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Mozilla Creates New Internet Mail and Communications Company
Mozilla has announced a new initiative to overhaul email and internet communications in general. The new company, MailCo, will be given $3 million in startup capital from Mozilla to start with the Thunderbird code and work from there. MailCo will be led by David Ascher of ActiveState fame and, according to him, will be a for-profit venture without the emphasis on profit.
will be a for-profit venture without the emphasis on profit.
Quick! When's the IPO?!?
Before anyone even brings this up, the reason they usually do for-profit instead of not-for-profit is there is a crapload more bureaucracy associated with a not-for-profit and they'll end up spending a lot of money dealing with it.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
If they want to make money, they should fix spam and privacy.
Email should have been designed with end to end encryption from the beginning.
And I'm tired of email being seen as just another database resource to be parsed for targeted advertising.
What's the point? From everything I keep hearing in the news, nobody uses email anymore. If Mozilla and "MailCo" really want to make a difference, they should start writing Facebook and MySpace email clients. Remember, the internet is not about open protocols and clients -- it's about one single website acting as the singular point of contact and communication for the entire globe! And of course, when people leave MySpace for facebook, all you have to do (instead of simply continuing to email them at their existing email address), is go to facebook, sign up for another account. Add the person. Have them add you. And then make sure that you add it to the growing pile of sites you check every day, so you can keep in touch with said idiot who refuses to use email.
The first thing they need to do is integrate spambayes. Thunderbird's current spam filtering sucks. Spambayes works great. For the love of god, somebody please do it already!
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Look at the original Ximian. I mean, writing Evolution was the core USP of whatever Ximian became into. But somewhere on the way into building an open source email client/PIM/Outlook-killer, the Evolution codebase filled up with what I can only call "employee code" (i.e This fixes the bug now, we'll see what it breaks in QA).
I've tried hacking around there, but eventually ended up back in thunderbird land. But on that side of the fence, some of the problems are purely due to over-engineered modularity (yes ... yes, we all love XPCOM [*cough* bonobo], but not that much). And considering I've weaned most of my relatives off Outlook Express with thunderbird, migrating them to Kmail was kinda too hard to have a point.
In short, "do it well" with hackers and don't just hack it up with code written by employees to meet deadlines. Because I sure as hell would love a email client that I could sic my sister/cousins on (she runs linux now, without any clue beyond "clicky clicky") and hack on when I get a brilliant idea once in a while (for example, a pluggable addressbook api - ala kmail's hooks)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Fool! Do you not know that profit is the antithesis of open source? Taking one dollar in profit makes you no different from Microsoft! Next you'll be hoarding your sources and throwing chairs!
Yadda yadda yadda, etc, and so forth.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
... someone would create a nice, easy to use, easy to integrate, mail and calender system for small, medium and larger companies. Something like JES but simpler and easier to configure and maintain....
wireless sync "push" email for my CALENDAR, mail, and contacts to my mobile phone.
That's all I want. Otherwise, the calendar and mail systems out there are perfectly good and well and take care of us without issue.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
I read (skimmed) the article. I was hoping they were going to build a client / server email engine that could replace MS Exchange, but it does not seem so. Does anyone know of a project trying to replace MS Exchange?
Insert Generic Sig Here:
well if this planned email app is anything like firefox it will eat memory like no tomorow :(
Now, if only we could write software that made people write better emails, such as following RFC1855, writing coherently and not like 419 scammers, and maybe write to have something to say, nevermind taking the time to edit their emails for brevity (compare EWD1300 and also the "I'm sorry I wrote you a long letter, I didn't have the time to write a short one" lament by several famous people), then that would be just spiffy.
Yes, good tools are important. But no matter how high quality the paper and the ink, if you insist on splattering ink on the paper and ranting incoherently, instead of writing legible prose, legibly, it is not going to help much.
In short, it is mostly a "people problem" and those are not solvable solely through technology. We will have to go out and teach our friends to write better emails. Sad but true.
