The news is located on numerous sites, but one of the more prevalent ones is Mitchell Baker’s Blog. In a new entry, Mitchell reveals that Thunderbird will become a sub-organization of the Mozilla Foundation, much like the Mozilla Corporation (which I think is essentially the Firefox group). There is also discussion happening on Ars Technica, Mozilla Links, and of course good ol’ Slashdot.

A formal name for the new organization has not yet been decided, but the one commonly used for the moment is MailCo – awfully generic in my opinion, but it’s just temporary.

Mozilla is providing some initial startup funding – to the tune of a cool $3 million – and there may be more money from them in the future. The money will be used to gather a team of people to focus on the Thunderbird project. I think this is a good thing, since under the previous structure, Firefox and Thunderbird were worked on side-by-side, with the web browser getting the bulk of the workers.

The new Thunderbird organization will be doing more than building an email client; there are plans to to explore expanding to internet communication in general, not just email. Other possibly relevant technologies include IM, RSS, VOIP, and so on. This could be interesting.

One direction I would personally like to see Thunderbird go in is add a built-in calendaring system. This can be done through the Lightning plugin, and allows integration with Google Calendar – this functionality seems useful enough to have it built into the software. Sunbird is a neat calendaring application, also built by Mozilla. Perhaps the Thunderbird team can use Sunbird for some inspiration…

In any case, Thunderbird has some interesting times ahead…I will be watching it!