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.

[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?

[moderatorrater]

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

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

[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....

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

[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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

[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: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.