MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--For almost all of its existence, Mozilla Messaging has been known for Thunderbird--e-mail software with the traditional view that a person's PC is the center of their computing existence.
Now, though, the Mozilla Foundation subsidiary's scope is expanding beyond the confines of the computer under your desk or on your lap. In the near term, the new Thunderbird 3 is becoming more integrated with the Web. And in the longer term, the Raindrop project has the potential to lift your inbox all the way to the cloud.
"For us it's really important to have Thunderbird. It's also important to not stay in the blinders of that scenario," Mozilla Messaging CEO David Ascher said in an interview at the company's headquarters here. With Raindrop, "We're focusing on best experience for messaging in a Web application."
Mozilla Messaging CEO David Ascher
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)The change reflects the changing nature of computing. Where Thunderbird's chief competition once was now software such as Microsoft's Outlook, it's now also got to reckon with Google's Web-based Gmail service and its ilk, Ascher said.
Thunderbird is still a priority. Thunderbird 3 is set to arrive next week in near-final form--though nearly a year later than had been planned--but Mozilla Messaging has high hopes the new version will be faster, easier to use, and more versatile through the addition of third-party extensions.
Universal inbox
Raindrop is something of an ultimate inbox in the company's vision, a Web application that draws not just from e-mail but from other communication conduits such as Twitter, Facebook mail, and instant messaging. Its goal isn't just to consolidate today's overabundance of communications channels, it's to help prioritize what's important and put off what's optional until a more convenient time.
"We're breaking the notion of one list coming in, in chronological order," he said. What just arrived isn't necessarily the most important thing to do, though human minds are prone to thinking it is.
Some aspects of Raindrop's future are more certain than others. It's way to early to say when the company might release its first version of the actual software, but one thing that's settled is that Raindrop won't be a service Mozilla offers. Instead, the software will run on others' servers--at Internet service providers, for example.
"Hosting a messaging system for the world is not something we can afford right now," Ascher said. Still, it's revealing that the company chose to create Raindrop as a server-based technology accessible through a Web browser rather than as PC-based software.
Will Raindrop rule the roost?
In the longer term--say 2015--might Raindrop replace Thunderbird as people's messaging interface of choice? Perhaps.
"I suspect some people will and some people won't," he said. "I think desktop software still has a bunch of user benefits that will last for quite awhile."
Persuading everybody to freely cooperate with Raindrop could be tough. Sites like Facebook like their central positions in people's electronic lives and like to serve ads next to their content. In time, though, Ascher believes they'll come aboard.
"I think in the long term, openness wins," he said.
Even without Raindrop, Thunderbird 3 will integrate with the Web. It's got Firefox's engine built in for displaying Web pages, a fact that means the software can display Web content.
That ability means Thunderbird can, for example, show Yahoo and Google calendars in separate tabs. There's little in the way of integration with those services today, but it can be added, Ascher said. He expects plenty more add-ons will bring it closer to the cloud, too. He didn't mention it, but even Raindrop could be added in its own compartment.
Mozilla Messaging smells money
Mozilla Messaging is part of a peculiar organizational structure. In the beginning the non-profit Mozilla Foundation oversaw the open-source software that was the core of Netscape Communicator. Eventually, that software split into two main components: the Firefox browser and the Thunderbird e-mail software.
The foundation set up two subsidiaries to oversee the two projects, first Mozilla Corp. for Firefox in 2005 and second Mozilla Messaging for Thunderbird in 2007. Ascher has since 2007 led the latter, which employs six engineers and nine others.
It also draws on the expertise of many volunteers in the open-source world who translate the software, write add-ons, and help debug it. Because of this help, Mozilla Messaging gets by with only one quality assurance employee and one marketing employee, and Thunderbird 3 will arrive in more than 40 languages.
The subsidiary today gets its funding from its nonprofit Mozilla Foundation parent, which in turn receives the lion's share of revenue from search advertising revenue that results from searches Firefox sends Google's way. Ultimately, Ascher wants Mozilla Messaging to be financially self-sustaining. But how?
"I'm not sure yet. I think what we're looking for are rev models like Firefox--revenue models where the user benefits and doesn't have to pay anything, and somehow enough money flows into Mozilla Messaging to fund development long-term," Ascher said.
That may sound like a lot of hand-waving, but Ascher points out he has no investors looking for a big and quick return on the money they invested, so Mozilla Messaging is a relatively cheap operation to run.
Ads? No thanks
One route the company won't take is advertising, the approach that's vital to Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail, as well as to Firefox.
"I don't think people benefit from advertising in mail," he said. "One reason it works for search engines is people often are searching to buy. They're happy to see ads. It helps them. I don't think that works in e-mail."
Today, there are probably somewhere between 10 million and 20 million Thunderbird users, said Rafael Ebron, Mozilla Messaging's director of marketing. That's a far cry from Firefox, whose users total more than 300 million, Mozilla says.
