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.

Re:Nice Article, Misleading Summary.

[oldspewey]

I think Lightning (or whatever it might morph into) could do worse than "taking on Outlook." I know people have security concerns with Outlook and that it's fun to bash on Microsoft, but as a communication and organization tool Outlook is an extremely polished, capable platform. 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.

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.

Vowels

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Petr Krcmar

Son, you ain't got quite enough vowels in your name.

Re:Vowels

[cp.tar]

The Rs are actually vocallic.
That, though, should be mitigated by the fact that the C should probably be transcribed as CH.

</nitpick>

Re:Vowels

[ozbird]

It's a little known fact that the Czechs invented SMS txt msgs.

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".

Mozilla calendar?

[moderatorrater]

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.

Re:Mozilla calendar?

[jlebrech]

How about SolarBadger!! It's a solar based calendar system, hence solar. and badger because I want it to.

Re:Mozilla calendar?

[oldspewey]

SundialFerret?

Re:Mozilla calendar?

[moderatorrater]

You mean shadowmushroon and watersnake, their techno music player and wiki software?

Re:Mozilla calendar?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Actualy, you can install the Mozilla Firesomething addon and you will no longer have to worry whether your browser has a reasonable name, as it will never last too long. And do not forget to enable changing the User Agent header for greater fun!

Hmmmm

[aeskdar]

Mozilla Messaging Devs Don't Want To Duplicate Outlook Neither does Microsoft's EULA

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

[gbjbaanb]

The summary is, as usual, not quite there in summarising TFA.

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. Is what he said in TFA, he's not making an Outlook clone, or an Outlook killer, just making a product that people want to use. So you're right, he's not looking to duplicate it at all, just make something better, and I applaud him for that.

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

[_xeno_]

Because Outlook's text editor sucks to the point that top-posting is basically the only way to make it work.

Outlook has two default text styles: "compose" and "reply." Assuming nobody bothers changing them, after the second reply everyone will be typing in the same font and color.

This means that you have to manually alter you text to make it stand out if you're replying to a reply.

Plus, as an added bonus, Outlook's quote is just an indent and a set of email headers. There's no nice ">" at the start of each quoted line or nice blue line like there is in Thunderbird.

And, because as already mentioned, Outlook's email editor sucks, Outlook really doesn't handle inserting new lines of text into quoted sections that well. Assuming nobody's done anything fancy with formatting it will simply unindent the line of text. However, you'll still be typing in the blue "reply" format unless you've changed that style, so the only queue that it's a reply is that it's not indented. Unless you're the first reply after an email is sent, then by default you'll be typing blue and their text will remain black. But after one round, this is lost.

But there's still that "assuming nobody's done anything fancy with formatting" thing I just mentioned. Throw in bullets or numbered lists (and keep in mind, Outlook like Word loves auto-formatting things) and things can get a little screwy. Those generally will prevent your text from being indented.

I actually did do an "inline reply" to an email that used a numbered list in Outlook, and that had the effect of resetting the numbered list numbers - instead of keeping the number from the original email, it started counting over again from 1. Not a problem if you're replying to all the original items, but...

In short, it's because Outlook's email editor basically sucks. It wants to be an embedded Word instead of an email editor.

For those who've never used Outlook, I've essentially formatted my post in a general "Outlook reply" format. Keep in mind that the quoted section would just be indented, without the little quote lines that Slashdot has added.

From: Imsdal (930595)
Sent: Tuesday, June 10 2008 01:05 PM
To: slashdot.org
Subject: Re:As well they shoouldn't

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.

Re:As well they shoouldn't

[JasterBobaMereel]

Outlook as an Email Client is frankly rubbish

Outlook as a PIM without Exchange is still rubbish

Outlook as a front end to Exchange is quite good and the best there is currently....

Re:As well they shoouldn't

[Kadin2048]

Outlook's whole idea of how to quote emails is different than what's traditionally considered proper in the Unix world and on Usenet. Its quoting style doesn't indent (use ">" characters); it just sticks a delimiter between the quoted text and the new part, and lets you start typing right on top.

I agree, this sucks. Usenet-style quoting is definitely better. However, it's important to understand why it was done this way (or at least why I think it was done this way), because it is not accidental. Most users of Outlook like this behavior. They want to be able to forward a big "stack" of messages, a whole chain of replies and replies-to-replies, around the office.

