Thunderbird in Crisis? 422
Elektroschock writes "The two core developers of Thunderbird have left Mozilla. Scott McGregor made a brief statement: 'I wanted to let the Thunderbird community know that Friday October 12th will be my last day as an employee of the Mozilla Corporation.' Meanwhile, David Bienvenu blogged: 'Just wanted to let everyone know that my last day at The Mozilla Corporation will be Oct. 12. I intend to stay involved with Thunderbird... I've enjoyed working at Mozilla a lot, and I wish Mozilla Co and the new Mail Co all the best.' A few month ago Mozilla management considered abandoning their second product and setting up a special corporation just for the mail client. Scott was more or less supportive. David joined in. While Sunbird just released a new version no appropriate resources were dedicated to the missing component. And while Thunderbird became the most used Linux mail client it has been abandoned by Mozilla for 'popularity reasons'. Both messages from David and Scott do not sound as if the founders will play any role in the Thunderbird Mail Corporation. What happened to Mozilla? Is it a case of pauperization through donations?"
Still good... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Still good... (Score:5, Insightful)
I use the Thunder/SunBird combo too, but it would be good to see it continue being developed. Given the possible split from Mozilla, I'd like to see OpenOffice.org take an interest.
Re:Still good... (Score:5, Interesting)
IMHO MoFo should be reorganized : the Xul Foundation, with everyone implied into (Firefox, Thunderbird, Songbird, CeltX, Disruptive Innovations,...) for-profit and non-profits organizations, and Firefox, FirefoxCom, Thunderbird should be independent corporations or foundations.
Re:Two things seem to have affected MozFo: (Score:5, Funny)
I thought that was the point.
He's one bad Morrison & Foerster (Score:3, Funny)
Re:He's one bad Morrison & Foerster (Score:4, Funny)
Apart from them being lawyers?
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What? And make it bloated, semi-compatible to Outlook and totally useless?
TB is a hundred times better than Evolution for reading mail on a Linux box. Because its GPL, I'm sure interested folks will be able to fork it and release useful extensions.
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I thought it was released under the MPL like all the other Mozilla software?
Re:Still good... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird/ [mozilla.org]
OH, PLEASE NO! (Score:3, Informative)
But I load OpenOffice and the world stops.
I fear that Thunderbird, under the direction of OO will become bloated and laggy as well! I had a friend who didn't know any better; her P2/300 was on loan to show her how to use Linux.
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Re:Still good... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Still good... (Score:5, Insightful)
Maildir is cool if you run Reiser4 (Score:5, Informative)
Maildir is luke warm (Score:3, Interesting)
Too many files, and you'll even thwart normal shell expansions, like grepping for a string in * and getting "Arguments too long".
I much prefer standard mbox format, with external index files. Not only can the files be read by pretty much anything, but searches are also MUCH faster.
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Thunderbird is great, and I u
OT: mail archives (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of my motivation for asking is because I've changed the way I file my paper files and suspect that I could treat my email the same way. I now file all my stuff, unsorted, in a box. The typical office depot collapsible box will hold about 3 months worth of records. 99% of the time, if I need something out of the "files" its in the current box in reverse chronological order and relatively easy to find. Boxes go in storage with the date range on them and after a few years, just get thrown out. I waste 0 time filing and since in reality almost never need access to the back files, there's no real penalty in the retrieval time either.
meh. must be a slow day.
Re:Still good... (Score:5, Interesting)
Google has no incentive in TB surviving....
Google provides Mozilla with LOTS of funding and has a director on board?
coincidence?
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Which, of course, is the first thing Google thinks of...
Well, it kind of shows in the code... (Score:3, Interesting)
New York City apartment in the summer. If I didn't have lots of GNU command-line tools and a hex editor to fix the many things that choke Tbird, I'd have abandoned the effort and switched to some proprietary client a long time ago.
Let's hope as a separate entity they can do better.
Re:Well, it kind of shows in the code... (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure if you're aware but there is a Thunderbird project called Penelope [mozilla.org] for those Eudora users stuck by Qualcomm's decision to discontinue the product. I haven't tried the Eudora importers, though...
Re:Well, it kind of shows in the code... (Score:5, Informative)
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Try Claws Mail (Score:5, Informative)
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Dude, because it bites.
No, seriously. It says so right on the website. Thanks, I'll be here all day.