I use pine myself (and must try that console ruby client) but have long recommended Thunderbird to others. Sunbird was comming along nicely and there is a clear overlap between web browsing, scheduling and email.
it wont hurt to have more customer-oriented, people-targeting companies on the web
Read radical news here
...will be a for-profit venture without the emphasis on profit.
What's the emphasis on, the "for-" ?
Could Mozilla create a script that can walk one through the setup of a mail server, just like setting up of Postfix is done using its configuration script.
I can tell you that without a lot of zeal to succeed, setting up a mail server can be an exercise in frustration. There are so many software versions, tutorials and other resources geared to helping out, but these almost always confuse!
I even thought of creating the script but I still need to polish my [bash] Linux shell programming skills.
A script to check whether one has all the components necessary to install a mail server, it goes ahead to list and pick-out/isolate duplicate software, then goes ahead and configures the environment...including the set-up of tables using MySQL or PostgreSQL or whatever. Then finally allows the admin to decide whether the need an ISP style mail server hosting virtual domains or otherwise.
I wonder why we do not have such a script.
A for-profit company that emphasizes public good over profit? If the organization's goals are not profit-taking then why did they set up a for-profit organization?
More to the point, they've got a great technical lead in there right now to commercialize their mail client some more. But at some point they'll bring in a business manager if they get good market traction with the mail product.
Then mozilla has a for-profit entity that, probably will alter the direction of the mozilla foundation. "Impossible!" you say. Well, take a look at the departments that generate the most donations/research funds at Universities as an example. You can deny it all you want, but money and the accompanying power often has unintended effects.
Support gnuzilla! http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/
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I use it all the time. Even multiple levels of it.
I can GPG encrypt my message.
The server can use TLS when connecting to the other server.
This should be a top priority.
I would say you need a short-text-message introduction protocol
backed by a reputation network as the only way of starting a new
communication between unintroduced parties.
Introductions should have to include a category for the nature of
the communication, chosen from a small standard ontology.
This could serve to tag or bucket the intro short-messages for
systematic review separate from looking at my established
correspondents messages.
You need digital signature based sender identity confirmation.
Made as easy to use as current email for the sender and recipient.
That's about it.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
French administation plug in for thunderbird : (X400 etc ...) made by British Telecom
http://www.milimail.org/milimail/index.php/Main_Page
This venture is getting $3 million in start up capital? That's less than the Microsoft Outlook team spends on coffee and donuts. Is this targeted for single users or are they going after enterprise email? If they are going after enterprise then they'll need a lot of money and a lot of years.
#1. Lots of hooks. One of the reasons that Outlook/Exchange is so popular is that anyone can write an app that uses them and become "emain enabled". Yes, I know this is USUALLY (99.9%+) the WRONG way to do it (why do I need Outlook installed to monitor web traffic?) but I'm sure that it can be done correctly.
#2. Online and live BACKUPS! No more shutting down the server to get a decent backup OR buying expensive database backup software.
#3. Shared folders / calendars.
#4. Roles / identities / aliases / whatever. So I can send email as "postmaster" without having to log out of my user account and log into the postmaster account. And so "sales" will go to the entire sales team.
Any other requirements?
From the original announcement:
FireFox is maintained by the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, which is owned by the Mozilla Foundation. With version 2, Thunderbird was licensed by Mozilla Corporation as well (Thunderbird 1.5 was still Mozilla Foundation).
For-profit is working for them for FireFox, they probably just figured they'd try to do a similar child company for Thunderbird.
Someone mentioned the decreased headaches of being for-profit versus legally being a non-profit, and that could very well be the case. FireFox is doing well. It seems like they know what they are doing. I am always sceptical, it's in my nature, but this doesn't seem to be a red flag. It was a red flag for me when FireFox was moved into for-profit hands, but nothing bad has happened because of it.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
"a for-profit venture without the emphasis on profit."
ZOMG a golden opportunity! Let me call my broker...
You want it modular so that you can upgrade it or swap it out when a flaw is discovered in it.
Scenario:
My user account is linked to the role account of postmaster.
