Greetings to Mozilla Messaging
Posted by Peng on 19 February 2008
A while back Mozilla said it was going to spin off their Thunderbird email client into its own company, and after months of waiting by concerned users Mozilla has finally introduced Mozilla Messaging, formerly known as MailCo, to the world.
According to the official announcement on the MoMessaging site (that’s not the official shortened version of the name by any means, I’m simply too lazy to type it all out right now 
) the primary concern for now will be to get Thunderbird 3 (Tb3) ready for users.
The initial focus for Mozilla Messaging is the development of Thunderbird 3, which will deliver significant improvements, notably integrated calendaring, better search and enhancements to the overall user experience.
People have been using trunk builds that will become Tb3 for some time. Once the project hits beta I’ll start playing around with it to see exactly what’s in store for us. (It possibly late beta sine it’s an email client and I really don’t want my email to get FUBAR’d.) The integrated calendar is already available with the Lightning project and there is a third party tool for syncing it up to the Google Calendar, although I haven’t played with it that much. There definitely seem to be some bugs with nightly builds from time to time (I use the nightly builds of Thunderbird 2) plus I already have two calendars to deal with, my Google Calendar and the calendar on my PDA, and I can’t get the two to talk to each other due to incompatibilities and the fact that I’m no longer running Windows. I really don’t want to have to deal with what could end up being a third calendar that I’d have to check to make sure it’s updated. Your millage, of course, may vary, but I’ll hold off on Lightning until it’s officially folded into my email client. As it is I’m still hoping for a third party tool that will let me sync my Thunderbird address book with my PDA. There hasn’t been a good one for Windows users, let alone Linux users, since Thunderbird 2 came out, although I’m seeing that it’s finally being worked on. Note to developers: Linux users want this kind of capabilities, too!
I will say that I’m glad to see Thunderbird getting its own resources. For too long it has seemed like a stepchild compared to Firefox and hopefully we can see development on Thunderbird (both Tb2 and Tb3) progressing at least a little more quickly. One thing that concerns me is that it seems that the Powers That Be are looking to make Thunderbird handle more than just email, newsgroups and news feeds. From previous things I read (and blogged on my old blog) it seems that MoMessageing plans to include an IM component into a later version. The name of the new company alone tells me that it wants to be your tool for hopefully all of your messaging needs one of these days, but I really hope I’m wrong. There’s already a plethora of IM clients out there, both standalone (for AIM, ICW, MSN, IRC, etc.) and multi-protocol clients (like Trillian and Pidgin) so dows Mozilla really need to fold that kind of code into what many will think of as their email client? I doubt seriously I’ll have any interest in doing IM in a future Thunderbird. Especially not after I’ve taken so much time to get Pidgin set up to work how I like it, not to mention all of the logged IM conversations I”ve got stored.
