Happy New Year fellow Thunderbird users! In the spirit of the start of a new year, I want to talk about some of the plans and ideas we have for Thunderbird for 2004. Is this document a new Thunderbird Roadmap? Maybe, but the roadmap talks about specific milestones and schedules. I wanted to step away from that and focus on areas and trends we want to focus on over the coming year. Is this a comprehensive list? No, definitely not. Does this list have everyone's pet feature or wishlist item? No, I don't think I could fit all of those requests in this little document. And off course who knows what interesting developments may happen in the e-mail space which we will want to react to as well.

Without further ado, here is the list in no particular order.

Thunderbird Installer

We are long over due to leverage Ben Goodger's Installer work for Mozilla Firefox to develop a Mozilla Thunderbird Installer. Having an installer is critical for making it easy for new users to adopt or just try out Thunderbird. In addition to having the basic installer, we want to turn common extensions (specifically Offline support) into options in the installer UI. This would make upgrading releases with these extensions more robust as well.

Seamonkey Profile Migration

Currently a user can migrate a profile by hand into Thunderbird from the Mozilla Application Suite. This just got a lot easier given the recent change in Mozilla to use relative paths in the user prefs.js file. But we still need an automated migration path. A good migration solution would have two behaviors: (1) the ability to re-use an existing seamonkey profile in place and (2) the ability to do a full migration, copying all mail folders and data into the Thunderbird profile. The former makes it easy for users to use both Seamonkey and Thunderbird for reading mail without creating duplicate copies of their local mail stores. The latter makes more sense for users moving to Thunderbird from the suite.

Junk Mail Improvements

We have made huge strides in developing our Bayesian based junk mail detection controls in the Mozilla Mail product line. However spammers continue to come up with different ways to bypass these controls. We need to continue to innovate in this space. Some of the ideas we'd like to work on include:

• Improving the classification algorithm used for determining if a message is junk.
• Support for server side junk controls. Many servers add headers to incoming messages they think are junk. We should have the ability to detect these headers, mark the message as junk on our end and follow the user specified behavior for handling messages identified as Junk.
• Improve the rules for tokenizing a message before it goes into the bayesian classifier. This will help give us better results.
• Limit the number of tokens we store in our training set. This will help reduce the memory footprint of our junk controls and should yield a small performance win as well.

Spell Checker

Our spell checker is based on a two year old fork of the myspell engine used by Open Office. Since the fork was created, many improvements have gone into the Open Office version making it one of the best spell checkers on the web. It would be great if we could go back and merge those changes into our fork to bring us up to par with the behavior seen in the latest Open Office release.

Support Multiple Identities Per Account

Many of us have multiple email addresses which end up in the same mail account. Up until recently you could only have one identity associated with an email account. A crafty user, can now edit their prefs.js by hand to associate multiple identities with a given account. We'll even be smart when replying to a message and pick the identity that the original author used when they sent it to you as the default identity in the compose window. However, we do not yet have a clean UI for creating and managing multiple identities for an account. The hard part for this will be designing a clean UI.

Profile Portability / USB Devices

This is more of a general Mozilla profile issue that Thunderbird could benefit from. There is a rising set of users that like to carry their application profiles around on USB key chain drives in order to achieve profile portability between machines. There are two classes of problems to be solved: (1) an install which works with a profile on a remote drive whose drive letter changes and (2) the app and the profile both live on the remote device.

Talkback Integration

Integrating Talkback technology into Mozilla Thunderbird for generating crash report data. Not that we ever crash of course!

Multiple SMTP Server Overhaul

We currently support multiple SMTP servers. However, the way we associate SMTP servers with accounts and how the user picks the outgoing SMTP server to use is a mess. We need to look at the issues involved with how we present and manage multiple SMTP servers to the user.

RSS Feed Integration

Integrate RSS Feeds into the mail window. Mail is a natural app for presenting RSS feeds. Let's take advantage of that.

Add Grouping to the Message List Pane

How about presenting a "history like" view of messages. For instance, when sorted by date,you have "Today's Messages". "Yesterday's Messages", etc. When sorted by sender, "Mail from Scott", etc.

Attachments

The ability to strip attachments from messages. The ability to search for attachments based on content type or file name.