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Mozilla Opens Thunderbird Email Subsidiary
alphadogg is one of several readers to note the opening of the Mozilla Foundation's new subsidiary, Mozilla Messaging, charged with developing the free, open source Thunderbird email software. Mozilla Messaging will initially focus on Thunderbird 3, which aims at improving several aspects of the software, including integrated calendaring and better search. ZDNet UK's coverage leads with the interest the new organization has in developing instant-messaging software.
Will the calendar work with exchange?
The CEO of this new Mozilla Messaging company writes the most insightful blog post containing the most hopeful look at the future of messaging and how Thunderbird could make a difference there... and slashdot links to mostly useless informationweek and zdnet stories?? Bleh...
David Ascher really gives me hope for where things are going - but he can't do it alone. And he can't get the people who'd help to do so if he's being ignored!
of life.
... something.
He'll still get attention - and you get bucket loads of slashdot karma. It's a win
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Rofl, like the folks concerned would see them. Anyway, what would be nice would be an effective filtering mechanism for Usenet groups. I try to use the current filtering system in Thunderbird and it just sucks all kinds of ass. I'd also love to see a way to rescind filtering and accidentally killed threads.
Yeah, I know, wishful thinking, good luck.
All these stories about open source software seem to be joining in a symphony that is ringing a death knoll for MS.
I guess not everything needs to be a MS killer, but where will they be once jabber based instant messaging, calDAV calendaring, and SSL IMAP are commonplace, easily integrated, federated and administered?
What FireFox did to their web dominance, these open protocols, standards and software will do to the rest of their business. (Embarrass and decimate.)
What advantages will Exchange have over a system that integrates and works nicely on a dozen different hardware devices, from servers to phones, without having to pay MS a single dollar?
Sure they'll still have their Visual Studio and Office, but boy they'll be crying over how much money they should/could have been making.
Consider their failures:
-XBox
-XBox 360 (May be early to call it a complete failure, but now that HD-DVD is dead, sony will ride them like a reverse cowgirl)
-Live? wtf?
-MSN Search
-Windows Mobile
They are truly stuck in a rut, a rut that seems to be getting deeper and deeper. (I should add...Thanks to Linux, Mozilla, FOSS, open-ness in general and other ideas that MS simply can't comprehend.)
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
I would like to see a search capability like that in the defunct Bloomba e-mail client (now the basis of WordPerfect Mail). The entire text of every piece of mail was indexed which made searches very fast. It was also easy to set up virtual folders (based on search criteria) to associate your e-mail according to several criteria. A given mail could appear in several folders, not just one. The company called it a Personal Content Database. The Bloomba client also incorporated a calendar and an anti-spam proxy.
The company producing the software, Stata Labs, sold the technology to Yahoo in 2004. It has since been resold to Corel for use in their WordPerfect Mail.
Never let reality temper imagination
Never let reality temper imagination
Email is not what people are after. Dopn't get me wrong, people want to send and receive email. That's a no brainer, but, there are a myriad to clients out there that do the job quite well. Some of the clients are stand-alone and some are web based.
Some of the clients also offer a "calendar" where you can store events.
However, what the world needs (to avoid Microsoft's dominance) is a shared calendaring system integrated into the same email client. I use Outlook at work. At the end of the day, I care nothing what I use to send emails with, but I do care that I can view others' calendars in Outlook, and that I can send them invites and see if they've got something in the calendar or not. That is what many people are looking for, not another email client.
This will never happen on the client side if there is no server backend to manage the data and the sharing permissions.
If you build it, people will come.
My two cents.
I think that the IM market is already quite flooded with competitors (competing protocols and competing unofficial multi-protocol clients). The most intelligent thing for Mozilla to do is perhaps build its own @mozillamail.com email system (or similar domain) with easy Thunderbird integration and integrate it with an XMPP client/server. XMPP is the way to go these days. In that way, folks who already have XMPP accounts (Livejournal users, Gmail users, and soon AIM users) can contact those using the Mozilla Mail service.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
another obscure IM client with a neurotic-friendly GUI will catch on in all the heavily saturated markets.
Until it will sync calendar and contacts with my cell phone. Until then I'm joined at the hip to MS and Outlook.
