In search of a home for Thunderbird

I just need to point out that the seeds of this change were planted and cultivated since 1995 and Netscape 2.0. MS saw this vision of the future we are living in today and it's very much the reason why they freaked out at the end of the '90s and pushed so hard on IE and ActiveX to slow down progress.

> Thunderbird is not just some interface to the server (though that may well be true using IMAP), but actively sort and prioritize email locally.

The reason why this is no longer the primary model for the vast majority of people to use Internet services is that they want to be able to access the full data from multiple devices which is technically very difficult
without a central server

> Slack, basically a reimplementation of IRC using JSON
> usenet/newsgroups, the grandfather of Reddit

I will note as you do that most of the new communication tools we use today have clear antecedents and that the base functionality was there from early days. SMTP, NNTP, IRC, Telnet, FTP cover a vast number of use cases such that most things you can do today, you could have done 30 years ago, only slightly differently.