Mozilla Messaging
Today we’ve announced the launch of Mozilla Messaging, the new name for the entity I’ve been calling MailCo on this blog. As promised, it’s a new subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, focused on email and internet communications. We’ve put up the essential information about the organization on the website, but I have more room for background here.
Since I signed up for this job, I’ve repeatedly been struck by the amazing opportunity it represents. No matter who I talk to, people are happy to know that Mozilla is doing this, go out of their way to express their shared optimism in the project, and either send their heartfelt best wishes, or simply offer their assistance. How many organizations can say that?
Email and other forms of internet communications present us with a paradox. The stunning proportion of our days spent communicating online clearly indicates that as a society, we are more intricately connected via the internet than ever before. I’m a case in point, strongly connected to dozens of people over the last few months in a shared effort to launch this new company, which lives nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Email, IM and IRC make that possible.
Yet as the number of such interactions grows, and as the number of ways in which we interact grows, the joy that communication can bring is too often replaced by frustration, confusion, or stress. Furthermore, as we transmit more and more digital data, privacy and control questions become more and more troublesome.
One common short-hand for the above is to say, somewhat flippantly, that “email is broken”.
I’ll explain what we’re going to do about it in the short term, but the more interesting question is for me to ask you “what are you going to do about it?” As I’ve slowly internalized over the last few months, the notion that anyone can and should participate in helping fix whatever is broken is a key tenet of the Mozilla project. It has structural implications for how we build companies, and, I believe, it’s a key advantage compared to all the other companies who are tackling the nest of issues that entangle internet communications.
We know we can’t do it alone, and we’re not even going to try. Indeed, rather than lay out a bold vision and convince people that we’re going to solve all their problems, we see our primary role as that of facilitating collaborative approaches to problem solving and incremental progress, through a combination of leadership and facilitation work. This is an unusual approach, and it can be chaotic and slow. But it seems to have worked well for Firefox and the web, and I believe it can work well for Thundebird and email.
So what’s our plan?
Our plan starts with building a great product. Firefox has shown that if you have a great product that tens of millions of people love to use daily, doors open and more opportunities become within reach. So we’ll focus on the product. Thunderbird 2 is already a hugely successful product by many measures, providing a great email experience to millions of users around the world, in 37 languages, on all three major operating systems.
We can make it even better.
We’ll do that by responding to user feedback, by incorporating key contributions from third party developers, by providing a streamlined user experience which lets people focus on the interactions they want to have with other people rather than with the software that’s in front of them. We’ll do that by taking into consideration the needs that people have today, and planning for the needs that people will have tomorrow. We’ll do it by implementing the best software engineering and open source practices we can.
No, really, what’s our plan?
We’ve started defining what Thunderbird 3 will be, because we think that there is enough consensus to make some of the first decisions on the most important changes to tackle first. Specifically, 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.
What each of those means in practice will be worked out in public, on blogs, mailing lists, and newsgroups, as transparently as possible.
In parallel, we’re going to be starting a multi-year process of improving the back-end architecture of Thunderbird. Over the years, Thunderbird hasn’t had the resources devoted to it that Firefox has, and it’s time to catch up, so that we can implement many of the features we have planned, and so that we can take advantage of the improvements to the Mozilla platform that were built for Firefox, but which we can leverage as well.
Longer term
We’re also going to start a broader conversation as to what the long term vision is for Thunderbird, which will feed back into the software development plans. I’ll have more to say about this soon, but I can give a sketch of where my thinking currently is:
First, it’s important to start from a solid understanding of what Thunderbird is today. Most importantly, it’s a desktop client built on the same technology platform as Firefox. This gives it some weaknesses, and some strengths. I think we should build on the strengths and mitigate the weaknesses.
One huge strength is the extensibility of the platform, which is one key differentiator for Firefox, and which can be even more important for a communications client than it has been for a web browser. Another strength is that we already have a complete web technology stack built into our mail client, and as a result, we can consider deep integration with both websites and web services which other solutions can only dream of. Another, crucial strength, is that as an open source desktop application, Thunderbird “belongs” to the individual person using it, not to the owner of any one website or communications network. As people struggle with keeping track of disparate communication channels and social networks, this nexus of control becomes a sweet spot for integration. There are significant weaknesses as well, most importantly the need to install the software to use it. There are interesting possibilities to consider there as web application technologies become faster, richer, and better integrated with the desktop experience, which will inform our long-term planning.