Personally, what I'd like to see is an e-mail client that comes by default with working encryption... that is to say, it tells other e-mail clients what encryption choices it offers and learns from messages it receives and always chooses the best encryption option when sending messages to others. Further, I'd like that choice to handle when I send a message to a CC list of 30 people, such that it will send messages to all users, some encrypted and some not, but still letting all users get the full CC list for responses. Ideally I'd like to see this built upon an open standard that has buy in not only from the Thunderbird team, but also other major vendors (IBM, Sun, Apple, etc.) as well as other types of software (IM, VoIP, video conferencing, etc.)
Seriously, in this day and age doesn't ist seem idiotic that easy to use encryption is not a built in feature for most e-mail clients? I know why Google hasn't done this (they have a conflict of interest) but what have e-mail software vendors been doing for the last 5 years? How is it possible that someone like Apple hasn't jumped on this and made a snarky advert where the "Mac guy" says, "Oh really, I put my mail in envelopes so random strangers and people at the post office can't read the letters I send to my bank and girlfriend."
Are the Qualcomm developers who support Penelope part of this? Will their work be incorporated into Thunderbird, or is it a separate project?
DMCA - Chilling free speech since 1998.
After Qualcomm got out of the e-mail client business and handed Eudora over to Mozilla, I wish that the Mozilla folks would just enhance the Eudora program - like they were "supposed to do." Whine-ingly
Lightning supports both WebDAV and CalDAV, which allow calendar sharing. It plays with google calendar & Apple's iCal. It just doesn't play with Outlook/Exchange.
Evolution works with exchange, as does MS's Outlook Web Access.
Supports "the big four." And then some.
/* No Comment */
Having just solved an enigmatic Microsoft Exchange problem that even their own support "specialists" could not assist with, I really hope this is the light at the end of the tunnel for a centralized messaging/calendering platform. Keep it simple, keep it safe. My god, my bosses spend thousands of dollars each year for platform licenses, upgrades and my labor, just to keep the ugly monster that is "groupware" running. All for just a synchronized calendering and email program so the managers can share their agendas without headaches. Assuming that is ALL they use their Outlook clients for, is it the server backend really that complicated to develop? Why is it 2008 and the only other alternatives that I could possibly levee the executives for is IBM and Novell? Until a low-cost or free competitive alternative appears that is stable and reasonably straight-forward to troubleshoot, it sometimes hard not to suspect the industry of committing pseudo Programmed Obsolesce.
"I drank what?" -Socrates
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." -Mark Twain
The Mozilla Foundation has the money, bit I like the KDE applications better. Kmail beats Thunderbird by far - and the rest of the kde-pim applications are pretty well developed. Could the Mozilla Foundation join forces with KDE? there are many, many challenges. For example there is an urgend need for an appication that synchronizes with your online calendar and your cell phone. KDE applications could use somthing like Linkification and severals other Mozilla addons, Mozilla needs help in evrythin which is not a browser.
"ZDNet UK's coverage leads with the interest the new organization has in developing instant-messaging software."
:p
Yeah, because thats really what we need right now, yet ANOTHER IM protocol/app.
XMPP is king, upgrade your clients accordingly.
If Mozilla want to do something useful, they should develop a Evolution server suite, which should be AS EASY TO USE and as powerful as Exchange, and I mean GUI's for the 90% of sysadmins who don't want to spend years reading manpages and breaking config files. Then you'll really see Evolution Client adoption in businesses.
The open source movement could have real potential if there where more collaboration between projects. This I feel will always be a thorn in the side of the OS movement, as collaboration is MUCH easier in person and with money to throw at problems. It'd be great to see some projects forking to try some collaborations. Like a uber-groupware package
People ultimately choose Microsoft software because everything comes neatly packaged, and slots together wonderfully easily for a beginner. Exchange working with Active Directory, and Office on the client machines, is very easy to set up and maintain, they work together in harmony, and by and large, it doesn't break. People and monopoly commissions bitch constantly about Microsoft's reluctance to open its protocols, to allow similar interoperability with other systems, but the best way to beat them, is to provide to decent competition.
Compare this to a Linux setup. You'll need to download many different packages, and glue them together with config files to get a comparable setup. Even then, lets face it, working with config files, and with Linux setup in general is nothing like as intuitive as the Microsoft experience. (Don't take from this that I don't like Linux, far from it, it is my OS of choice, but it simply doesn't appeal to non techies)
That is all.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
A lot of people use the example of Exchange Server as a reason that open source will not displace MS in the business world. They like to point out that no open source program interfaces properly with its calendaring function, damning all these clients to hobbyist hell. It has become an obsession.