I go on vacation. I use principal/agent to assign LIMITED rights to my user account to someone else while I'm out. That also, by default, allows them access to postmaster through my account. That way I don't have to dig through a bunch of roles and accounts and then remember to take them back later.
But include switches so that I can limit/deny that if I really want to. Or assign it to someone else. But the default should be the easiest.
Open your email client. Look at the default colour of the messages. Most of them are black type on a white background.
I want the default colour to indicate that it has passed my tests for LEGITIMATE mail. I do NOT mean that is has not FAILED to be identified as spam.
This is mostly for business users. As the email admin, I should be able to identify the servers that send us legitimate email. So I can add headers that are known only to my system.
Any message NOT containing those headers will be shown in a different colour. Even if they pass all the anti-spam tests.
This is a change from identifying what MAY be spam. This is about identifying established relationships.
Always nice to have the windows users with us.
incredible (for the price).
Perhaps they could even have several versions, such as a Thunderbird "Lite" that only does email, and a full version that does groupware (calendars, address books, etc.) If they're smart, they'll make an effort to interoperate with existing open source groupware servers such as Citadel or Kolab instead of wasting resources building their own. There really is a market for this stuff out there.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
For f*ck sake. When will they understand? Why do you think the RIAA moron forwarded all his email to GMAIL? Because it is 10 faster to search in old emails! Outlook / Exchange totally sucks at everything except ONE: Send an invitation to 20 people for a meeting, book the room and the projector in ONE go, see on ONE screen who has accepted and synchronise the whole shitload with even the crappiest Nokia west of Honkong. You gonna make a better email, you better choose: either you make a corporate client with meeting requests built in, or you totally reinvent email. In this case I am talking about slowly building up a network of trusted SSMTP servers (Yahoo and GMAIL to start with) and make it VERY easy for people to avoid spam. Spam should not be detected in the client. The trusted mailservers should tag a mail as "probably spam" and then the client should just run the one rule: throw out everything marked as spam, unless the sender is in my adress book. The day people learn they can get zero spam with zero configuration, that is the day you will kick Outlooks butt (in the domestic marked).
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
What is actually happening - the way I see it - is that Mozilla (corporation/foundation) is finally abandoning its mail&news client formally. In practice this has been true for years - the number of mail&news developers is currently 2, compared to about... 150 IIRC people working on the browser (although this includes people working on joint core code, such as XPCOM, NSPR, necko, XUL, etc).
In recent years Mozilla is being bankrolled by Google: The choice of Google as the default search engine in Firefox means added revenue of > $5 Billion a year. Google has been paying back with some drops from that bucket - a few tens of Millions a year, see e.g. here (NY Times).
It seems to me (as an outsider and an occasional Thunderbird/Seamonkey extension developer) that effectively means that Google's interests have become, and will be from now paramount in Mozilla's policy. Now, if you're Google, you would be more interested in developing and expanding the use of a browser rather than a fast, modern, full-featured and easily extensible mail and newsgroups client (which I feel Thunderbird is _not_yet_, unfortunately) - this would mean people will tend not to use your webmail system and your web interface for newsgroups. This is bad for you, since you'll be seeing less ad revenue, you'll be able to collect a lot less useful marketing information about users, and your efforts to centralize users' Internet experience around services-servers-content which you control or are involved in will be impeded. So, obviously, you will want the money you donate to Mozilla - which should have 'rightfully' been divided differently (say, at least 25% for e-mail and news work - and that's being modest and not making 'affirmative action' demands).
Now you just need to spin this somehow, e.g. like this.
I do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little larger. I wish to break all prisons. -R.W. Emerson
Now we can have a *company* to manage our mail. They're so good about security, companies are. And we're going to elect them to do our mail, voting with our money?
How about a revamp of the email system? I've not heard any good, serious ones. And they all start with "But we'll only be able to talk to part of the crowd, with this change..."
(That's how it starts, but with a multi-homed email server...)
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
is this going to kill the new Thunderbird based Eudora?
