Thunderbird 3 literally borrows the best ideas from Firefox and applies them to e-mail, says Mozilla Messaging CEO in a one-on-one with ComputerWorld Canada. What gives Mozilla’s free, open source and cross-platform e-mail application an edge over Outlook
Thunderbird 3, the latest version of Mozilla Messaging’s free, open source and cross-platform e-mail application released Tuesday, borrows heavily from Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser.
“We have borrowed literally from our friend Firefox and tried to replicate their success in many ways by taking some of their best ideas and seeing if they applied to e-mail,” said David Ascher, CEO of Mozilla Messaging, a subsidiary of Mozilla.
There are a lot of notable features, according to Ascher, but the ones that really stand out by users who have been testing it out over the last few months are the tabs and search.
With tabbed e-mail, users can create tabs for messages they refer to often, add additional tabs through add-ons and have their search results appear within the tabs.
“Just like Firefox introduced tab browsing … we’ve decided that the idea of tabs for managing content is really useful,” said Ascher.
The new search interface stands out because it ranks the search results by relevance and allows users to filter the results. Users can also conduct searches through means such as tags or mailing lists, he noted.
“Over the last 10 years, people have started to use e-mail more and more and they have more and more messages — that makes the problem of search ever more important,” said Ascher.
In developing the interface, Mozilla Messaging looked at the best e-mail search interfaces on the market, which were all fast, all indexed messages and all provided a long list of messages matching a search, according to Ascher.
“We have, I think, a very compelling search interface that allows people to find messages even if they have a large amount of mail,” said Ascher.
Search results deemed more relevant, for example, will include those from messages that a user has replied to. “Messages you’ve replied to are more likely to be important to you than messages you haven’t replied to,” he explained.
Thunderbird 3 also includes “a bunch of other features just to make people’s live easier,” said Ascher. A reminder to include your attachments before sending an e-mail is one of his favourites.
“I was very happy when we added a feature that recognizes when you mention keywords like ‘attach’ or ‘attachment’ and pops up a little warning on the side that doesn’t get in the way, but gently reminds you that maybe you want to attach something. That actually saved me quite a few times,” he said.
Tabs and search are notable organizational and productivity features, but the e-mail application’s strength also lies in features that Ascher described as either “get out the common pitfalls people have with e-mail or hopefully save people a little bit of embarrassment.”
Outlook and Outlook Express are among Thunderbird’s top competitors, according to Ascher, but users are coming at it from a variety of other applications.
“We’ve had large organizations switch from Outlook and Notes, we’ve had a bunch of users come at it from Outlook Express as home users or Windows Live Mail. We have people who are switching back from Gmail or other Web mail systems … there’s a lot of competitors,” he said.
What gives Thunderbird 3 an edge on the market is user experience, customization options and increased control, according to Ascher.
Mozilla builds software for people to have the best experience possible and makes it free so as many possible as possible can then get access to the software, he said. “Our user experience is very good and it’s very polished,” he said.
“As a public benefit organization, our mission is to make the Internet fun and easy to use and productive … so that means we end up with software that is designed for a user’s mind, which ends up paying off in a better product,” said Ascher.
Mozilla also realizes that every user is different, he pointed out. “As a result, we build the best product we can for the most people we can and we also build it in a platform for third parties to create add-ons and customization,” he said.
This flexible approach is useful to both home users and enterprises looking for an e-mail system that they can deploy across heterogeneous networks, said Ascher. “Whether that’s Windows, Linux or Mac — and they can build the capabilities that they need for their particular organization, for their particular market, for their particular users,” he said.
The French military, for example, use Thunderbird with very powerful add-ons they built for their internal networks that gives them military-grade security, he pointed out.
Thunderbird users also like the fact that they can control where their e-mail is, said Ascher. As a desktop application, it keeps people’s e-mails on their computers or servers, as opposed to delegating them to a third party like a Web mail provider, he said.
Ascher admitted that Web mail has some great advantages, but it also includes challenges, especially from the security management point of view.
Mozilla Messaging’s plans for the future include adding more add-ons and customizations so people can “make it even more personal,” said Ascher. “We are eager to see people use it,” he said.
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