Open Enterprise
Glyn Moody
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Glyn Moody's look at all levels of the enterprise open source stack. The blog will look at the organisations that are embracing open source, old and new alike (start-ups welcome), and the communities of users and developers that have formed around them (or not, as the case may be).
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How Can We Save Thunderbird Now Email is Dying?
Published 08:19, 06 April 09
I like Thunderbird. I've been using it for years, albeit now more as a backup for my Gmail account than as my primary email client. But it's always been the Cinderella of the Mozilla family, rather neglected compared to its more glamorous sister Firefox.
The creation of the Mozilla Messaging subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation means that efforts are already underway to remedy that. But there's a deeper problem that Thunderbird needs to face, too.
In terms of fixing the short-term problem of increasing Thunderbird's user base, there are number of actions that can be taken. Perhaps the easiest is starting to encourage and promote Thunderbird add-ons. The equivalents for Firefox have turned into one of the most powerful arguments for using it – and for not being seduced by shiny new browser toys like Chromium/Chrome.
I often hear people say that they couldn't live without a particular browser add-on, but I've never heard the equivalent for Thunderbird. That needs to change if Mozilla's email solution is to become as central – and loved – as its browser.
Related to this is that much more must be done with the SpreadThunderbird site, which is effectively moribund. One of the biggest factors that led to Firefox's success was the use of the community of enthusiastic users to drive further uptake, notably through the SpreadFirefox site.
This simply isn't happening with Thunderbird, so it's no wonder that adoption rates are an order of magnitude lower. If open source has taught us anything, it is that the user community is immensely creative and capable of acting as a multiplying factor.
These are relatively simple things to try. But the larger problem facing Thunderbird is more profound, and not so easy to solve. Email is dying. Time and again I come across comments to the effect that people have given up on their email inbox, and simply junked their messages.
Increasingly, people are turning to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as their messaging medium. It's not hard to see why. These are opt-in services: you get to choose who can contact you, unlike email.
This has led to the scourge of spam, which now represents 94% of all email, according to Google's Postini subsidiary. A classic Tragedy of the Commons has resulted, whereby a few selfish individuals exploit and ultimately destroy a resource used by all.
Sadly, it looks like the battle against spam is lost; even though services like Gmail offer extremely efficient filtering in my experience, it's a poor substitute for a messaging service that can assume that you want to see everything that is sent to you, because only people of interest are allowed to contact you.
The more Facebook and Twitter spread, the more people will be turning to these opt-in networks for their communications; email, as a result, will dwindle in importance, turning into a kind of digital wasteland inhabited mostly by those too poor, uninformed or lazy to move on, and by spamming parasites who prey on them. I don't imagine that Thunderbird wishes to become the software of choice for either.
This implies that Thunderbird needs to change from an email program to a messaging program that embraces these new forms of opt-in communications. A way must be found to integrate tweets, Facebook messages, RSS feeds and whatever else comes along in the next few years, into a coherent and navigable stream of messages.
I expect this will require considerable intelligence on the part of the program, so that it can display messages in a way that prioritises them according to their source, so that Twitter DM's take precedence over RSS feeds, for example. Similarly, this approach presumes that the messaging client both learns from the user's everyday actions, and is highly customisable, because everybody will have their own needs and requirements for handling the firehose of messages that are directed at them.
There are already some attempts to achieve this marriage of messaging flows – things like Flock or TwitterGadget. But these are just adumbrations; Mozilla needs to spend a lot of effort – and maybe money – on carrying out research into just how people will want to receive and pass on messages.
Moreover, it's a huge challenge: not some simple upgrade so much as a complete reinvention of what messaging means in the age of Facebook and Twitter. And it will be a continuing task, not a one-off operation, as new services emerge, new habits are formed - and new vulnerabilities in the system are found that must be dealth with.
Other issues that will need to be addressed include questions of standards: bringing together messages in this way will doubtless lead to new technical approaches that will soon crystallise as standards. The Mozilla Foundation clearly has an important role to play here in terms of ensuring that they are open and not captured by any one company or group of companies.
Now is the time to start planning for this rather than waiting and then being reactive to the initiatives of others, who may not be so focussed on the long-term well-being of the Net commons.
Those are my thoughts: what do *you* think Thunderbird should become? One person who'd like to hear your views is Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation. He has an interview with the head of Mozilla Messaging, David Ascher, about the future of Thunderbird, and has asked me to encourage you to post your ideas there in the comments.
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