It is worth noting, however, that webmail clients are available for pretty much every single ISP that provides email so you don’t have to put any private data on Google’s servers. Ultimately, your mail has to go to some server though and where ever that is, there’s probably a webmail client.

I don’t use Gmail regularly. My mail goes to a Mozilla server. I access it via both Thunderbird and the Zimbra web interface.

I don’t see how this leads to interoperability problems, though. It’s still IMAP, POP, and SMTP, regardless of whether I’m accessing it from Thunderbird or a webmail app. Can you explain further what you mean here?

- A

1. adding sunbird lightning calendar to Thunderbird installer by default
2. Integrating serverless Instant Messenger retroshare.sf.net to Thunderbird
3. Creating a adress book in Thunderbird, which has: emailadress, retroshare-key fields for each contact (copy out line).
4. creating the online-contact box in the left menue as a contact list for Thunderbrid email, users are offline or online and can be messaged or emailed. So there is no need for a buddylist, it is just the contacts adressbook of Thunderbird, which appears in the write Window and under teh folders in the main window left.
5. Make a Thunderbird wizard, which picks up email-pop, retroshare cert_user.pem file OR creats an account for retroshare serverless IM.

These five steps to a new Thunderbird future combine both:
- online and offline communication
- Instant Messaging and Email
- serverless (new jabber-retroshare) and serverbased protocols (email)
- a new general interface to internet communication on the desktop.

If no new roadmap is done for Mozilla, let

If y’all are really interested in keeping the web open then focus on innovating faster, not worrying whether or not somebody needs to use a computer to be a productive member of society. The hubris of your presentation this week was rather annoying.
I’d rather see MoFo compete against Silverlight, JavaFX, and AIR with something more than mostly empty rhetoric.

I’d suggest, as others have, renaming MoCo to FirefoxCo and then having MoFo focus on the mozilla platform. If you need any help, I’d suggest looking at the BoF ran by your former OSAF org which, when I passed by it last night consisted of maybe four people and Ted Leung. I remember not so long ago where there were easily a half dozen OSAF folks at OSCON bof with maybe fifty people in the crowd total, while there might be just five of us with a Netscape employee at the Mozilla one. It wouldn’t take long to have Mozilla get back to that size if you’re not more focused.
How much time and energy does Mitch Kapor spend on OSAF anymore?

As for Thunderbird, if might make sense to form a TBCo since there are more than a few large companies and enterprises that use it. But there really isn’t a lot of innovation with email clients, so it’s not clear how much of market there is. Given that Apache, Eclipse, etc Foundations don’t seem to have these issues, I’d suggest you drop-kick your “Manifesto” into the dust bin and get back to engineering.

I think this is the part that people are getting that impression from. If nothing else, this is sitting just poorly enough to put people on edge. I think the public were assuming that a benefit of the corporation would be that this would become Moco’s territory, freeing the foundation to explore other less cared for aspects of the internet.

People don’t know what has or hasn’t been done already behind the scenes that has led up to option 3 being what seems like a first line option. I think people were prepared to hear about another subsidiary or foundation for Thunderbird, but the idea that cutting TB lose is already an option… it makes it very hard for people who don’t know how the foundation and corporation really work to accept that this isn’t just a polite way of showing the project to the door.

If this is how the foundation really feels, then option 3 should be off the table for now, unless efforts have already been made to try options 1 and 2 that we just don’t know about. If option 3 is on the table because it’s what the Thunderbird devs want, then why is this all being framed in terms of what the foundation is focused on? Also, why aren’t they making the call to action?

I think this will all be a lot easier to understand and accept as you make more posts about all the aspects involved. I also agree that Thunderbird should have it’s own organizational structure, but then I already know about the resources that Moco has for Firefox, and why simply hiring more people won’t help much. I think once those topics are explored more in public then others will find it harder to misunderstand the intentions here.

http://www.mozilla.org/community/developer-forums.html#dev-apps-thunderbird

I think that generally Thunderbird has taken an interesting and perhaps correct course during the last years, otherwise critics of what has been done so far would have been much greater. But this isn

I believe I could help in the future development of Thunderbird. I’d like to see it incorporate some of Outlook Express’s nicer features that it lacks, and eventually integrate calendaring functionality (Sunbird) - I think it has great potential to be an Outlook killer.

For my part, I wouldn’t like to see a ‘Thunderbird Corporation’ spinoff (what I perceive Option 3 to be). I don’t think Thunderbird, in its current form, could earn its keep as a separate organization. That shouldn’t relegate it to being dumped, though; it’s a useful piece of software for the community, and profit shouldn’t be the be-all-and-end-all of development. Cross-subsidize Thunderbird development with some of Firefox’s (large) resources. If Google won’t have it, tell them where to jump.

Perhaps it would help clear up some of the confusion if you stated, in plain terms, your understanding of the de facto Mozilla mission as it stands today and how you think Thunderbird does in fact contribute to it. What you wrote above (”the Mozilla mission is very broad; broad enough to encompass many aspects of human interaction with the Internet”) is so broad as to be almost meaningless.

I thought you might be interested in this:

I would love to share a new tool with your readers. BigString is a free email service that allows a user to easily send, recall, erase, self-destruct and modify an email after it has been sent. BigString users have unprecedented control over all of their email, whether they choose to send it through the BigString.com website or even Microsoft Outlook.

It is inevitable. At one point or another in your life, you