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Thunderbird in Crisis?
Posted by
Zonk
on Mon Oct 08, 2007 01:11 AM
from the film-at-eleven dept.
from the film-at-eleven dept.
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?"
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Thunderbird to Leave Mozilla Foundation 239 comments
An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine is reporting that Mozilla Thunderbird is to move to a 'new separate organizational setting' as the Mozilla Foundation focuses more and more on Mozilla Firefox. Citing a blog post by Chief Lizard Wrangler Mitchell Baker, MozillaZine outlines the three possibilities for Thunderbird that are being considered: 'one is to create a entirely new non-profit, which would offer maximum independence for Thunderbird but is organisationally complex. A second option is to create a new subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation for Thunderbird, which would keep the Mozilla Foundation involved but may mean that Thunderbird continues to be neglected in favour of Firefox. A final option is to recast Thunderbird as community project, similar to SeaMonkey, and set up a small independent services and consulting company to continue development. However, there are concerns over how the Thunderbird product, project and company would interact'. Lead Thunderbird developer Scott MacGregor favours the third option."
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Still good... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Still good... (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday October 24, @03:50AM)
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)
(http://dascritch.net/)
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.
Re:He's one bad Morrison & Foerster (Score:4, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Apart from them being lawyers?
Re:Still good... (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Monday August 22 2005, @11:02AM)
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird/ [mozilla.org]
Re:Still good... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://kavlon.org/ | Last Journal: Friday March 21 2003, @02:10PM)
OT: mail archives (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Saturday April 15 2006, @06:21PM)
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, Insightful)
Maildir is cool if you run Reiser4 (Score:5, Informative)
(http://myatomic.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday November 19 2006, @12:31AM)
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?
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)
Try Claws Mail (Score:5, Informative)
Natural Selection (Score:1, Insightful)
If not, then someone will eventually come out with something better.
Re:Natural Selection (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
(http://whineymacfanboy.googlepages.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday April 12 2007, @09:28AM)
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.
Thunderbird is awesome on Windows (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.thoughtbug.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday September 27, @05:52PM)
(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)
(http://kim.biyn.com/)
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)
(http://www.on.net/)
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)
(http://www.devdas.geek/)
Re:Thunderbird is awesome on Windows (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Thunderbird is awesome on Windows (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.daishar.com/blog)
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.
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.
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?
Jesus Christ, you know we're in deep shit... (Score:4, Funny)
Oh wait, what...?
key fact missing (Score:2)
(http://www.wintermarket.net/)
i suspect this is having an unspoken impact on things in the mozilla camp
Thunderbird in Crisis? Yes. (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://nixwizard.net/)
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)
(http://www.freebase.be/)
Re:Thunderbird in Crisis? Yes. (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://localhost/)
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.
Re:Thunderbird in Crisis? Yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
(http://svein.halvorsen.cc/)
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.
Damnit man think of the users! (Score:3, Funny)
(http://www.gamerslastwill.com/)
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)
(http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars)
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)
(http://theravensnest.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday October 07, @07:05AM)
Re:The elephant in the room. (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://knoppixquake.webhop.net/)
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.
Crisis? (Score:1, Interesting)
Mutt! (Score:1)
(http://kant1.chch.ox.ac.uk/)
The main reason is that, for me, email is mostly text (at least the email I want), I do tons of email over a ssh connection, and, even with an ADSL connection (but not the biggest pipe in the world), X11 forwarding over ssh made using Thunderbird over ssh slow and cumbersome. In addition, filtering, scripts, backup, attachments, editing (with my editor of choice)
Luckily, I don't do calendaring.
Best wishes,
Bob
FUD, FUD, FUD, and FUD (Score:2)
(http://www.stox.org/)
Both got new jobs ... (Score:1)
(http://thirdprize.blogspot.com/index.html)
May I suggest... (Score:1, Interesting)
It's much faster and powerful than Thunderbird, and it's multiplatform. I was tempted to swap it with Thunderbird some months ago and went back as soon as I discovered how unstable is Thunderbird when managing a dozen or so accounts.
For the normal user Thunderbird is a good email client, but when you need something fast, powerful and stable, I'd strongly suggest to try Claws Mail.
That's the power of Open Source. Should Thunderbird "die", it would be mantained by someone else in a matter of weeks, but in the very unlikely situation it dissolves without the development being taken over by other developers, we already have a great alternative.