Second, it’s important to keep an eye on larger trends. Email is more important than ever, and yet it’s no longer the only game in town, or even the dominant one for younger generations or emerging economies. 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.
Finally, it’s important to keep our options open. Thunderbird has a unique opportunity because of its relative uniqueness as a popular open source desktop communications client. There are countless possibilities for evolution even today, and more will show up tomorrow.
Time will tell whether the plan succeeds. I’m happy to hear about other approaches we should consider, so feel free to drop me a line.
People
To build a company that can succeed in this effort requires individuals who share an common perspective on what defines success. I’m extremely proud of the people who have alread chosen to help, signing on as board members, employees and contractors, or as volunteer contributors. If you get to interact with them, I’m sure you’ll understand why. Each of them combine deep competence in some aspect of building a great software company, understands that to succeed we must be part of a broader community, and subscribes to the Mozilla vision of what the internet could and should be. They all could be spending their time doing something more lucrative, but apparently they simply couldn’t resist the opportunity to try and work together to do something really great, and have fun in the process. I can’t wait to work with all of them.
In addition, I’ve been awed by the competence and dedication of all of the people who have helped us get to today’s launch. At this point I think everyone in Mozilla has helped in some key way, starting with legal & recruiting, through engineering, QA, build, marketing, and PR, and finishing, late at night, with IT. Thanks to all, and I look forward to continuing our collaboration!
In some ways, I hope that I won’t have much occasion to write about what Mozilla Messaging, Inc. is doing over the coming months, because it is not the interesting story. We’ll provide significant input and leadership in the direction setting, engineering work, and operational support, but the really interesting story will be whether we can convince people to spend their time working with us.
Email is broken. What are you going to do about it?
Please – make Thunderbird’s RSS support awesome. Y’know, instead of pap.
All these exiting new features are great, but when are you going to fix the basic stuff? Every email client ever has default new mail and reply templates with variables, for example.
Being able to actually build the damn thing on Win32 would also help you get a lot more support. The current instructions don’t work and even if they did the internal documentation is poor – meaning actually making improvements is not exactly easy anyway.
I’m not trying to troll, I’m just saying you need to get some basic stuff sorted out before thinking about all these more advanced features.
I’m really glad to see that there is finally some publically visible movement on the Thunderbird front.
I think calendar integration will be the Thunderbirds killer app that everyone has been waiting for.
Good luck to you all.
“What I’d really like from the next version of Thunderbird is the ability to synchronize email/calendar/contacts, etc with Smart phones and PDAs”
Please, its the only thing keeping me with outlook, well that and the callander in outlook, but if you can fix it to be an Outlook killer, I will be there
(I use Thunderbird Portable for my encrypted emails!)
You guys don’t only have a nice ambition: you’ll succeed !
Because:
- TB is already a very good base, my only mailer at home for many years
- it’s the best mailer on Linux desktops (and Mac too ?), which home and corporate uses are on nice steep growth pathes (but don’t neglect windz though!)
In addition to home, I’d love to be able to recommend it at work in our Lotus Notes environment. The motives for a 100 000+ employees corporation to make the move:
1) huge productivity gains thru better usability than Notes Mail (easy target !)
2) unique innovations: clic-sender-name-to-call is the most badly needed one (probably Avaya in the back-end, consider interface, or with bluetooth cell phone), a company can save millions of bucks in dialing/redialing time with this
3) Increase in security (e.g. consider protecting the contents with an expirable user id with server-side renewal)
4) sync to nokia and win-mobile
5) seamless archive management
6) good IM integration
I need this tomorrow
Good luck !
I’d ask you to take a very close look at Time & Chaos / !ntellect ( http://www.chaossoftware.com) and build something around Thunderbird that will allow us to accomplish everything you can there, only in an open source environment. !ntellect incorporates Chaos Software’s e-mail client into T&C, but I’ve never liked it, and still use Thunderbird which does not, of course, integrate with T&C.
I’ve been using T&C for over 15 years now, and it’s amazing to me with all the development during that time that there is still no other application that comes close. And, trust me, I’ve looked hard a number of times at Lightning, Evolution, etc, because T&C is really the only thing keeping me on Windows. It’s not just the app itself, but also the syncing with WM and Palm OS devices as well – just way too much trouble to accomplish all of that in Linux, if it even can be done, and, based on my experience, I’m not convinced that it can.
