Mozilla Creates New Internet Mail and Communications Company 135
Mozilla has announced a new initiative to overhaul email and internet communications in general. The new company, MailCo, will be given $3 million in startup capital from Mozilla to start with the Thunderbird code and work from there. MailCo will be led by David Ascher of ActiveState fame and, according to him, will be a for-profit venture without the emphasis on profit.
Integrate SpamBayes! (Score:5, Insightful)
The first thing they need to do is integrate spambayes. Thunderbird's current spam filtering sucks. Spambayes works great. For the love of god, somebody please do it already!
Don't let code rot by "employees" (Score:4, Insightful)
Look at the original Ximian. I mean, writing Evolution was the core USP of whatever Ximian became into. But somewhere on the way into building an open source email client/PIM/Outlook-killer, the Evolution codebase filled up with what I can only call "employee code" (i.e This fixes the bug now, we'll see what it breaks in QA).
I've tried hacking around there, but eventually ended up back in thunderbird land [dotgnu.info]. But on that side of the fence, some of the problems are purely due to over-engineered modularity (yes ... yes, we all love XPCOM [*cough* bonobo], but not that much). And considering I've weaned most of my relatives off Outlook Express with thunderbird, migrating them to Kmail was kinda too hard to have a point.
In short, "do it well" with hackers and don't just hack it up with code written by employees to meet deadlines. Because I sure as hell would love a email client that I could sic my sister/cousins on (she runs linux now, without any clue beyond "clicky clicky") and hack on when I get a brilliant idea once in a while (for example, a pluggable addressbook api - ala kmail's hooks [linux.com])
Re:Chance to fix email? (Score:1, Insightful)
Ex: I give you my email address in a file with
1) My email address
2) The encryption key
3) My passphrase *for you*
Now, when I recieve an email, I decrypt it, if the passphrase and email match my personal database, it's flagged as good, otherwise it is treated as spam.
Something like that?
Just give me.... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's all I want. Otherwise, the calendar and mail systems out there are perfectly good and well and take care of us without issue.
Re:Lost Cause (Score:1, Insightful)
Start a list of requirements you'd suggest. (Score:4, Insightful)
#2. Online and live BACKUPS! No more shutting down the server to get a decent backup OR buying expensive database backup software.
#3. Shared folders / calendars.
#4. Roles / identities / aliases / whatever. So I can send email as "postmaster" without having to log out of my user account and log into the postmaster account. And so "sales" will go to the entire sales team.
Any other requirements?
Re:Encryption is already available. (Score:3, Insightful)
But none of that is BUILT IN from the ground up. It's all tacked on - sometimes.
And that makes all the difference.
Re:Stop The Bus! (Score:3, Insightful)
You do not want it "built in". (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Chance to fix email? (Score:3, Insightful)
That seems to make more money these days. And as the lead developers of the mail program, they should have an easy time bypassing any anti-spam filters built in, and include a root kit to mine for more valuable personal information.
Default colours for verified email. (Score:4, Insightful)
I want the default colour to indicate that it has passed my tests for LEGITIMATE mail. I do NOT mean that is has not FAILED to be identified as spam.
This is mostly for business users. As the email admin, I should be able to identify the servers that send us legitimate email. So I can add headers that are known only to my system.
Any message NOT containing those headers will be shown in a different colour. Even if they pass all the anti-spam tests.
This is a change from identifying what MAY be spam. This is about identifying established relationships.
Only one shot (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Integrate SpamBayes! (Score:3, Insightful)
On a more serious note, doctors shouldn't communicate medical information via email since it's insecure and patient information is confidential. I think there are probably rules about that... I message my doctor (not about viagra) through my HMO's website, which coincidentally utilizes the electronic health record software my company makes.
A mail server should never delete mail (Score:2, Insightful)
Imagine if the US Postal service decided what mail was rubbish and trashes one of your credit card bills because it contained the word viagra. It's not for them to decide.