Mozilla

Email Call to Action

July 25th, 2007

Do you think email is important part of Internet life? Are you interested in seeing something interesting and exciting happen in the mail space? Believe that Thunderbird provides a much-needed option for open source email alternatives and want to see it get more attention on its own? Long to see something more innovative than Thunderbird in the mail space happen?

So does Mozilla.

Are you someone who could contribute to such an effort? Do you have expertise and a desire to be involved in an innovative mail effort and/or a focused Thunderbird effort? If so, Mozilla would like to hear from you.

Thunderbird

Mozilla has been supporting Thunderbird as a product since the beginning of the Foundation. The result is a good, solid product that provides an open alternative for desktop mail. However, the Thunderbird effort is dwarfed by the enormous energy and community focused on the web, Firefox and the ecosystem around it. As a result, Mozilla doesn’t focus on Thunderbird as much as we do browsing and Firefox and we don’t expect this to change in the foreseeable future. We are convinced that our current focus — delivering the web, mostly through browsing and related services — is the correct priority. At the same time, the Thunderbird team is extremely dedicated and competent, and we all want to see them do as much as possible with Thunderbird.

We have concluded that we should find a new, separate organizational setting for Thunderbird; one that allows the Thunderbird community to determine its own destiny.

Mozilla is exploring the options for an organization specifically focused on serving Thunderbird users. A separate organization focused on Thunderbird will both be able to move independently and will need to do so to deepen community and user involvement. We’re not yet sure what this organization will look like. We’ve thought about a few different options. I’ve described them below. If you’ve got a different idea please let us know.

Option 1: Create a new non-profit organization analogous to the Mozilla Foundation — a Thunderbird foundation. If it turns out Thunderbird generates a revenue model from the product as Firefox does, then a Thunderbird foundation could follow the Mozilla Foundation model and create a subsidiary.

This model probably offers the maximum independence for Thunderbird. But it is also the most organizationally complex. There is lots of overhead to create a new foundation, find good board members, recreate the administrative load. When we started the Mozilla Foundation Mitch Kapor, our-then business development lead and I spent a bunch of time on this work. The current Thunderbird developers don’t have this level of business assistance. If there is revenue that requires a subsidiary then the overhead goes up even further. There is serious concern that this will detract from serving Thunderbird users, since the core Thunderbird team is small and developer-focused.

Option 2: Create a new subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation for Thunderbird. This has less overhead, although it still requires a new company that serves the mission of the Mozilla Foundation. In this case the Mozilla Foundation board and personnel would remain involved in Thunderbird. Thunderbird would continue to need to be balanced and prioritized with Mozilla’s focus on delivering the web through Firefox, its ecosystem and the Open Web as the platform. The Thunderbird effort may therefore still end up with less focus and less flexibility.

Option 3: Thunderbird is released as a community project much like SeaMonkey, and a small independent services and consulting company is formed by the Thunderbird developers to continue development and care for Thunderbird users. Many open source projects use this model, it could be simpler and more effective than a Mozilla Foundation subsidiary. However, creating this as a non-profit would be extremely difficult. Running a services company as an independent taxable company is the simplest operational answer. We would need to figure out how such a company relates to the Thunderbird product itself. What’s the best way for such a company to release a product? How does that relate to the community project that stays within Mozilla?

We don’t know the best answer yet. And we don’t expect to without a broad public discussion and involvement, which we hope this message will trigger. Today someone suggested to me that perhaps there is another foundation that might be a good home for Thunderbird. I hadn’t thought of this; it’s a creative idea.

If you’ve got thoughts or — even better — want to get involved, please let us know. Some suggestions for making sure Mozilla is aware of your comments are at the end of this post.

Broader Mail Initiative

We would also like to find contributors committed to creating and implementing a new vision of mail. We would like to have a roadmap that brings wild innovation, increasing richness and fundamental improvements to mail. And equally importantly, we would like to find people with relevant expertise who would join with Mozilla to make something happen.

If we can see a path to an innovative mail initiative in addition to supporting existing Thunderbird users, then we are interested in doing so. If we find the best way to improve mail is incremental development of Thunderbird as already planned, then we’ve learned something extremely valuable as well.

Mozilla has a range of resources — funds, code, etc. — that can be applied to this problem. We’re looking for people with expertise, vision and leadership capabilities. If you are such a person, or know of such people, please let us know.

Discussion

If you’re interested in these topics, let us know. The web is great at distributed discussions, let’s see what we think about mail. I’ll moderate comments and trackbacks here quickly. If you want to make absolutely sure that Mozilla can find your thoughts easily, feel free to leave a pointer to them here. There’s also a page for each discussion on the Mozillla wiki, although they require you to log-in to edit. So if you have a Mozilla wiki account or are willing to create one, you can find these pages at the locations below. Go to the “Discussion” tab at the top to add your thoughts or pointers back to your posts.

