I find it telling that such numbers are Just Not Good Enough anymore. We're now well into a generation of users numbering in the billions whose lives are cloud/IoT integrated who could care less about, or are totally ignorant of, a service that renders and stores locally. And it's far easier for the Web developers to monetize their "free" services.
"...other changes Mozilla may make to its browser, including switching to the Chromium rendering engine, which powers Google's Chrome." Oh boy. I can't wait! "Mozilla has identified potential homes for its Thunderbird email client... The Mozilla Foundation was a third possibility, according to Simon Phipps, a noted open-source expert, who was hired to identify the best organizational destinations for Thunderbird." There's no place like home.
So since Mozilla wants to divest itself of TB, Mozilla may be a good place to send it. Maybe along with all Mozilla's other problems it's becoming schizophrenic? I like Thunderbird, but don't care much for or trust Mozilla, that's why I've gone with FossaMail which is already one branch (fork? whatever you call it) of Thunderbird. So even if the TB brand was ever to die out, hopefully being open source some compatible form of it will always be developed.
I would consider FossaMail except it's not available in a portable version which is odd since Moonchild's Pale Moon is so versioned. Haller's PortableApps platform has yet to adopt it and it's unlikely it will. Both venues have received and ignored numerous requests for a portable. I've been running PortableApps' TB in a VeraCrypt (and TrueCrypt) container for years as there's no other solution for client-side security that is acceptable to me.
