From the Mintoaur project page http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/minotaur/ :

"Minotaur will have the same UI as the mozilla mailnews client.

"Thunderbird is an effort by the Phoenix team to create a stand alone mailnews client with a new UI, one that uses the new toolkit and follows the UI practices of Phoenix. But Thunderbird will be built from Minotaur."

In the past, it has been reported in several places (including here) that Minotaur and Thunderbird are the same thing but they're not. Sorry about that. It wasn't an intentional attempt to mislead. :-)

Alex

Thunderbird is the name of the "phoenix-ized" standalone mail client effort which hasn't really started yet. Minotaur is Mozilla's mail client built to run standalone which Seth has already mostly working on the 1.0 branch but hasn't been moved to the trunk becuase it depends on the XUL preporcessor being ported over to Mac first.

Minotaur is the first step toward a really nice and really fast standalone mozilla-based mail client to complement Phoenix. But as a first step it's not going to use all of the new Phoenix technology, rather it's going to be pretty much the same as Mozilla mail, just running standalone. Later, with Thunderbird (hopefully) we'll see it trim down and speed up and maybe have all the nifty customization that Phoenix offers.

Or something like that ;-)

--Asa