Thunderbird
Mail Initiative

188 comments for “Email Call to Action”

  1. 1

    Kurt said on July 25th, 2007 at 10:06 am:

    Why can’t you guys just hire more people to work on it? Mozilla received millions last year and have only picked up a few people here and there so what is going on with the rest of the money?

  2. 2

    Markus said on July 25th, 2007 at 10:11 am:

    No suprise that the OSS community turns away from Mozilla (see Epiphany ported to WebKit). Your arrogant attitude towards the community annoys me sice quite some time. All you care about is revenue. Start fixing bugs (look at the top voted bugs on Bugzilla) instead of think of ways to get more and more money.
    You’re a non-profit organisation for god’s sake.

    Want a new vision of mail? I got one for you:
    After 8 long years start adding a f*cking scroll bar to the header view! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9942

    I’m eager to try out Mac OS X Leopard’s Mail.app. And once the Shiira web browser gets an ad blocker, Mozilla browsers can kiss my a*s.

  3. 3

    Henrik Gemal said on July 25th, 2007 at 11:48 am:

    Sad to see the 110 focus on Firefox. But if that’s what it takes to beat Internet Explorer then we got to make that decision.

    Go Go Go Firefox!

  4. 4

    Ricky said on July 25th, 2007 at 12:13 pm:

    And don’t forget to rename the “Mozilla Corporation” to “Firefox Corporation”, I think that will make things more obvious (http://www.bengoodger.com/2007/04/the_autonomous_future.html).

  5. 5

    Andrew Sutherland said on July 25th, 2007 at 12:35 pm:

    In order to thrive, Thunderbird has to not only beat other email clients, but it also has to beat web-based email like gmail and friends. There are some scenarios where gmail/etc. cannot compete, like in the enterprise where coporations likely frown on forwarding all your email outside the company. But it seems hard to build the kind of community around Thunderbird that Firefox has if it is only used in the enterprise.

    I think the core development of Thunderbird has been good and the underlying plug-in architecture enables innovation. I think more could be done to support third-party innovation (ex: put mailnews in mercurial!), and I don’t really see anything wrong with Mozilla contributing with innovation of its own.

    Anywho, my suggestion for a brave new world of email is to put visualization into Thunderbird! I am actually already working on this in my free time, although it’s slow going right now because I am doing so using Python and have to contend with the issues that entails. (Right now there’s a PyXPCOM bug in my setup that has distracted me into Python bindings and associated tooling for Robert O’Callahan’s chronicle-recorder, since I am also a fan of trying to visualize program execution for debugging support…)

    Blog entries with exciting, if confusing and rough, screenshots can be found at: http://www.visophyte.org/blog/2007/04/09/an-actual-thunderbird-email-visualization-at-last/ http://www.visophyte.org/blog/2007/06/13/thunderbird-stacked-linechart-visualization/

    I’m not saying Mozilla should throw all their support behind email visualization (though I would not complain!). Although there is some low-hanging fruit in the visualization space, the best visualizations are going to build on deep analysis, which Thunderbird could provide and benefit those people who aren’t a fan of shiny things. For example, topic-analysis of emails or support for automated extraction of quasi-structured data from e-mails. By the latter, I suppose I mean defining an API so that plugins can be written to extract information from e-mails and then exposed to consumers in a common way. (Perhaps this relates to microformats?) Besides the obvious things like extracting UPS/etc. tracking numbers, dates, and places for other plugins to build on, there is the opportunity for the long tail, which is likely a place where gmail will not go.

    For example, I order a lot of CD’s, and I generally receive an invoice via e-mail. A plugin (or plugins with a common output representation) could extract the totals and allow me to chart the horrors of my CD spending sprees. While this information can be gathered other ways (directly crawl and parse Amazon pages for only-Amazon stuff), there is some benefit to leveraging all the information that pours into your inbox.

    A more practical example of something useful would be a plugin that extracted references to bug tracking numbers, and not just a bugzilla-specific one. In my old job, a lot of bug-related conversation happened in e-mail. Let us say I want info about bug #A, and in that thread there is a reference to bug #B, which has other threads. While today I can search for #A in Thunderbird, then when I see the reference to #B I can search for B. However, with these references directly exposed, while I am browsing the thread on A, Thunderbird can directly point out the thread/messages about B, visualizations or no.

    I’d be interested in others who are also interested in visualization in Thunderbird. Although I am still more talk than code right now, I hope to change that soon. So, people interested in this idea I guess please post here too or drop me a line? (sombrero@alum.mit.edu)

  6. 6

    Majken said on July 25th, 2007 at 1:04 pm:

    I agree that things are going to get really interesting with the web and what it can do. I think we might be missing the boat if we think it’s all going to happen within the browser. All the talk I hear about “the web is the future!” sounds like Firefox as OS, and maybe it’s my lack of vision, but I just can’t see that working out well. If everything is going to be “on the web” then where does a browser separate from the operating system fit in? Will it be like PowerDesktop, an alternative file exlorer?