I kid. But seriously for real this time, GTK+? WTF+? That does bite. I know it's a great toolkit that's been in use since ancient times, etc., but it's p
is webmail to blame (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:is webmail to blame (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Decent integration with -other- applications is non-existent. (even simple stuff like sending an attachment from the windows desktop, or the iphoto / mail.app link on OSX) webmail doesn't compare.
2) When I decide to just quit all windows of my web-browser to clean up my desktop I hate that the mail gets closed too. I like that its a separate application, one that doesn't crash when I visit a website that kills the browser.
3) No offline functionality.
4) Large Attachments have to be 'downloaded' when I need them. I often leave stuff as email attachments, and then just open the attachment when I need to look at it. On my 'heavy' mail client its a fraction of a second to open it.
5) PRIVACY. You can't rely on that with webmail.
6) User experience. Gmail is 'comparable' to a real application, in the same way that a mock-up looks like a real product. From 4 feet away it might even look the same, but start using it and its immediately obvious you are using a web based application. Maybe one day that won't be true; but 'html + javascript + xmlrequest' won't be the platform its built on.
Webmail is a great technology but it doesn't replace a good mail client, it complements it.
Re:is webmail to blame (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll just add to that:
7) Integration with old mail. I've got email dating back 10 years. I don't know of any way to import that into gmail. But I can import my gmail into my offline mail app.
I don't want to lose my mail history every time I switch webmail providers.
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In
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Not particularly useful I think.
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http://marklyon.org/gmail/instruction.htm [marklyon.org]
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I hate gmail, and webmail interfaces in general.
Webmail is just a subset of the Gmail services, though.
1) Decent integration with -other- applications is non-existent. (even simple stuff like sending an attachment from the windows desktop, or the iphoto / mail.app link on OSX) webmail doesn't compare.
I'd say that Gmail's free POP3 support works pretty well with other applications, along with its various POP3 delivery settings.
2) When I decide to just quit all windows of my web-browser to clean up my desktop I hate that the mail gets closed too.
Don't close the tab you run Gmail in...? What are you "cleaning up your desktop" for if you want some stuff to remain open? Sorry, I must simply not get this part.
4) Large Attachments have to be 'downloaded' when I need them. I often leave stuff as email attachments, and then just open the attachment when I need to look at it. On my 'heavy' mail client its a fraction of a second to open it.
Well, but that's because your mail client downloads them in the background. Again, you can do either this with Gmail by using POP3, or by saving the large attache
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But its the part of gmail that defines it. Gmail's pop3 is pretty much the same as anyone elses. Except you get more space than usual, and you pay for it with a privacy policy that no one should be willing to submit to.
That said, most of your counter-examples come down to using gmails pop3. Which presumes using a 'heavy client' which nullifies the op's suggestion that 'heavy clients' are obsolete.
Anyway, one big advantage for me with webmail is that it
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Consider how much information they potentially have about you if your an avid google fan... and even if your not they have a shocking amount of data.
They might have any or all of the following:
1) your email (and your contacts)
2) your search history...
3) the analytics information from any site you visited using google analytics (no small number)
4) your conversations in google talk...
5) your youtube activity...
6) your google documents...
7) what a
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2) When I decide to just quit all windows of my web-browser to clean up my desktop I hate that the mail gets closed too.
Don't close the tab you run Gmail in...? What are you "cleaning up your desktop" for if you want some stuff to remain open? Sorry, I must simply not get this part.
It's pretty simple, if you have a heavy mail client all you have to do to close a couple of dozen browser windows is bring one into focus and hit [CMD]+[Q] or whatever key combination you use in WIndows/Linux to get rid of all of them instantly. The moment you start using a web browser as your e-mail client you have to close each browser window individually using [CMD]+[W] ([ALT]+[F4] on Windows IIRC) to filter out the one you want to keep. I usually use Safari for browsing but I always open my web-mail in
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Unless you operate your own MTA, how is web mail any more or less private? Ultimately you rely on those operating your mail account not to peek in your inbox.
OFFTOPIC: Your sig. (Score:2, Offtopic)
Much better than iTunes - your non-PC-savvy friends will be able to confidently buy any track from Amazon, instead of being confused by the mingling of DRM-encumbered & DRM-free tracks on iTunes (and its cheaper to boot).
