefox. Firefox is a web browser like Chrome and Safari. It is not relevant in a discussion about e-mail.

Mozilla Foundation is the non-profit which has several initiatives and projects, two of which are subsidiaries owned by the Foundation:

• Mozilla Corporation makes Firefox
• MZLA Technologies makes Thunderbird (sometimes referred to as Thunderbird Project)

And it gets confusing because a) people think "Mozilla" is one organization (it is several) and b) they share some of the same web space at https://www.mozilla.org/, including support at https://support.mozilla.org/

Thanks for the clarification, Wayne.

Fun fact, Thunderbird support here was only added as of February 17, 2014 as it was at Getsatisfaction before and before that community support for Thunderbird was on the independent https://forums.mozillazine.org forums like desktop Firefox was before starting here back in 2007 as an official place.