    I think there is a serious underestimation of how much people want their data *off* the web as much as possible, especially in North America. What will happen for those users? I guess Firefox would save their data to the HD and tell the server to delete it, and then the web interface would be able to read the mail again? Or Firefox would display it without sending it back to the server? Isn’t that another suite?

    I think my biggest problem with all this is I don’t know how far in the future all this is, maybe it’s next year, and so it’s *Really* happening, but is it really? What’s the timeframe for this? Are we really somewhere with standards that it can happen so soon? 5 years maybe?

    So while everyone’s really excited about what’s coming down the tubes, I’m sitting at home wanting to use an email client, and a calendar manager, and I like not having to go online to check stuff (*my* internet is up pretty much 24/7 and I have unlimited bandwidth, but pretty sure that’s still the minority). Especially on my laptop. Yeah there’s mobile phones, too, but seriously what is the security like? Hackers are just beginning to get into the market and will phone providers and manufacturers really have the experience to close the holes quick enough to keep people’s data safe in the near future?

    All this R&D is great, but I’m a user and I exist *right now* and my data could use managing *right now* and *right now* I don’t care how many apps I have to use to do that, that’s what my operating system is for. I care that things like Thunderbird, and Sunbird (which is an alpha I might add, it’s amazing) work. really. well.

    If the technologies are going to converge, then fine. But why so much bet hedging? Why not let it happen organically? Innovate the current products and UI. I mean web based or standalone the UI that people like is going to be the same. Isn’t this what the foundation is *supposed* to be doing? Nurturing things that *are* good for users and seeing what happens?

  7. 7

    Karsten D said on July 25th, 2007 at 2:02 pm:

    TB, unlike Firefox, has always had strong competition – there are *lots* of good mail programs out there – and lack of developer resources, maybe in part a millstone legacy of the Mozilla Suite.
    Misty as TB’s future is, I wish them all the luck they need…

  8. 8

    Karsten D said on July 25th, 2007 at 2:02 pm:

    TB, unlike Firefox, has always had strong competition – there are *lots* of good mail programs out there – and lack of developer resources, maybe in part a millstone legacy of the Mozilla Suite.
    Misty as TB’s future is, I wish them all the luck they need…

  9. 9

    Karsten D said on July 25th, 2007 at 2:02 pm:

    TB, unlike Firefox, has always had strong competition – there are *lots* of good mail programs out there – and lack of developer resources, maybe in part a millstone legacy of the Mozilla Suite.
    Misty as TB’s future is, I wish them all the luck they need…

  10. 10

    Jasper said on July 25th, 2007 at 2:34 pm:

    I agree with Markus to some extent: the users have been contributing in providing direction for the project by filing bug reports (including feature requests) over the years. Several rather annoying bugs have been extensively documented but are still open after more than half a decade (e.g. 65794). So I think it should be clear about where to move with the development at least in the short term, a nice overview to start with is available at: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Fix_some_longstanding_bugs
    And this is only a partial listing, e.g. 161968 and 250340 and probably a lot of others could be added.
    So it is my opinion that the discussion on how to improve Thunderbird is a non-starter.

  11. 11

    mscott said on July 25th, 2007 at 2:47 pm:

    I’ve put some thoughts David and I have on finding a new organizational home for Thunderbird over at:

    http://scott-macgregor.org/blog/?p=4

  12. 12

    Mitchell Baker said on July 25th, 2007 at 3:02 pm:

    Kurt:

    I do not believe that hiring more people will solve the Thunderbird issues. Assume an additional 5 (or 10, or 100) people to work on Thunderbird. Is that enough to compete with other players for a consumer based product? No. Firefox is succeeding because of a massive community of people who build the product and drive adoption.

    Thunderbird does not have this community. It never has. We can speculate on the reasons. But whatever the reason, Thunderbird does not have the community development that has driven other projects. I do not see Thunderbird changing. And I do not see Thunderbird developing further within the current structure without such a change. I do not see Mozilla hiring enough people to make up for this difference.

    Mitchell

  13. 13

    dan m said on July 25th, 2007 at 3:31 pm:

    been reading several posts about this — sounds like a good move — I’d love to see Thunderbird take off and become more than it already is.

  14. 14

    jminta said on July 25th, 2007 at 4:08 pm:

    What isn’t clear to me from this and the previous posts on Mozilla’s direction is precisely how Firefox and “delivering the web” fit together. Is it Mozilla’s position that Firefox is where the effort is, should, and will be focused in order to “deliver[] the web” or is this more a sign that Thunderbird didn’t match this mission, but Mozilla is looking for other products that might fit? In other words, is there some gap between Firefox and Mozilla that Thunderbird simply hasn’t filled, or are Mozilla and Firefox essentially co-extensive (there never was a gap to fill)?

