Mozilla has announced a new initiative to overhaul email and internet communications in general. The new company, MailCo, will be given $3 million in startup capital from Mozilla to start with the Thunderbird code and work from there. MailCo will be led by David Ascher of ActiveState fame and, according to him, will be a for-profit venture without the emphasis on profit.

Well, what is the impact of such a company on Synovel? Synovel is working on a Collaboration suite, that is more generic and involves a desktop client built on top of Mozilla Thunderbird. The biggest part of Synovel's Collaboration Suite - codenamed Finch, is the software that runs on server. The web-client and server software together are expected to be much more important (can be quantified to 80 on a 100 point scale).

We are happy that work on Mozilla Thunderbird and the much ignored mailnews code will get faster now and we will continue to make our contributions as well as derive work from the Mozilla software. Now that MailCo is a new company by itself, we will also explore any possibilities of working together with them.