- A

If there solutions available for easy offline archiving, reading, composition and sorting of webmail without the use of client side applications (TB being one of them)please share information about them with me. Currently I use TB for this purpose mainly (along with managing multiple accounts and profiles on a single computer).

You’re mostly talking about the marketing community here, but I actually think that Thunderbird could use more help in documentation and support as well as qa and development. The Tbird audience just isn’t the same as the Firefox audience and I don’t think that marketing with the Firefox techniques would be the right place to put focus for Thunderbird.

Maybe I’m completely wrong, and I’m happy to be proved wrong by some industrious volunteers but I don’t think it’s worth the effort to increase investment in trying to reach Firefox-like users for Thunderbird.

- A

and you are right. But an important contributing factor to the above fact is that the community development focus of Mozilla has been around Firefox ever since version 1 (of Firefox) was released on November 9 2004. TB is never going to have the download numbers Firefox but is MoFo willing to give TB a shot by working on a donation supported NYT ad, like you (we) all did for Firefox. What about a project for used generated TV advertisements for TB? How about just putting TB affiliate buttons on the main page of spreadfirefox?

(I know you remember the discussions but looking at the following url will make it clear that there was some interest in having a separate Spread Thunderbird in order to develop a community around it even a long time ago. http://www.spreadfirefox.com/search/node/spreadthunderbird)

I feel talking about the community around TB is very not a very fair assessment. The Firefox community is there because of the efforts of a lot of people (with you being right there at the top of the list). At least some efforts need to be made to develop a community around TB before writing it off.

(I believe that google has nothing to do with this decision and now that the decision has been made my personal preference is for a separate non profit for Thunderbird)

Right, there were about 5 or 6 pretty dedicated volunteers up through 0.6 when MoFo was created and started paying you and one or two others to work on it and by then I’d guess it was up to around 8-10 full time people’s worth of development.

“There were what maybe 8-10 people contributing to its engineering full time (aggregating partial time).”

Agreed.

“The difference is that the availability of revenue has meant the Mozilla Corporation has been able to hire, and hire it has. How many full time engineers contribute to Firefox now?”

I believe that the number is 10.

Seth and I have been doing a lot of really cool community metrics this year and our latest numbers put the total number of code contributors for Firefox+Gecko at about 115 for each of the last two quarters. Mozilla paid about 35 of them. Of that 35, 10 are on Mozilla’s Firefox team.

I don’t have the Firefox/Gecko breakdowns in front of me for contributors not paid by Mozilla but it’s a safe bet that it’s a bit heavy towards Firefox (Gecko being a bit more difficult to work on) — so let’s just say it’s 50 of the 80 people not paid by Mozilla, for the sake of this discussion. Oh, and a cool note, the not paid by Mozilla folks are responsible for about 50% of the code changed over the last two quarters. I think that’s pretty cool.

So, Mozilla has a Firefox team of about 10 people. There’s a community of about 50 people outside of Mozilla’s employ who are contributing about as much code as the Mozilla paid Firefox team is contributing. I don’t have Thunderbird numbers except that I know Mozilla’s paid Thunderbird team is 2 people, or 1/5th of Mozilla’s Firefox team.

I think, though, that a more interesting comparison would be the number of community members contributing extensions or the total number of extensions developed for Firefox and for Thunderbird. There’s where the difference in ecosystems really shows and isn’t tightly coupled to Mozilla’s employment process. You could also look at the number of nightly build downloads. I’m not sure what that number is for Thunderbird lately but it’s up around 15K per day for Firefox. Looking at the Firefox and Thunderbird volunteer affiliate buttons, Thunderbird buttons are viewed about 500K times per week and Firefox buttons are viewed about 25M times per week.

So, yes, Mozilla pays more Firefox developers than Thunderbird developers (5 times as many) but that’s just one measure, and one that I don’t think speaks to the real situation these two projects face. We simply cannot drive change in the world without a large and healthy community. Where we have that, we are effective. Where we don’t have that, we’re not. We don’t have the kind of community around Thunderbird that we do around Firefox. There are probably a lot of reasons, but I think that MoCo’s investment in developers is not key among them.

- A

Most of these solutions are implementing IMAP quite well, they’re all doing a fine job with SMTP, there’s plenty of interoperability based on ancient email RFCs, privacy isn’t any more of a concern than it would be with desktop clients and more and more of them are moving towards an offline model that will allow for both archiving and off-line email reading and composing.

I’d say that webmail is doing pretty well.

- A

From previous blog…
“We would also like to find contributors committed to creating and implementing a new vision of mail.”

Today’s internet is becoming different from what we know before. Now we have social networking wherein people are hooked and used it as a way of communicating with friends. We also have instant messengers, etc., etc.

With the internet becoming more and more obiquitous people just log in to their webmails and rarely use a client.

This is not to say ThunderBird is no good. It is. But it’s time we face these new challenges and collaborate on making new breed of communication system into a reality.

Is there an introductory guide on how to contribute to TB?

By the way, Yahoo’s new mail interface is far too slow for daily use. Everyone I know has switched back to the old one.