Forging Ahead with Thunderbird

The Chief Executive Officer of the Mozilla Corporation, Mitchell Baker wrote in her blog about the Thunderbird Email clients. To sum it up, Mozilla has realized that they haven’t been giving all the support Thunderbird needs, because it’s big brother Firefox has been getting all the limelight, and correspondingly, all the resources. So to give Thunderbird a fighting chance, a couple of alternatives were presented.

However, I’d like to focus on the smaller, more visionary aspect of her posting titled “Broader Mail Initiative”. In essence, what do you think mail should be like in the near future? This is interesting.

One of the obvious features is tagging. I’m a heavy Gmail user. I like the tag idea. Admittedly, it took a few days to get used to it, but it now seems much more intuitive. The folder paradigm breaks down when you want to put the message into more than one folder. While I like the Gmail client, I think their simple tagging implementation has something to be desired. The best implementation I’ve seen of tagging is done by the folks at del.icio.us, particularly the Bookmarks sidebar. When clicking upon a tag, it opens a sublisting of other tags. Now that’s cool.

Now what if you could overlay your tags with your contacts? so while your message content tags have a blue tag, your contacts would be labeled with a green tag. Good contact management is hard to come by. Outlook is considered the standard, so people write their apps to have parity with it. This is the wrong approach. No one ever got noticed by being like everyone else. Gmail, once again, is a good example. They allow you to add and remove sections to a single contact dynamically, let you name these sections anything. That’s nice. It’s particularly useful when someone works for more than one company, and correspondingly they have separate contact for each company they work for.

Another feature I’ve always felt was missing was centralized company information. For example, I used to work at GotVoice. I have several people from GotVoice in my contacts list. Currently, if I want to have the address information in each contact, I have to copy/paste it. I’d rather just link to it. So if I update the corporate address, they all get it.

The beauty of web-based email is that its accessible from everywhere, and it’s always in synch. With a client like Thunderbird, as soon as it’s downloaded, you have to access it from that computer. This is the typical consumer case where POP3 is the default. Yes I know there’s IMAP, but it’s not typical. I’d be curious to know what percentage of non-technical email users are even aware of it. So given this scenario, how can you know how much mail you have on your desktop machine. Well, this is where a good publisher extention would come in. At its simplest, you could just auto-publish a report to a URL you specify, so you can read it via RSS from another computer, or even a handheld device.

Like Firefox, a key component to success is extendability. So you’re gonna want things like anti-virus, digital identification and certification, and contact management. Integrating with web-services is another key. Some these are already implemented like Plaxo’s toolbar. Integration with Firefox is an advantage that thunderbird can exploit. Let’s say you had a friend who sent you a URL to look at. If you wanted to keep it, you have a “Send to Firefox Bookmarks” menu item, which would also a tag in thunderbird automatically.

What about something that lets you tag part of a message, like a quote. This would be particularly useful in a long email. Just to be able to skip down to it, would be a great time saver.

Maybe it’s the idea of mail that prevents it from growing? If we thought it differently like as communication, then we can use thunderbird to manage audio voicemail, webcasts, video chats, IM, SMS, and text email. Then we just search through our content that way?

It’s too big for just me. What are your thoughts?