I was once told by a Mozilla policy person in DC that Thunderbird was outdated and people should use webmail. They liked Gmail better and didn't see the point of using an IMAP client. It was a weird conversation.
I understood it was just their personal opinion, but finding myself advocating for Thunderbird against someone who works for Mozilla was a little strange. My take away was that Mozilla doesn't really know what its priorities should be and there is significant disagreement within the org about what they should be spending resources on.
There's a wide spectrum of people at Mozilla. It can range from "oh, I broke Thunderbird? Here, let me fix it for you." to "Thunderbird? Why haven't you died yet?"
In terms of who fit where, a few of the people at the head of the Mozilla Foundation were definitely strongly supportive, but I think most of the upper-tier management levels tended to be against Thunderbird as too much of a distraction from fixing issues [1]. This resulted in a lot of mixed messaging about how much Mozilla was or was not supporting Thunderbird. By the time you get down to most of the development staff, there was usually a desire to be kind and helpful towards Thunderbird but utter confusion as to whether or not they could be so due to the aforementioned mixed messaging.
[1] I'd argue that this was strongly short-sighted. To me, Mozilla deciding to ultimately screw over embedding, and a lot of the issues with Thunderbird would have been solved with a big push to a new, stable embedding. I even made arguments to that affect nearly a decade ago, but to no avail...
Yes, together with nearly any other MUAs except few termina's based ones and Emacs based one. And that's clearly demonstrate how someone decide to push them to the oblivion. Someone that's probably interest in webmails...
> didn't see the point of using an IMAP client
Well, me neither. I use a local client that's operate on my very personal, well backed-up, maildir. My "imap client" (mbsync) is a mere imap sync tools not much different than intra-server sync tools like Dovecot DSync...
On "the better" part... Well, for me is better to have my messages on my iron, to act on them locally so at lightspeed and without the need of a connection and an working remote imap just to search or refile or compose messages. Also I do not know why I may prefer to download my MUA anytime I access my mail (like webmails) when I can have one, lighter and powerful locally...
It's a matter of taste :-)
Someone like freedom, someone like jails. Mozilla most important "business" is a browser so essentially a modern way to the jail (not because of itself, of course). Perhaps they have to choose, perhaps since they move big money they have managers more interested in money and trends than in tech, or even incapable of really understand tech and simply following current trends trying to feel "up to date"...
I've gotten the impression that Mozilla people haven't liked Thunderbird or Firefox for a very long time, and would rather be Mozilla Web Services or something.
I understood it was just their personal opinion, but finding myself advocating for Thunderbird against someone who works for Mozilla was a little strange. My take away was that Mozilla doesn't really know what its priorities should be and there is significant disagreement within the org about what they should be spending resources on.