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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.
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
Aye, source and destination client encrypts, with a special passphrase entry in the mail details?
Ex: I give you my email address in a file with
1) My email address
2) The encryption key
3) My passphrase *for you*
Now, when I recieve an email, I decrypt it, if the passphrase and email match my personal database, it's flagged as good, otherwise it is treated as spam.
Something like that?
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 disagree, email is still the dominant form of communication online. Although instant messaging and facebook are creeping up, especially amongst youth, the VAST majority of people still use email. Although some integration with Facebook would be pretty cool, Facebook itself is a fad. In 10 years, will it still be as popular as it is today? Just consider the examples set by Xanga, MySpace, and the rest that have fallen or are falling by the wayside. Email, however, will be around for a long time, and an improvement in the protocols would ensure its staying power.
#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?
And you can also add the the list: piglatin, rot13.
But none of that is BUILT IN from the ground up. It's all tacked on - sometimes.
And that makes all the difference.
You want it modular so that you can upgrade it or swap it out when a flaw is discovered in it.
If they want to make money the should spam and sell privacy info.
That seems to make more money these days. And as the lead developers of the mail program, they should have an easy time bypassing any anti-spam filters built in, and include a root kit to mine for more valuable personal information.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
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.
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
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!