Mozilla Messaging, the brand new Internet communications initiative of Mozilla Foundation has officially opened for business.

Back in 2005, the Mozilla Foundation has created the Mozilla Corporation as its commercial subsidiary responsible for its open-source products’ development and distribution. But in July 2007 the Foundation has realized that this commercial subsidiary is in fact focusing mainly on Mozilla Firefox and has announced that Thunderbird will be developed by an independent organization.

The creation of a new mail focused subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation was announced since September last year, under the name MailCo.

The initial focus for Mozilla Messaging is the development of Thunderbird 3. Thunderbird represents a free and cross-platform e-mail and news client that has been developed by the Mozilla Foundation, which launched also the much successful browser, Firefox.

However, Internet Explorer has still remained the first browser used on the Internet, but at least Firefox represents a much successful project for Mozilla than its Thunderbird email and news client.

Mozilla Messaging has staffed a small product development team who will work as part of a community of contributors from around the world.

David Ascher, CEO, Mozilla Messaging explained on his blog the new goals of Mozilla Messaging, which has big ambitions for Thunderbird.

“Thunderbird 3 will build on the great base that is Thunderbird 2 (and the work already performed in trunk by the current and past contributors), and add some key features, such as: integrated calendaring (building on the great work done by the Mozilla Calendar team and their Lightning add-on to Thunderbird), better search facilities, easier configuration, and a set of other user interface improvements,” Ascher wrote.

According to Ascher’s vision Mozilla Messaging is not only about Thunderbird. The activities of the new company will revolve also around the way we interact online.

“It is worthwhile considering what the right user experience could be for someone using multiple email addresses, multiple instant messaging systems, IRC, reading and writing on blogs, using VoIP, SMS, and the like. What parts of those interactions make sense to integrate, and where? I don’t believe that stuffing all of those communication models inside of one application is the right answer. But the walled gardens that we’re faced with today aren’t the right answer either. There is room for innovation and progress here, and we need to facilitate it”, Ascher said on his blog.

Besides David Ascher, Mozilla Messaging board of directors, lso includes Christopher Beard, vice president and general manager of Mozilla Labs, and Marten Mickos, CEO of open source database vendor MySQL AB.