  15. 15

    Matias Jose said on July 25th, 2007 at 5:46 pm:

    I am not sure what type of organization you should use in the legal aspect. But as a Project Manager, I would recommend that you split current Mozilla organization in three parts: Actual Mozilla taking care of XUL Runtime Libraries (everything that has to do with it including support for the databsae engine and future XUL desktop environment), then the Firefox and Thunderbird folks into 2 separated teams taking care of building the XUL part of the apps (not the core libraries).

    Firefox team cannot take care of both Firefox and the XUL at the same time to my opinion. I think the 3 teams should be deeply connected in the way that both Firefox and Thunderbird teams should be able to work on add ons to the XUL libraries, but then the Mozilla guys should manage and maintain the code.

    Gues Mozilla could split in two (as they already must be doing it, some guys do Firefox, some guys do XUL runtime) and then you could call more people to do just Thunderbird. I think this applies to your idea of Firefox and Thunderbird being subsidiaries of Mozilla.

    Funds can come in lots of ways, including support for Enterprises and custom security applications which work as extensions for both Firefox and Thunderbird and could extend XUL runtime libraries.

    I think XUL Runtime should me modular and extendable using platform specific dynamic link libraries for its non essential functions (aka internet connectivity) so we don’t get into the .NET bottleneck problem of having to load 18MB of code to run Notepad…

  16. 16

    Rafael said on July 25th, 2007 at 9:07 pm:

    This is good. Option #3 is the best choice and we should see some good innovation coming out of Thunderbird/Mail.

  17. 17

    Craig said on July 25th, 2007 at 10:05 pm:

    I used to be an avid user of Thunderbird. It is a great e-mail and Usenet client.

    However, I honestly must say that I do not have much use for an offline client anymore. On any given day I use three to five workstations, not to mention systems that are not mine. Synchronizing my e-mail and Usenet settings is tedious at best. However, the real killer is that usually one of those systems always being reformatted weekly. Constantly backing up my data, importing it, and then trying to keep them all synchronized is just too much work.

    For the last few years I have switched to entirely online options. Gmail, Hotmail etc. solve all of my e-mail problems. Google Groups solves my Usenet problems. No more back ups, importing, and synchronization. It really is an ideal system for me.

    Thunderbird has some great features that I miss. Most important to me is being able to see the encoding of a post, something that neither Gmail nor Hotmail specifically support (although defaulting to UTF-8 is very acceptable). Sorting Usenet messages is quite useful too.

    However, as good as the features are, an offline client is just not practical for my needs.

    While I do hope for a continued, bright future for Thunderbird, I can not grasp how it can survive as an offline client. Synchronization between multiple systems is the biggest obstacle. Firefox, on the hand, provides a platform for solving all of these issues.

    What can Thunderbird do support my needs?

  18. 18

    Michal Illich said on July 25th, 2007 at 11:08 pm:

    Well, there may be two things that can hurt Thundebird more than the organizational and personal issues which you are facing now:

    Threat 1: Losing Mozilla brand for e-mail application. I don

  19. 19

    Eoban said on July 26th, 2007 at 12:22 am:

    I cannot help but consider that this decision by Mozilla might have been partially brought around by the fact that Thunderbird, unlike Firefox, has no clear revenue model. Firefox’s Google search bar gets Mozilla a few cents from Google each time someone uses the built-in search. However, Thunderbird has no such revenue stream. I’m not accusing anyone of anything; I am merely pointing out this important difference between Firefox and Thunderbird.

  20. 20

    Alex Hudson said on July 26th, 2007 at 12:40 am:

    (I’m a hacker on a server-side mail project, Bongo – click my name [I think?!] to get to our homepage).

    This news makes me sad. Not because Mozilla seems to have realised that Tbird doesn’t really fit, but that there doesn’t seem to be any idea about what Tbird is/was about.

    It’s probably true in a way that webmail has eaten some of Tbird’s lunch: it’s a simple mail client not terribly suitable for corporate use, and signing up to a webmail is a lot simpler than downloading and configuring a mail client.

    It seems very clear to me that Tbird doesn’t know who its users are, though. And talking about which organisation is best suited to developing it seems to be putting the cart before the horse: without knowing who you’re developing it for, I can’t see how you can know _how_ you should develop it.

    I personally think Tbird has been too afraid of taking on Outlook. God knows I have no love of “enterprise groupware” – again, see the Bongo Project – but if Tbird is to be developed sustainably, it needs revenue, and I don’t see how revenue can be generated by aiming it as a free product for home users. It can’t send users to Google like Firefox can, or support itself with ads. That seems to be pretty simple, to me.

    Personally, I would _love_ Tbird to get closer to the Bongo Project, and become a client really suitable for business use. It doesn’t need bells or whistles: it needs to do stuff like sharing contacts and calendars easily. It needs to be something which doesn’t require configuration, and can pull resources like signatures from a server.

    Yes, it is a desktop project, but it needs to stop trying to cater just to lowest common denominator. Without losing the ability to do that, it can gain much tighter integration with open source mail and appeal to a much broader audience, and hopefully one who would be willing to put some money its way.

