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Mozilla Messaging Devs Don't Want To Duplicate Outlook
Petr Krcmar writes "Thunderbird 3.0 Alpha 1 was released last month. A few months before, two main developers left the project and development was moved from the Mozilla Corporation to the Mozilla Messaging, the new subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. We had the opportunity to ask some questions to David Ascher, Mozilla Messaging CEO. The interview is about present and future of Thunderbird and about related projects like SeaMonkey, Spicebird and Mozilla Calendar."
Nothing should be ruled out. An Outlook like summary page, sync and what not could easily happen.
All we can be sure of is high quality and something users will like. I like Kontact's layout and feature set, which is much larger and more flexible than Outlook. It would not surprise me to see something better from the Mozilla team, but I won't be disapointed if the interface is what I'm used to. He goes on to mention social networks. This is exciting, but I'm not sure today's social networks do enough to protect their users from advertisers and other fraudsters.
Petr Krcmar
Son, you ain't got quite enough vowels in your name.
Can't they come up with a better name than that? Something that combines a place or condition with an animal name? Something like "streetcornerzebra" or "bridgetroll"?
Come on, Mozilla, get your act together.
It's time the free software world merged PIM with social networking. The goal of Personal Information Managers is social network tracking and free software should be able to replace things like Facebook. Facebook, Myspace and other social networking sites really get their start because people in the non free software world don't have adequate PIM tools. The extras Facebook and MySpace have provided could easily be provided by free webservers and interface modules. Everyone would appreciate the granularity, control, security and privacy free software would grant them for their information.
The usual suspects are standing in the way. The M$ desktop monopoly leaves most people with an inadequate network stack and package management. ISPs block ports and do other stupid things to community sharing software. The US government is so without a clue that it's more a problem than a help. These things will be overcome.
Aside from vendor lock-in, Outlook isn't some genius application. I (would like to) believe that it can be done as well or better without aiming to duplicate it.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
HTML email is evil; it's what makes phishing possible.
Who do I have to blow to get plain text mail made the default?
Most people wouldn't know the difference, and if someone really cared, they could enable it.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I just wish they could get calendar / mail sync with portables going. That one single thing would be the difference in $GOBS spent on MS Office, Exchange, server hardware / OS, and just using Thunderbird + Sunbird, which (outside of that one feature) everybody here really likes.
Unpleasantries.
Still, it's good enough - I don't have much to complain about and I still like it a lot more than Outlook.
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
I don't know what I will do if it doesn't duplicate all Outlook's amazing features like
-Being slower than sh#^ starting up or closing down
-Always telling me I didn't close it properly when I did, and making me sit through some shadowy scanning procedure that doesn't seem to do anything.
-Slow performance when sorting
-Slow performance when searching
-Slow to initially render the Outlook today page
-Resource pig for the simple functionality you get
How will I ever survive without something JUST LIKE OUTLOOK?
Thunderbird 3 Alpha 1 Screenshot on some forum. Here is a Thunderbird 3 Alpha 1 Screenshot direct link.
Wait, wait, so you're saying if we merged this PIM thing with social networking, we just might actually get someone laid?!
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
crap only geeks could use
For some reason as soon as I read "Spicebird" I thought of some gecko-rendered porn content delivery client. think of XULRunner that indexes all of the YouPorn/RedTube type sites of the internet. Yeah I know, I have a twisted mind.
If you think only idiots fall for phishing, I can prove you wrong:
I know a guy who is a college professor, has a PhD, has published lots of highly regarded papers, has scads of grad students supported by grants that he gets easily.
And he entered both his credit card number and bank account number into a phisher's web form. He lost four thousand dollars!
You'd think he'd know better - but he was simply unfamiliar with phishing; his professional area has little to do with computers, so he's simply not very clued in to Internet scams.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I get friend requests, but know not to accept them blindly. When I check out their MySpace page, it's sometimes a fairly blatant ad for a pornsite.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I'm still waiting for the Eudora integration. Eudora, an excellent mail client in my opinion, was abandoned for Penelope which is an open source integration project with Thunderbird.
Nuclear Reactor Designers Don't Want To Duplicate Chernobyl.
I'm not sure what the target market would be here. The people who use Outlook tend to be business users, and merging the PIM with social networking is the last thing they would want to do. They will be looking for an Outlook/Exchange replacement. There are a few almost replacements out there, but none of them quite make it.