Something just like !ntellect but with Firefox as the browser portion and Thunderbird as the e-mail client would be absolutely ideal for me as the front end console I would operate from all the time.
I have several business clients I have set up on Thunderbird using IMAP with backend dbmail (sql based). Here are some of the real business issues that need to be addressed:
Server stored address books (ldap has never worked for us).
While we are at it – remote profile management. It used to work for Mozilla – one login and everything is the same everywhere!
Syncing with palm/blackberry – including syncing google calendar (lightning) with palm/blackberry.
A mozilla provided secure SMTP server so I do not have to help users through ridiculous arcane procedures to configure their ISP’s SMTP servers when they work from home (those same ISP’s won’t let me use my own SMTP server – or cripple it due to DNS issues with spam blockers).
I would love to see an intelligent filter generator — Something like Quicken financial transaction reconciliations between existing Quicken account transactions and a QDF download from a bank or broker. Every time I drag an e-mail out of the inbox to another folder, a record of the action would be made and after a threshold (user configurable, of course) was reached a pop up could offer to create a rule to do it automatically and show the proposed rule conditions (from, to, subject, words in message body, spam filter score, etc.) and actions (move, copy, delete, play sound, tag, relate to specific e-mail personna, etc.) and allow modifications before commitment.
Hi David – congratulations on the launch of Mozilla Messaging, this is an exciting time for all us Thunderbird fans!
(I left this comment yesterday but it appears not to have made it through, so I’m reposting. Hope that’s OK.)
I have one question and one suggestion about the future of Mozilla Messaging:
Question: How does this impact the Eudora “Penelope” project that aimed to migrate Eudora users to a new Thunderbird-derived product?
Suggestion: If you’re looking for new ideas about handling messaging on the desktop, I recommend checking out HEP (http://www.fettig.net/projects/hep/), a pretty clever project that brings together mail and feeds into one interface. It’s not perfect, but it does provide an interesting look at one way TB could evolve into a sort of personal messaging hub.
This T-bird e-mail project will end up just like Outlook Express…full of worthless functions, constant crashes, poor flexibility to entegrate with other software, and limited ability to facilitate add-ons.
Ed
As a long-time Thunderbird user, my personal hope is for reliability, consistency, and speed.
Right now, there are a heap of Thunderbird issues that I sigh and put up with: quirky editing, a slow interface, needing to repeatedly redo actions, occasional inability to send, and restarting every day.
For me, mail is a critical application, and although I use Thunderbird, its poor quality makes me reluctant to recommend it. Even before new features, please make it something everybody is proud of!
I’m reading all of this and trying to understand whether you’re just adding features to Thunderbird or actually trying to come up with an entirely new personal communication system to replace email.
Coming up with a new system to replace email would mean abandoning the core of email, SMTP, for something new. For two years now, I’ve been working on a project that does exactly that–replaces SMTP with a more modern, web-friendly core protocol. If you’d like to hear more about it, or to take a look at my source code, just let me know (you have my email address).
@Brad K. (comment #43) – No, SeaMonkey is not dead. SeaMonkey won’t be MoMe’s focus, of course, but a lot of Thunderbird’s needs will be more closely aligned with SeaMonkey than with Firefox, and there’s a lot of benefits for both SeaMonkey and Thunderbird in working together on mailnews code.
Also see KaiRo’s blog post on Mozilla Messaging: http://home.kairo.at/blog/2008-02/my_take_on_mozilla_messaging_and_seamonk
You really need to focus on *reliability* – I have an 80 year older relative using Thunderbird but the folder indexing / storage frequently breaks, and I have to somehow fix this. Far better to adopt a reliable storage format, e.g. maildir. I hesitate to recommend Thunderbird to new users for this reason.
See http://lwn.net/Articles/266938/ for a few comments that amplify on this, including a comment from someone else that points out his wife, a real power user, also finds that Thunderbird is not reliable enough.
There’s no such thing as 100% reliability, but I have never found Outlook 2003 has any of these problems, and sadly Thunderbird does have them.
http://lwn.net/Articles/266938/ also has some comments about the stateful nature of the user interface and how this confuses some users.