    I’m extremely interested in the future of Tbird; the business I run uses it exclusively for our mail. But more than that, I see a lot of potential for it. It absolutely needs vision, though!

  21. 21

    Mick T said on July 26th, 2007 at 12:46 am:

    I don’t understand the reasoning behind saying that Thunderbird doesn’t fit into the Mozilla manifesto.

    It seems to me that Thunderbird fits perfectly into Mozilla’s vision of the open web, and I really don’t understand why Mozilla doesn’t believe it has the resources to run both the Firefox and Thunderbird development.

    Am I missing something here?

  22. 22

    Dean said on July 26th, 2007 at 1:00 am:

    Craig: IMAP removes all that need except for some miniscule configuration.

  23. 23

    Markc said on July 26th, 2007 at 1:09 am:

    Although this could potentially be a good move for Thunderbird, if it ultimately results in more focus and resources, I see it as a bad idea for the Mozilla ecosystem as a whole.

    Already there have been misgivings from some developers about the Foundation/Corporation’s dedication to Mozilla as a platform. Platform work seems largely focused on “is this feature needed for Firefox” rather than “is it a good idea for the platform as a whole”.

    Without Thunderbird to worry about, I fear that platform work will become ever-more Firefox-oriented, leaving other consumers out in the cold – especially the small companies and individuals who aren’t in a position to maintain their own XULRunner builds and patches.

  24. 24

    jp said on July 26th, 2007 at 1:10 am:

    So what became of the idea to have TB and FB both be XULRUNNER applications? I think it is a pity that the Mozilla foundation concentrates so much on FF, since Thunderbird has much more potential for truely innovative and interesting features, especially also for users from companies. But obviously this is about money and greed rather than innovation and development. Google probably does not like to see competition to its Gmail and probably is not interested to see its money go to TB development.

  25. 25

    Fede said on July 26th, 2007 at 1:32 am:

    Craig: Or just use IMAP. With IMAP, the email resides on the server, but you connect with a client like thunderbird. So, as long as you have the mail account configured (which, with thunderbird, is as hard as carrying along your profile to the new computer the first time you use it), your mail is there waiting for you, with your custom folders, etc.

  26. 26

    Benoit said on July 26th, 2007 at 2:01 am:

    Even if Option 3 is chosen, I think this Thunderbird effort should get a stronger support (including funds, trademarks) from the Foundation than SeaMonkey today.

    I always understood your mission of preserving choice and innovation on the Internet as it is written: it’s the Internet, not the Web.

    I think integrating the calendar team (Lightning) with this new Thunderbird structure might also be a good idea.

  27. 27

    Cris said on July 26th, 2007 at 2:42 am:

    sorry, but this is a crazy and even stupid idea! i am very sad to see what is happening since mozilla lost its roots and since the new mozilla corporation comes up 🙁 i am really disappointed. thunderbird is a great product and the ONLY remaining alternative for windows users.

  28. 28

    Fr said on July 26th, 2007 at 2:42 am:

    Mitchell says:

    “Assume an additional 5 (or 10, or 100) people to work on Thunderbird. Is that enough to compete with other players for a consumer based product? No. […] Thunderbird does not have this community. It never has.”

    So what’s the point of letting Thunderbird going its own way? Do you expect to see more people involved? I don’t see how. Email is part of the web, it’s part of the Mozilla mission.

    From what I see, my family is more interested in reading their email than browsing the web. What they first want is a way to easily read their email. If they want to read news, they read them in newspaper. If they want to watch TV, they turn on the TV; they don’t care about people blogging, they don’t care about the latest release to see SVG working in a web browser. They want to read and write emails. Sorry, but that’s part of the web. Unless you define “the web” as what and only what goes through a web browser. But that’s certainly incorrect.

    I agree with a previous comment. Rename Mozilla Corp as Firefox Corp. First the Mozilla Suite, and now Thunderbird. Which is next?

  29. 29

    Fr said on July 26th, 2007 at 2:42 am:

    Mitchell says:

    “Assume an additional 5 (or 10, or 100) people to work on Thunderbird. Is that enough to compete with other players for a consumer based product? No. […] Thunderbird does not have this community. It never has.”

    So what’s the point of letting Thunderbird going its own way? Do you expect to see more people involved? I don’t see how. Email is part of the web, it’s part of the Mozilla mission.

    From what I see, my family is more interested in reading their email than browsing the web. What they first want is a way to easily read their email. If they want to read news, they read them in newspaper. If they want to watch TV, they turn on the TV; they don’t care about people blogging, they don’t care about the latest release to see SVG working in a web browser. They want to read and write emails. Sorry, but that’s part of the web. Unless you define “the web” as what and only what goes through a web browser. But that’s certainly incorrect.

    I agree with a previous comment. Rename Mozilla Corp as Firefox Corp. First the Mozilla Suite, and now Thunderbird. Which is next?