However, I think that in trying to emulate outlook in this respect, open source projects such as thunderbird have lost the innovative edge that other OSS projects have. I am convinced that Exchange Server is as good as dead and google docs is going to kill it. Google docs does everything that Exchange Server does, and it is in many respects better. It is innovative (labeling, for example), and most importantly, you don't need a client of any kind to use it. Just a web browser and there is no client side configuration at all. From an IT side, it is certainly easier to deploy and manage than Exchange server. Google already offers domain accounts for free, I think at least in part to prevent small and growing businesses from getting hooked on Exchange in the first place.
I bet that in the near future google is going to start selling the software that runs google docs for clients to run on their own servers. I would also bet that they will develop Exchange Server migration tools soon.
However, there is no reason why an open source project could not have done this. In the arena of website content management systems, open source projects such as TYPO3, Joomla! and phpwebsite are the leaders because instead of trying to emulate Microsoft Frontpage, they came up with good, innovative solutions oriented toward real people. Similarly, SugarCRM and phpBMS are leaders in small to medium business client management systems for the same reason: instead of emulating Microsoft Access, they are innovative, powerful, easily managed web-based solutions. None of these projects are less ambitious than google docs.
In getting so hung up on the question you just posed, we are going to see yet another generation of Outlook clones that will never be as good as Outlook because the open source developers cannot take the Exchange Server apart like Outlook developers can. We should stop asking that question and start asking what we can do to make that question irrelevant.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
You can subscribe to your Facebook notifications as an RSS feed in Thunderbird, and click to open each message in Firefox.
The reason that Microsoft has such a stronghold in certain markets is they have vendor lock in.
Office formats in the past weren't easily usable with other office suites.
Exchange server doesn't work with other email clients without a plug in. (this is for the extra stuff such as calender in outlook)
MSN messenger would not be easy to bring over to the jabber platform for the simple reason that Microsoft decided it would be a good idea to use users email addresses as users login names. Try explaining to a user why they need another @example ontop of their login. End user confusing yes.
The live services. Is one of the most confusing branding methods. Is it for the xbox is it a messaging platform? It's more of a umbrella brand that includes everything.
Windows mobile, I don't know how they got that on so many mobiles other then at the time people wanted features that other operating systems didn't offer (Palm, Symbian.) Hopefully there will be more choice once Android hits (which I really like, it does things right for a mobile platform)
So will Microsoft go away as soon as we would like. Well no unfortunately but the options of replacement have been good and are eating away at Microsoft's once empire. This discussion could go on for a long time as to what is vendor locked in or why people keep going with a broken methodology.
They (the people) don't know better, and Microsoft takes advantage of that. That's what I attribute most of it too.
The two things that keep me using gmail:
- Grouping related emails into conversations
- Unobtrusive chat built-in
I don't use chat enough to remember to start up MSN or AIM or whatever when I'm at the computer. But I'll chat occasionally on gmail because it's always open if I'm at my computer anyway.
Put those two things into Thunderbird and I'll use it.
So with there being no mention of the Eudora code base that Qualcomm gave to the Mozilla folks, does this mean there are no plans for those features in Thunderbird? Does Eudora only have implications for the Penelope project?
I think it would be a shame if all we got out of Qualcomm's Eudora are some very superficial changes (new buttons, etc). Then again, maybe I have an overly rosey memory of Eudora and it really didn't have much to contribute.
While I have my little soap-box, how come Thunderbird doesn't start off with a Junk email folder so that I can mark something as Junk and have it go to that folder? Apparently, there are people out there who don't get Junk email!
How about not losing e-mail as a priority for Thunderbird 3.0? Or an automated backup system? I've had Thunderbird lose all my e-mail randomly, the profile became corrupted and there was no easy way to retrieve it.. (Which is why I use IMAP now.. =) )
-Myke
You might want to try Citadel, which has integrated email, group conversations and shared calendaring.
My IM client of choice on Windows is Miranda. I quit using Trillian Pro in favor of Miranda.
