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."

Comments

PIM as Social Network Tool? Yes!

[Odder]

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.

As well they shoouldn't

[pembo13]

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.

Re:As well they shoouldn't

[LWATCDR]

The good things about outlook have next to nothing to do with with sending and reading email.
Where Outlook shines is the in three areas.
Calendaring, Scheduling, and Syncing.
Your average outlook users that just uses it for POP and imap can replace it with anything. It is the business users that us Outlook with Exchange that are stuck with it.
Heck I just wish I could sync Thunderbird with my Cell Phone over bluetooth!

Re:As well they shoouldn't

[Imsdal]

The reason Outlook is good is that it's far more than an e-mail client. Yes, Gmail does a lot of the e-mail stuff better (and searching, in particular, ridiculously much better). But I still use Outlook at work and I'd really hate to switch.

The reason is that the integration between mail, tasks and the calendar is so much better than Gmail or any other competitor I have seen. As an example: I have a rule that takes any message sent from myself (i.e. when I bcc myself), creates a task of said message, and correctly populates the subject, body and category fields, and then deletes the e-mail. What's the point of this, then? The point is that it creates a "Waiting for"-task as per David Allen's Getting Things Done methodology. By just bcc-ing myself, I get the task into my trusted system so I'm sure I will follow up on it later.

I am sure this can be done in other PIMs as well. But I have never seen any other PIM where this is even remotely as easy to setup.

Re:As well they shoouldn't

[Imsdal]

I hate having to figure out who said what in which e-mail when I'm at work (using Outlook).

Whatever happened to quoting and proper mail etiquette, anyway? When I started using message boards in the early '80s, almost everyone quickly learned to quote properly, to cut out the unnecessary stuff and so on. Now it seems to be a completely lost art. I have had people at work ask me, in all seriousness, why I didn't top post and what those strange ">" characters meant.

I agree that threading is important now, but it is (IMNSHO) a technological solution to a social problem. I find hat unfortunate.

Re:As well they shoouldn't

[lubricated]

> Whatever happened to quoting and proper mail etiquette, anyway?

Broadband cheap large hard drives. Top posting is very convenient, first you read the new stuff, and probably the only stuff you care about, the rest is just included for reference and context if you need it.

Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail's Worst Misfeature

[MichaelCrawford]

Why oh why oh why does message composition for new accounts default to HTML instead of plain text?

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.

Re:Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail's Worst Misfeature

[LO0G]

That's just silly. HTML mail doesn't make phishing possible. Crooks make phishing possible.

Crooks have been running phishing scams since well before the internet first went online. All you need is a telephone and you can mount a phishing scam: "Hi, this is xyz from your bank. We're running a quality check on the vendor who produces our checks. Could you please repeat the 12 digit number located at the bottom of the check? Now can you read the little numbers near your address? Great, thanks a bunch!". The phisher just got all the information they need to completely drain your checking account.

If we banned HTML mail, the banks wouldn't be able to send HTML mail, and the phishers would simply copy the non-html mail that the banks send.

HTML mail has it's own set of issues, but enabling phishing isn't one of them.

Re:Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail's Worst Misfeature

[CastrTroy]

Banks don't send email, the phishers aren't copying HTML from anybody. What makes phishing possible, isn't HTML, and it isn't crooks. It's the people who fall for it.

Re:Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail's Worst Misfeature

[TheSunborn]

And just let me be the devils advocate.

I really think that you should only send carrige return in your mail if you want to start a new paragraph. Sending an entire paragraph as a single line is good, because then my mail program, can wrap the lines acording to my window size.

Sending mails with a specific line width sucks if my display is smaller or wider then what the sender think is the right linesize. What If I am on a mobile device which can only show 60 chars on a line. If you email have a newline after 80 chars, it will not look good.

And similary, my current mail program can show 200 chars on a single line, so why leave more then half the window empty, just because you want to wrap lines on an arbitrary position which have not really been a limit since we started using graphics display.

Re:Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail's Worst Misfeature

[Blakey Rat]

HTML email is evil; it's what makes phishing possible.

Wow, has "evil" lost all meaning? I like to think of "evil" as things like, say, gassing people or conquering a neighboring country with extremely brutality. Now adding pretty pictures to emails qualifies.

In any case, phishing was possible when emails were text-only. I saw dozens of phishing messages in text-only emails, so in addition to deflating the word "evil" to uselessness, you're also flat-out wrong.

Re:Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail's Worst Misfeature

[Hatta]

You're not thinking hard enough. Sure a crook could send a txt email pretending to be a bank, but they'd have to type out the full URL of the phishing site in the email. If they use HTML, they can hide it behind a friendly blue link. Also, html email allows spammers to embed an image link. If someone accesses that URL, they know that that email address has a real person behind it. That's highly valuable information to spammers.

HTML email doesn't cause phishing or spam, but it does facilitate it. HTML email is bad practice.

Re:Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail's Worst Misfeature

[sherriw]

Holy crap. Your post just clued me in to why all my friends have stopped checking their email, and now use Facebook 'mail' almost exclusively. Can't believe I didn't credit spam at least partly for this annoying transition.

Re:Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail's Worst Misfeature

[Clover_Kicker]

Yeah, _no_one_ has EVER found a way to make certain

  * * * plaintext * * *

stand out from the rest.

Sync

[Odin_Tiger]

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.

Re:Nice Article, Misleading Summary.

[tokul]

I use Outlook daily on my work laptop, while I have Lightning installed on my personal machine. One of them wins hands down as a productivity tool.

I suspect that you don't use Outlook. You use Outlook and Exchange.

Re:Pfff...

[shird]

I think Exchange integration is the big one that most other similar clients lack. Being able to schedule a meeting and have it show in a shared calendar, book rooms etc, its pretty much required by any decent sized organisation and I haven't seen anything that comes close to replacing it.

Re:PIM as Social Network Tool? Yes!

[jonbryce]

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.

outlook+exchange is the competition (in business)

[billtom]

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.

Re:But why?

[STrinity]

Um, because not everyone wants to use webmail?

Re:Nice Article, Misleading Summary.

[Anonymous Coward]

"The only thing that Outlook has was good integration of information."

What's a PIM for, again?

Re:PIM as Social Network Tool? Yes!

[Kalriath]

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.