Mozilla Messaging Devs Don't Want To Duplicate Outlook 355
Petr Krcmar writes "Thunderbird 3.0 Alpha 1 was released last month. A few months before, two main developers left the project and development was moved from the Mozilla Corporation to the Mozilla Messaging, the new subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. We had the opportunity to ask some questions to David Ascher, Mozilla Messaging CEO. The interview is about present and future of Thunderbird and about related projects like SeaMonkey, Spicebird and Mozilla Calendar."
Nice Article, Misleading Summary. (Score:5, Interesting)
Nothing should be ruled out. An Outlook like summary page, sync and what not could easily happen.
All we can be sure of is high quality and something users will like. I like Kontact's layout and feature set, which is much larger and more flexible than Outlook. It would not surprise me to see something better from the Mozilla team, but I won't be disapointed if the interface is what I'm used to. He goes on to mention social networks. This is exciting, but I'm not sure today's social networks do enough to protect their users from advertisers and other fraudsters.
PIM as Social Network Tool? Yes! (Score:3, Insightful)
It's time the free software world merged PIM with social networking. The goal of Personal Information Managers is social network tracking and free software should be able to replace things like Facebook. Facebook, Myspace and other social networking sites really get their start because people in the non free software world don't have adequate PIM tools. The extras Facebook and MySpace have provided could easily be provided by free webservers and interface modules. Everyone would appreciate the granulari
Re:PIM as Social Network Tool? Yes! (Score:5, Funny)
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http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html [jwz.org]
Now the problem here is that the product's direction changed utterly. Our focus in the client group had always been to build products and features that people wanted to use. That we wanted to use. That our moms wanted to use.
"Groupware" is all about things like "workflow", which means, "the chairman of the committee has emailed me this checklist
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For personal mail, most people use webmail services, and in many cases they already use Firefox to visit the webmail site, so I'm not sure what more the Mozilla Foundation could offer
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Re:PIM as Social Network Tool? Yes! (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Nice Article, Misleading Summary. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Assuming you have any. There's a reason you keep getting downmodded, and it has nothing to do with an evil M$ conspiracy.
OK, actual discussion begins here:
The headline makes perfect sense. Outlook has many good features worth copying, but the ove
Vowels (Score:5, Funny)
Son, you ain't got quite enough vowels in your name.
Re:Vowels (Score:4, Informative)
The Rs are actually vocallic.
That, though, should be mitigated by the fact that the C should probably be transcribed as CH.
</nitpick>
Re:Vowels (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, yes, it's all Latin script. But Latin script is not very well suited to Slavic languages, which have introduced a variety of new letters which I cannot repeat here. Instead of transcribing those, most times English speakers simply strip the diacritics and mangle the pronunciation.
Budapest is spelled just like that in Hungarian; English speakers just mangle the pronunciation. /.) is first stripped, then mangled up in pronunciation. Many a last name in former Yugoslavia ends in -i[cacute], which is most closely pronounced as -itch (no point in trying to make English speakers distinguish between ccaron and cacute anyway), but when stripped to -ic is pronounced as [ik].
Any Slavic name containing a ccaron, cacute, zcaron, scaron (type them up between &;s somewhere other than
This is the rough equivalent of me pronouncing your name John as [Yochn], just because it is spelled like that, and Slavic languages are rather phonetically spelled. This is why the Cyrillic alphabet was invented in the first place.
For instance, if Croatian still used the Cyrillic alphabet, most of our problems with sorting would disappear: our digraphs lj, nj, and d[zcaron] would always be represented as single characters (which has become possible with Unicode, but nobody ever uses those, as they would require complicated find/replace rules).
So no, it's not "all Latin script".
Re:Vowels (Score:4, Funny)
Mozilla calendar? (Score:5, Funny)
Come on, Mozilla, get your act together.
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I'd prefer SolarGroundhog.
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Re:Mozilla calendar? (Score:5, Funny)
Hmmmm (Score:2, Funny)
As well they shoouldn't (Score:4, Insightful)
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Sounds like a troll, but it is, in my opinion. Gmail is better too.
A few features that need to be improved on by anyone fixing Outlook:
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Gmail is amazing at this. Best feature in my opinion - especially when e-mail chains get long. (Haven't used iMail.)
