07/12/2004
Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, open-source, cross-platform email, news, and chat client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. The project began in July 2003 and was originally launched as Minotaur, shortly after Phoenix. But the project failed to gain momentum.
With the success of the Mozilla Firefox the demand for an email client that goes with it increased. The Minotaur was revived under the new name of Thunderbird, and migrated to the new toolkit developed by the Firefox team.
Thunderbird was then initially released its version 1.0 on December 7, 2004. Thunderbird received more than 500,000 downloads in its first three days of release, and 1,000,000 in 10 days.