For personal mail, most people use webmail services, and in many cases they already use Firefox to visit the webmail site, so I'm not sure what more the Mozilla Foundation could offer them.
One of its features, which could be disabled, was to verify that there were two spaces after each period. The author of the Mac is Not a Typewriter would call me now and then to complain about it. He wanted me to change it to verify that there is just one space.
I always meant to allow it as an option, but just never got around to it.
Now, he has a point, that software ought to be able to handle the extra space needed at the end of sentences. But I've never used an application that did, and have always found it necessary to use two spaces to get the right typography.
A program that did it right would have to be able to parse natural language, because you want extra space at the end of sentences but not after abbreviations.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
The problem I see is that most people probably don't care either way, so they would find it acceptable if it defaulted to plain-text email.
I think most Thunderbird users are unaware you can even select the composition type.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Something that would help Thunderbird adoption a lot is if the big CRM vendor (such as SalesForce and Netsuite) integrates their system with it.
I wish I could use Thunderbird in our enterprise. But it just won't work. We are locked in to Symantec for AV. Whenever Symantec scans and finds a virus in a Thunderbird mailbox, it quarantines or backs up the entire inbox. With daily scanning, hard drives quickly fill up. We are unwilling to create exceptions for scanning and have not found a good way to automate cleaning of the Quarantine.
So until then, Outlook is here to stay for us.
Uhmm...., no. Thank you.
The "goal" of personal information managers is to manage personal information. I want a product that does that, and does it well. I don't give a rat's ass about social networking sites aside from their (highly questionable) utility as a place to store contact information. There are lots of tools for that, some good, some not so much, but I most definitely do not need or want to add pictures of my latest golf outing or a list of my favorite songs to that tool in order for it to work.
I could rant all day long about what I colossal waste of resources and time I believe "social networking" to be, but that's just me. The real point I want to make is, please, dear gawd, don't put such crap into a utility program like Thunderbird.
Hearing that they're integrating with Lightning, I just thought it would be so much more appropriate to call it that. "Thunder and Lightning" makes sense, but "Thunderbird and Lightning" sounds like fried chicken.
You hit the nail on the head there. What's lacking in FOSS is a fully functional Exchange replacement. The lack of one pretty much drives MS currently. Exchange and the associated client licensing are a huge cash cow, and nothing in the FOSS arena approaches it, though I haven't searched this month. Any time something does start to look promising, it's captured one way or another by the existing profit streams. Either it goes commercial, or is bought out by a commercial concern. What this tells me is that when it comes right down to it, people want to get paid. At the point when a FOSS app has that combination of packagability, profitability, and ownability - it immediately leaves the FOSS community.
At best, people want their PIM to send and retrieve data from their social network. They don't want it to be a _replacement_ for social networking any more than they want cat to be a replacement for vim.
Have any of you seen Chandler. It looks promising...
-P
Why have ONE conviction when you can have TWO?
Meet Flock, which integrates with most popular webmail systems and most popular social networks.
Read my blog.
1. On my Asus EEE pc, the to: address section is four lines high. This takes up quite a bit of real estate and I can't seem to reduce it.
2. Fluidic import/export of emails. I accidentally downloaded a ton of emails off my Comcast account and forgot to check to leave the messages on server. I couldn't find a way to re-import them into my main pc's Thunderbird. They are just sitting on the hard drive, but I would rather have them IN Thunderbird for searching.
3. Searching nested email folders doesn't work in the upper-right hand widget. To add insult to injury, I have to re-type it when I switch folders.
4. Hitting Esc doesn't clear the search box. Itunes is the only app I've seen that lets you do this.
5. No blatant "block person" in newsgroups.
6. No caching of password when news servers(read: giganews) screw up and ask you to re-authenticate. Can't you pre-populate the password field? I'll retype it in if it is really wrong.
7. No uuencode support like FreeAgent(the most over-complicated software ever made for newsreading) has.
I did have similar problems : after a while, huge folders that haven't been opened recently lose all the attribute of their messages (marked as read, marked as spam, etc...)
The bug did persist manifesting even if it was supposed to be fixed in recent versions of thunderbird.
Until recreated a new user profile. For some unkown to me reasons, the bug persist because of some settings in the profile and only goes away with a new profile (or a fresh install on a new machine - that's how I realised that I should make a new profile)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Karma is a joke. If gnutoo/Odder/whoever wants to karma whore by posting half his comment in one post and the other half in a reply from a sockpuppet, then honestly, who gives a fuck? The comments should be modded up if they seem interesting, and modded down if they look like trolling, and ignored otherwise, regardless of who posted them.
