Mozilla Messaging Starts up Operations [LWN.net]

Mozilla Messaging has announced that it has begun operations. "The initial focus for Mozilla Messaging is the development of Thunderbird 3, which will deliver significant improvements, notably integrated calendaring, better search and enhancements to the overall user experience."

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Mozilla Messaging Starts up Operations

Posted Feb 19, 2008 23:21 UTC (Tue) by darwish07 (guest, #49520) [Link] (6 responses)

I dream of something like an open-source web-based mail reader like Gmail, sponsored by
Mozilla. The development becomes open, and the server side software is updated for each
extra-stable release. Maybe mozilla can also make some money from the project by ads, google
search and new novel things. 

This would be much more better than creating a local mail reader/local calender which becomes
less appropriate daily. (espicailly the calender side, which you basically need to update it
from a variety of places if you are a busy person).

Mozilla Messaging Starts up Operations

Posted Feb 20, 2008 0:35 UTC (Wed) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (2 responses)

If they want to make money what they should develop is an Outlook/Exchange open source
competitor.

Mozilla Messaging Starts up Operations

Posted Feb 20, 2008 19:57 UTC (Wed) by cpm (guest, #3554) [Link] (1 responses)

Careful;

That is how this whole thing started, I could go into it, but here
is as good a write up as I have read:

http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

Mozilla Messaging Starts up Operations

Posted Feb 20, 2008 21:04 UTC (Wed) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link]

This is more or less the inspiration for what we're doing at www.bongo-project.org.

It's not an exchange/outlook killer, but it will hopefully be simple but useful web mail/calendar.

Thunderbird is also a pretty key client for us & the various other free software mail projects; I wish the Mozilla Messaging co. all the luck in the world.

Mozilla Messaging Starts up Operations

Posted Feb 20, 2008 0:37 UTC (Wed) by kev009 (guest, #43906) [Link] (1 responses)

That's what IMAP and CalDAV are for.  It would be nice to see something like IMAP for a user's
RSS subscriptions so it would remember what has been read as well.  Not everyone wants web
only interfaces.  I quite like my fat email clients, and only used web interfaces when on
public computers.

Mozilla Messaging Starts up Operations

Posted Feb 20, 2008 1:49 UTC (Wed) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link]

The OP might be on to something.  I use Mutt at home and Icedove at work.  While I still
prefer local clients to web equivalents, offering a web-based client in addition to standalone
clients could be a decent way to generate revenue.  Even better if the web client could
support the "productivity" features many businesses use.  

Microsoft's Exchange web client is horrible to use.  I imagine people would love an
alternative.

Mozilla Messaging Starts up Operations

Posted Feb 20, 2008 11:24 UTC (Wed) by raboofje (guest, #26972) [Link]

This would be much more better than creating a local mail reader/local calender which becomes less appropriate daily. (espicailly the calender side, which you basically need to update it from a variety of places if you are a busy person).

I tend to disagree: I want my calendar to be an aggregation of calendar 'feeds', and these feeds may not be publicly available: some may require my personal credentials to access, others might not even be accessible from outside my corporate network at all.

I don't want to trust online webapps with my credentials to external sites - we really need standardized infrastructure to give different webapps *partial* access to your data at other webapps. As for information that's only locally available, web-based offerings are out of luck there entirely.

The technology to do this is largely in place. I hope it will turn into a real usable product soon.

Mozilla Messaging Starts up Operations

Posted Feb 20, 2008 11:53 UTC (Wed) by mgh (guest, #5696) [Link] (2 responses)

What concerns me is that the thrust of the approach to the new Thunderbird is more features...
how about getting the basics right first?

- some attachements are corrupted, some on receipt some on sending
- attachments are downloaded up to 3 times when using imap 
- even if mail is available locally the remote server is always preferred

the last two (amoung others) make thunderbird almost unusable with IMAP and a mobile device.

Don't get me wrong I use TB everyday for 10 hours a day and it does some things very well.

But I'd trade a lot of features for better stability.  My reccomendation to the TB team would
be improve quality, reduce code size, make TB portable for mobile devices and modularise it so
features can be added as modules for more capable devices.  Anyway dreams are free :-)

Mozilla Messaging Starts up Operations

Posted Feb 20, 2008 20:00 UTC (Wed) by cpm (guest, #3554) [Link]

- some attachements are corrupted, some on receipt some on sending
- attachments are downloaded up to 3 times when using imap 


Umm, interesting.

gotta roll out here @work of about a hundred tbirds, running
on OSX,Win and Linux. I've NEVER seen this in the 3+ years
that we've been a tbird only shop. 

What I have seen, is some of my 'power users' deciding to move
some stuff out of their multi-gig inboxes into subfolders, and
the so-called move ends up creating multiple copies of the emails.

I've never been able to replicate this myself. I've tried.

Stability and reliability

Posted Feb 20, 2008 21:54 UTC (Wed) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]

I agree completely. Stability really is critical - Thunderbird has to manipulate the user's
own data, but it sometimes is just not reliable, which causes real problem for both new users
and power users. See http://lwn.net/Articles/266938/ for comments on this.

Ease of use etc matter as well, but without reliability adoption of Thunderbird will always be
limited.