David Ascher has published a Thunderbird 3 Planning mail where he details so called high level points and a rough road map for Thunderbird 3. The main goal is to publish a public milestone build of Thunderbird 3 in 2008, with alpha builds in the first quarter, beta builds without calendering in Q2, beta builds with calendering in Q3 and widely useful builds in Q4, subject to change of course depending on development progress.
The main reasons why Thunderbird has not been chosen by many users -in comparison to Gmail or Microsoft Outlook – are the missing calendering function which makes Microsoft Outlook so indispensable and a mediocre search function which can’t compete with that of Gmail for instance. The main emphasize will therefor be to add those two features to Thunderbird.
A integrated calendering function is in my opinion a solid step in the right direction because this really seems to be a function that most users would not want to miss. And installing an extension to add support for it as it is currently the case is not that helpful either because most average users don’t even know that such a feature exists.
Besides these two functions the codebase will be revised quite a bit and patches plus bugfixes will also be released frequently. I’m looking forward to test the new releases of Thunderbird 3 once they come out, what about you ?
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An integrated calendar will be nice. But that’s only a baby step. They need to be able to sync with the PDA’s out there (palm, PocketPC, Windows Mobile, Linux). No business professional is going to switch unless they can port their contacts, calendar, call logs to a PDA.
I’m looking forward to it, but they had better move fast. Spicebird is already out in beta and has many of these features. Cleaned up interface, calendar integration, jabber IM integration are already there. Still, Spicebird has a long way to go. The point is, Thunderbird is no longer just competing with Outlook and GMail, now it’s also competing with clones of itself.
Of course, I want Thunderbird become want Firefox became – most advanced e-mail client in the world, like Firefox is now most advanced browser in the world.
But there is long-long way to go for Thunderbird.
Roman ShaRP, I don’t agree. Outlook, even Express, is heavy because it want to do too much things. I prefer the UNIX way “do one thing but do it well”. an e-mail client should only focus on emails, a usenet reader should only focus on usenet, and a calendar should only only focus on calendars. After that, it’s all a story about communication between applications.
I mean The Bat, not Outlook (which I actually hate). The Bat is well-developed, robust and mighty mail client. All in place – mailboxes, settings, filters.
Compared to it, Thunderbird is rather “ugly duckling” :(
My biggest concern, when it comes to the future PIM-package from Mozilla is that it’ll be able to synchrinize scheduling easily with my mobile phone.
Other than that, I’m completely in lov with the use of a tabbed interface – a la Lotus Notes.
I would like to see full support for aliases including being able to select the sent items folder in IMAP for each alias. (see fastmail webmail). Also, getting IMAP working as it should would be even better!