(What are we to call them? I’ll stick with MoMsg for now I think)

Welcome to the planned MailCo, whose name has been revealed as Mozilla Messaging Inc.. This has been in the pipeline for a little while, and it doesn’t seem to be quite ready yet, but it seems they’re almost there.

I think this will be news to a lot of people – Bryan Clark tells us on his blog he only waved goodbye to RedHat yesterday – but it’s best that things go forward pretty quickly in my opinion. If anything, MoMsg needs to get going yesterday: Thunderbird 2 has been out a long time now, and Firefox 3 is just around the corner. Getting Thunderbird 3 out of the door very quickly ought to be a priority.

The track record in this area isn’t great. Other organisations have had seed funding, great ideas, engineers on board and haven’t produced – I wouldn’t want to see the next “Dreaming in Code” be about Mozilla – and I’m slightly surprised that for a commercial organisation, they only seem to have hackers on the payroll at this point. But, very early days yet: I’m very excited that they are looking to put calendaring features into Thunderbird directly (Lightning as a plugin is great, but it does feel like a bolt-on).

So, best of British to all those at MoMsg – I really look forward to seeing what you produce!