I probably am just missing what you are talking about, but I don’t really see the vision. Calendaring may well be important, but adding calendaring because the other guys have it doesn’t seem like the correct approach. What is it that you are trying to do? What problem will Thunderbird be the best at solving?
Calendaring would fit if your goal is to organize people’s life. With this goal I would also add a to-do capability. Some way to send reminders to mobile devices. Also a way to accept text messages from cell phones to add events and to-do’s. And probably more along this line.
Maybe your goal is to be a information center. You mention the tracking of blogs, IM, and of course email. You could also add in voice mail integration through a service such as grand central. How about web clips of part of web pages with notes and annotation. A watch on web pages to see when they change. Rethink bookmarks to save a web of pages associated with a topic.
Alternatively, you might focus just on email as a function. In this case, IM, calendaring, etcetera are unimportant. However, there are email problems that need to be ‘fixed’. Certainly spam control — possibly a combination of known trusted senders as well as a passphrase for new emails. Finding/search is another area of improvement. In addition to better filtering, and search what about automatic labeling possibly using bayesian approaches similar to the spam filter. “I notice some of your emails are addressed to John Doe, Sara Smith, and Pete Doe. Would you like me to create a new category?” Yes, this category “Family” would contain all emails to/from these people. Likewise, auto categories might be created for travel reservations, workgroup messages, and newsletters. Attachments are another broken feature of email systems. You get an attachment from a colleague, and you can’t edit it directly. You have to save it somewhere else. Once it is saved elsewhere, it is not associated with the email thread anymore. Over time, you have a set of emails in, and a set of saved messages that all together represent different versions of the same document. However, these documents are only associated in your head — not in the email system. Similarly, I often send attachments to myself to transfer docs from home to work. I end up with multiple doc copies stored in email and multiple copies stored in folders.
So, this email represents three different views of a future system. Maybe you would suggest another alternative that’s even better. My point is that you are more likely to get an interesting vision of the future if you first determine the problem space that you are working in, and then design the features. A features first approach can lead to a scattershot solution or one that is less imaginative.
Sorry, if this sounds a bit like a lecture. I teach this stuff at a University and this is similar to an exercise that I set for my students.
What is about Mozilla messaging and calendar/taks/contacts syncronization with mobile phones and PDA’s? I don’t want use Outlook anymore for that!. This is only reason why I’m using Outlook.
> It is worthwhile considering what
> the right user experience could be
> for someone using multiple email
> addresses, multiple instant
> messaging systems,
I hope you will not try to reinvent the wheel yet again.
What are your plans to make use of http://www.foaf-project.org/ and http://openid.net/
Very interesting Prof. Michael, really. In other words, is this project about creating, or about improving ? And to what extent ?
With venture capital investors backing me, I would go for the creation, but with less financial and time resources I would have to shoot for a realistic migration of installed base in corporate environment, which means less cutting-edge innovation.
As much as I love Tthunderbird, I’m a bit skeptical that the thoughts go far enough. It sounds a bit like an outlook copy.
Risks & Chances:
1. If it’s becoming too much of an Outlook clone, you would be aiming for the past, instead of being innovative. => So try finding an innovative new messaging path.
2. Syncronization is today the big thing, people are willing to have a worse communication center if it nicely syncs with their mobile devices (Webservices, Phones/PDAs as well as Notebooks)
3. The big chances are filling the gaps between current tools:
a)the gap between Chatting and eMailing. We always had synchronous and asynchronous communication, e.g. phone + answering machine. With Chatting and eMailing we have a big gap because neither do they interact (I can pick up my phone while someone is talking to my machine) NOR do they have the same features (chatting can text, video, voice and even transfere large files directly from a to b while eMail is mostly text small attachments and with complicated way over storing stuff on the web and sending links even file transfere)
I hope these thoughts will make Thunderbird the most exciting project of the next years.
Thunderbird CAN have the next iPhone-like hype.
one more vote for secure-by-default emails.
But, hey, you’ve got your work for you in picking this list of wishes. They seem to be very many, evenly spread, with rather few favourites. That may mean that it is fine as it is, for now.
Which probably adds weight to the need for a bigger, better “vision” while you have a chance.
Great news, calendar functionality especially. I assume this will synch with google calendar?
16 brains, 2 M$, Open Source world contributors : Let’s go !
