LWN: Comments on "The beginning of Thunderbird 3 planning"

Finally filed a bug for my wife's recurring thunderbird crash...

dank — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 18:09:03 +0000

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=426351

The beginning of Thunderbird 3 planning

goaty — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 06:27:24 +0000

The first commandment of mail software is "thou shalt not lose mail". I'm an IMAPper too, but
if POP3 users are losing mail, that has to take priority over everything else.

I'm not sure I accept the idea that Thunderbird needs to increase its userbase, but if we take
that as true, then calendering is definitely the way to do it. If you duplicate the
calendering functionality from Evolution, a million corporate desktops would switch overnight.
Evolution is so flaky I'm starting to think it was developed by creationists out of spite.

The task not the program

Cato — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 09:39:50 +0000

It's not just the task - it's the fact that the Thunderbird interface is stateful.  

Take the message filtering box - a nice feature for power users, but confusing to novices, who
will type something in here and then later on wonder why all their messages "have been
deleted" or "have vanished".  This is truly a panic-inducing prospect for someone who is a
novice at Thunderbird and not very confident with computers.  Making it really obvious how to
"show all my messages again" would help solve this - or have a "progressive disclosure" model
where this feature is not enabled initially but can be turned on with an "I am a power user"
toggle set by the user.

I'm not a usability expert so there may be much better solutions to this, but this just shows
that there can't have been much usability testing of Thunderbird.

Filter Rules should be stored in IMAP server

tcwan — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 06:08:45 +0000

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.

The beginning of Thunderbird 3 planning

tristangrimaux — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 03:18:50 +0000

This is no incompatible at all: "One says better imap, another says 
stability"

For those who are IMAP users, there is no stability problem, for those 
who are POP3 users, stability is killing their mailboxes.

As usual, there are people saying little things that are unimportant and 
there is a big clamor on those two factors. Choosing wisely is key for a 
god product manager, and this is what he needs to show.

You (as I) are in the side of IMAPerS so I agree, and I should add 
Contact info on IMAP folders.

Contacts

tristangrimaux — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 03:07:19 +0000

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.

Contacts management!!!!!

billou — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 01:45:18 +0000

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

The beginning of Thunderbird 3 planning

liljencrantz — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 19:31:14 +0000

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.

IMAP and virtual folders

dskoll — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 19:01:33 +0000

IMAP support always seems to be bolted on afterwards

Sadly, that's true. I can imagine the development going something like this:

"Aaaah! There are all these weird mail stores out there. Let's abstract out a generic mailstore and specialize it for each actual store."

"OK, what can a mail store do? Well, let's look at POP3 and see.."

The generic mail store API is then designed around POP3 and has no idea how to use the more advanced facilities offered by IMAP. :-(

The beginning of Thunderbird 3 planning

amac — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 16:36:34 +0000

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

For power users, fix reliability

dank — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 14:35:00 +0000

OMG yes.  Thunderbird crashes monthly for my wife,
and when it does, she has to remove upwards of 10,000
duplicate messages from inbox, and go through a 
complicated ritual of compressing mail folders 
and resetting every single fucking folder's sort
options by hand.  This is a serious pain when you have
200 folders.  I swear to god she loses 8 hours of work
each time this happens.  And she's no novice.

I think one key to this is to get more forceful about
enabling the crash feedback widget.  If Thunderbird
notices it has crashed three times without that turned on,
it should get very persuasive about enabling it.

If gmail ever gets folders, Thunderbird is so toast for users
like my wife.

The beginning of Thunderbird 3 planning

andydread — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 13:31:06 +0000

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.

IMAP and virtual folders

fergal — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 10:39:41 +0000

Yes, I've written a few scripts to do bulk operations in IMAP and it definitely seems like a protocol that just grew and the was documented but that is no excuse for clients doing:

Fetch message 1 header.
Thank you.
Fetch message 2 header.
Thank you.

when they should be doing:

Give me all the message headers.
Thank you.