Did you try Google? For me it lists 13 of them: SIM, Proteus, Pidgen(GAIM), OpenWengo, Miranda, Meebo, Kopete, Fire, Centericq, BitlBee, Ayttm, Agile Messenger, and Adium.
Is there a reason the guys at Cerulean can do IM so well where the open source community hasn't to date?Trillian is a fine IM client, provided you only use Windows (don't need suport for other OS's) and don't mind paying for interoperability with some protocols. I used to use it when trapped on a Windows box at work years ago. That said, claiming the open source clients can't compete or don't exist just exposes that you've never bothered to look. For a reality check go look at the comments on arstechnica when the Trillian OS X client was announced. To summarize, the reaction was a big yawn, since there are several clients available on both Linux and OS X that are free (as in beer) and OSS and are as functional and polished or more. Heck Trillian doesn't even support OTR without a beta version of a third-party plug-in. In fact plug-ins only work on the pro "for pay" version so if you want to chat with something like a Google GTalk user, or XMPP over ZeroConf you have to shell out for a non-crippled version. If you're stuck using just Windows it is a reasonably easy answer, but I'd rather use Pidgin these days and probably Kopete within the next few months now that it is abstracted from the OS enough to be built for Windows and OS X.
Let me answer your question with a question. Why do you assume there are no OSS solutions instead of spending 2 minutes with Google?
Allow me - again - to propose a moratorium on all "Microsoft is dying" posts until all the following conditions are met:
1 MS stops reporting 15%-20% growth each quarter.
2 MS stops reporting 30% growth in "emerging markets," 20% growth in the EU and 15% growth in the U.S.
3 MS no longer has the energy or the resources to underwrite projects such as the design and launch of a communications satellite for Africa. Microsoft plans comms satellite for Africa
4 MS stops paying dividends.
5 MS no longer holds $20 billion - $30 billion - $40 billion in cash.
6 MS begins borrowing money to meet its expenses - not to finance a takeover of Yahoo!
I went trolling Mozilla.Com for Thunderbird development info (roadmaps, release date projections) recently and found it startlingly bare in terms of Thunderbird related material.
Basic functionality works pretty well, but the editor is braindead, especially when it comes to switching back and forth between HTML/Plain Text edits.
And there needs to be some more options/tuning of the IMAP engine. First off, 5 connections as the default is broken, and I'd like to see IMAP locks get broken and stay broken by other IMAP client access. Thunderbird tends to hang on to them which makes other client access (eg, remote) go read-only, which sucks when your pocket vibrates with "new" mail Thunderbird has conveniently re-marked "unread". Outlook Express does this better.
I'd also like to see the reading pane status selectable per account (eg, on for news, off for email).
But development seems pretty bare.
hopefully mozilla wont feel the need to reinvent the wheel and will use libpurple!
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Unless there is something wrong with Pidgin and Kopete that I do not know about, you need to retract this comment.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Currently the only reason I need to run Windows on my work laptop is MS Office, especially Outlook working with Exchange. I have a Linux workstation that I use for almost everything, the only reason I have to have to take my laptop out of the bag is for mail and calender. I have tried Evolution, and I find it to be very clunky and jerky.
That's what kvm is for.
Including sit physically secure in my server room? I hate Exchange too, and also think email clients should stick to email instead of adding the kitchen sink, but Google isn't going to kill MS until people can have control over the hardware it runs on.
Exchange isn't going to die anytime soon. No matter how good Google Aps is, no one with half a brain and a medium to large buisness.. is going to give Google power over their email severs. Too many sensitive documents go out and come in, through email. No one wants someone else to have power over their business by controlling access to those documents. Sure, we geeks can tout it as a triumph of innovation or whatever the buzz word is this week, but you'll never see google aps as a replacement for Exchange and Outlook. And those two products really should be called one product, because its not till you put them together that either really shines. Its a symbiotic relationship. You can't build a better open source exchange server and have it succeed without a better open source version of outlook. Want to see Exchange die? Lock the writers of Qmail and Thunderbird in a room for a few months, and keep delivering them beer and pizza through a mail slot.
I know it was a bit long, but if you're going to reply you could at least read the whole post.
I bet that in the near future google is going to start selling the software that runs google docs for clients to run on their own servers.Even if they don't do this, a lot of users (especially smaller businesses without dedicated IT staff) would prefer not to be responsible for the hardware, anyway. Larger ones not so much.
