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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.
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.
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.
#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?
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
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