May I help ?
So obvious I even forgot to mention them: user-chosen either icons or picture thumbnails for each personal folder and each contact, displayed in e-mail list and headers.
Looks like cosmetics but it’s actually real productivity gain, especially in big entreprise.
Type your comment here.
You really need to cut a new branch as soon as possible, meaning RIGHT NOW. Just cut it and then start with the bug fixing and do a release of Thunderbird 2.5 for March 15. There are too many bugs fixed to wait until a Thunderbird 3.0 with all the doodads. Just cut the branch now with the bug fixes and cull out the additions, and give us a decent working product. Thanks.
Let me put my ha’penny where so many others have and request a true, rdbms backend (ODBC compliant?!) for Thunderbird 3.0. If you want to open the app up to some real outsider development, we’ll all benefit from a nice, clean, standards-compliant clean break between user interface and backend. Power a new wave of mail handlers with an industry leading relational backend in 3, please!
Hi David,
I recommend reading about ISS (Instant Syndicating Standards), a set of open standards that combines features from both e-mail and instant messaging. As for a basis for Mozilla Messaging, I recommend checking Sameplace, an I.M. application for Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird that has recently won the Extend Firefox 2 award.
Congrats for getting MoMe (as someone on Mozillazine suggested) off the ground! Hopefully now we can see quicker updates to Tb than we’ve seen in the past.
I personally would love to see an easy way to use Firefox’s cookies in Tb, plus a way to finally use embedded objects in messages, especially RSS feeds. As it stands now I have to expand the header pane (which I usually keep closed to have more screen for the messages) and open an article from a news feed in my browser to see a Flash video, and that’s simply a pain in the arse to have to do so often. I know it was removed a while back, but please bring the plugins back in the first MoMe release of Thunderbird.
As far as the future goes, I understand why you’d want to include all kinds of messaging, and I know some people want it, but many more DON’T want things like IMs in our email client for a variety of reasons. Personally I only have Tb open once or twice a day to grab mail and update my RSS feeds (I’m disabled so I don’t have the constant work emails to have to deal with). Putting an IM client in Tb would be a complete waste of code for me. As it is I can’t use the Gmail IM feature closed since I have three Gmail accounts and am constantly switching between them. If the MoMe devs insist on adding a ton of features to Tb please make them modular enough that users can disable them upon installation, especially for us Linux users that get Tb right from your servers and not from our distro’s repository. I’d hate to have to stay with an old version of Tb simply because it got too filled with features I have no interest in using.
Maravilha. Nas empresas em que trabalho retirei outlook de todos os lugares e coloquei o Thunderbird. O Mozilla Messaging com certeza revolucionará ainda mais esse excelente cliente de e-mail.
Meus softwares open source:
- Firefox
- Thunderbird
- Openbravo
- Linux Fedora
- BrOffice
Recomendo todos eles.
I’ve lost emails in Thunderbird due to database corruption. It was insanely annoying. (It was only one email I lost, but it was a pretty important one).
I have a PostgreSQL database on my system. I would like to stick my email in it, since it would allow me to have a fast, secure, scalable storage for all my mails. Also, backups would come naturally from my normal database backup routines. It would also allow me to have my database frontend (Thunderbird) on one system, and the actual database data on another.
I’d like to see a generic database interface in Thunderbird, which can be used to stick mails in any kind of storage system (provided someone writes the thin layer required).
MySQL and PostgreSQL should be supported out-of-the-box, so to speak, but the interfaces should be simple enough to add any other storage backend within a few hours of coding. (Obviously the external database support would be a build-time configuration — no one should be forced to have a bunch of database code installed on their system which they don’t use).
I would be willing to put some coding effort into this myself.
I’m very happy to see the new website and David’s blog entry. Of course it’ll take some time to see the results, but I’m relieved to see TB in good hands
Really glad there is an email product competitor coming to the forefront. I’m a small businessman, and I’ve been “locked” into MS Outlook (mostly because of compatibility issues). Hope that’s over soon, so I can remove the complete suite, and use a “good, useable” package. I’m using OpenOffice, but I’m in need of a valid email program for my work, one with features of the mainstream products.
Perhaps other software developers (like Intuit) will develop apps to be shared with open source products, not just “hard-coding” their software for MS products.