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Seriously. Since I started using AdBlock, I do try to donate to the well-designed community websites that I use.
Sort of like the way I try to buy music directly from the artists I like best, since I refuse to deal with any of the largest music retail channels.
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That makes 3... (Score:2)
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Thunderbird is awesome on Windows (Score:4, Insightful)
(also, if you're careful enough, Outlook and Outlook Express are perfectly usable on Windows, especially the newer versions)
Re:Thunderbird is awesome on Windows (Score:5, Informative)
Thunderbird's renderer works, Evolution's is crap.
Also, while there is a tiny handful of plugins for Evolution, there is a HUGE selection of extensions for Tunderbird which are extremely useful, including one extension which can be used to automatically purge duplicate messages from one's inbox.
With that said, I do use Evolution as my primary email program both at home and at work, but only because the scalix connector is available for Evolution. Thunderbird can access via IMAP only, and cannot use Scalix's calendaring features.
Re:Thunderbird is awesome on Windows (Score:5, Interesting)
So in a nut shell, there appear to be limited corporate revenue opportunities for thunderbird, it is just a useful, simple, easy to use, end user interface for managing email, fit for purpose rather than fit for profit software.
No corporations are really going to get behind it, especially not google or any other company involved with email servers.
So thunderbird will keep quietly ticking along, doing the job it needs to do, with out any major changes, just continual refinement. I use it and I am pretty happy with that. To put it simply, I am sick of software changing for change sake and to generate upgrade profits. As for privacy invasive web mail, eww, I only use that for G-mail (garbage mail) and questionable web sites.
The next big thing might be email address portability, much like postal address not being bound to the people making the deliveries, one could envisage a government controlled email address router to allow end users to retain a permanent email address, not bound to a particular supplier or as a marketing tool for that particular supplier ie. an address that avoids customer lock and ensures competition in email services. It would really hurt web mail but of course not as much as cheap internet serving appliances, IPv6 and free email software servers, privacy invasive web mail is doomed ;).
Re:Thunderbird is awesome on Windows (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Thunderbird is awesome on Windows (Score:5, Informative)
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I don't think the answer is in standardizing a format for stored email, though - it would be nice, yes, but good luck getting all the major players to implement it. Server-based mail systems like IMAP are far better in terms of availability and compatibility, and they
Re:Thunderbird is awesome on Windows (Score:5, Informative)
Outlook has been pretty safe since the XP release (Outlook 2002), and even the 2000 release with a patch. That's when they stopped allowing you to open executable attachments. There was still a minor risk of javascript nastiness, but they fixed that as well. The 2003 (11) and 2007 (12) releases of Outlook have been stable and safe. (Outlook 2007 doesn't use the controversial Ribbon toolbar like the rest of the Office 12 suite)
Outlook Express is dead, though if you're still using XP you have it. Outlook Express has also been the Microsoft mail client with the most issues, mostly because it's free and more or less neglected. The problem is that "Outlook Express" and "Outlook" actually share nothing in common except for the name and the fact that they both do email. Beyond that they're two separate codebases, managed by two separate teams. It's unfortunate that they're named similarly, since Outlook Express' issues have tarnished the fact that Outlook proper is actually a very good, secure, and competent email client.
If you're running Vista, Outlook Express is gone. It was replaced by Windows Mail, a more bare-bones mail and news reader that finally divorces the "Outlook" name from the free mail client. Alternatively, you can use the Windows Live Mail Beta [live.com] software (different from Hotmail/Windows Live Mail web interface, as it's client software that can be used for other mail accounts besides just Hotmail). Windows Live Mail integrates with Live services (Messenger, Spaces), where Outlook Express and Windows Mail don't.
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Hmm... is "Windows Live Mail" basically "Outlook Live," in the same vein as "Office Live"?
Re:Thunderbird is awesome on Windows (Score:5, Insightful)
Outlook Express certainly has weaknesses, but it is relatively standards compliant. If one of my customers sends me an email using Outlook Express, I will be able to read it with whatever email client I am using at the time. If someone uses Outlook to send me mail, I may be faced with a Winmail.DAT attachment that nothing except Outlook (and a few webmail sites) can interpret. Similarly, any mail that I have stored in Outlook Express is easily exported to other mail clients. With Outlook, third party products are necessary to avoid serious lock-in. In some areas (again, considering just email in isolation) OE has better functionality. In particular, the IMAP support in OE is better than that in Outlook 2003.
