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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!
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.
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.
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.
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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
http://www.birdiesync.com/home.html Works well, I use it at home for Thunderbird/Lightning since I use Outlook at the office.
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.
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.
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!
You might want to try Citadel, which has integrated email, group conversations and shared calendaring.
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?
That's a stupid, terrible idea. Running an email server, especially one that won't puke under load, is expensive and time-consuming, and would be a distraction.
Mozilla.org should concentrate on their core stuff, the browser and email.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.