But both projects can punch above their weight. Just being a freely available alternative--whether with Thunderbird or with Raindrop--can steer other products and services, Ascher believes.
"Firefox had an influence over people greater than its market share," Ascher said. "I don't think we'd need to manage everybody's e-mail servers for us to have an influence over the e-mail landscape and make sure everybody has a better experience."
Do you pine for the Netscape Communicator days with unified browser and e-mail software but want something more current? Mozilla on Tuesday released SeaMonkey 2.0, which combines Firefox and Thunderbird.
The new version, for Windows, Mac, and Linux, is rebuilt with Firefox 3.5.4 and is more closely aligned with the standalone browser. "SeaMonkey is now much closer to Firefox as far as user profiles, add-ons, and functionality of user interface elements are concerned," according to the release notes. Among other changes:
• Retrieving e-mail using the IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) protocol is faster, and for new IMAP accounts, mail is synchronized by default with the local computer.
• The Mozilla Lightning calendar plug-in for Thunderbird can be used.
• E-mail accounts, folders, and messages can be viewed in tabs.
• The mail module lets you subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds that the browser discovers on Web pages.
• The browser is faster at running Web-based JavaScript programs and supports a variety of modern Firefox features coming with the HTML5 standard.
• Browser tabs can be reopened after being closed, and tabs are reloaded if the browser crashes.
• The user interface for handling add-ons, passwords, forms, cookies, and downloads have been overhauled.
• The Mac OS X theme fits in better with the look of Leopard and Snow Leopard, the previous and current versions of the Apple operating system.
• Several older operating systems are no longer supported: Windows 95, 98, Me, and NT 4 as well as Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) and 10.3 (Panther).
The software is available as a download for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux in 18 languages.
Mozilla's Thunderbird team has been working on software called Raindrop that aims to unify communications channels such as e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter into a single interface with enough built-in smarts to separate the important messages from the routine.
"E-mail used to house the bulk of the conversations that took place on the internet, but that's no longer the case today. In today's world people use a combination of Twitter, IM, Skype, Facebook, Google Docs, e-mail, etc., to communicate. For many of us this means that we have to keep an eye on an ever-growing number of places we might get new messages," the Raindrop developers said in a blog post about the technology. "We hope to lead and spur the development of extensible applications that help users easily and enjoyably manage their conversations, notifications, and messages across a variety of online services."
A key part of the effort will be to spotlight messages that are important.
"Raindrop intelligently separates the personal messages from the bulk," said developer Bryan Clark. Among other things, it will automatically recognize messages from e-mail lists and from sources such as Facebook or Amazon that send numerous updates, filing them accordingly.
Given Mozilla's two main projects, Firefox and Thunderbird, there's one particular interesting aspect to Raindrop: It's a Web application, not downloadable software. "Our flagship applications will be built entirely for any modern web browser that supports Open Web technologies," the developers said. However, the group expects to support front-end software, including applications for mobile devices, that can use the Web-based service.
The vision has been knocking around Mozilla for some time. David Ascher said in a 2007 interview as he was taking over as chief executive of the Mozilla Messaging subsidiary, "People end up subscribing to more and more channels of communications. It makes it hard to keep track of what's going on if they have to check six different inboxes, search across a variety of systems." He said the group wanted to address the issue.
Mozilla released a major update Tuesday to the beta build of its desktop e-mail client Thunderbird, debuting a new search feature, "smart" folders, an activity manager for monitoring communication with your mail server, and better Gmail integration among the list of improvements. Thunderbird 3 beta 4 is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Search results in the new beta open in their open tab, and are filterable.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)The smart folder view condenses your various in-boxes into one gestalt in-box, but it's easy to switch back to the traditional view if you don't like it. In the folders pane, use the left and right arrows at the top right to change your folder view until you're looking at the one you prefer. Thunderbird will remember your last setting, so when you restart it won't jump back to the smart folder setting. If you have multiple e-mail accounts, though, this should make managing your e-mail stream much easier.
Apparently, there was a lot of code that was overhauled in this fourth beta and that might explain why my default button bar and toolbar settings reverted to normal. It might also have been because of the introduction of the new search bar, which defaults to a significant chunk of window space. The global search bar features auto-complete as well as more robust filtering tools for narrowing down a broad search quickly.
Thunderbird 3 beta 4 introduces tighter folder integration for Gmail users.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)I found the new search to work well, opening the results in a new tab, although occasionally narrowing down results did not produce the desired result of fewer e-mails in the results window. Searching by tags also appeared spotty at times. Searches do produce a nifty chart, accessible by clicking on the blue bar graph at the top of the search results, that's good for numbers junkies who want to see how often that particular search term shows up.