I read the article, it didn't say anything about not wanting to duplicate Outlook, it simply said they didn't want call Outlook out. Not yet anyway. Thunderbird may still end up very much an Outlook clone.
Adapted from http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/HOWTO/Advocacy
mmmm laaaid. oh sorry. anyway. I've always thought an email client that has a calendar layout and lists im threads within the days along with email would be the coolest client ever. I think IBM is the closest to what I want. I would prefer something only dependent on specifications like imap, webdav, ical... and not on server.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Mod parent up. He looks like she needs the karma. ~
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
I've got a question for Mozilla Messaging. What's the point of developing a desktop application for email? Mozilla has already built a fantastic tool for accessing email, it's called Firefox. I use it with Gmail, though there are plenty of other providers. I never have to think about POP/IMAP configurations, and my email is available from any computer I happen to be using.
If anything, they should be working on an open source Gmail-like webmail server.
Its about time, i think kde PIM is finally merging IM and given the scripting throughout KDE it shouldn't be to hard to add social networking interaction too (especially as most spam you with emails about what's happening so a simple script could probably turn those 100 pirates v ninja initiations into useful information).
i really had high hoped for TB but theyve really missed the boat this one.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
At work I've been using Thunderbird/Lightning with IMAP for the past couple years. Before that I used Outlook at a previous job, and now we've just been merged and moved *back* Exchange and Outlook 2007. There are aspects I love about both, and aspects I hate about both.
For email, I find Thunderbird wins with no contest. I hate everything about Outlook's email handling. The billion different places that options and settings are stored, stationery, the fonts, the crappy way links are handled if you change to plain text only....gah! But the shared contacts, calendaring, and syncing are excellent. Lightning was OK, but I could never get it to work well as a task-oriented work process as I could with Outlook. However, Lightning's handling of multiple calendars (Google calendar connector specifically) I feel is much better.
Depending on how things pan out, how does it fare for Tbird if the Exchange APIs are actually released and work? Outlook's muscle comes from the tight integration to Exchange. If I could use Thunderbird/Lightning but get all of the groupware benefits of Exchange, hopefully with improved Task handling...then I think they'd really be on to something!
There are quite a few things that could be improved in Outlook. For instance, I go to lunch the same time everyday (company rule). When I go to add a lunch appointment to my calender, I should simply have to hit a "Lunch" button, and it know what time it will be. Instead, I have to input the same time every time.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
If you send an email to someone named test@abc.def.gh, you can never send an email to someone namted test@abc.def, as the autocomplete feature jsut completes the email adress.
Also, a lot of work has to be invested into the search function. Why can't I search over all folders and must click x times to be able to do so (going voer the menus)
When business people talk about what they like in outlook, it is almost always a feature that uses both outlook and the Microsoft Exchange product as well. The tight integration of features between client and server software across the group really provides some cool functionality.
Now, if you take the time, you can configure a half dozen different open source server programs (mail, calendaring, centralized address book, etc.) and configure Thunderbird to talk to them (with several addons, of course). But it is a real hassle.
So what I'm getting at is that if businesses are a real target for Mozilla Messaging (and I'm not sure if they are or not, does anyone know? are they only interested in home users?) then they need to address the server side as well as the client side.
You have spent too long in a social vacuum if you can't see the problem with posting under multiple accounts, replying to yourself, and karma whoring.
LinkedIn is a social network with a focus on business users.
http://www.mhall119.com
--
twitter/Erris/Mactrope/gnutoo/inTheLoo/willeyhill/westbake/Odder/ibane? Click on my home page link to do a SockCheck(TM)
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
There are plenty of Exchange replacements, the problem is that Outlook doesn't work with them.
http://www.mhall119.com
And how that is Microsoft's problem? ;)
...
No, seriously
Why oh why oh why does message composition for new accounts default to HTML instead of plain text?
You don't seem to have tested this. It may look like it defaults to HTML, because you have a formatting toolbar.
However, if you do not apply any formatting, your message will be sent as text/plain. It will only be sent as multipart with HTML if you actually did use formatting.
This seems to me the clever thing to do.
You also have an option that will ask you before actually sending HTML, and offer the choice (plain/plain+HTML/HTML-only)
I'm not saying it's Microsoft's problem, I'm saying it's Microsoft's fault.