The same goes for moving/copying messages. IMAP support always seems to be bolted on afterwards

IMAP and virtual folders

dskoll — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 02:14:35 +0000

I use Thunderbird with IMAP and it's OK for my needs.  While I agree that most IMAP clients
suck, you have to realize that IMAP as a protocol sucks.  It's really a horrible protocol; the
best IMAP client I know of is "Pine" (or "Alpine") and one of the authors of Pine was the main
IMAP RFC author, so I'd hope he'd get it right!

For Thunderbird 3, I'm not that interested in an integrated calendar.  I would prefer some
kind of tagging mechanism to tag messages (with arbitrary numbers of tags per message) and
then filtering on tags to make virtual folders.

The beginning of Thunderbird 3 planning

leoc — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 01:50:05 +0000

How about a button that simply "archives" into a database (kind of like google mail "Archive"
button).  Then you could have "folders" that are just views into this database.  For example
you could browse your archived email by year (or sender, or recipient, etc) without having to
manually do any sorting.

IMAP and virtual folders

fergal — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:46:02 +0000

Evolution sucks for IMAP. Sadly the competition sucks even more. I deal with several thousand mails per day using Evolution and vfolders and I far too often find myself waiting as Evolution goes off in a trance for no good reason - there is a reason, it has decided to do something silly with IMAP server, it's just not a _good_ reason.

Today I did my semi-annual checkout-if-any-of-the-competitors-have-stopped-sucking-yet. The answer was a resounding "no". I watched sadly as Thunderbird, Balsa and Sylpheed all started downloading message headers 1 at a time from the server, destined to finish some time next year. Kmail was reasonably snappy and seems to actually take advantage of some of IMAP's goodness however searching by "any recipient contains" just got me a while bunch of error messages. It seems it has no idea which kinds of searches are available on an IMAP server.

It really makes me wonder does anyone actually use IMAP or do they just develop the code with test accounts on test servers :(

The beginning of Thunderbird 3 planning

rahvin — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:29:22 +0000

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.

IMAP and virtual folders

proski — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 14:55:41 +0000

In fact, the only reason I had to switch to Evolution was lack of support for mailing list based virtual folders on IMAP in Thunderbird. Yes, there is a bug in bugzilla for that.

A more generic complaint is that the logic for virtual folders is very limited. For example, I cannot make a virtual folder for messages that didn't come from any mailing lists. That's true for Evolution as well. Fix that, and I'll switch back.

The beginning of Thunderbird 3 planning

Josiah47 — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 13:34:05 +0000

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.

The beginning of Thunderbird 3 planning

ceplm — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 09:51:07 +0000

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

The beginning of Thunderbird 3 planning

wingo — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 09:47:01 +0000

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

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

(apologies for pedantry, I couldn't resist)

For novices, fix reliability and usability

halla — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 09:42:53 +0000

If thunderbird would start using Akonadi, a lot of the reliability problems would be solved.

For novices, fix reliability and usability

nim-nim — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 09:37:54 +0000

Data storage reliability could be dramatically improved by dropping mbox for maildir at last
(it would make imap support more natural too BTW)

maildir support has been requested since 2000 but unfortunately it seems not to be on
thunderbird authors radar, even after all the mbox robustness problems people predicted then
materialised

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58308

Every thunderbird user with data storage problems should vote on this bug.

The beginning of Thunderbird 3 planning

sjayaraman — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 09:34:47 +0000

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".

The task not the program

grantingram — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 09:22:53 +0000

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.

Whilst I am all in favour of easy to use interfaces - I can't help feeling that the reason Firefox is easier to use is that fundamentally browsing the web is much simpler than managing your e-mail in Thunderbird.

In the first you are essentially reading text and in the second you are writing text and managing other bits of text people have sent you...

For novices, fix reliability and usability

Cato — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 08:54:44 +0000

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.

The beginning of Thunderbird 3 planning

ringerc — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 07:47:34 +0000

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.