That said, I’m a little disturbed by the focus on “messaging” per se. If you work your way through the comments that have been posted in response to the initial, one suspects, understandable if naive optimism of Mr. Ascher, you hear a recurrent theme.

A lot of people are looking for a real PIM, tightly integrated email, calendar, addressbook (with some kind of outlining, I would suggest myself), pretty much what the Outlook-challenged ECCO was aiming at doing and never succeeded. If you keep your focus on providing half of what ECCO could accomplish ten years ago, somewhat updated, focus on exportability, and then, for heaven’s sakes, get rid of your static email UI in favor of something that looks like the final versions of Eudora, you might finally pull together a product that is an asset rather than an annoyance to its users.

The main thing to emphasize is integration and exportability. On the email side, there are so many flaws it’s hard to know where to begin but I’ll name three: 1. filters that work on all accounts and both the Inbox and Sent folders in all folders (i.e., universal filters for those of us who still organize folders and use filters), filtered incoming mail arriving in an opened, free-floating window so you know its there, and then a small but crucial detail: Please find some way to not open every folder every time a user opens the program. This quirk whose functionality one struggles to understand, adds five to ten minutes to a nightly back-up on a day when at most 5 percent of the folders and their files were accessed.

A pet list of complaints on the email side, I’m sure. But if you want direction, acquaint yourself with the old ECCO and the last version of Eudora and maybe you’ll get somewhere in the end. Neither of these were complete but pulled together, with exportability added, you’d have something. Obviously, brought forward to embrace new forms of messaging. Nothing wrong with that.

Sorry I can’t be more positive but I just don’t think Thunderbird as we know it today is even nearly a credible program, after all this time.

I’ve been working in the computer industry for over twenty years and I’ve seen email grow from a niche tool, used only by the I.T. staff, to something used by school children. As ubiquitous as it has become, there is really no one size fits all solution that will satisfy everyone, and problems still remain.

For my part, I like the flexibility of having my own domain, but would rather leave the day to day operations of the servers to someone else. So, I pay a hosting company to maintain the servers. Because we have the current standards that we have, I can be pretty sure that my family members, whether using PC, Mac, or other system will be able to access their email accounts, either through POP or IMAP.

On the other hand, I wish that standards were a bit more far reaching and widely accepted.

For example, some of the things that I wish were standardized across hosting companies:

Server based calendars
Shared Calendars
Event Invitations (There is some interoperability between Thunderbird and Mac Mail, but it isn’t perfect…)

Also, I often set up mail accounts for family members in other states, and I would like to be able to easily script their installations including user and server settings. I could give them their passwords over the phone, but an install script, or equivalent would make my life a lot easier.

Finally, it would be nice to be able to augment the existing junk mail system by tyeing it into a spam list server(s).

Best of luck!

I hope that Mozilla Messaging becomes a springboard for a lot of positive changes.

Stuart