  30. 30

    Fr said on July 26th, 2007 at 2:42 am:

    Mitchell says:

    “Assume an additional 5 (or 10, or 100) people to work on Thunderbird. Is that enough to compete with other players for a consumer based product? No. […] Thunderbird does not have this community. It never has.”

    So what’s the point of letting Thunderbird going its own way? Do you expect to see more people involved? I don’t see how. Email is part of the web, it’s part of the Mozilla mission.

    From what I see, my family is more interested in reading their email than browsing the web. What they first want is a way to easily read their email. If they want to read news, they read them in newspaper. If they want to watch TV, they turn on the TV; they don’t care about people blogging, they don’t care about the latest release to see SVG working in a web browser. They want to read and write emails. Sorry, but that’s part of the web. Unless you define “the web” as what and only what goes through a web browser. But that’s certainly incorrect.

    I agree with a previous comment. Rename Mozilla Corp as Firefox Corp. First the Mozilla Suite, and now Thunderbird. Which is next?

  31. 31

    Daniel said on July 26th, 2007 at 3:08 am:

    Why not just keep Seamonkey which is stable and fast. Firefox has been a memory hog from the beginning and this is the major complaint and is still the problem at the present time.

    Concentrate time and effort into one brand makes sense. Seamonkey!

  32. 32

    Thomas said on July 26th, 2007 at 3:38 am:

    I see a disturbing trend in the current development at Mozilla. First, old bugs seem not to be fixed in favor of addition of revenue-generating features such as google search etc. Next, xul/gecko receive less and less focus. The xul runtime is very old and needs to be overhauled. Xul runner seems to get “kind-of” canceled due to alledged lack of programmers. SVG never gets the focus it need to make Firefox stand out compared to its competition. And finally, another piece of software that does not generate money as much as firefox does also should be outsourced. I was always wondering why Apple choose khtml as a basis for Safari, now I start understanding the issues. It was never the intention that the Mozilla foundation creates a “useful” open-source platform to implement exciting browsers or web-related applications. It appears to me that the main goal from the very beginning was to still squeeze out some money of the inital Netscape code-base, by simply getting a large user-base and then adding in some funding through google or therelike.
    I am truly disappointed to see these “new” ideas popping out of Mrs. Baker recently so fast. For me it’s clear, more and more developers/users will turn away eventually from Mozilla.

  33. 33

    Mike said on July 26th, 2007 at 3:45 am:

    Firefox and Thunderbird are a quite good package. If you give avay one of them (in occurance Thunderbird), I think it should be very hard in the future for you to stay on the market. We need both and not only one of them. If not, I think that a lot of people will change also their browser if they must have an other mail client.
    So keep Thunderbird in the Mozilla Foundation anf found out few people for programming them.

  34. 34

    CableGuy said on July 26th, 2007 at 5:51 am:

    Whatever solution is going to be chosen. I wish you all the best and all help you can need. Please go on with the best e-mail client ever made!

  35. 35

    Michael Smith said on July 26th, 2007 at 5:57 am:

    Hello Mitchel,

    thanks for this initiative, I think I have two good ideas to the development, the thunderbird development team and the organizational structure.

    Maybe Thunderbird has not such a usersbase and development features and money resources to stay in that shape as it is.

    But I would not through away the baby with the bath tub, as we say here.

    First, making a new organization/foundation is too much work and takes time. So I suggest to give Thunderbird just one year more in the mozilla organization and then make it either a cild company or a sf.net community project.

    After that year, do not miss to ask the developers and coders about their interest, in which environment they want to work.

    Please, let Thunderbird for one year in this organizational structure as it is. And we can develop the following ideas.

    1. Thunderbird is a very good mail client. It is in one step mass-ready: But, Outlook is still better, because it has a calendar.
    So just add to Thunderbird a calendar function to get reminders for emails to reciepients with a bithday. So instead of outsourcing Thunderbird, merge Thunderbird, with Sunbird. Both are birds, you know?
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/portablesbird/

    2. And this is the new idea of email: 80 % of email we do to trusted friends. And we do less email, because we are on Instant Messengers.
    So we need like in Google Mail the option for both: sending an email message or – if online – an Instant Message.
    There is a new serverless Instant Messenger out. this is http://retroshare.sf.net

    It is open for client and protocol, for all posix available, at the moment with QT/FLTK gui.

    The main principle is, that all communication is done ONLY to friends, which were defined before with a symmetric key exchange. This means, communication is safe and encrypted.

    This has the side effect, that no one can message and email me – besides the definded trusted friends.

    Retroshare Messenger is both: an email client and an serverless Instant Messenger.

    So… sending serverless Email is definately a feature, how mail is in future organized. The same for Instant Messaging. The Instant Messenger market is one with very high interest, see Google Talk or the merge of AOL-ICQ and MSN-Yahoo and all the Multimessengers.

    The idea is now: to implement RetroShare serverless Email and serverless Instant Messenger into Thunderbird.

