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

Nice Article, Misleading Summary.

[gnutoo]

Nothing should be ruled out. An Outlook like summary page, sync and what not could easily happen.

Thunderbird is somewhat like a supertanker. It's been sitting in port for a few years with only a maintenance crew on board, and now we're trying to take it out to sea with a bunch of new sailors on board â" it takes a while to grease all the machinery, fix the rusty pipes, get the old-timers to train the new folks, and agree on a course.

Do you think that Thunderbird has ambitions to compete with Microsoft Outlook in near future?

I'm less interested in specifically competing with any specific product, and more focused on figuring out what the best user experience we can give users is. I'm sure that for some users, Thunderbird 3 will be a better fit than other products, but taking on Outlook or any one product isn't how we're looking at product planning.

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.

Hmm.

[MythMoth]

I use Thunderbird for all my email. I got used to the Netscape Messenger when I migrated from Pine a few years back, and I liked it enough to move to Thunderbird later on. It's a nice enough mail package. I do have some gripes though:

• If you use POP3 on really hefty mailboxes it occasionally decides that all the messages are "new" and downloads them all again. Very annoying.
  
• If you use IMAP there seems to be no easy way to tell it to always download a local copy of all messages in all folders. Perhaps there's a magic flag somewhere that I haven't found, but the closest I seem to be able to find is downloading the text of the messages that I've read (not the same thing).
  
• There's no conversation-style view of messages. This would be a killer feature as even GMail seems to do it wrong (threading by subject text instead of message Id)
  

Still, it's good enough - I don't have much to complain about and I still like it a lot more than Outlook.

Re:Pfff...

[CastrTroy]

With the large amount of email that people seem to accumulate, and the importance of being able to find email, I don't know why there isn't a good email client that uses a real database engine to store the data. Searching and sorting could be much quicker, and much more functional. You also wouldn't have to worry about large email collection, as most DBs can handle quite a bit of data very well. Something like a light version of Postgres or MySQL would work well. SQLLite might work alright, but some people have some very large collections of mail and it may not perform so well. The storage engine and the client could be developed separately, so different clients could be designed for different needs. And the storage engine could be located anywhere.

Re:Thunderbird 3 Alpha 1 Screenshot

[singularity]

And they still do not seem to have grasped the concept of the global Inbox. Mail.app is about the only program I have seen that does it how I want it:

Inbox
  >Account1
  >Account2
  >Account3
Sent
  >Account1
  >Account2
  >Account3
Trash
  >Account1
  >Account2
  >Account3

If I click on "Inbox" (first line above), I see all messages in all the Inboxes in all three accounts. If I want to just see the Inbox for Account1, I can click on that instead (second line).

Thunderbird and others seem to be convinced that everyone wants to break up everything based on accounts. Does anyone know the UI reasoning for this?

Re:PIM as Social Network Tool? Yes!

[IGnatius T Foobar]

It's time the free software world merged PIM with social networking.

Then you probably want to be looking at Citadel, which is a full-featured email and PIM system that was built from BBS roots. The user interface and data model are centered around the idea of connecting people with each other, rather than the lame-brained attempt to clone Exchange that everyone else is doing.

Will the newly opened Exchange APIs help?

[edmicman]

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!

Re:Vowels

[cp.tar]

Probably not. It would create an inconsistency. Plus, you wouldn't like English names spelled elsewhere according to local spelling, would you? Budapest is written Budapest in English as well, not Budawpasht as the Hungarian pronunciation would imply. After all, it's all Latin script, it is not as if you have to transcribe it to/from Cyrillic or Greek.

Oh, yes, it's all Latin script. But Latin script is not very well suited to Slavic languages, which have introduced a variety of new letters which I cannot repeat here. Instead of transcribing those, most times English speakers simply strip the diacritics and mangle the pronunciation.

Budapest is spelled just like that in Hungarian; English speakers just mangle the pronunciation.
Any Slavic name containing a ccaron, cacute, zcaron, scaron (type them up between &;s somewhere other than /.) is first stripped, then mangled up in pronunciation. Many a last name in former Yugoslavia ends in -i[cacute], which is most closely pronounced as -itch (no point in trying to make English speakers distinguish between ccaron and cacute anyway), but when stripped to -ic is pronounced as [ik].

This is the rough equivalent of me pronouncing your name John as [Yochn], just because it is spelled like that, and Slavic languages are rather phonetically spelled. This is why the Cyrillic alphabet was invented in the first place.
For instance, if Croatian still used the Cyrillic alphabet, most of our problems with sorting would disappear: our digraphs lj, nj, and d[zcaron] would always be represented as single characters (which has become possible with Unicode, but nobody ever uses those, as they would require complicated find/replace rules).

So no, it's not "all Latin script".

Re:PIM as Social Network Tool? Yes!

[Hal_Porter]

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.