There are replacements to Exchange, but in order to use them you have to replace more than just Exchange, which is why they are not gaining traction. The combination of Windows+ActiveDirectory+Exchange+Outlook can be entirely replaced with open-source software. The problem is that you can't replace just one, because some portion of the others won't work with anything else.
http://www.mhall119.com
I am one of those who uses a fixed width, and my mail client automatically inserts a \n where appropriate.
I understand your point, but the thing is that I often draw charts, or lists with different levels of indentation (like in Python code). With a fixed width I can be sure the recipient will see things as intended.
If I didn't do that and instead wrote a disclaimer like "this thing is best read if 70 chars wide" - many would either not understand what it means, or simply not bother to adjust their settings for that email (why should they?).
Perhaps a smart mail client can automatically remove a \n unless it is followed by [at least] one more \n - thus people like you will be happy.
The saddest poem
Be sure to shoo those Social-Networkin' whippersnappers off of your lawn when you get home too
does it still come with the data-losing feature of the 4Gb mailbox limit? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=387502
Flock is not free software.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
I was just about to mention Citadel. Especially, since the Thunderbird Sync Kolab plugin now works well with synchronizing address books and calendars with it.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
Can't you just use a search folder that combines your Inbox with Sent mail, and/or whatever other folders you use? That's what I've been using in Thunderbird for the last year or so, after I wanted to mimic gmail's conversation view. I also use a similarly designed Search folder in Outlook when I'm at work, because I like to see conversations it context.
Granted that I don't use it much because I've found that search folders over IMAP/Thunderbird seem to be hideously slow (for me) when the Inbox and Sent folders are reasonably large, even when my IMAP server runs on the same local machine, meaning lots of bandwidth and very low latency. I think it's the threading of emails in such a search folder that slows it down most.
I do wonder if it should generally be more a task for the IMAP server to provide search folders and combined views in many contexts, though, because being closer to where the mail is hosted it's in a much better position to host useful indexes and so on. I haven't spent much time looking at available IMAP servers to find out if there are any that can be easily configured to do this.
Sorry but as I'm Anti-Social, I'd rather you not force this upon me. Otherwise I'll be forced to go Postal and give you a major paper-cut before mailing you to the middle of Zimbabwe with Do Not Open Until Xmas 2400 AD or after the 2nd Coming of Christ" to ensure you stay fresh.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
The interesting thing is that all those sockpuppets have really bad karma. Getting himself modded down to -1 status so many times is actually quite an impressive accomplishment!
This is a good idea... i was thinking about this as well.
:)
however, your list of things to overcome is too long.
M$ desktop monopoly - not a problem - free compilers work on Windows too.
ISPs block ports - can be worked around (eg, if email, with microformats embedded in HTML, were used for reliable store-and-forward sychronization)
Clueless US government - why would the govt. want to get involved?
You can easily replace just the Exchange part, since Microsoft recently (with virtually no fanfare whatsoever) released the Exchange protocol. You can duplicate Exchange in Open Source as much as you like.
So it's neither Microsoft's problem nor fault - the info is there.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Well, I did look at it a few months back and it would segfault randomly.
It generally felt like a huge hack that wants to do a little bit of everything but gets nothing right.
I'll keep it on my list, though, as it has interesting ambitions.
You know, the more I read Jamie Zawinski, the more I wonder what the fuck I'm doing as an engineer in a large company. Consider.
http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html
Now the problem here is that the product's direction changed utterly. Our focus in the client group had always been to build products and features that people wanted to use. That we wanted to use. That our moms wanted to use.
"Groupware" is all about things like "workflow", which means, "the chairman of the committee has emailed me this checklist, and I'm done with item 3, so I want to check off item 3, so this document must be sent back to my supervisor to approve the fact that item 3 is changing from 'unchecked' to 'checked', and once he does that, it can be directed back to committee for review."
Nobody cares about that shit. Nobody you'd want to talk to, anyway.
Users GOOD
If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.
When words like "groupware" and "enterprise" start getting tossed around, you're doing the latter. You start adding features to satisfy line-items on some checklist that was constructed by interminable committee meetings among bureaucrats, and you're coding toward an externally-dictated product specification that maybe some company will want to buy a hundred "seats" of, but that nobody will ever love. With that kind of motivation, nobody will ever find it sexy. It won't make anyone happy.