Re:As well they shoouldn't (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatever happened to quoting and proper mail etiquette, anyway? When I started using message boards in the early '80s, almost everyone quickly learned to quote properly, to cut out the unnecessary stuff and so on. Now it seems to be a completely lost art. I have had people at work ask me, in all seriousness, why I didn't top post and what those strange ">" characters meant.
I agree that threading is important now, but it is (IMNSHO) a technological solution to a social problem. I find hat unfortunate.
Re:As well they shoouldn't (Score:5, Informative)
Because Outlook's text editor sucks to the point that top-posting is basically the only way to make it work.
Outlook has two default text styles: "compose" and "reply." Assuming nobody bothers changing them, after the second reply everyone will be typing in the same font and color.
This means that you have to manually alter you text to make it stand out if you're replying to a reply.
Plus, as an added bonus, Outlook's quote is just an indent and a set of email headers. There's no nice ">" at the start of each quoted line or nice blue line like there is in Thunderbird.
And, because as already mentioned, Outlook's email editor sucks, Outlook really doesn't handle inserting new lines of text into quoted sections that well. Assuming nobody's done anything fancy with formatting it will simply unindent the line of text. However, you'll still be typing in the blue "reply" format unless you've changed that style, so the only queue that it's a reply is that it's not indented. Unless you're the first reply after an email is sent, then by default you'll be typing blue and their text will remain black. But after one round, this is lost.
But there's still that "assuming nobody's done anything fancy with formatting" thing I just mentioned. Throw in bullets or numbered lists (and keep in mind, Outlook like Word loves auto-formatting things) and things can get a little screwy. Those generally will prevent your text from being indented.
I actually did do an "inline reply" to an email that used a numbered list in Outlook, and that had the effect of resetting the numbered list numbers - instead of keeping the number from the original email, it started counting over again from 1. Not a problem if you're replying to all the original items, but...
In short, it's because Outlook's email editor basically sucks. It wants to be an embedded Word instead of an email editor.
For those who've never used Outlook, I've essentially formatted my post in a general "Outlook reply" format. Keep in mind that the quoted section would just be indented, without the little quote lines that Slashdot has added.
Sent: Tuesday, June 10 2008 01:05 PM
To: slashdot.org
Subject: Re:As well they shoouldn't
Whatever happened to quoting and proper mail etiquette, anyway? When I started using message boards in the early '80s, almost everyone quickly learned to quote properly, to cut out the unnecessary stuff and so on. Now it seems to be a completely lost art. I have had people at work ask me, in all seriousness, why I didn't top post and what those strange ">" characters meant.
I agree that threading is important now, but it is (IMNSHO) a technological solution to a social problem. I find hat unfortunate..
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Outlook has two default text styles: "compose" and "reply." Assuming nobody bothers changing them, after the second reply everyone will be typing in the same font and color.
Only if you're using HTML mail and default options.
Plus, as an added bonus, Outlook's quote is just an indent and a set of email headers. There's no nice ">" at the start of each quoted line or nice blue line like there is in Thunderbird.
Only if thats how you want it. It's almost infinitely configurable.
Your choices are:
- do not include original text
- attach original message
- include original text with no formatting changes
- include and indent original text
- prefix each line with ? (pick what you want to prefix it with)
You can also choose whether to reply above or below.
Thats pretty damn
Re:As well they shoouldn't (Score:5, Insightful)
Broadband cheap large hard drives. Top posting is very convenient, first you read the new stuff, and probably the only stuff you care about, the rest is just included for reference and context if you need it.
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Where Outlook shines is the in three areas.
Calendaring, Scheduling, and Syncing.
Your average outlook users that just uses it for POP and imap can replace it with anything. It is the business users that us Outlook with Exchange that are stuck with it.
Heck I just wish I could sync Thunderbird with my Cell Phone over bluetooth!
Re:As well they shoouldn't (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason is that the integration between mail, tasks and the calendar is so much better than Gmail or any other competitor I have seen. As an example: I have a rule that takes any message sent from myself (i.e. when I bcc myself), creates a task of said message, and correctly populates the subject, body and category fields, and then deletes the e-mail. What's the point of this, then? The point is that it creates a "Waiting for"-task as per David Allen's Getting Things Done methodology. By just bcc-ing myself, I get the task into my trusted system so I'm sure I will follow up on it later.
