Not too long ago, Mozilla foundation announced the formation of the autonomous entity Mozilla Messaging to spearhead its projects in the Internet Communication Software space. The organization has trained its eyes on delivering the next major release of the e-mail client Thunderbird – version 3.0.

A quote from Ars Technica

“Our plan starts with building a great product. Firefox has shown that if you have a great product that tens of millions of people love to use daily, doors open and more opportunities become within reach. So we’ll focus on the product,” wrote Ascher in a blog entry. “We’ve started defining what Thunderbird 3 will be, because we think that there is enough consensus to make some of the first decisions on the most important changes to tackle first. Specifically, Thunderbird 3 will build on the great base that is Thunderbird 2.”

Eminent personalities heading Mozilla Messaging include CEO David Asher, Christopher Beard from Mozilla Labs and Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL AB. The alpha release of ThunderBird 3.0 is set to come out this year, hopefully by April. The actual plan to spin off a separate foundation for developing Thunderbird was mooted in July last year.

As compared to the browser space where FireFox faces a proprietary competitor (Microsoft’s Internet Explorer), in the email client space there are some compelling open source email client software such as Yahoo’s Zimbra. Mozilla’s move in branching off the e-mail software division may be to perhaps emulate the success it has had with its Firefox web browser. The Firefox web browser has gained immense adoption online and the latest statistics from w3schools.com reveal that it has 36.5% share of the browser market as of February 2008.

It is yet to be seen if spinning off the e-mail client will make a dent in Microsoft Outlook’s market share. Let’s hope that Thunderbird 3.0 beats all expectations.