Why? Because it's easier to cover your ass that way, that's why. When you forward an email in Outlook, you're not just forwarding a single message (usually), you're forwarding the whole thread.

If you want to envision the paper-world use case that approximates Outlook, think of people passing memos around. Someone gets a stack of memos, they read through them, compose their own memo, and staple it to the top of the stack, and then pass it along. You typically do not -- and probably don't want -- people editing and chopping up other people's replies. (Yeah, they can -- there's no security involved -- and that's a big weakness.) If they want to include something that somebody else said, then they just type it into their memo, attributing it (or not) just as they would in a regular standalone letter or memo.

The disconnect between "the Usenet way" and "the Outlook way" is because the Usenet way is driven by people who honestly want to exchange information in the most efficient way possible. That is not the goal of most business communication. The goal of most Outlook users is to CMA and look smart for the boss.

Re:As well they shoouldn't

[Kadin2048]

A good point also.

I think (see my other post) that the major driver of Outlook's behavior is the business use case, where people want to keep a whole thread of messages together as they forward and reply.

However, it's probably equally important that Outlook is really designed as an intranet mail solution, not an Internet one. And when everybody's on a relatively fast LAN, shuttling really bloated email messages around isn't as much of a problem as it is on the Internet. Since the cost of quoting every message in a long thread in full is relatively low, there's no reason not to do it.

It's worth pointing out that some other intranet email systems (e.g. Lotus Notes) do this as well, when you reply and quote the original message. (Although I don't remember whether Notes' default is to quote or not.) Notes is even designed so you can expand and collapse the chain of quoted messages.

Where Outlook's behavior becomes really obnoxious is when it started being used for Internet email, rather than just intranet mail, because that's when you start noticing the 50 pages of replies-to-replies that are attached to every one-line message. And it's even worse when you start using mobile devices.

Re:As well they shoouldn't

[Allador]

While Outlook's text editor isnt anything to write home about, you've got a couple things wrong here.

Outlook has two default text styles: "compose" and "reply." Assuming nobody bothers changing them, after the second reply everyone will be typing in the same font and color. Only if you're using HTML mail and default options.

Plus, as an added bonus, Outlook's quote is just an indent and a set of email headers. There's no nice ">" at the start of each quoted line or nice blue line like there is in Thunderbird. Only if thats how you want it. It's almost infinitely configurable.

Your choices are:

- do not include original text
- attach original message
- include original text with no formatting changes
- include and indent original text
- prefix each line with ? (pick what you want to prefix it with)

You can also choose whether to reply above or below.

Thats pretty damn flexible.

It defaults to a very reasonable default for most people.

For most folks, top-replying is the correct choice because it serves most of the people most of the time.

And, because as already mentioned, Outlook's email editor sucks, Outlook really doesn't handle inserting new lines of text into quoted sections that well. Assuming nobody's done anything fancy with formatting it will simply unindent the line of text. However, you'll still be typing in the blue "reply" format unless you've changed that style, so the only queue that it's a reply is that it's not indented. Unless you're the first reply after an email is sent, then by default you'll be typing blue and their text will remain black. But after one round, this is lost. Note that this kind of stuff only happens if thats how you have Outlook configured and leave everything default. And you have to be (crazily) using HTML email for this. It's all quite nice and sane when you've set outlook to do everything as plain text.

In short, it's because Outlook's email editor basically sucks. It wants to be an embedded Word instead of an email editor. Outlook's email editor IS Word, at leats for HTML and RTF messages. Literally it uses the MS Word engine for it. Quite alot of brouhaha a while back about that because it really limited the kind of HTML you can use.

For those who've never used Outlook, I've essentially formatted my post in a general "Outlook reply" format. Keep in mind that the quoted section would just be indented, without the little quote lines that Slashdot has added. Unless you've configured it to put quote lines like Slashdot has.

Keep in mind as well that for most people, top-reply works most of the time, thats why most email editors default that way. Otherwise for every single email that you read that has a reply you have to scroll offscreen to read it, instead of what you want to read being right there.

I will say that Thunderbird's default reply-formatting IS better than Outlook's. But its pretty minor, and you can make Outlook look very similar if you want to fiddle with the customizations.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Who do I have to blow to get plain text mail made the default?

Me, for a start!

