Sunbird is the Thunderbird blocker in the enterprise market. Thunderbird plus Sunbird plus a groupware server (kolab etc.) has the potential to kill the Exchange platform, a giant market.

The problem of Open Source is that you need some investment and critical mass to take off. Firefox got the investment.

At work I’m stuck with an exchange server. For my personal email, I run my own server. I use thunderbird (IMAP and SSL) inside my network, and when I’m away from home I use the squirrelmail web-client (also IMAP and SSL). I do this is because you have to install thunderbird, which I can’t always do.

The only good idea here is adding new kinds of indexing, data collecting and searches to thunderbird (like the CD spending example).

The idea expressed here forgets that anykind of web-email depends on someone hosting huge email servers somewhere. Are you wanting to provide an out of the box hotmail or yahoo service? Do you think hotmail or yahoo or anybody else will start using it? There are already tons of web-clients (like squirrelmail) try improving them instead.

If you want to go out and make an “exciting” software web service company out of email don’t hide behind open source get your own venture capital.

I think the mozilla foundation should exist for more than just Firefox. In stead of always factionalizing and duplicating efforts, we should build instituions that can grow and survive.

If most of the “buzz” is about firefox (right now, might not be that way 2 years from now), then it can help support other projects inside Mozilla. I still don’t use firefox because it’s klunky and limited. I use the latest version of what the foundation is named after.

I think companys would free their old, no-longer profitable code as long as there is an organization to take it over, not just throw it away without any hope of anything coming of it. All of this old code might not live on as seperate, resurected products, but its code can be known, learned from, and provide prior art to protect free software from software patents.

I’m thinking of an clean and fast interface which uses hotkeys, advanced filtering, plenty of storage, embedded chat client, features for mobile phones/SMS, the works.

There is no real difference between Firefox and TB, they are just different ways of displaying web data, XUL + RDF + XML + SOAP + HTTP + FTP + IMAP are just ways of representing XML over an open standards connection.

Don’t get caught up in it’s an email vs web thing - it’s not - it’s all just XML data, and somewhere in the not to distant future it will all begin to align, and the varous Mozilla technologies are the perfect place for them to meet.

Yes TB is dire, but why should my calendar and email be in a different app to my web browser? Why should I care that one is XHTML and another MIME? Why is it all not just web data? If Web 2.0 is about anything more than marketing BS it’s about destroying data silos.

If TB can generate a revenue, then fine let it, but if you want both TB and Firefox to have a longterm future, then they are fundimentally intertwined - one feeding from the other, stop thinking web vs email and starting leveraging this spectacular platform.

If Thunderbird had tons of users, then Mozilla would have no problems with keeping it going.

Why then — and here’s the obvious thing, at least to those who know marketing principles — why hasn’t Mozilla displayed the Thunderbird download button on the same page as the Firefox download page.

Duhhhh. When the people come to get Firefox, they’ll see Thunderbird, and out of curioisity many will download it.

It’s called leverage. Co-branding.

So obvious.

Right now, the Thunderbird download page is hidden away, requiring the users to click the PRODUCTS page to find out. Most people are not curious, and won’t click the PRODUCTS link.

People in Mozilla live in an ivory tower inhabited by techies. They think everyone knows about Thunderbird, but aren’t using it. No, most people don’t know about Thunderbird.

Geez. I get so frustrated. Why not try the obvious. It can’t hurt. Put the Thunderbird download button on the same page as Firefox.

Look, don’t kill off our Thunderbird program, before you’ve at least tried the obvious.

And, admit it, spinning off Thunderbird into a separate organization will kill it off, because you’ll have lost the chance to leverage off the massive Firefox user base.

Please, at least try the obvious.

- I’m more productive with its UI than I am with Outlook.
- I like the unlimited tags and saved searches
- I use secure pop connections so I can use popfile.sourceforge.net which is by far the best email categorizer/spam detecter I’ve seen.
- I feel more secure from viruses when using Thunderbird as compared to Outlook.

I use Thunderbird over Gmail because:

- I prefer the UI
- I occasionally have to send encrypted/signed emails between email accounts and I can do that easily with Thunderbird and haven’t figured out how to do that with GMail.

I tried very hard to standardise a medium sized business on Thunderbird / IMAP and as great as the e-mail part of it was, the various departments asked for on a frequent basis was the calendar / tasks / meetings functionality. In came a new manager who saw this deficiency, and what did he do? Wiped the whole lot out with Outlook and Exchange.

Now someone will no doubt chime in to tell me “Oh but TB was never a business class app, and is meant for home e-mail”. Business is where the investment and community are. Business needs are what pushes Linux kernel development and so many other aspects of OSS.

I have actively participated with feedback / bugzilla and in Q&A sessions for Lightning and the pathetic resources pooled to Clint and the team is so obvious. Help them get the groupware aspect sorted asap, get in bed with the Funambol project for your synchronisation with mobile devices, help the caldav server developers out, etc and you will have your community, your investment and success.

By all means ignore this, and turn off the light while you’re at it. Messing around splitting TB up from the well known FF / Moz brand when you should be focusing on the calendaring/tasks/meetings/etc is idiotic. You may as well as Google to PR0 it.

Gmail is the largest breach of privacy since first generation of spyware. They keep your mail, analyse your mail and advertise using your private mail data.

I was never a great fan of Mozilla project but the recent progress and some shadowy decisions like these makes me question what kind of “good” Mozilla offers over MS IE.

One is bound to MSN/Microsoft and other is bound to Google. Where is the difference? If you are that bound to Google, why still beg for Donation from good willing people who thinks they are supporting open future?

Apple Safari is used as a weapon in their hands to force people to upgrade their already working operating systems but I don’t see they put “Donate to Webkit” buttons all over the place.

If you give up actual mail technologies like IMAP for some Webmail which doesn’t give a heck to your privacy and your client vendor does some tricks to force you to that technology, would it matter if it is open source or not?

Tell us when are you putting “Click here for mail” link pointing people to Gmail on Firefox.

With recent developments in scene and everyone having good bandwidth, especially with introduction of 3G technologies, real mail isn’t going anywhere. Just check around, how many Blackberries you see?

If you take this decision and couple of years later you whine about how evil that MS Outlook/Lotus duopoly is, we will make people remember it.

Last word: You should notify Qualcomm about your Gmail support plans so a great mail client which is use in REAL corporate World would continue its development instead of becoming a “theme” on an abandoned non serious mail client.