Ok, I said it was a funny story, but obviously that's not the funny part, unless sad is funny.
I think he wrote another article on the utter idiocy of rewriting Netscape so the code became nice and easy to read too. In both cases he's basically sick of humouring bright people who have completely lost touch with reality because they are stuck in their own little world of refactoring or business alliances or open source. Anything that convinces bright people that they don't need to solve hard problems, just apply some "magic pixie dust" that will make those hard problems all disappear.
And now he's running a bar. I wonder how long before I am.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Jeez! Why not start a blog instead of monopolizing /. stories? First post and 3 first replies to yourself? What burning insight could have driven you post yet again?... A link... to... Wikipedia :-|
Perhaps when you hit a subject that you know so little about, you could leave the talking to others.
Thank you for your cooperation.
Why not try it out: Thunderbird nightlies.
End user's I deal with care allot about "workflow". Perhaps software on the home PC is about making people happy - at least for the small [yes, it is small] portion of the population that spends time every day on social networking sites and the like. But most of the software used every day is for the purpose of doing work.
I guess he would think a mail client that integrates with MySpace is a killer app.
Using "Common Sense" is being either to arrogant or to ignorant to ask people who know more about something than you.
"The M$ desktop monopoly leaves most people with an inadequate network stack and package management."
What exactly can't Microsoft's network stack do that any other OS's network stack can?
What can't MSI packages do that RPM's can?
End user's I deal with care allot about "workflow". Perhaps software on the home PC is about making people happy - at least for the small [yes, it is small] portion of the population that spends time every day on social networking sites and the like. But most of the software used every day is for the purpose of doing work.
I guess he would think a mail client that integrates with MySpace is a killer app. I dunno, I think he was criticising soulless software like Lotus Notes. And he was right, Netscape was fucked around this point. He's funny too, unlike the drones that mumble buzzwords like "enterprise" and "groupware". They were boring bureaucrats, only interested in making money from other boring bureaucrats. And in the end they didn't even manage that. So what use were they?
You have to like someone who says this
"Groupware" is all about things like "workflow", which means, "the chairman of the committee has emailed me this checklist, and I'm done with item 3, so I want to check off item 3, so this document must be sent back to my supervisor to approve the fact that item 3 is changing from 'unchecked' to 'checked', and once he does that, it can be directed back to committee for review."
Nobody cares about that shit. Nobody you'd want to talk to, anyway.
Which really is the point. Even if you can make money out of "that shit", do you really want to? When you were at University, did you really think you'd be a replaceable cog in a big machine, with an average salary (until your job is outsourced or right sized away), producing a inferior clone of Lotus Notes so that people could file their TPS reports online? Fuck that. I wanted to be a Pirate Of Silicon Valley or a video game programmer. At any rate someone who would either make it big through Godlike business and coding skill or crash and burn spectacularly.
Ah well, I suppose I should let you go back to filling in your WebTPS report. If you ever decide to go postal, please kill the people in my rival department, not me ktxbye.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Did they now? I certainly hadn't heard that. If that's the case, then I do expect many new and existing open source projects to support that protocol.
Unless of course this was released under one of those MS licenses that isn't compatible with open source licenses.
http://www.mhall119.com
He'll just blame it on "M$" and strut off into the sunset while patting himself on the back for being such an awesome advocate of free software.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
But at what cost?
For smaller companies, there's Microsoft Small Business Server - around 2000 US$ for 10 Users. Add 5k of hardware. Add maybe 10 hours of works. Makes around 10k US$ total.
Can OSS compete on this? Price-Wise?
Please leave the humor to the professionals.
http://www.mhall119.com
easy ... I understood his "complaint" more like why is it possible to do it with POP and not with IMAP. I was wondering myself and didn't found an answer. I also find this one annoying especially because this "Easy Button" exists for POP and it took me a while to figure out that this feature isnt available for IMAP ... I found it somewhere in the documentation but with no reason why.
Like the parent poster I like using Thunderbird, its ok that it has some flaws and I see no harm in discussing them.
Besides, does anybody know why you can use the global inbox feature with POP but not with IMAP in Thunderbird?
Who cares if they want to or not... until other things interoperate flawlessly with corporate (Exchange/Outlook) calendaring and e-mail systems -- people won't switch.
It doesn't have to have the same UI, but it does have to play in the same space for it to ever have a chance of "Total World Domination".
care allot about
"a lot".