February 21
Sending the right message
Mozilla Messaging has been formed! And yes, that’s me in there; I’ve made a new home with Mozilla Messaging so look forward to much more talk about email, calendaring, and communication in general. 
Luis pointed out, the name born from MailCo is Mozilla Messaging, a change that I believe brings the correct focus to the coming efforts.
Since the launch I’ve been reading lots of different articles about the launch and the related comments following peoples opinions.
- lifehacker: What Do You Want to See in Thunderbird?
- slashdot: Mozilla Opens Thunderbird Email Subsidiary
- ars: Mozilla Messaging reveals plans for Thunderbird 3
- lwn: Mozilla Messaging Starts up Operations
- More Links at: Mozilla Messaging Launches
Here’s a mix of common threads I’m seeing from the comments.
- Polish!
- Calendar Integration
- Better Search
- Shared Calendars
- Better LDAP
- Conversation View (gmail mail)
- Archiving Support
- Encryption (make it easy and by default)
- Phone Sync (Address Book, Text Messages, Phone Logs)
- Better OS Integration (Windows, OSX, GNOME, KDE, etc.)
- Better Address Book
- Import Outlook PST, .DAT files
- Exchange Server Support
- Better vCard Support
- Taggging (ala gmail)
- Sync contacts w/ GMail, LinkedIn, Facebook, Yahoo, etc.
- New Mail / Reply Templates
And a very common theme is for making Thunderbird FAST AND LEAN!!
All excellent directions to look into. But that is a big list of tough items to handle all at once. I’d like to take the approach of focusing on our core goal and iterating many of these pieces as they align and become defined by our progress.
Email… and Calendaring?
David Ascher wrote an excellent entry launching Mozilla Messaging which unveiled the current plans for Thunderbird. Many comments in his blog and other articles relayed a feeling that these new Thunderbird plans would lose sight of improvements that are sorely needed to bring regular email up to speed. When actually there is a short and medium term set of fixes that need to be done in order to get the regular email experience up to speed.
In parallel to those email fixes we’ll be working on a plan of improving personal communication. There’s no secret agenda in this communications plan we’re going to be very open, honest, and looking for lots of feedback. But it includes improving calendar support inside Thunderbird, not as an additional tool to download but as another way to help people Communicate Effectively and Get Things Done.
Getting Things Done
I’ve got to make a run to the used bookstores in Central Square and look for a copy of Getting Things Done. If that doesn’t work out I’ve added that to my wishlist just in case. But email is usually a thorn in my side, I get so much of it everyday like so many other people and yet I feel like I’m fighting the tide of emails instead of sailing the seas. I like the set of mental tools that the GTD book provides for not languishing in the meta and instead diving into the guts of things and I want to see that inside my email. I want to feel a sense of control over my email again, like I used to have when I first started using email so long ago.
Extensions and innovating beyond ourselves
Since there are so many ideas out there on how to improve communication, organize email, handle attachments, integrate calendaring, and more there is no way a small team will be able to prototype all these ideas; much less implement them all. This is where extensions have to come into play. The Thunderbird extension system has fallen far behind that of Firefox and it’s constraining our communities ability to innovate in an area where so much innovation is possible. Extensions allow everyone to try to fix this problem with email and communication and it creates a vibrant feedback loop where we can all benefit; but I’ll talk more about this later.
My starry eyed view of the future of Thunderbird is a fast and lightweight platform for wrangling all my electronic communication, a supported, active, and vibrant extensions community building cool new ideas on top of an extensible platform can be tried, tested, and rolled into future releases. The future is bright.
You should add better IMAP support in general to that list. I
I’d send you a copy of GTD myself, but you’re a big boy with a big, google-funded budget now- amazon one yourself
Tabbed email reading.
So think of email headers as links that you can open in tabs.
Thinking about it, an extension for this might exist already.
I see you weighted after all your opinion on the huge flamewar Evolution vs. Thunderbird from fedora-devel-list.
That is what I want from TB: to be worthy as a default mail client for Fedora and, in my view, it needs more desktop integration for that (at least at the Firefox 3 level).
This is a great list!
I really would like better encryption, especially GPG. That Enigmail plugin really does not cut it. TB realy should do that as transparently as Evolution really.
Where can I read up that Evolution/Thunderbird in fedora-devel thread?
Here’s a link to the default email client thread on the fedora-devel list.
I hope you’re not forgetting NNTP– that’s the only thing I ever use Thunderbird for, these days, but it could be a lot better esp. wrt to binary groups.
Oh, and its RSS support sucks– I could be *tempted* to use Thunderbird for both NNTP + RSS if it was as good as Liferea/NetNewsWire/Vienna etc…
@jon: will do, i’m sure that’s on the horizon for platform fixes
@luis: thanks, i like to hunt for used books from the local shops anyway
@matt: I think tabbed email might be an interesting feature as a strategy for defering handling email. I have seen some existing plugin for tabbing, but have not checked it out yet
@nicu: TB needs to compete and win. I’m excited about making it competitive, until it is I could see pushing a change just yet.
@ralph: I’d like to try a couple different ways of working an encryption interface. I agree that Enigmail is ok, but I’d like to see some innovation on top or around that. That’s why it’s so critical that we get a decent extensions system working soon.
Thanks for getting back to us all. All that’s left is to say good luck to you. I too would like to see Thunderbird becoming the default mail client on Fedora… Evolution is a strange world for me.
I think this is really neat and think you guys will do a great job.
After you guys conquer email, can you take on openoffice? Maybe a mozilla version of openoffice with the clarkbw user-friendliness?
Please lets keep and if possible improve on the “Grouped by sort G” feature. It has a few bugs currently but it is the one feature that keeps me using thunderbird.
Does this mean you’re moving to the Bay Area? I hope so! Let me know if you need a landing pad.
That’s awesome about the new job! I’ve been using Thunderbird for 5 or 6 years now. I very much look forward to all the new attention the application is going to get over the next few years. Yay!
Also, I have a copy of GTD. If you want it, you’re more than welcome to take it. I think I bought it on Amazon for $8.00 or something like that.
I’ll second “better IMAP”. Top of the list of IMAP fixes: search-based delete folder rather than copying to a trash folder.
@Todd: thanks dude! I don’t know if that’s up the road, I bet you could take on google docs pretty well as an alternative to oo.org
@Alastair: please send me mail about the bugs you’re talking about, I’m not aware of them
@Alex: I’ll be visiting a lot since Moz is headquartered out of there, but I’ll be living up north in Vancouver near the rest of t-bird the team.
@Will: Thanks buddy! Let me know what kind of issues you have with it, I love feedback from people who get a lot of email. I found a used copy of the book just yesterday, hopefully I’ll get through it quickly and we could chat about it.
Bryan–toss me your email address somehow. I don’t think I have it anywhere.
Being able to pull “messages” (which are really crippled emails) out of Facebook etc would be cool. To make this happen, being able to write extensions for actual messaging protocols etc would be the bomb.
[...] some downtime Sunday reading Getting Things Done (GTD) after previously talking about it I picked up a copy a couple weeks ago and have been running through it in my spare time. I [...]