Every site I have ever been to that uses Outlook experiences periodic Outlook lock-ups. These will often clear themselves after a few minutes, but have a real impact on productivity. Sometimes, their cause is quite mysterious.
I allow that Outlook in conjunction with Exchange has some compelling functionality, especially in the areas of shared folders and calendar/task management. These make Outlook an appropriate choice at times, but I am always relieved when the decision goes against Outlook.
Don't forget KMail (Score:3, Informative)
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Re:Thunderbird is awesome on Windows (Score:5, Interesting)
One, the aggregate Inbox - I can view all my inboxes at once without actually merging the folders. It's so handy to be able to see all my new messages at a glance, or separated into accounts, so quickly and intuitively.
Two, filtering IMAP messages by body text. I've tried half a dozen other email programs and none of them seem able to filter IMAP messages this way. I can't see any valid explanation why other clients refuse to do this. I can sort quasi-spam (ads from companies I've placed orders from, for example) far more effectively with body filters.
If Thunderbird could duplicate those two features I'd probably give up Mail.app. Thunderbird is far more extensible and has quite a few features Apple's client lacks, like good IMAP folder management and Bayesian filtering.
Yet both Thunderbird and Firefox feel largely stagnant these days - Firefox 3's promises seem nebulous and the release never seems to come any closer, and neither program is doing anything all that innovative in the meantime. The most impressive new feature I've seen in the past year (which wasn't an extension) has been Thunderbird's categories, which is itself is a copy of Gmail's keywords feature and rather similar to Mail.app's smart folders. What are the devs doing?
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[F]iltering IMAP messages by body text. I've tried half a dozen other email programs and none of them seem able to filter IMAP messages this way. I can't see any valid explanation why other clients refuse to do this./quote>It's computationally quite complex. To do it sanely, you need a fairly sophisticated text-processing database engine on the backend, and they've not been available for that long. But I do think you'll see that feature more in the future now that there's OSS DBs that can tackle this so that everyone doesn't have to reinvent it. The future's bright!
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Just because it's in a separate file it doesn't mean that the signature is meaningless. The signature doesn't simply say "yeah, whatever's the first part of this email is fine", you know. Do you really believe that deta
Jesus Christ, you know we're in deep shit... (Score:4, Funny)
Oh wait, what...?
key fact missing (Score:2)
i suspect this is having an unspoken impact on things in the mozilla camp
Thunderbird in Crisis? Yes. (Score:3, Insightful)
Until feature-for-feature Thunderbird can equal or beat Outlook it will never have people flocking to it like Firefox did.
Look at Firefox versus IE 6 - heck, Firefox basically "inspired" IE 7 (tabs, search bar on the top right, extensions, etc. etc.) That's what led to the huge masses adopting it.
The fact that Zimbra has released a cross-platform offline client instead of extending Thunderbird to fit their needs speaks volumes.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/26/zimbra-to-lauch-desktop-application-with-full-offline-functionality/ [techcrunch.com]
Re:Thunderbird in Crisis? Yes. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Thunderbird in Crisis? Yes. (Score:5, Interesting)
Once you start dragging and dropping from your inbox to your to-do list, contact list, and calendar, it's hard to give that up.
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Re:Thunderbird in Crisis? Yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Thunderbird in Crisis? Yes. (Score:4, Insightful)
Now let's say you are scheduling meetings with multiple people in multiple buildings. When you send a meeting request, doesn't email seem like the best place for that request to land? They click a button of some sort embedded in the message to accept (or reject) your meeting request. The sauce behind what happens next is what I think leads to a valid decision to marry the two. If you had a separate program for calendaring, how would the email client signal the calendaring solution of the acceptance?
I don't doubt workable solutions could be offered. I'm just suggesting the most _logical_ shortest path of least resistance is indeed to have them integrated.
Re:Thunderbird in Crisis? Yes. (Score:4, Informative)
You should give credit to the right people. Two of those three are Opera innovations, that Firefox copied. Not that Firefox is not a good browser. I'm just saying who actually did this first.
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Damnit man think of the users! (Score:3, Funny)
I need security updates. I need a calendar. We all use Thunderbird. Just fork it damnit! We need it.
call it Inlook or something!