    This should be scheduled for one year of work within the Mozilla Foundation (just a gui integration) and then we release some betas of Thunderbird with Retroshare Instant Messenger and serverless Mail and ideally with Sunbird Calendar. The official Release is then a full integration of RetroShare serverless protocol for serverless Email and Instant Message and the Sunbird.

    3. Thunderbird is used not so much, because it is not bundled into the Firefox Installer.
    One Comment said, that the Mozialla Foundation should then use the name Firefox Foundation.
    But instead of your initiative, I would recommend to a) give Thunderbird one year merging with Retroshare and b) going a little bit back to the roots: Mozilla Foundation was Netscape? So Mail and Surf. And if the we get Thunderbird with Firefox bundled to ONE Suite, then we would not have these problems. Really, I am really surprised about the suggestion to outsource Thunderbird, if it was Sunbird, ok, but Thunderbird? Even Netscape said, that the acutal version is only browser. But a few days later they said an email client will be not excluded for the future!!!

    My suggestion is:

    1. Integrate Sunbird in Thunderbird
    2. Integrate Retroshare in Thunderbird
    3. Bundle it to the Firefox Installer.

    Then after one year of development, decide new and see, how the product is used or not.

    And last: If there is a new organization needed for Thunderbird in one year, this is definately the OpenOffice.org community, as they play around with a calendar and as well with an Instant Messenger.

    *IF* Thunderbird MUST be outsourced now, then make a new joint-venture-company with OpenOffice, for a Product, which has Email (Thunerbird) Serverless Email and IM (Retroshare) and third a calendar (Sunbird) integrated.

    But it is a mistake to do it isolated outsourced (merged in a joint venture or not), this is why I suggest to have a very HIGH DEVELOPMENT for the next six months, to get the first version of Thunderbird 2.7.9.9 launched this year, with Sunbird and Retroshare implemented in the gui.
    The beta should be this year released.

    Then in 2008 we get first official Version of 2.8.0.0

    I think this would be a good vision to email: a serverless email and message communication done with the retroshare protocol in the Thunderbird.

    Besided it would have good synergies to have the option to mail to friend over Retroshare (no spam, confidential mail, sending of documents… etc)
    and second you can use for Mails to public Mailadresses (with @ in a mailadress) the Thunderbird. Thunderbird would get an Instant Messenger as well.

    Last idea: Retroshare is discussion to add the http://www.sim-im.org Multimessenger as a Patch to retroshare, or other way round, SIM will integrate Retroshare…. this both added to Thunderbird would be like a Multimessenger we need.
    – serbased Mail Message (Thunderbird)
    – serverless Mail Message (Retroshare)
    – Serveless Instant Message (Retroshare)
    – Serverbased Multimessenger (SIM-im.org with AOl, MSN YAHO ICQ JABBER)
    – Calender Function like in Outlook (Sunbird).

    This should be the plans for thunderbird in the next months.. a lot of stuff to do, maybe you can discuss it with the small development team and get a few coders as well from firefox.

    Remember: The main goal is to get an Installer ready, which is Bundling Firefox with the Message Tool.

    Reading Information is only the half of the medaillon, the other half is to discuss them onlin ewith friends.

    Incoming Information (Reading web, Firefox) and outgoing information (Email, Thunderbird) are 2 ways of communications, which are essential for human beings.

    So please do not make mistakes! Give Thunderbird a Push with a serverless Instant Messenger.

    Thanks!

  36. 36

    Thomas M. Ritter said on July 26th, 2007 at 6:11 am:

    Yes, its important…eMail communication is a part of our daily life, may be more – its the “control center” of many tasks and messages. In the future there`re will be exist not several programs for messaging, mailing and so on, only one tool is needed for efficient communication.So the development of a “player”, which integrates such functionality, is needed.
    Our suggestions are: developing Thunderbird Core by small team of separate enterprise added by open modules /tools, developed by community. Both, the Core and the tools area can connected to several using scenario and business cases, like bundling with a larger partner or personalisation of each Thunderbird. There

  37. 37

    mfmeulenbelt said on July 26th, 2007 at 6:44 am:

    I don’t really get it. I assume this decision has been discussed for quite some time within the Mozilla Corporation / Foundation, so why did you choose to take up the Eudora code? And why do you state you want a new initiative for mail, when you’ve just ditched your mail client? If you want to integrate mail into Firefox, use the Seamonkey code. If you want to have a separate mail client anyway, use Eudora or Thunderbird. Or am I missing another option for mail?
    Then the options for Thunderbird: just how much development has Seamonkey had since it’s inception? If Thunderbird is to follow a similar route, how much development do you expect Thunderbird to get? I expect close to none, but that’s strictly as an outsider. At least it can’t be much less then now.
    I’m sorry, but I feel like I’ve just been robbed of my two favourite mail clients.

  38. 38

    John Q Public said on July 26th, 2007 at 7:02 am:

    If mozilla foundation does spin off Thunderbird like it did SeaMonkey, then it should change its name to Firefox Foundation. It’s becoming clear that mozilla foundation does not support the innovative internet suite that it could have been.