I’d like to see Thunderbird incorporate a few old-school options from Pegasus Mail, such as RegEx filtering: http://community.pmail.com/pmail/PegasusMailOverview.aspx
I hope that the development of Messanging will go on smoothly.
I was a bit bothered by the fact that TB3.0a1pre build of 2/19, and earlier dates worked fine, but those of 2/20 and on had serious SMTP problems. The same was true of Seamonkey2.0a1pre mail. I could not reply or forward using the ISP SMTP. May be someone else commented on this, but I found it disturbing.
As a user of Thunderbird currently, its functional but lots of room for improvement. I am very happy you all are continuing to develop and improve Thunderbird and keep good options open for mail client.
Using it as a collection point and archiving for several addresses, so my mail db gets quite large. Right now, when dealing with large volume of mail with several filters, it is really slow. I would really like to see more speed in dealing with larger volume.
The other thing is that it is still difficult to move mail files from one machine to another. I would like to be able to point to backed up mail folders and have it import them into a new installation.. have not figured out how to do that easily. Import – export has to work better.
Last.. thought it would be interesting to have more tools to make it easier and faster to back up web based email clients.
Thanks for reading my rants.
I tried Thunderbird 2 years ago (ages in internet time) but decided to stick with Eudora. The main sticking point is that it does not automatically decode and store attachments in a separate directory. I carry around my files in a flash drive. There are some attachments that I still might need that I don’t have to carry around all the time. So I move them to a separate folder in my main computer. I never figured out how to have Thunderbird store attachments that way.
I have been searching vainly for something that functions like the Palm Desktop or Microsoft Outlook for years that can synchronize with my celphone’s (Symbian, SE P990i) contacts directory and calendar. Ideally with the capability to put the data anywhere in a network or the net. I am keeping my fingers crossed.
I know I want true portability. I use three machines regularly (home, work, laptop) and others occasionally. I’d like to designate one machine my “home base” and be able to plug in a memory stick, take everything TBird I might possibly need with me (including attachments, rules, filters, archive etc) and then when I get back to home base be able to dump the things I have acquired in my travels back into that computer.
I am sooo tired of having to watch the same stuff download over and over again. I am sooooo tired of having to set up duplicate message rules to be able to make sense of my Email. And I really don’t want to have to have an Internet connection to check something in my Email archive/attachments.
Hi David,
Thanks for blogging in such detail on the thinking behind this new initiative. It’s great to follow along, and certainly gives me hope that we’ll have better solutions to online communications soon!
Email is broken because we’ve changed our demands, expectations, and interactions with it. We’ve also fragmented the medium searching for quick fixes to distributed collaboration and social networking. Thankfully, it sounds like Mozilla Messaging may be the entity that can enable the changes we need.
It’s pretty amazing to think that the work you’re doing has the power to impact human interactions on a global scale.
Cheers,
Erik
Will your project be an alternative to MS Outlook? Will it interface to an exchange server? Will it be able to interface with 70% of the functionality on the Ex Svr? If so you have a hit.
There are zillions of ppl like me who grudgingly switched to MS Outlook when corporations started adopting Ex. Server. We resisted the change, but the integration with calendar, corporate address, conf. rooms etc. forced us to be compliant.
————————————–
DEAR DAVID ASCHER,
Greetings.
I may want a lot of things in an E-mail client, but the one which stands out and is not available, as best I can tell, is the ability to “tell” it where to store Folders.
WITH ENTHUSIASM,
t r a c y .
P. S. FYI: Regarding your comment: ” . . .somewhat flippantly, that “email is broken”., commas and periods always “go” inside closing quotation marks.
————————————–
———————————-
2008 0304 1853 TUE
DEAR DAVID ASCHER,
Greetings.
If TBird had tabs for Read, Compose and Addresses like juno’s offline client does it would be way nicer than the difficult-to-deal-with, separate windows in T-2.
WITH ENTHUSIASM,
t r a c y .
———————————-
I have been using Mosaic, Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox and Thunderbird
since… their creation… And Sunbird… for the last two years…
But recently, I bought a new Symbian Nokia phone… the already old
6086… which syncs easily, through the Nokia PC Suite, with…
Microsoft Outlook (sic).