Windows users should also find that Thunderbird results will now appear when search in Windows Vista and Windows 7, while Mac users will find Growl notification support for new e-mails, integration with the Mac OS X address book, and support for Mail.app. Beta 4 doesn't support legacy versions of Windows prior to Windows 2000 or Mac OS X 10.3 and older.
Thunderbird 3 beta 4 supports the nightly builds of the calendaring plug-in Lightning, but many other add-ons are likely to break until their publishers release compatibility updates. The full list of Thunder 3 beta 4 changes can be read here.
As the social-networking e-mail client Postbox approaches its announced general release date at the beginning of September, the cross-platform program updates with what looks to be more a "tidying-up" release. Available for Windows and Mac, Postbox 1.0 beta 15 introduces a new version of the Thunderbird calendar plug-in Lightning, improved contact searching, and other performance tweaks--but not much else.
Installing Postbox may require a reboot.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)Derived from Mozilla Thunderbird, Postbox beta 15 will also let you drag and drop e-mails from one account to another and introduces a crash reporter that had been strangely missing until now. Search queries that return no results will now suggest alternative search terms, and more plug-ins have been ported over from Thunderbird, including ThunderBrowse, Virtual Identities, and support for Mozilla-client profile rescuer MozBackup. Frustratingly, Postbox now requires a reboot to work--at least, it did on upgrading my installation from beta 14.
The full changelog can be read here.
One of the better Mozilla Thunderbird extensions is ThunderBrowse, which allows users to quickly open e-mailed links in a browser window built into the e-mail client itself. The latest version introduces support for the Thunderbird-derived Postbox, as well as compatibility fixes for the Thunderbird 3 beta builds and a new click engine.
ThunderBrowse now offers tab support in Thunderbird.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)However, for users who haven't checked out or updated ThunderBrowse in awhile, there's a lot to play with. Through the expansive options menu, you can configure links to open in new tabs. This allows your original e-mail to stay open in one tab, while the link has been opened in a new one. Unfortunately, in the Thunderbird 3 betas, this does not open a new Thunderbird tab--you'll only get a new ThunderBrowse tab in your message pane. Even if the pane is maximized or the message has been open in a new tab, you'll find a slightly cumbersome new tab bar opening beneath the URL bar.
Other new or recently added options in ThunderBrowse include customizing an external browser to open e-mailed links that's different from your system's default browser, greater control over behavior after left-clicking and scroll wheel-clicking links, and enhanced user security through permission control for JavaScript, images, plug-ins, and cookies. There's also a new auto-complete feature and the ability to move the ThunderBrowse URL bar to the bottom of the pane.
Postbox's latest update builds on the add-on functionality that was introduced in the previous beta, supporting Thunderbird's calendar plug-in Lightning, among others, and also comes with an announcement that the days of Postbox-for-free are coming to a end.
Postbox beta 14 for Windows and Mac has its own build of Lightning, which should allow users to communicate with both local and networked calendars. While Lightning works perfectly for me in Thunderbird, it wasn't able to talk to CNET's Microsoft Exchange server in Postbox. The Provider for Google Calendar plug-in, which gives users bi-directional Google Calendar access, works fine in Postbox--albeit with a slight hiccup when first loading the calendar.
Postbox gets it's own version of Lightning in beta 14, but it's still a bit buggy.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)Postbox now natively supports Gmail-style conversation threading and e-mail message counts. So if you've got a collapsed thread, where you can only see one message, there will now be a number next to it telling you how many unread messages are in the thread. Unfortunately, when I clicked on the first message, even if it had already been marked as read, it automatically marked all the unread messages in the thread as read, too.
There's a new Contacts sidebar, although the old Address Book is still available by hitting CTRL+2 or going through the Tools menu. The new Web services option, also available from the Tools menu or the Advanced Settings tab under Options, gives you more granular control over which Web services you're logged into through Postbox. This is useful if Postbox isn't your main Twitter manager, so you can keep your API count from exploding and preventing tweet updates.
Postbox Inc. also announced that they're expecting to take the program to a premium-only status in early September, when the program graduates from beta development. A single-user license will cost $39.95, with a family pack option consisting of licenses for five people living at the same address costing an additional $19.95. A lifetime upgrades option can be bought for another $24.95. These prices are currently discounted for a beta sale good until August 31, at $29.95, $9.95, and $19.95 respectively.
Postbox isn't the only Mozilla-based software to charge for downloading, but the list of programs that do isn't exactly long. Rafael Ebron, spokesman for Mozilla Messaging, pointed out that some of them include TuneUpTwitFactory.
The full list of Postbox extensions is available here, and release notes for Postbox beta 14 are available here.
Thunderbird 3 beta 3 is now available to download for Windows, Mac, and Linux users. The beta introduces some significant improvements to the open-source desktop client, from performance to interface.
