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.

Comments

Profit?

[Eponymous Bastard]

will be a for-profit venture without the emphasis on profit.

Quick! When's the IPO?!?

Re:Profit?

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Create New Internet Mail and Communications Company
2. ???
3. Don't profit much!

Before anyone hates

[porkThreeWays]

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.

Chance to fix email?

[DeadlyBattleRobot]

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.

Re:Chance to fix email?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

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.

Lost Cause

[Seumas]

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.

Re:Lost Cause

[Seumas]

I actually don't have a problem with instant messaging. For example, my company uses our own IM product exclusively, because we are distributed all around the globe and many of us telecommute. Without IM, we'd be in a lot of pain. And for the world in general, IM is a different method of communication, rather than a version supplanting an already existing similar method. There's email, IM and telephone. But MySpace and similar "services" do nothing but erode these "big three".

It's sad that after decades of an evolving internet, the userbase is largely reverting to the sort of "singular resource" method of contact that we had to deal with on BBSes. That's ridiculous. If MySpace is down or slow (which it always is), you aren't able to communicate. Not to mention, you have little control over spam and you're giving all of your communications to the Fox News Corp databases.

There are so many people, however, who use ONLY social networks to communicate through and they rarely (if ever) check their email. It sucks to be essentially forced into creating an account somewhere and having to add it as one more point to check every day just in case those few people send you something. For these reasons, I hate social networks with a passion. They are seeking to consume eyeballs from users by taking over everything people typically use the internet for -- but constraining all of these services to one unreliable commercial network.

I just hope this trend does not continue.

Re:Lost Cause

[Ajehals]

It's currently the best well to tell everyone in a large group about some minor change in the office. No. The best way to communicate a change to an office is clearly to hold a meeting that includes all the stakeholders, all those directly effected by the change and anyone who may at some time be directly or indirectly impacted by the change, Preferably the meeting should be held off site. Email is for inviting people to that meeting (preferably by sending 3 or four emails and an .ical with the date listed.

Re:Lost Cause

[turbidostato]

"For these reasons, I hate social networks with a passion."

This, of course, being said on an HTTP-based site that adds absolute nothing to the NNTP protocol and paradigm it predates.

Re:Lost Cause

[Rich0]

Don't forget to send reminder emails 2 weeks in advance, 1 week in advance, day of, 5 minutes before, and 10 minutes into the meeting when attendance is low.

It isn't like that functionality would be better implemented in a calendar application or anything like that...

Integrate SpamBayes!

[FuzzyDaddy]

they should fix spam

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!

Re:Integrate SpamBayes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you probably wouldn't refer to it as v1agr8 and your wouldn't be worried about your pepper not staining up.

Re:Integrate SpamBayes!

[Xtravar]

As I always tell people, what If I am emailing my doctor about Viagra. Then you should obviously spell it "v1agra" to avoid the filter, duh.

On a more serious note, doctors shouldn't communicate medical information via email since it's insecure and patient information is confidential. I think there are probably rules about that... I message my doctor (not about viagra) through my HMO's website, which coincidentally utilizes the electronic health record software my company makes.

Don't let code rot by "employees"

[Gopal.V]

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)

What madness is this?!

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

Re:What madness is this?!

[gzerphey]

This is Sparta?

::Shrugs:: Yeah, I know, I'm leaving.

Re:What madness is this?!

[The One and Only]

Good, we were about to taser you.

Just give me....

[HerculesMO]

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.

Re:MS Exchange

[bsod_vista]

You mean like this or this or even this?

Start a list of requirements you'd suggest.

[khasim]

#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?

Re:Encryption is already available.

[kwerle]

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.

Re:$3 Million is not enough

[dascritch]

And gazillions of lines of code from Mozilla, from Eudora, perhaps from MiliMail etc.... That's a lot of leverage !

Re:Stop The Bus!

[Rhapsody Scarlet]

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? So they can make money from business dealings and funnel that money into the Mozilla Foundation to further the development of the products they sell. It's exactly what the Mozilla Corporation has been doing for a while now.

For-profit, not new or necessarily bad for Mozilla

[dreemernj]

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.

You do not want it "built in".

[khasim]

You want it modular so that you can upgrade it or swap it out when a flaw is discovered in it.

Default colours for verified email.

[khasim]

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.

Only one shot

[spectrokid]

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).

A mail server should never delete mail

[kylehase]

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.