Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. Originally launched as Minotaur shortly after Phoenix (the original name for Mozilla Firefox), the project failed to gain momentum. With the success of the latter, however, demand increased for a mail client to go with it, and the work on Minotaur was revived under the new name of Thunderbird, and migrated to the new toolkit developed by the Firefox team.

 

Thunderbird is a mythical creature common to Native American religion and is probably the genesis of the other uses of the word. This extra large bird was a sussposed meat eater and there have been accounts of human attacks in recent years,also thought to be related to the semimythical pheonix.