The beginning of Thunderbird 3 planning

Please don't forget about IMAP users.

Things like "Search improvements" in mail clients seem to tend to focus on home-user POP3
users. That's all well and good.

Good IMAP servers like Cyrus IMAPd, however, offer server-side indexed search, and already do
a great job. Additionally, tbird already uses IMAP flags to provide colour labeling of
messages. All it really needs is the ability to invoke a server side search recursively on a
mailbox tree.

I'm afraid that, while "improving" search for POP3 users, server-side IMAP search might be
neglected or made worse than it is. That'd be unfortunate, and it's something that does need
to be kept in mind.

The one absolutely critical thing to fix for Thunderbird is reliability of data storage and
particularly indexes.  I support a few friends/family who use Thunderbird and they frequently
find that messages seem to disappear - this is usually fixable by deleting *.msf files, but
try talking this through with someone on the phone or IM!  Thunderbird needs to prevent such
problems completely if possible through more reliable storage design, or at least recognise
such problems and automatically fix them.

The other important usability item is making it possible to lock down Thunderbird for use by
novices - e.g. disabling the search/filter field (which makes messages 'disappear' again, have
now figured this out), and disabling drag/drop of folders (too easy to lose a folder within
another one).  This is for people who have trouble with Windows Explorer folders, but can cope
with email programs - one of them is 82 and has been using computers and Internet email for 20
years plus, but doesn't get on with folders. 

These issues are based on Windows users, but until people start using some key open source
apps on Windows it's hard to move them to Linux, and the same thing would affect true novices
who use Linux on a low-end PC.

Firefox is far, far more usable than Thunderbird, probably due to greater investment by the
Mozilla people.  I hope Thunderbird can get up to this level.

Calendar integration might be a feature requested by many users, there are users who use
Thunderbird just as a mail client. For those users, speed is the main factor. So, I worry
whether this integration (and other feature additions) could lead to a decrease in
performance. In that case, my suggestion would be to make Calendaring as modular as possible
and provide users an option to "Disable Calendaring support".

> heading off the newly spun-off "MailCo" company.

Where, at the pass? Perhaps you mean "heading up" ;-)

(apologies for pedantry, I couldn't resist)

I haven't seen the word "xulrunner" used anywhere in the article. Will TB3 be based on it or
not?

Just a thought on a functionality,
What do people think about this. right now i have archive folders under my inbox one for every
year. when im done with and email or emails, maybe there should be an archive button like the
junk button that is configurable, in the sense that you can configure which folder to send
messages to onclick.

As someone with multiple mail accounts (having my own domain and mail server) I find the UI
for managing those multiple accounts with a lot of folders in each account (everything is
IMAP) to be tremendously inadequate. Thunderbird is in desperate need of a better UI to handle
how you access different boxes and folders. I also feel personal folders aren't handled in the
best way. Backup is another issue that should be much easier than it is and for god's sake
dump mbox for mdir, it's not hard to have over 2GB of mail these days.

And the spam filtering is about as smart as dirt is. 

Suggestions to increase Thunderbird's growth-rate not just growth.  From one that is trying to
do the growing out in the field.

Your point #2 is one of the main roadblocks we have with migrating people to Thunderbird.  We
deploy many mail servers and clients.  It is fairly easy to migrate the Firefox users in a
corporate environment even with active-x issues.   We need to be able to easily migrate users
from Outlook/Exchange to Thunderbird/Exchange. That is the first step in getting rid of the
Exchange servers.  Then we migrate the servers off of exchange to standard open source
IMAP/iCAL or IMAP/GroupDAV. Migrating the client should be as easy as migrating from IE to
Firefox.  Import all exchange settings from Outlook with wizard and go. 

A mobile/embedded version with decent imap support and Ical/groupdav on the calendar end.
Push is overrated with todays data-rates dropping.  And the increasing popularity of unlimited
data plans.  Our customers chose standard IMAP over inbox-push when presented with both
options for their mobile device 95% of the time.  We should be able to install this on Windows
Mobile and Linux smart phones at the very least.  Iphone would be good too when that becomes
possible.   

An Ajax webmail version of Thunderbird ?  I know this is a stretch but 
as one of those who deploys hosting servers as well as corporate email servers I think that a
decent web version of Thunderbird as the default webmail client on these servers would go a
long way towards increasing the comfort-zone of familiarity to users who already have
Thunderbird installed on their office desktops and mobile devices.      

This would be very helpful for us in replacing the entrenched exchange/outlook setup at a
rapid pace at least in the SMB area. 

Please consider adding and _easy_ way to backup and restore email, currently it is _not_ user
friendly.
We use Thunderbird at work (about 20 of the employees here have email), and several people
have lost email because they could not figure out how to backup their mail.  Needless to say
this is bad.

Thanks,

amac

It's very interesting to note that most of the comments in this thread are feature suggestions
and extremely few of them agree with each other. One says better imap, another says stability,
or a grandma mode or better tagging or... It seems to me that people have very, very different
ideas of what their email program should do, and while some of them can be combined, others
pretty clearly are incompatible. I think that Ascher would do wisely to use some form of
survey to pick out one small set of related features that are relevant to many potential users
and ignoere all other requests until those core things are fixed. It is quite poissible that
he has already done this, I guess. Anyway, I think Thundebird at this point pretty much needs
to find a cohesive vision and go for it. 

Personally, I'd very much like it if that vision was calendaring+IMAP+better searching, but
I'm probably as unrepresentative as the rest of the people here.

The way contacts are handled by thunderbird is awfull....

Please, Thunderbird should use and understand contacts stored on a 
folder, and folders created to store contacts.

Contact information is very important and is totally abandoned in 
Thunderbird.

I'm not sure if it's an IMAP capability, but currently the filter rules are stored in the
client. Obviously if I want to run the mail filters from different systems, I'd need to
replicate the rules manually each time.
It should really be stored on the IMAP server.