Since I didn’t found any simple way to sync my phone with Sunbird, I
exported my agenda to an .ics file… First, I was not able to
import the agenda into Outlook directly from Sunbird… But, then, I
was able to do it with the help of Google Calendar (importing the
.ics from Sunbird and exporting it from Google to an new .ics,
readable by Outlook). A fact that, in itself, resumes all the
paradoxes of the different interpretations of a standard (iCal), as
viewed from Microsoft, Google, and Mozilla.
Now, I am using Outlook, and I will continue using it until the
versions of Sunbird or Lightning are mature enough to bluetooth-sync
with my phone… which, I suppose, will at least take one year or
two!
This situation seems sad… but also seems unavoidable…
On the one hand, Nokia has already signed with Microsoft several
deals that make it clear that they are willing to work together…
So I don’t think that future versions of the Nokia PC Suite will
provide any help to sync with Mozilla apps!
On the other hand, the calendar projects at mozilla evolve quite
slowly… And it is clear (since the Mozilla Foundation decided to
split its development into a Firefox and an everything-else branch)
that the calendar project is not the top priority.
But the Mozilla Foundation is wrong. What they have in front of them
is a suite (called Microsoft Office) and not just an Internet
browser… And the only way to counter this suite is to provide
another suite (Open Office+Firefox/Thunderbird/Lightning). If one
element of the suite is weak, the whole system gets weak.
So please, you big shots from the Mozilla Foundation and Sun
Microsystems: Please, put a little bit more of money into the
weakest link of the chain, the one that allows us to manage the most
precious thing in our lives… time.
I love Thunderbird. I hope there will be a Windows 64bit version.
Will you ever have an instant message service like messenger, yahoo,etc.?
Ditto the request for the ability to sync a PDA/Treo/Blackberry. This is the ONLY think keeping me from migrating back to Linux. Microcrash Winbloze Vista has been a nightmare. I’m stuck in Outlook land until this happens.
So I hope you will include MAPI-compatibility
Very good news !
It’s really appreciable that a vision will be given to that very important project.
I suggest that a wiki/whatever place should be created, so that users could post/vote for their wishes.
I recently discovered a mail app called siMail, which use a database to store informations. As a result, you can “browse” your emails with different kind of views : organised by date, by contact, by category/tag, etc…
This way of orgasing email is very productive, as you can sometime look for an email through the date, the sender, whatever tag you applied to it… this fonction + the “search box” that already exist in Tb would be a very productive way to find back emails.
Re #89: “commas and periods always “go” inside closing quotation marks.”
I believe this is standard in US style-guides, but in the UK it’s exactly the opposite.
Which makes sense to me, because the punctuation’s not part of the quote, it’s part of the sentence containing the quote.
But each to their own…
I would like to echo a couple things others have posted in the comments and throw my hat in to the suggestion pool if I may.
Having a truly lightweight mail client that can be expanded via extensions seems like the holy grail to me. Outlook is an awful piece of bloatware because it tries to do everything and many only use it for e-mail. Don’t fall in to the ‘it must be like Outlook’ trap. It must be *better* than Outlook. Make calendar/tasks a freaking amazing plugin or a standalone app. I love how Lightning and Sunbird are the same but different. If I want to run it inside of my mail I can, or I can run it as a separate app. Build upon Thunderbird, but do it in a modular fashion so it is scary fast and incredibly expandable (but that has to be easy too).
Another wee bit of a gripe that I have is IMAP support. Simple things like a global inbox for IMAP (see Mail.app for a great implementation) proper IMAP Idle support and easy folder mapping seem to be missing from Thunderbird 2.0.
In my humble opinion it is critically important to first develop a world class e-mail client. This means a compose screen that doesn’t look like it is fresh out of the early 90’s. Extreme system stability. Instant e-mail searching. An amazing contact/address book. Once you have that down (and frankly Thunderbird doesn’t cut it quite yet, although it is close) then it would be prudent to move on to calendar, tasks, webmail integration, etc. It’s not just features in a bullet list that will make the difference, it is fit and finish.
Outlook is the beast to beat and while Outlook has it fair share of extremely large issues, it does have a polish that Thunderbird is sorely missing.
Just my $3.50.
is iyt possible to get FRENCH version ?
Will this program eventually evolve so you can synchronize through the computer with a blackberry. I am stuck with outlook which I truly dislike. I have found Thunderbird to be a far superior product but have not been able to synchronize with my blackberry.
Darrell