I am sure this can be done in other PIMs as well. But I have never seen any other PIM where this is even remotely as easy to setup.
Re:As well they shoouldn't (Score:4, Informative)
Outlook as a PIM without Exchange is still rubbish
Outlook as a front end to Exchange is quite good and the best there is currently....
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They copy the rest of the browser, and Opera mail has all the features you mention, including remarkably fast searching.
In fact, I believe Gmail took their labels from Opera M2 views.
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I'm less interested in specifically competing with any specific product, and more focused on figuring out what the best user experience we can give users is. I'm sure that for some users, Thunderbird 3 will be a better fit than other products, but taking on Outlook or any one product isn't how we're looking at product planning.
Is what he said in TFA, he's not making an Outlook clone, or an Outlook killer, just making a product that people want to use. So you're right, he's not looking to duplicate it at all, just make something better, and I applaud him for that.
Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail's Worst Misfeature (Score:5, Insightful)
HTML email is evil; it's what makes phishing possible.
Who do I have to blow to get plain text mail made the default?
Most people wouldn't know the difference, and if someone really cared, they could enable it.
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Why oh why oh why does message composition for new accounts default to HTML instead of plain text?
HTML email is evil; it's what makes phishing possible.
Who do I have to blow to get plain text mail made the default?
Most people wouldn't know the difference, and if someone really cared, they could enable it.
Not only that, but can someone please introduce people to hard carriage returns instead of these virtual ones? Ultra-long lines are not fun in these HTML-type emails... and LookOut and AOL are two of the primary culprits in proliferating this failure to actually wrap the lines somewhere around 80 characters.
Re:Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail's Worst Misfeature (Score:5, Insightful)
I really think that you should only send carrige return in your mail if you want to start a new paragraph. Sending an entire paragraph as a single line is good, because then my mail program, can wrap the lines acording to my window size.
Sending mails with a specific line width sucks if my display is smaller or wider then what the sender think is the right linesize. What If I am on a mobile device which can only show 60 chars on a line. If you email have a newline after 80 chars, it will not look good.
And similary, my current mail program can show 200 chars on a single line, so why leave more then half the window empty, just because you want to wrap lines on an arbitrary position which have not really been a limit since we started using graphics display.
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it's the end users's (application's) job to decide where to wrap the line, not the author's.
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That's being very thoughtless and is bad netiquette. How is he supposed to print the e-mail out looking nice on his dot matrix printer if you do this?
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And similary, my current mail program can show 200 chars on a single line, so why leave more then half the window empty, just because you want to wrap lines on an arbitrary position which have not really been a limit since we started using graphics display.
But this is part of the "plain text" mode. If you're going to use plain text and have it convert these HTML emails into plain text, you'll end up with these ultra-long lines that force horizontal scroll bars at the bottom when you include the text of the email as part of the reply. It does not auto-wrap the line... and if it does, it fails to put the little marker in front of it to indicate that it's text quoted from the original message.
Re:Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail's Worst Misfeature (Score:5, Informative)
This is one of those endless debates between old fogeys who hate everything that didn't already exist in 1975, and people who realize that, hey, paragraph breaks make a hell of a lot more sense than line breaks!
The author used to call me for tech support (Score:3, Interesting)
One of its features, which could be disabled, was to verify that there were two spaces after each period. The author of the Mac is Not a Typewriter would call me now and then to complain about it. He wanted me to change it to verify that there is just one space.
I always meant to allow it as an option, but just never got around to it.
Now, he has a poin
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In any case, a lot of software written now is based on that assumption. The HTML spec, for example, will strip all but one space if more than one space is typed in a row.
Re:Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail's Worst Misfeature (Score:5, Informative)
The header "format=flowed" lets you send text/plain messages that look great whether you are reading it with telnet or pine or with Thunderbird or any other modern MUA. The main rfc for email, RFC 2822 [faqs.org], explains that the sending MUA should, but is not required to, break up paragraphs into lines of less than 78 characters terminated by a carriage return/line feed. If you specify the "format=flowed" header described in RFC 2646 [faqs.org], you allow the receiving client to rewrap the email according to the receiving user's preference. Typically modern MUAs will rewrap format-flowed plaintext email to the window size.
The specification states that lines ending with a space and then a CLRF are to be treated as part of a single paragraph that can be rewrapped. Hard breaks are then done by terminating the line with a simple CLRF with no preceding space.