Personally I think it's more likely they'll sell hardware which runs their software, similar to the Google Mini search appliance. Or perhaps even add the functionality to Google Mini: a box that costs a few grand that can index just about all your data and hosts your email and calendar. That'd be a pretty compelling offering for people starting up businesses.
How about email archiving abilities built into Thunderbird? That would be nice. I use Thunderbird for my mailing list account. I get a couple thousand messages a day and I never delete mail. Archiving options would be nice.
By far the absolute biggest, largest, most grand and lacking feature is the ability to store Thunderbird settings on the damn server so I can fire up Thunderbird from multiple locations and still have full access to my configured filters. Please!!! I would pay good money for that feature.
I was an avid Thunderbird user, have been for a long time. But then I transfered all my email to Google apps (GMail). I tried the web interface... and found myself using it more and more often, until eventually I realized I hadn't used Thunderbird for 1-2 months. So I installed the Gmail and Google calendar provider into Thunderbird thinking I might use it more... and I did at first... but then I found myself back in the web interface more often than not. To me the email client is no longer a concern, unless I plan to travel and need offline access I can't imagine myself using anything but the web interface to GMail if I am online (which more and more is the case).
Wow, there's a bleeding edge one! It's only been public for a few months and is on version 0.1. It looks promising, but with a long way to go before it is competitive with some of the other offerings in the market. I hope they pull off the multi-platform support well, without becoming a least common denominator offering that cannot take advantage of the platform specific differences (integration with native address books, services for OS X, package managers on Linux, etc.).
I happen to be one of the unfortunate masses whose employer insists on MS Exchange for all its scheduling needs. Since I work on a linux box, this is a constant source of frustration. My day job will become noticeably easier if the OpenChange project yields a solid and reasonably featured open source Exchange client.
Thunderbird has no revenue source. Without help from the profit generated by Firefox (primarily from Google), Thunderbird is doomed, at least in terms of centrally paying people to develop it.
It's been cast off to fend for itself. I'd expected a more altruistic attitude from an organization calling itself "The Mozilla Foundation," and am rather disappointed by this change.
Kid-proof tablet..
Video, Voice, and File Transfers.
;)
Also, at least some OSS IM developers (pidgin) seem to believe that since they don't feel like adding video/voice support to the clients, then clearly no one wants it. Reliable File Transfers tend to get written off as "too hard, use ftp."
Check out their Faq/Feature pages some time. Clearly they know what we really want despite what we're asking for.
A good example of how to do it right would be Adium. It's just gaim/pidgin underneath afaik, but they've added features that users want, so the underpinnings must be in there. Unfortunately, it's mac only, so not much for cross-platform.
Kopete is way ugly too, does that count?
The PC is the mainframe... The people worrying about MS Exchange are like mainframe developers predicting or worrying about some obscure business application. It's irrelevant. You're 3, 5 years behind the times already.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(mobile_phone_platform)
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS8591201260.html
http://www.symbian.com/phones/index.html
This is the now, not the future, Microsoft have already lost, and they have admitted it. All their Windows mobile devices?
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/pocketpc/default.mspx?curPg=All
Almost all, industrial applications.
Deleted
i fear that its being attacked from the wrong end.
whats needed isnt so much a new client that can integrate 1001 different protocols, but a server that can do so, and that one can connect to using any interface out there.
as in, a one stop shop online for mail, im, chat and whatsnot. hell, if one could merge mail, im and chat into a single protocol one would be half way there. and with the recent extensions to xmpp it may well happen.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Quote: "A lot of people use the example of Exchange Server as a reason that open source will not displace MS in the business world."
The reason it isn't working is because there are too many open-source exchange like projects. Therefore, none of them gets all of the features which are needed.
To succeed, they should bundle all forces and create ONE solution.
When we were looking for a Groupware solution, I have tried several open source solutions.
They all failed in one of the following:
- Open source Outlook connector isn't working properly;
- PDA synchronization is poor (of doesn't support a lot of devices);
- No windows client exists;
- Features were missing.
In the end, they all failed the pilot.
So we ended up with Novell Groupwise (through Novell Open Workgroup suite), which I have become a great fan of. It also made me see the immaturity of the open source projects.
