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.