People are wise to question (Score:2, Insightful)
In this matter, everyone is being too cordial to be believed at face value. Doubtless there's a rich subtext. Such is life.
Might this not be.... (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Portability (Score:1)
It does have an irritating bug of only showing three email accounts in the accounts folder panel, and hiding any other accounts you have, even if you collect email for them (and so you can't read emails to those accounts). Oh, and I don't like it being a Usenet reader as well, it doesn't do it particularly well anyway.
Kmail for KDE (Score:4, Informative)
Protocols (Score:1)
If such a thing does exist, please speak up!
GMail (Score:2, Insightful)
(http://www.apreche.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday November 08 2005, @11:17PM)
From the blog of David Ascher (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.jay.fm/)
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.
Get the CD! (Score:1)
How about a count of the number of people who ... (Score:2, Insightful)
(http://www.nocturnal.org/)
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!.
Thunderbird in Crysis? (Score:2, Funny)
Thunderbird is the worst email client out there... (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Thursday August 28 2003, @02:54PM)
* does not handle large mailboxes well
* if it can't connect to a mail server, it throws away everything it knows about mail in that account
* after years, they still haven't made the minor modifications to fix encryption
** "encrypt when possible"
** trying to save drafts signed
* it does not keep track of what's happening in imap folders very well
* it does not handle text replies to html messages well (e.g. any email addresses get duplicated as mailto tags)
Someday I may even be able to find the time to fix some of these, but for now, well, it's still better than anything else...
Money? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.layt.net/john/)
Chandler? (Score:1, Offtopic)
(http://home.san.rr.com/jasno | Last Journal: Wednesday February 25 2004, @07:51PM)
Thunderbird needs better filtering (Score:2)
(http://www.keirstead.org/)
For example - our companies mail boxes are not allowed to go above 1 GB. So, in KMail, I have a rule that says to automatically move messages older than 90 days from my IMAP inbox to my local inbox. This automatically protects me from having my inbox overflow, and I still get to keep all my messages for archival.
Can I do even this simple task in Thunderbird, no. But KMail sucks for other reasons ( HTML composing support is horrible). So, in the end,I have to run BOTH mail clients at the same time, so that I can use thunderbird while KMail filters for me. This is ridiculous.
Standard mail file formats (Score:2)
(http://www.mobydisk.com/)
Tbird for windows (Score:2)
(http://www.mrcopilot.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday August 02 2005, @10:10AM)
On my windows box at the office I aslo switched to tbird, but I found myself on Gmail more and more. I no longer keep an office at the company and I only use windows for testing win builds of my software. Now all my mail comes through Kmail. I find it easier to use more integrated and just plain better. If I was to do it all over again I'd suggest waiting for the KDE4 for windows versions of KOrganizer. I received complaint after complaint about calendaring, and Sunbird just didn't cut it. I see it has been updated recently but I'm beyond it now.
The blog about Tbird and Mozilla Corp sealed its fate for me.
Good luck to the next group that inherits it. Note to Google. There is screenspace available to serve your adds in the Tbird client. Maybe you should pick it up or fund the Mozilla guys to continue it with a Oficial Gmail extension. Like you guys would use that.
bad odour (Score:1)
(http://www.filthynoises.com/)
Re:Evolution (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Tuesday March 13 2007, @02:39PM)
Re:Mozilla Inc (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday October 24, @03:50AM)
Most Open Source supporters ARE normal corporations.
Re:Evolution (Score:2)
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 supported Windows install of Evolution, I'm willing to try again but until that I'm sticking to Thunderbird.
Re:Slashdot sensationalism damages OSS project! (Score:2)
(http://powerlord.livejournal.com/)
The
Which part do you consider sensationalized? The title "Thunderbird in Crisis?" I'm sorry, but the two lead developers no longer playing a role in how the project is led, with no indication of who is going to lead the project from now on is a crisis.
The only other part that isn't fact (or reasonable conclusions drawn from facts) is "What happened to Mozilla? Is it a case of pauperization through donations?" This is a legitimate concern. Mozilla Foundation founded Mozilla Corporation as a money making operation, with Google as its main client. Mozilla Corp. then kicked out Thunderbird to focus on the development of Firefox.
Merriam Webster has the following as part of the definition of pauper [m-w.com]: "a person destitute of means except such as are derived from charity." I'm assuming this is what the poster meant.
Sincerely,
vgpowerlord