Groupwise includes -any- feature our users are asking for, while the open source solutions lacked a lot of things.
Also, with Groupwise Mobile Server it is possible to synchronize mail, contacts, appointments with any smartphone over GPRS. (A feature we are using very intensively, since it's actually a complete blackberry alternative for no additional cost)
If you look at the development model of Groupwise you can clearly see why open source can't succeed.
For one, Groupwise has been developed for at least 10 years.
Also, Novell purchases all kinds of company's or additional products to quickly add a lot of extra features in the standard package they sell.
Since the open source movement has to develop everything themselves and didn't have such a large head-start, it is almost impossible for them to succeed.
I use mainly the Yahoo IM protocol since all my friends use it. I have ditched their official client for about 8 months since I consider it adware/spyware/bloatware. :)
I have been using Pidgin since and I believe that it is the best alternative however there is one downside that completely pisses me off: file transfer does not work, and this absolutely sucks. I don't miss the audio/video capabilities of Y!M, nor the IMviroments and the craptacular audibles, but not having efficient file transfer capabilities kind of feels like regression. Meh... I guess I'll just live without it since I will never install Y!M on my computer again. I hope Microsoft buys them off and buries them so everybody can move to an open standard IM protocol
p.s. here's a table with a comparison of IM clients http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_instant_messaging_clients
I still know the days we were talking about a 1% market share of firefox.
Then people started to talk about 5% and later 10%
Today it's on 15% (perhaps more?) already, which is quite a lot. And virtually any website created today supports firefox correctly.
Also, back in the days MS had about 99% of the OS market, now I see you mentioning 90%.
Not even to mention the server market, in which Linux is making some very good progress.
10+ years ago when I started working with Linux nobody even knew what it was. Today a lot of (non-tech) people know what Linux is, so that is some real progress.
Don't forget the fact that the numbers start growing more and more rapidly as the market share increases.
If the current trend progresses in about 10 years we'll be at around 50% or something. (Please correct me if I'm wrong)
I'm old fashioned, and have always used a mail client rather than web mail where possible as I like having a rich editing environment. In recent years I have moved to IMAP mail wherever I can in order to be able to at least read my mail pretty much anywhere. Thunderbird (and Firefox)'s OS portability has made it possible to have a common mail interface on practically any computer, but what is still missing, as has been said elsewhere, is a common environment. This is where Gmail et al (but mostly GMail) has the advantage: it can be run practically anywhere that there is a web browser and Internet access. Now that Gmail has POP3 and IMAP access it can be integrated into Thunderbird. Similarly there is at least one application (for OS X at the moment - it's called Mailplane) that integrates Gmail with the desktop and hooks into iPhoto, iTunes, Growl and the other things that make OS X a cool working environment. A lot of these things are probably available as extensions for Thunderbird.
The gap is physical portability: for me, the ability to open Thunderbird on any machine and retrieve your environment, or indeed, have a Thunderbird-like experience (terrible phrase) through a web browser would be very valuable. Thunderbird has a common configuration format that can be read across a WAN all ready, and it seems to me that that could be extended across the Internet in a relatively trivial way, and could be applied to a web browser interface in the same way: there could also be an option for offline configuration storage on a USB key or similar. There would be a public network and the option to have private servers (free software of course, with paid support) that could either be internal or Internet facing. The aim would be for Thunderbird to become a genuinely portable communications environment that would provide an alternative to or even a complement for Exchange or Lotus Notes while using FOSS components.
I use Pidgin on Windows and Linux and have just switched to Adium on OS X after using Mercury for a while, but getting frustrated with its closedness and the idiosyncrasies of its developer, and was surprised to see that there still isn't webcam support, which is somewhat remiss given the ubiquity of cams on laptops these days (Mercury does have it, and file transfer that works). This does strike me as a bit of a show-stopper at the moment, and it may well be that if Mozilla Messaging adopts libpurple as its IM library, that would be the place in which development should initially concentrate.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Hopefully this will mean that some /actual/ progress will be made on Thunderbird. I've been using it for years and I do like it, but the Lightening calendar add on is terrible, and it lacks some 'nice to have' features.
As to those who've lost their email due to corrupted files... this happens to Outlook too. Just write a batch script to backup your mail folder once in a while. Problem solved.