The elephant in the room. (Score:5, Insightful)
Email has evolved into a collaboration tool, not just a way of sending words in ASCII. Plain and simple, until your contacts can email you a meeting request and TBird puts it in your calendar automagically - and that meeting goes in your BlackBerry/Treo/Gizmo-of-the-week - it won't gain near the same buzz. Outlook + Exchange adds far too much business value to simply abandon in the name of Open and Free.
If you just need email, Thunderbird is OK-fine - if you need collaboration, you need Outlook. It's a damn shame, too.
Re:The elephant in the room. (Score:4, Informative)
Still it doesn't do exchange intigration all that well, but I think they're on the right track.
They wrote about it on the dot [kde.org] a few days ago.
Re:The elephant in the room. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The elephant in the room. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep... I always *hated* outlook for email (still do). But I use it daily at work. At work, I am constantly getting scheduled for meetings, or scheduling them myself. These meetings are always with people in different cities, states, or even different countries. You can look at other people's calendars, and see if they have declined/accepted a meeting. There are a few glitches, but overall it works very well. I use Office Communicator as much as email. Although I can't stand many things about it, it does integrate nicely with the corporate address book. If someone is in a meeting, their status goes to "in a meeting". If only they would have tabbed windows and allow logging of conversations. You can email a conversation, which is nice, but there are times when you forget to do it.
Overall, I have gained a real appreciation for using these tools in business by using them daily.
And if you think I have gone soft, I still use pine as my primary mail client at home.
FUD, FUD, FUD, and FUD (Score:2)
Thunderbird needs Exchange support (Score:3, Insightful)
The advantage of Thunderbird over Evolution is that it runs on all major platforms. Evolution does have a port for Windows, but it's pretty poor. I expect that a lot of companies would be interested in a Thunderbird client (and paying support for it) if it would support the mail server they use.
Perhaps Thunderbird / Sunbird should even move to the OpenOffice project. After all, an Outlook app must be the major the missing component in the OpenOffice suite, and here is one ready for adoption.
Kmail for KDE (Score:4, Informative)
From the blog of David Ascher (Score:5, Informative)
Open Letter to the Thunderbird Community [ascher.ca]
Also note that both Scott and David say they'll still be working on TB. Scott's post:
David's:
Given the timing and very similar wording of their posts, I'm guessing that Ascher's right - they're going off to work on something together.
It does suck; those two know more about TB than anyone, and even when they were full-time employees, TB development was fairly glacial - it's just too big and monolithic for that size development team. But I don't know that this necessarily means the end of TB. I certainly hope not.
T-bird in crisis (Score:4, Funny)
shutup about exchange.. (Score:3, Insightful)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/openchange/ [sourceforge.net]
There have been MANY projects to try and pull apart that communications channel into a library that could be implemented anywhere and no one has managed it (yet). The original work (above) was about trying to make an exchange (server) replacement, but now its extending into implementing client connectivity. Hell, evolution only manages to do it by going thru the OWA (which is a hack at best). So everyone sitting there going "oh it should have exchange connectivity" paleeease write to MS and tell them they should open the protocols (personally, i think they should be forced to do this).. It would be fair to say that it would be nice if it had a real calendar/colab tool for the corporate environment, but if your using this at home you really REALLY need to get a more spontaneous life, seriously!.
Money? (Score:4, Insightful)
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However, nowadays I use a mixture of Windows and Linux environments and because of that constant change I'd like some things to stay stable. So I have switched to Thunderbird as my e-mail client. Just because it's similar in both Windows and Linux environments.
I have tried to install the win32 Evolution to a Windows XP box but that bombed pretty hard. If they get a stable and suppo
Re:Mozilla Inc (Score:5, Insightful)
Most Open Source supporters ARE normal corporations.
he meant M$ (Score:2)
But Mozilla is still far from it.
Anyone can abandon a project, even a corporation.
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Re:Natural Selection (Score:4, Insightful)
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I use it for work email because I need to be able to tailor ways I write email according to folders (internal/external mail etc). That said, I do my personal mail on gmail because I need to read it on any machines and because I use it as a sort of knowledge database. Searching email in a real client always takes years where as in Gmail it keeps everything, ever, and takes a fraction of a second to search it. T
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Thunderbird has been ignored for too long! (Score:3, Informative)