Email and Messages.

Filed under: email, messaging, sphere

It’s now common knowledge that Mozilla wants to do an overhaul of Thunderbird. As for the progress they have thus far in fixing email and messaging, it’s too soon to tell. Don’t think I am a Thunderbird hater, I actually use it to manage my Gmail accounts when I’m on my laptop. However, my personal opinion is that you can’t fix email (and clients for that matter) if they aren’t broken.

Gmail as a web-based client is really nice, I must say. I’ve never really used Microsoft Outlook (except in college) so I can’t really voice my opinion on that. Evolution mail was nice considering Ubuntu integrated it into their desktop edition, but it was lacking in many areas, including the lack of Gmail support. Given the fact that the Thunderbird project is now being headed by Mozilla Messaging, could this mean that in the future, IM is incorporated into their email client? That has yet to be seen, but it’s beginning to look that way, considering the vision statement on the official website and news items like this. Funny thing is, there is this quote of interest:

“We’d like Thunderbird to do searches across common archives and have a better focal point and search system,” said Asher.

We are already there with the wonders of SupraSearch.

Now, the beauty of SS is the amazing *fanfare* email capabilities. Not only is SS an email client, but it is also mail server as well. Having this ability makes it that much easier to set up custom rules for mailing lists, automatic forwarding, and you can even forward mail into different spheres. The idea is that you can set it up to forward any message created in a sphere to forward either to all contacts, all members, or specific other email addresses. The cool thing about that is that when people reply, the reply will go directly into the sphere. It’s sort of like a shared “Sent Mail”, where all members of a sphere can see the sent mail at the same time, and when the person replies, it will show up in the sphere in real-time for all members to see. Attachments are easy to send, also enabling saving documents directly to the server. Interestingly, SS auto-converts all office documents to PDF format to make them fully searchable.

It just goes to show we do messaging differently.