We first heard that Mozilla might be ready to spin off Thunderbird as a separate corporation back in July. At the time, all we knew is that Mozilla wanted to focus on Firefox and allow Thunderbird to shed its overlooked stepsister status and get the attention it deserved.

Well, it turns out that Mozilla has pretty big plans for the little e-mail client. The goal is pretty much to make Thunderbird an Outlook killer much the same way Firefox has become something of an Internet Explorer killer.

Mozilla has announced that ActiveState CTO David Ascher will head up the new company. The new organization will be a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation and will receive $3 million in seed funding from Mozilla to get started.

The new company will continue to support Thunderbird, but will also continue to build out its product and encourage a "robust developer ecosystem" to encourage open source involvement in the project. What would be most interesting is if Mozilla released a Thunderbird server that could compete with Microsoft's Exchange Server head-on.