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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 spoke with Scott MacGregor, lead engineer Thunderbird at Mozilla.
Wired News: With seemingly every aspect of our data moving toward online apps rather than the traditional desktop model, why is Mozilla still interested in a desktop email client?
Scott MacGregor:
****[I have a response to this, but it wasn't quite accurate (he said something about GMail that wasn't true) so I asked him for a better response which I want to integrate here and lead to the GMail/webmail integration question]
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.
WN: How does the webmail integration work?
A lot of users want to check their webmail accounts using a desktop client, but they don't know all the information necessary to connect. For instance with GMail you need to know the server names in addition to your login information. We wanted to make the process easier for users so we've provided GMail integration using just an email address. All the user has to do is enter their email address and password and Thunderbird will figure out the server details for them.
For the Mac version we've provided the same one step integration with .Mac. We're planning to add more webmail services and even ISP providers in future releases. In the mean time it's possible for developers to write extensions for other popular web email providers.
WN: Mozilla touts the "open source security" model, why is open source security better than a proprietary solution?
SM: One of the great things about open source is that you have the entire community, thousands of users, looking to find in Thunderbird. And when they do, we have what I call the security swat team, people who are always watching for reports of vulnerabilities and helping to patch them. The open source model allows us to find problems faster, correct them faster and get updates out to users.
We've built a number of security features into Thunderbird like hishing protection -- when you view at a message Thunderbird analyzes all the urls in it to see if they might be trying to trick the user. Thunderbird displays a warning at the top of the message when it thinks something malicious is going on. If the user clicks the links anyway Thunderbird then pops up a warning dialog. If you're using Firefox as your browser, you really have two lines of defense since Firefox also has built in phishing protection.
WN: What are some of the key features in the new version of Thunderbird?
SM: With Thunderbird 2.0 we're trying to focus on a few key features. People still get too much email to easily sort it, so we've focused on ways to better manage your inbox. The new mail alerts feature makes it easy to see new mail without having to stop what you're doing and change applications. [NW note: This feature is only available in Windows and Linux version of Thunderbird]
We get most of our feature suggestions from user feedback and with the popularity of tagging on popular websites like Flickr led people to overwhelming want to apply that to email. So tagging support is one of the key new features.
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 jump back and forth between recent messages.
We've also added full support for Windows Vista.
And we've really seen an explosive growth of people and companies building add-ons for Thunderbird so we've tried to make it easier for those developers by improving the add-on framework.
WN: Have many developer's updated their add-ons at this point or should the average user wait a little while?
SM: It will take a while for Thunderbird 2.0 to propagate out. Most of the add-on developers wait until the RC1 when they know the code won't be changing much and then they update their add-ons.
WN: Firefox is planning to support microformats in the next version, any plans for microformats in Thunderbird?
SM: I think that's a really interesting thing for us to look at for the next release. In some way I think that microformats would be even more powerful in a mail app because the data is tailored especially for you, whereas on a web page it may not be. For instance, say you get a message that says let's eat at this restuarant at this date etc, to then to be able to extract that out to calendars and contact managers would be really nice for users.
WN: Speaking of address books, Mac users have been clamoring for support for the Address Book app in OS X, is that part of the Thunderbird roadmap?
SM: We're very close to having integration support for Address Book and that will be part of the next release.
WN: What are Thunderbird's 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.
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