I glad they are starting to tackle this head on. I think thunderbird has massive potential. There are a few things missing from it though. The first thing missing is a built-in calendar. I don't think lightning+sunbird is quite there yet.
I use thunderbird exclusively for my email.
Things I'd like to see:
built-in encryption for mail stores.
ability to choose mail store format.
calendar with outlook compatibility so I can sync with my phone.
better spam filtering.
better newsreader support. (built-in encoding and decoding of popular nntp formats)
firefox/thunderbird extension installation support. (I hate having to save and load into thunderbird.)
On the server end, I'd love to see a thunderbird collaboration suite of apps for thunderbird client and and new thunderbird group email server.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Is this where the Eudora code base is going to Join Thunderbird?
Perhaps it's a way for Thunderbird to stop playing second string to Firefox, and have a dedicated set of developers. That would be great, since there is so much potential if T-Bird gets developed independently.... it just seems like devs get burned out putting new code/features into Firefox, then Thunderbird is just an afterthought.
I would like to see some kind of P2P integration with E-Mail, so for example, my E-Mail program could try to deliver directly to anyone in my address book who is also logged in to the peer network at the time. No more need to storage of the mail on ISP's servers, since it is delivered directly when possible. Something like an IM Service that works like E-Mail... (ie: allows file attachments and doesn't pop up in your face all the time)
I also want the ability to use my GMail account like an IMAP account, since the E-Mail that comes into it is always stored on their server anyway. All that would initially be downloaded would be the headers and Body, anything else is only downloaded when requested. Then, when I close Thunderbird, it's not Stored on my machine, just cached for a short while and deleted at regular intervals.
Make America grate again!
There is nothing "bolted on" regarding encryption right now.
It is simple to add it. Very simple. And just as simple to change it.
You're contradicting yourself. If it is "everyone" then there is no one who is "left behind".
And that is the problem with your plan. It depends upon everyone doing something when the reality is that such will not happen.
A. If your system has a graceful failure to allow email to be transmitted even if the other side has not upgraded, you'll end up with the exact situation we have today. Because 99.9% of the people will stick with their current systems. Net result - no change.
B. If your system does NOT have a graceful failure, then no one will adopt it because it will not work with any of the established email systems. And your inability to send/receive email with them will be DIRECTLY attributed to your deployment of this "better" technology that just does not work. Net result - no change.
Most legitimate email is spam compliant, instead of readable, thoughtful, interesting, and well written. I would like more intelligently written emails.
Please please please, make the profile system much less obtrusive. It is so confusing to use, migrate, and handle these profiles in Thunderbird. It is why I don't use Thunderbird anymore. It kept breaking and was just too much hassle.
1. Do some stuff 2. Spin off Thunderbird 3. ??? 4. Profit!!
"A good friend with access to Microsoft's Exchange team suggested a reason for this, which came from Microsoft: the Exchange code is so old and so crumbly that Microsoft doesn't dare to fiddle with it. Yes, it would make perfect sense to centralize collaboration and social networking in the address book/e-mail client, but Microsoft apparently can't do this without risking the stability of its omnipresent e-mail client and server."
.net 2.0 managed code. Doesn't sound too much like "old and crumbly code that people don't dare fiddle with".
His "good friend" (assuming he even exists) has no clue what he's talking about. Anyone who's used or managed various versions of Exchange will have noticed that not only has administration, OWA and most things been evolving over time (simple example: compare OWA in Exchange 5.x, Exchange 2000, Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2007), but Exchange 2007 is mostly
Idiots like this guy need to grow up, they're the ones that make the OSS movement look like a bunch of mindless zealots. I mean, imagine you're an exchange admin who's looking to switch: you're just going to think "If this cnet guy needs to make stuff up to make this new mail server look good, I'm probably just going to waste my time trying it out"
Citadel (or, Citadel/UX specifically, see citadel.org homepage) might be worth looking at as an integrated mail/calendar system. It is already integrated and very simple to install and maintain.