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

[bmajik]

You could use Outlook, which lets you set the default composition type. Additionally, it lets you change it easily from the Ribbon bar :)

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

[brunascle]

totally agree. I really hate it when someone inserts a carriage return in the middle of a sentence just because that's where he hit the end of his text box. it makes for a very uncomfortable read, because my mind initially thinks it's the end of a sentence, and i have to reread it to figure out what's going on.

it's the end users's (application's) job to decide where to wrap the line, not the author's.

Re:Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail's Worst Misfeature

[jez9999]

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.

That's being very thoughtless and is bad netiquette. How is he supposed to print the e-mail out looking nice on his dot matrix printer if you do this?

Re:Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail's Worst Misfeature

[Blakey Rat]

There's a good book about this, called "The Mac is not a Typewriter:" http://www.amazon.com/Mac-Not-Typewriter-Professional-Level-Macintosh/dp/0938151312 It's not specific to the Mac, but it tries to dispel the old ways of thinking about how to create documents. (i.e. use the tab stops in your word processor instead of just hitting space a bunch, stuff like that, use only one space behind a period when using a variable-width font, etc.) It applies equally well to all GUI computers, but was written back when the Mac was about the only one out there.

This is one of those endless debates between old fogeys who hate everything that didn't already exist in 1975, and people who realize that, hey, paragraph breaks make a hell of a lot more sense than line breaks!

Re:Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail's Worst Misfeature

[jc42]

Not only that, but can someone please introduce people to hard carriage returns instead of these virtual ones? Ultra-long lines are not fun in these HTML-type emails... and LookOut and AOL are two of the primary culprits in proliferating this failure to actually wrap the lines somewhere around 80 characters.

Um, no; 80 characters is entirely wrong. We don't use punched cards any more (though I do have a small stack of them as souvenirs of the Bad Old Days ;-). The display software that shows a message to a user should wrap long lines at the edge of the window, whatever size it is. Any other choice is imposing a width that will be wrong on some nonzero-sized population of users.

I can see the objection that most email software can't do this, because it can't see the window that the email will (eventually) be displayed in. But such software has no business doing line wrapping at all. Line wrapping is to make the text readable on the user's screen. So it should be done only by the software that's actually putting the text onto the user's screen.

Doing line wrapping to any fixed size, or before the final rendering, is simply user-hostile and should be publicly mocked by any sensible users.

Re:Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail's Worst Misfeature

[paulthomas]

I wrote an email parser about five years ago, and I can tell you that there is a good compromise to the problem you describe in the email standards implemented by virtually all mail clients (MUAs).

The header "format=flowed" lets you send text/plain messages that look great whether you are reading it with telnet or pine or with Thunderbird or any other modern MUA. The main rfc for email, RFC 2822, explains that the sending MUA should, but is not required to, break up paragraphs into lines of less than 78 characters terminated by a carriage return/line feed. If you specify the "format=flowed" header described in RFC 2646, you allow the receiving client to rewrap the email according to the receiving user's preference. Typically modern MUAs will rewrap format-flowed plaintext email to the window size.

The specification states that lines ending with a space and then a CLRF are to be treated as part of a single paragraph that can be rewrapped. Hard breaks are then done by terminating the line with a simple CLRF with no preceding space.

Most modern MUAs that I have dealt with can (and typically by default) send format-flowed email that has the standard line breaks every 78 characters for the benefit of clients that cannot rewrap, and contain contextual clues for newer mail clients to seamlessly reformat the message body. For example, Apple's Mail.app by default sends multi-part MIME messages, one part containing the rich text email and the other part containing format=flowed text/plain. No matter what email client the recipient is using, at least one of those options will look acceptable.

You can find a pretty good write-up of this at Dan's Mail Format Site.

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.

Re:Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail's Worst Misfeature

[kigrwik]

From the Hacker's Jargon

evil adj. As used by hackers, implies that some system, program, person, or institution is sufficiently maldesigned as to be not worth the bother of dealing with. Unlike the adjectives in the cretinous/losing/brain-damaged series, `evil' does not imply incompetence or bad design, but rather a set of goals or design criteria fatally incompatible with the speaker's. This usage is more an esthetic and engineering judgment than a moral one in the mainstream sense. "We thought about adding a Blue Glue interface but decided it was too evil to deal with." "TECO is neat, but it can be pretty evil if you're prone to typos." Often pronounced with the first syllable lengthened, as /eeee'vil/. Compare evil and rude.