The new beta is built on Mozilla's Gecko 1.9.1.1 platform, keeping it up to date with the latest changes that affect Firefox. Mozilla also claims that there are more than 500 changes in this version, and hints at more alterations to come by stating in a press release that many of them are ''laying the groundwork for future changes''. On his blog, Chief Technical Officer of Mozilla Messaging Dan Mosedale said that many of the improvements will help support the new global database search engine. Based on these comments, more betas of Thunderbird 3 are expected.
The interface and behavioral changes in this beta are significant and should be easy to spot for longtime 'bird-watchers. The biggest is that Thunderbird now supports e-mail tabs. If you've checked out the highly unstable Shredder version of Thunderbird, or Postbox, a competitor that's based on Thunderbird's own open-source code, you've known that this feature has been due for a while.
Hitting Enter or double-clicking a message will now open it in a new tab and make it your focus. Middle-click an e-mail to open it in a new tab but retain your focus on the current tab--usually the folder pane. You can switch tabs via the hot key combo CTRL+Tab, and the new tab menu button on the right side of the tab bar will help you manage your tabs.
Another new feature is the message summary view, which you can see when you select multiple messages at once. They'll open in the message preview pane. Changes to folders include a Smart Folders mode, which gives users the ability to combine inboxes from multiple accounts, and the new ability to customize column headings on a per-folder basis.
Gmail integration has existed in Thunderbird for a while, but improvements to the feature in this beta include better recognition and integration of Gmail's special folders. These include Sent and Trash, and non-English versions of Gmail. All Mail defaults in Thunderbird to the Archives folder.
The account setup wizard has been overhauled. Reachable under File, then New, Mail, and Account (Quick Setup), Thunderbird now looks to mozillamessaging.com to look for additional information on how to configure the account. Mosedale stressed in his blog that only the domain name from your e-mail address gets sent to Mozilla's servers, and that the entire process falls under the Mozilla's privacy policy. Nevertheless, it's a move that's likely to cause some concern among privacy advocates.
The compact header mode has been deleted, which is sure to annoy those who like using Thunderbird on smaller-form computers like netbooks. Mosedale cited bandwidth issues as well an ongoing need to improve the design and configurability of the feature.
In my own experiences with Thunderbird 3 beta 3 for half a day, users with large inboxes should be careful to note that Thunderbird now adds all your messages to its search archives. This can hamper performance until it's completed. Also note that the calendar extension Lightning isn't compatible with beta 3 unless you're using the nightly build.
Considering that it's based on Mozilla Thunderbird, it was a bit of a surprise that add-ons weren't available for Postbox when it debuted. That's now been remedied in Postbox beta 13 for Windows and Mac. Given Postbox's emphasis on social-networking technology and Mozilla's own success with add-ons, this move puts the e-mail client in an excellent position to attract more users.
The latest Postbox introduces add-ons to its users.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)A Webware 100 winner, the list of supported extensions isn't long at the moment, and notably it doesn't include Thunderbird's calendaring tool Lightning. Since Postbox doesn't have its own supported calendar, this could prove to be a deal breaker for some. However, the list does include several plug-ins that Thunderbird users should be familiar with, including ReminderFox, QuickText, and MinimizeToTray. MozBackup and Zindus are listed as "coming soon." There's new support for localized dictionaries from Mozilla, too.
Users who wish to install Postbox add-ons while running Firefox can either save the XPI file to their desktop and then install it manually, or drag-and-drop it into Postbox's open Add-ons window.
Other changes include fetching profile pictures from your address books in Postbox, Mac OS X, Twitter, and Facebook for the Inspector Pane. Settings can be imported from Mail.app. Multiple attachments can be dragged to your desktop. Along with a large number of stability and usability fixes, the security improvements made to Firefox 3.0.10 have also been folded in. Full release notes can be read here.
If you've been playing around with the Postbox e-mail client for Windows and Mac, beta 11 has been unleashed upon the world.
Unlike March's beta 10, though, this update includes more performance issue fixes than anything else. Still, it's probably a good idea to upgrade.
Most notably, memory and CPU usage have decreased. Postbox claims that indexing is three times faster in this version, compared to beta 10, and that indexing uses about 75 percent to 80 percent less memory than before. I don't have statistics to do my own comparison of beta 10 to beta 11, but I did notice empirical improvements in performance.
AOL Mail account support has been added, and a bug in importing data from Outlook Express has been fixed. There's also support for usernames with special characters, and you can now add a contact to your address book with one click from the contact panel.
Beyond those changes, the full list is made up mostly of fixing annoyances such as LDAP and IMAP connections hanging.
Postbox had problems accepting a change in my network password from the last time I used it, when I had to re-enter it four times before the program remembered it. This probably has to do with how the program talks to the Exchange server, but it was irritating nonetheless. Thunderbird, on which Postbox is based, required my new network password to be entered only once.
Postbox is a finalist for 2009's Webware 100, awarded by CNET.