If you are old enough to remember the heady days of BBSes in the 1980s, yes this is the same Citadel that you remember running many popular BBSes of the day (well one of them anyways--there were many clones and forks. The present Citadel originated in the mid 1980s as a port/rewrite of the original Citadel system written for CP/M to UNIX). Citadel is/was known for its "floors and rooms" model of navigation amongst its forums. The primary/native client is still the familiar text/terminal interface, however it is more commonly accessed and administered through the "webcit" web-based client.
In the past two decades it picked up SMTP, POP and IMAP support--email is treated like a special kind of message and your inbox and folders are types of rooms (ie. they are stored and handled largely like the BBS forum posts). Some time later Citadel got calendaring functionality, including CalDAV interoperability (IIRC, calendar events are simply specially structured messages within a special "room" as well). Also, the address book became LDAP-enabled and also supports the vCard standard and there is chatroom capability.
Since Citadel now knows POP, IMAP, vCard, CalDAV it could possibly be a good server for Thunderbird/Evolution/Kmail clients. Besides supporting the above standards they are also GPL3-licensed and fully publish the internal/native protocol used by the original citadel and webcit clients (much of it is recognisable from what was used in the pre-WWW days--it is compact and works quite well). You could in fact create your own servers and clients that interoperate with Citadel with relative ease.
The other great thing that Citadel carried over from the BBS days is horizontal scalability so that multiple Citadels on many hosts can join into a net and keep in sync (this came from the way BBSes on dialup had to transport messages between them as Fidonet etc. were known to do). In fact, Citadel has the potential of handling enterprise-wide email/groupware needs.
Perhaps this new "code name MailCo" corporation might do well to work with the Citadel people or others in an effort to build a TOTAL email/groupware solution (client AND server). The IT world could really use something to offer up against IBM Bloated Goats and Microsoft Derange Server.
I hope that MailCo will take Sunbird as well. Both Thunderbird and Sunbird have huge potential married together. The Lightning project is trying to do that but Sunbird is moving slowly and Thunderbird now getting a new team behind it we may finally see the thing that we thought we would see: A new email.
I hope that they can create an open source alternative to Outlook and Exchange. Heck go for the max and replace SMTP and IMAP/POP with some new protocols. Say OMD (Open Mail Delivery) and OMBR (Open MailBox Retrieval) and create new rules around it. Think of it as Email 2.0 (seems like everything is 2.0 these days). This could be used to start from the ground up and make email even harder to spoof and address the exploits that spam use.
I hope that they give away the software and charge for the support like other open source companies. I look forward to seeing what they come up with.
Procrastinating life a way at a rapid rate of speed.
Being for-profit is also a good way to hide the Google money so the IRS and open-source community don't ask too many questions about it.
The red flag for MailCo is not its for-profit status, but the combination of for-profit and no-revenue sounds like a recipe for failure.
That's a shame, they obviously shoulda called it Mailzilla.
$ echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'
Hey first nigger, you da one dat stole my fried chiken and wutermelon?
What problems did you have with profiles? After TB 1.0, these have been stable. You can have a default profile (so never need to see the profile manager).
Yet.
So if the goal really is to "overhaul" internet communications (presumably into some better form than what is common today), is it really a good idea to start with the Mozilla codebase? Wouldn't a blank slate make more sense?
I find it irritating that many ISPs block suspected spam without any notification to the recipient except in fine print on the terms of use document. It's much wiser for mail servers to tag suspected spam with an easy to filter string rather than drop it completely. This way the client is sure to receive every piece of mail and can choose to open their spam box to check occasionally. If they find mail that was falsely tagged, there should be a simple "not spam" mechanism for reporting back to the server.
Imagine if the US Postal service decided what mail was rubbish and trashes one of your credit card bills because it contained the word viagra. It's not for them to decide.
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
Still packaged like that but you could go and change it. It just makes their testing etc easier. I've found it works just fine now A lot of the reason for slowness in older versions was the spam handling etc - they've improved th configuration and it works pretty smoothly now.