And no, Gmail is not a viable alternative to a desktop mail client. Don't get me wrong, I think Google's services are great and I use Gmail for somethings, but having your entire email universe in Google's hands is foolish.
Anyway, I hope this announcement will mean some major upgrades to T bird and soon.
Someone on Slashdot uses a single protocol IM client?!? Wow! I haven't even considered using one of those since the 90's. Now I haven't used WLM personally, but it is my understanding that it currently has no support for AOL IM, ICQ, IRC, or Skype. Jabber support is only in the closed beta of version 9. It is further my understanding that there is no client for Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, Blackberry, PalmOS, or pretty much anything other than Windows, the XBox, and a pay-by-the-month client for some Nokia phones. It is also my understanding that it does not support XMMP via ZeroConf and has no support for encryption. Finally, it is one of the three clients out there (the others being YIM and AIM) that is targeted by and is occasionally vulnerable to malware.
I suppose if you don't ever want to send and receive IM's from AIM, Jabber, ICQ, Skype, IRC, Mac OS, Linux, iPhone, Blackberry, or Palm users and you are not concerned about security or who reads your messages and you only use Windows and you never want to auto-discover other users on a LAN, well then I suppose Windows Live Messenger would work. I actually think you might be the only person I've ever talked to that met all those criteria though.
" but Google isn't going to kill MS until people can have control over the hardware it runs on."
This appears to assume that people assume their own "in house" technical people are going to do a better job of looking after their data than Google would. I'm not sure how many people would bet on their own geeks vs Google geeks.
Basically, we don't have the money or space (or energy) to manage an Exchange server in-house, and our email is already hosted off-site, through our website provider. So moving to Google realistically offers no drawbacks I've been able to think of (as I'm sure our web host would hand over our sensitive documents as readily, if not more so, than Google) and will finally let us do calendaring and simple document sharing (neither of which we're able to do particularly well right now). In addition, everyone is already using Thunderbird, from the previous GM's tech decisions, and I anticipate using the calendaring plugin for Thunderbird, coupled with GCalDaemon or a Thunderbird syncing plugin, to be a huge improvement over our current system. And, since I've already played with GCalDaemon on my home computer to sync with my personal Google account, I don't anticipate many transition pains. Likewise, I know the small non-profit down the hall is also using Google Apps for Domains for their email.
Again, I think you're right - from everything I've heard, Exchange and Outlook are a fantastic solution on a medium or large network, if you have the resources for them. But for small businesses with little or no IT staff, it's overkill and Google Apps for Domains seems to be a pretty great solution.
-Trillian
He's exactly right. Add in SMS logging and unified contact management (Cellphone phonebook synchronization + email address book, etc) and you have a huge winner.
Using this approach the message could arrive via a window showing a virtual aggregated IRC/sms channel the user was talking in, or if the user was mobile and the message was urgent could arrive via SMS to his phone. Heck, both of them could be using SMS and neither of them would know or care whether the other was online or not.
Imagine being able to send a message to someone and not care what address they are at right now or how to contact them.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
Why do you assume there are no OSS solutions instead of spending 2 minutes with Google?
I guess I didn't clarify my definition of "adequate". The OSS solutions are in my opinion inadequate.
Pidgin, GAIM et al for some reason refuse to support features that aren't offered universally by IM networks. For example, Yahoo! has chat rooms, ICQ has "find a random user" functions, MSN has video chat. But because MSN doesn't have chat rooms, GAIM won't support connecting to the Yahoo chat rooms. Because Yahoo! doesn't have "find a random user", GAIM won't support that function for the ICQ network... ICQ and MSN and Yahoo all use different video protocols - the OSS solution to this problem? Don't use any! You end up cutting off a huge amount of functionality that these networks have and I have no idea why.
The trillian developers have tried to include functionality from every network where it applies, whereas the OSS community seems to scoff and ignore any functionality that is not universally supported. As a result, open source clients are deficient in each case compared to the native messaging client, and when compared to Trillian, deficient as a messaging amalgamation tool.
I want to believe in the OSS message, that's why I'm asking. Why isn't there better compatibility with each of the features the messaging networks use? Trillian can do it. Why can't OSS?
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Yes, that's exactly the point I was trying to make.
The Trillian guys have gone crazy in the Alpha builds adding support for video/voice etc on the different networks. It looks very promising at this stage.