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:Sync

[ACMENEWSLLC]

>>That one single thing would be the difference in $GOBS spent on MS Office, Exchange, server hardware / OS

What you *could* do is purchase an Exchange seat with 1and1.com for $6.99/mo.
For that, you get a copy of the latest Outlook, you get an Exchange seat @yourdomain.com, you get antivirus & antispam, active sync, Outlook Web Access, 1GB of space.
Since this is Exchange, you can do OTA sync too.
$6.99/mo. That's pretty cheap. There is a free 3 month trial right now.
1and1.com

Re:Sync

[jrumney]

There is a Funambol plugin for Thunderbird/Lightning that can sync the calendar and address book with a SyncML server (and via that to any device which supports SyncML). For mail, I use IMAP, so its always on the server, whichever device or workstation I access it from.

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:Hmm.

[MythMoth]

Gmail's conversation view shows your messages and the replies of your correspondent in context. It is, if you will, a combined threaded view of your inbox and outbox at the same time.

The only problem with GMail's conversation view is that it uses Subject rather than Message ID. While the threaded view in Thunderbird does indeed use Message ID, it only ever shows one half of the conversation (and I'm not sure how or if it handles multiple correspondents in a conversation).

It's not an enormously big deal for me, but it's not a feature that's currently in Thunderbird. I would use it if it were available and I suspect that for GMail users it would be a big deal.

Re:Hmm.

[MythMoth]

Ok, mission accomplished. All messages are downloaded, and new messages are available offline. That's extremely pleasing, so thank you for pursuing this. Left to my own devices I might have tested it when T'bird 3 came out, but certainly not before.

My recollection was that I'd tried this before with T'bird 2 so either it's a bugfix since an earlier 2.0.0.x release, or PEBKAC.

Thanks again.

Pfff...

[mark72005]

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?

Re:Pfff...

[Wiseazz]

Especially when Lotus Notes already does all those things... and does them better!

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: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:Pfff...

[JasterBobaMereel]

Outlook - Stores your mail either in a modified Access MDB database (offline PST) or a full SQL database (Online - Exchange server) so why are both slower at searching than Thunderbird which stores mail in textfiles!

Re:Pfff...

[jabuzz]

Of if only it did. Online it stores your email in a *huge* modified Access MDB database (Exchange). Microsoft have been promising SQL storage for Exchange for nearly as long as WinFS.

Thunderbird 3 Alpha 1 Screenshot

[TheGreatOrangePeel]

Thunderbird 3 Alpha 1 Screenshot on some forum. Here is a Thunderbird 3 Alpha 1 Screenshot direct link.

Re:Thunderbird 3 Alpha 1 Screenshot

[Errtu76]

Pah, i wouldn't use it. Have you seen how blurry certain parts of the screen are? It's totally useless in its current form.

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!

[Qzukk]

Wait, wait, so you're saying if we merged this PIM thing with social networking, we just might actually get someone laid?!

What language interview questions translated?

[ClayJar]

Before creation of organization project left two main Thunderbird developers. How this situation remarks project and how are these developers involved in Thunderbird now?

That simply *must* be a mechanical translation. Not even *Yoda* speaks in that manner.

In other news:

[cool-RR]

Nuclear Reactor Designers Don't Want To Duplicate Chernobyl.

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.

The author used to call me for tech support

[MichaelCrawford]

... quite frequently. Working Software sold a popular spellchecker for the Mac called Spellswell. It would do a lot more than built-in spellcheckers.

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.

Re:The author used to call me for tech support

[Blakey Rat]

For variable-width fonts, regardless of the medium (computer or print), you're only supposed to use a single space. As far as I'm aware, this pre-dates computers altogether. It's only when using a monospace font that two spaces are necessary.

In any case, a lot of software written now is based on that assumption. The HTML spec, for example, will strip all but one space if more than one space is typed in a row.

CRM Integration

[yota]

Something that would help Thunderbird adoption a lot is if the big CRM vendor (such as SalesForce and Netsuite) integrates their system with it.

Re:PIM as Social Network Tool? Yes!

[Jawnn]

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.

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!

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:PIM as Social Network Tool? Yes!

[mhall119]

LinkedIn is a social network with a focus on business users.

Re:PIM as Social Network Tool? Yes!

[mhall119]

There are plenty of Exchange replacements, the problem is that Outlook doesn't work with them.

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.

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.

Re:PIM as Social Network Tool? Yes!

[Hal_Porter]

I use this article pretty regularly in presentations to point out flaws in the Open Source model, and as a prime example of idiocy itself.

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.