  39. 39

    Percy said on July 26th, 2007 at 7:03 am:

    Cross-posting relevant portion from Mozilla Links:

    My first reaction is surprise. It is pretty obvious that Firefox is the focus of most resources available at the Mozilla Foundation/Corporation. Firefox is the most important source of revenue for the Mozilla entities but most importantly an extremely effective way to follow its principles and achieve its goals of building and enabling open source technologies, consumer products, and economic models for public value. Regarding the web.

    But according to the Mozilla Manifesto, Mozilla is about all that for the Internet and not just the web. Mozilla could be about chat, VoIP, video conference, peer to peer and other Internet enabled technologies. Not all of them or at least not all of them at the same time, but being solidly established in the email segment I don

  40. 40

    hrmpf said on July 26th, 2007 at 7:10 am:

    Ihr stopft Firefox voll mit irgendwelchem Script-Mist, weil ihr von Google korrumpiert werdet, anstatt den Browser schlank zu halten, und dann auch noch so was …

  41. 41

    guanxi said on July 26th, 2007 at 7:14 am:

    Mitchell – There are two things that I don’t think are clear (or at least, not clear to me):

    1) How does being in MoFo/MoCo limit TB? It may seem obvious from the inside, but could you give a specific example?

    2) If I understand correctly, the new mail innovations are a a new MoFo/MoCo project. Why are they not going into Thunderbird, and how will this project integrate better with MoFo/MoCo?

    Thanks,
    guanxi

  42. 42

    Andr said on July 26th, 2007 at 7:35 am:

    Do you think email is important part of Internet life?
    YES!

    I’m only a user but… afraid to the future

  43. 43

    Andr said on July 26th, 2007 at 7:35 am:

    Do you think email is important part of Internet life?
    YES!

    I’m only a user but… afraid to the future

  44. 44

    Andr said on July 26th, 2007 at 7:35 am:

    Do you think email is important part of Internet life?
    YES!

    I’m only a user but… afraid to the future

  45. 45

    bluelectric.org said on July 26th, 2007 at 8:40 am:

    Rettet Thunderbird (oder so)!

    Offensichtlich halte nicht nur icke E-Mail für die wichtigste Anwendung im großen Internetz: In Mitchell’s Blog schreibt Mozilla-CEO Mitchell Baker (das muss man auch erst einmal hinkriegen: auf der eigenen Seite unter “About me” au…

  46. 46

    asteko said on July 26th, 2007 at 8:52 am:

    “The Mozilla project is to preserve choice and innovation on the Internet.”

    – from “About Mozilla” http://www.mozilla.org/about/

    “The Mozilla Foundation was established in July 2003 as a California not-for-profit corporation dedicated to the public benefit. The Mozilla Corporation was subsequently established in August 2005 as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Foundation to coordinate the development and marketing of Mozilla technologies and products.”

    – from “About the Mozilla Foundation” http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/

  47. 47

    nadav said on July 26th, 2007 at 9:21 am:

    the major problem with thunderbird, and the cause for it’s lack of popularity (compared with firefox), is that it is desktop software and not a web client. the majority of users don’t need all the features the program has. they prefer the comfort of webmail, accessible from everywhere. gmail, yahoo, ms, and many more – all suggest a good web alternative. If there was a webmail which had the usability and strong programer support thunderbird has – it would be #1. there is no real necessity in staying chained to the desktop. the change needed is big, no doubt, but so would be the outcome.

  48. 48

    Ben said on July 26th, 2007 at 9:24 am:

    Percy: in the early days at the Foundation, when money genuinely was stretched thin, it was rather the opposite: corporate support contracts for _Thunderbird_ contributed in non-trivial ways to the organizational bottom line. Those of us working on Firefox that needed the time to get our product in shape really appreciated the work Scott, David and the rest of the Thunderbird team did to help bridge the gap.

  49. 49

    Vaughn Reid said on July 26th, 2007 at 9:58 am:

    I am sad to see that the Mozilla Foundation does not feel that Thunderbird is an integral part of its mission to further access to the Web in an open manner. Email access, whether from a browser or a desktop based client is still a fundamental part of Internet access for most users. It will continue to remain a fundamental part of access to the Internet by most people for the foreseeable future.

    A free open, extensible mail client that shares a similar code base to Firefox, Lightning, and Sunbird are the only chance that Windows users have of replacing the Exchange/Outlook/Internet Explorer Juggernaut that currently absorbs corporate IT cultures and corporate Intranets.

  50. 50

    Vaughn said on July 26th, 2007 at 9:59 am:

    I have a theory about why Mozilla Foundation may be getting rid of Thuderbird. Here it is:

    Since Google is a primary funder of the Mozilla Foundation, and since Google is actively developing and offering their own enterprise grade email ecosystem via gmail and google apps, maybe they are wanting to kill off or hinder the development of Thunderbird to

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