Last week, we released the latest version of Thunderbird! This release marks the first of our releases from within our new combined team which I mentioned in the past. Get it & enjoy it — I’ll draw your eye in particular to the new integrated add-on manager and my personal can’t-live-without add-on, the Conversations add-on which has matured a lot since I last mentioned it.

This month also marks the introduction of a critical new addition to the Thunderbird team: I introduced JB Piacentino to the Mozilla weekly call and Thunderbird teams a couple of weeks ago, but this seems like a fine time to introduce him to the broader community. JB is now the new Managing Director for Thunderbird. I’m confident that he’s going to provide what Thunderbird has been needing for a while now — someone who can have a broad enough perspective on Thunderbird to understand its breadth and full potential impact, but with a focused enough mandate that Thunderbird will get the attention it deserves.

JB has an ideal background to complement the rest of the Thunderbird team’s skills — in particular, he has a combination of entrepreneurial expertise and a passion for product marketing which will serve Thunderbird well. And while he’s new to the Mozilla community, he’s been an avid follower and supporter of Mozilla for a long time.

I’m also excited about the fact that JB is based in Paris, France. Thunderbird has a significant concentration of users in Europe, and moving the center of gravity of the project closer to our users will likely have a broad set of benefits.

I’m visiting JB and the Mozilla Paris office this week in fact, and we’d like to welcome anyone who happens to be in the area to come to a Q&A we’ll be having at the Mozilla office tomorrow evening:

28 Boulevard Poissonnière
75009 Paris
at 7pm (19:00)

I encourage people to get in touch with JB, and share your thoughts about Thunderbird.