What motivated this question?

How do you define dead??

As you may know, in mid-2012, Mozilla announced that it was going to shift its development efforts more toward mobile platforms and would support Thunderbird with security patches but less emphasis on new features.

• Thunderbird: Stability and Community Innovation | Mitchell's Blog
• About the future of Thunderbird | Beyond the Code
• Adjusting the way Thunderbird is managed | The Mozilla Thunderbird Blog

That appears to still be the plan, and hopefully support will continue for the foreseeable future.

(Obviously I don't have a crystal ball, but if management within Mozilla uses Thunderbird themselves, I think they will be reluctant to kill it.)

>What motivated this question?

Because the statements from Mozilla are practically verbatim repetitions of countless other statements made in the past about other software (not Mozilla) that is being shut down, only they don't come out and say it, they say some Orwellian doublespeak bs about how it's 'evolving' and they're 'responding to our users changing needs' yadda yadda.

I don't even know why I'm bothering to reply. You specifically ignored by request to NOT refer to Mozilla corporate statements. Also you linked to a blog which is flooded with spam and bot comments, which diminishes its credbility - the blog of the chair of the Mozilla foundation! WTF? That speaks volumes about Mozilla leadership.

Hi arminius1, if you have a specific concern that motivated your question, please mention what it is. For example, are you concerned about "lock in" of your data? Are you concerned that security fixes might stop? Is your email service changing and you want to make sure Thunderbird supports it?

Generally speaking, you can read the tea leaves as well as I can. I gave you what I was able to uncover in my research. If you do not find it helpful, continue searching and asking.

If you prefer to ask on an unofficial forum, try here: http://forums.mozillazine.org/index.php

There is no clear answer about Thunderbird's future despite the official statements that "we are not dropping Thunderbird". The real risk isn't Mozilla deciding to kill Thunderbird, its whether Thunderbird will slowly wither away.

Mozilla continues to provide infrastructure and stability and security fixes. The community is providing bug fixes and new features, but at a much slower pace than when Mozilla employees also did that. That's one reason why new features will only be added once a year.

There are numerous discussions on the tb-planning mailing list about how to get funding, what to do if Mozilla eventually stops all support, can we eventually leverage any code from the simpler email client Mozilla is developing for the Firefox OS etc. There is definitely a long term problem that needs to be dealt with, but nothing is likely to change for a good while.

Its easy to migrate your mail and address books from Thunderbird to other email clients. I wouldn't worry about lock-in.

http://www.rumblingedge.com/ is a web site that tracks bug fixes for various Thunderbird builds. Looking at it provides a good sanity check that development has not stopped.

Update: https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2014/11/thunderbird-reorganizes-at-2014-toronto-summit/ https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2015/02/thunderbird-usage-continues-to-grow/

In general, follow https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird to keep current on how Thunderbird is doing