Most modern MUAs that I have dealt with can (and typically by default) send format-flowed email that has the standard line breaks every 78 characters for the benefit of clients that cannot rewrap, and contain contextual clues for newer mail clients to seamlessly reformat the message body. For example, Apple's Mail.app by default sends multi-part MIME messages, one part containing the rich text email and the other part containing format=flowed text/plain. No matter what email client the recipient is using, at least one of those options will look acceptable.
You can find a pretty good write-up of this at Dan's Mail Format Site [dan.info].
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Um, no; 80 characters is entirely wrong. We don't use punched cards any more (though I do have a small stack of them as souvenirs of the Bad Old Days
Re:Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail's Worst Misfeature (Score:5, Funny)
Me, for a start!
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HTML email is evil; it's what makes phishing possible.
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It's easier to dupe people with email (Score:2)
If you think only idiots fall for phishing, I can prove you wrong:
I know a guy who is a college professor, has a PhD, has published lots of highly regarded papers, has scads of grad students supported by grants that he gets easily.
And he entered both his credit card
Re:Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail's Worst Misfeature (Score:5, Insightful)
Crooks have been running phishing scams since well before the internet first went online. All you need is a telephone and you can mount a phishing scam: "Hi, this is xyz from your bank. We're running a quality check on the vendor who produces our checks. Could you please repeat the 12 digit number located at the bottom of the check? Now can you read the little numbers near your address? Great, thanks a bunch!". The phisher just got all the information they need to completely drain your checking account.
If we banned HTML mail, the banks wouldn't be able to send HTML mail, and the phishers would simply copy the non-html mail that the banks send.
HTML mail has it's own set of issues, but enabling phishing isn't one of them.
Re:Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail's Worst Misfeature (Score:5, Insightful)
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I totally agree with your second sentence. On the other hand, the problem wouldn't be a big deal without the con artists who run them - being gullible isn't a big deal if there's nobody trying to scam you.
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Re:Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail's Worst Misfeature (Score:5, Insightful)
HTML email doesn't cause phishing or spam, but it does facilitate it. HTML email is bad practice.
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I'm not aware of any email clients released in the past 4 years that automatically opened external links in email messages, and I wouldn't use one because of just that issue. The web bug problem is a huge issue not just for phishers but for spammers in general.
And if we banned HTML email, then the phishers would just switch to text-only email. People will still click on http://www.yo [evil.com]
Re:Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail's Worst Misfeature (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, has "evil" lost all meaning? I like to think of "evil" as things like, say, gassing people or conquering a neighboring country with extremely brutality. Now adding pretty pictures to emails qualifies.
In any case, phishing was possible when emails were text-only. I saw dozens of phishing messages in text-only emails, so in addition to deflating the word "evil" to uselessness, you're also flat-out wrong.
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evil adj. As used by hackers, implies that some system, program, person, or institution is sufficiently maldesigned as to be not worth the bother of dealing with. Unlike the adjectives in the cretinous/losing/brain-damaged series, `evil' does not imply incompetence or bad design, but rather a set of goals or design criteria fatally incompatible with the speaker's. This usage is more an esthetic and engineering judgment than a moral one in the mainstream sense. "We thought about addin
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Part of the problem can be seen by skimming over the replies, and noting how many people ignored that "default". Most of the replies argue sending only plain text or only HTML. Anyone who has looked at Thunderbird at all should be aware that it can do either, and the only question is which is the default
Funny related story: My wife works from home a lot, using VPN, Skype, etc, and her office is mostly Window
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Who do I have to blow to get plain text mail made the default?
Most of the world. In business e-mail, I see colored text used a lot to denote inline comments. Personal e-mail, on the other hand, tends to make use of inline pictures.
The argument against HTML is fairly weak. Loading inline images from an external site could verify that you received the email, and the IP address it was received at. The solution to that is to block external images. E-mail programs that support HTML also support pictures as attachments.
Certain e-mail programs can't render HTML. Luckily,
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I get MySpace spam all the time (Score:2)
I get friend requests, but know not to accept them blindly. When I check out their MySpace page, it's sometimes a fairly blatant ad for a pornsite.
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* * * plaintext * * *
stand out from the rest.
Sync (Score:5, Insightful)
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Now I just need a job that is more meeting/schedule driven
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What you *could* do is purchase an Exchange seat with 1and1.com for $6.99/mo.
For that, you get a copy of the latest Outlook, you get an Exchange seat @yourdomain.com, you get antivirus & antispam, active sync, Outlook Web Access, 1GB of space.
Since this is Exchange, you can do OTA sync too.
$6.99/mo. That's pretty cheap. There is a free 3 month trial right now.
1and1.com [1and1.com]
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Hmm. (Score:5, Interesting)
Still, it's good enough - I don't have much to complain about and I still like it a lot more than Outlook.
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Re:Hmm. (Score:4, Informative)
The only problem with GMail's conversation view is that it uses Subject rather than Message ID. While the threaded view in Thunderbird does indeed use Message ID, it only ever shows one half of the conversation (and I'm not sure how or if it handles multiple correspondents in a conversation).
It's not an enormously big deal for me, but it's not a feature that's currently in Thunderbird. I would use it if it were available and I suspect that for GMail users it would be a big deal.
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I use it all the time. I think it does a
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A conversation view shows both sides of the exchange in a threaded format, allowing you to recap on a discussion without having to constantly flip between the Inbox and Sent Mail views.
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user_pref("mail.strict_threading", true);
This will get you closer to proper threading by message ID. It's just too bad it isn't available in an easier to use config dialog.
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My recollection was that I'd tried this before with T'bird 2 so either it's a bugfix since an earlier 2.0.0.x release, or PEBKAC.
Thanks again.
Pfff... (Score:5, Funny)
-Being slower than sh#^ starting up or closing down
-Always telling me I didn't close it properly when I did, and making me sit through some shadowy scanning procedure that doesn't seem to do anything.
-Slow performance when sorting
-Slow performance when searching
-Slow to initially render the Outlook today page
-Resource pig for the simple functionality you get
How will I ever survive without something JUST LIKE OUTLOOK?
Re:Pfff... (Score:5, Funny)
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Yeah, it seems like Evolution copied most of those 'features' of Outlook. The only thing it does better than Outlook is delete messages. It can empty a trash folder with 20k messages in less than two minutes, whereas Outlook takes about four hours.
Both of them are slow and randomly lock up on me. Unfortunately my work uses Exchange without OWA turned on, so those are the only two options I have right now
Re:Pfff... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Pfff... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Thunderbird 3 Alpha 1 Screenshot (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Thunderbird 3 Alpha 1 Screenshot (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Thunderbird 3 Alpha 1 Screenshot (Score:5, Interesting)
Inbox
>Account1
>Account2
>Account3
Sent
>Account1
>Account2
>Account3
Trash
>Account1
>Account2
>Account3
If I click on "Inbox" (first line above), I see all messages in all the Inboxes in all three accounts. If I want to just see the Inbox for Account1, I can click on that instead (second line).
Thunderbird and others seem to be convinced that everyone wants to break up everything based on accounts. Does anyone know the UI reasoning for this?
What language interview questions translated? (Score:3, Funny)
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No, but many Slavic speakers of English do.
In other news: (Score:3, Funny)
Will the newly opened Exchange APIs help? (Score:4, Interesting)
For email, I find Thunderbird wins with no contest. I hate everything about Outlook's email handling. The billion different places that options and settings are stored, stationery, the fonts, the crappy way links are handled if you change to plain text only....gah! But the shared contacts, calendaring, and syncing are excellent. Lightning was OK, but I could never get it to work well as a task-oriented work process as I could with Outlook. However, Lightning's handling of multiple calendars (Google calendar connector specifically) I feel is much better.
Depending on how things pan out, how does it fare for Tbird if the Exchange APIs are actually released and work? Outlook's muscle comes from the tight integration to Exchange. If I could use Thunderbird/Lightning but get all of the groupware benefits of Exchange, hopefully with improved Task handling...then I think they'd really be on to something!
outlook+exchange is the competition (in business) (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, if you take the time, you can configure a half dozen different open source server programs (mail, calendaring, centralized address book, etc.) and configure Thunderbird to talk to them (with several addons, of course). But it is a real hassle.
So what I'm getting at is that if businesses are a real target for Mozilla Messaging (and I'm not sure if they are or not, does anyone know? are they only interested in home users?) then they need to address the server side as well as the client side.
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