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Mozilla is set to release the final build of its popular email client, Thunderbird, and the public release will follow roughly a month after that. Mozilla claims Thunderbird, which is built on the same technology as the Firefox browser, has 80 million users worldwide and the community of developers who support it have translated it into over 35 languages.
But with GMail gaining users everyday and Yahoo Mail's recently announced unlimited email storage offer, does anyone need a desktop email client anymore?
To find out where Mozilla stands on web apps, desktop clients and the future of your email I recently say down with Scott MacGregor, lead engineer Thunderbird at Mozilla.
Thunderbird is an open source email client built on the same technology as Firefox
Thunderbird has support for vista and in available over 35 languages
With thunderbird we're trying to focus on a few key ears, people still get too much mail so we've focused on ways to better manage your inbox. We've really seen an explosive growth of people and companies building addons for Thunderbird and we've tried to make it easier for those developers
Focus on tagging. We get most of our feature suggestions from user feed back and with the popularity of tagging on popular websites like Flickr led people to overwhelming want to apply that to email.
labels vs tags Thunderbird no longer has labels tags are just more flexible labels.
Another thing that came out from the web is the back and forward buttons, a lot of users wanted to have that functionality in the email client. It makes it really easy to
Mail alerts. are mac only.
find as you type.
Why is open source security better than a proprietary solution?
Phishing protection -- when you look at a message thunderbird analyzes all the urls in a message and if they come from known
one of the great things about open source is that you have the entire community of thousands of users looking to find vulnerabilities. We have what I call the security swat team, people who are always watching for reports of vulnerabilities and it allows us to find problems faster, correct them faster and get them out in update form.
One of the advantages of the mozilla platform is its extensibility and we've tried to make the architecture even better to allow developers to make even more powerful extensions.
Everything is moving online why are you building a desktop client?
Thunderwird can aggregate your webmail accounts in one place. It's also comforting to know that I have backup of my mail.
A lot of users don't know all that information and we wanted to GMail integration through email address. All the user has to do is enter an email address and Thunderbird will figure out the server details for them.
We're planning to add more webmail services and even ISP providers in future releases. It's also possible to write extensions for other popular web email providers.
What advantages does Thunderbird offer that a web-based solution like Gmail doesn't?
Plans for the future?
We'll start collecting feedback from users once the new version is released and then we'll sit down as a community and figure out what we're going to do.
Addressbook integration?
We're very close to having support and that will be part of the next release
Microformats support?
I think that's a really interesting thing for us to look at for the next release. Say you get a message that says let's eat at this restuarant at this date and then to be able to extract that out to claendars and contact information. that would be huge. In some way I think that microformats in mail would be even more powerful in mail because its tailored especially for you whereas on a web page it may not be.
What's up with Eudora version?
Penelope we're all working on the same code base going forward.
Have many developer's updated their add-ons at this point or should the average user wait a little while?
It will take a while to propagate out. Most of them wait until the RC1 when they know the code won't be changing much.
Vista integration after beta 2.
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