OSS messaging clients always seem to scrape in with the bare minimum of compatibility for each network.
I don't understand why they're so far behind, the Trillian guys are working on very few resources from what I can see and they're producing an incredibly promising product.
OSS gives you text messaging and that's it.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
I guess I didn't clarify my definition of "adequate". The OSS solutions are in my opinion inadequate.
Inadequate compared to Trillian's crippleware version or pay version?
Pidgin, GAIM et al for some reason refuse to support features that aren't offered universally by IM networks.
Umm, I think you are a little off base here. Pidgen does not refuse to support features that are only supported by one protocol. They implement numerous such functions. If they are missing one in YMSG or MSNP or OSCAR, remember both Yahoo and Microsoft refuse to publish those protocols to allow interoperability so all functions are the result of a lot of reverse engineering and guesswork. As for AIM/ICQ, they've committed to transitioning to XMMP, so you can expect full support for all features as soon as AOL manages to do so.
For example, Yahoo! has chat rooms
Umm, Pidgin supports chat rooms for Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, IRC, XMMP, and MySpace.
ICQ has "find a random user" .... Because Yahoo! doesn't have "find a random user", GAIM won't support that function for the ICQ network...
Yeah, I don't think they've gotten around to that and probably never will unless someone submits a feature request for it. Is this really a major consideration when choosing an IM client for you? It has nothing to do with what YMSG supports.
MSN has video chat
This is actually a valid concern. It has nothing to do with the fact that some protocols don't have a video chat and everything to do with getting enough developers interested in implementing it for a given protocol. There are several video chat protocols in development, but no concrete timetable for MSN. Of course Trillian has been unable to do video chat with versions of MSN Messenger newer than 6.2 (which was released in the summer of 2004). So if you're trying to work with someone who has version 7 or 8 or the new beta of 9, you're SOL on Trillian too. Maybe if Microsoft would publish their protocols, or (I know it's crazy) use one of the well established open and published standards, this wouldn't be an issue.
ICQ and MSN and Yahoo all use different video protocols - the OSS solution to this problem? Don't use any!
I already mentioned the state of video chat on Pidgin. Pidgin, however, is not the only OSS IM client. Kopete, OpenWengo, Proteus, Psi, and Skype all support one or more video chat protocols.
You end up cutting off a huge amount of functionality that these networks have and I have no idea why.
Maybe because those networks are all intentionally trying to make it hard for anyone to implement their features as part of a business plan that relies upon broken or restricted interoperability between networks. This is the same shit they tried with e-mail in the early days, when AOL e-mail users could not send or receive messages from non-AOL subscribers. The idea is, if you can get enough market share you can lock users into only your service and have a monopoly on the service instead of competing. Right now Microsoft and Yahoo have both been losing to AOL, so they are trying to form a partnership to use their joint market share to fight AOL. AOL, on the other hand, has responded by moving to open standards and is now starting to allow any client or service to interoperate easily, or so they claim as they've only made it halfway so far.
Note, what killed the walled garden of e-mail was businesses deciding e-mail was a required tool and setting up their own servers. I know an awful lot of tech companies that have done the same thing with IM and the currently winning standard is XMPP (championed by Google, Sun, IBM, Apple, AOL (very recently). Novell, RedHat, Suse, etc.). There are currently hundreds of free, public Jabber servers and innumerable corporate ones. There are not as many as there are mail servers, of course, but that is the trend t
I really don't get this. I mean don't people ever learn that trying to cram more and more functionality into one thing just ends up creating a bloated crappy mess that nobody wants to use?
Make Thunderbird a great mail reader. It's not bad now but there is obviously room for improvement. Forget about making it read news. Forget about making it handle RSS. And for god's sake forget about making it into a calendaring program. Sheesh.... just make it a great mail client. AND get together with the people who are interested in news readers, rss handlers and scheduling programs and create a standard so that individual programs for each of these functions can cooperate/inter-operate with each other.
Create a seamless (appearing at least) system where users can pick the RSS reader they want to use, the calendaring program they want to use and still have them work seamlessly with the mail program they want to use. Not a monolithic bloated unmaintainable monstrosity that is supposed to do everything and locks a user into only those ways of doing things. Haven't the experiences of the last forty years of software and systems design taught us anything?
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop