Interviewed by CNN on 08/07/2012 18:23, Rufus told the world: > BIll Spikowski wrote:
>> I agree that the Seamonkey email client "is already pretty much what >> its users want" -- but that doesn't mean we wouldn't want something >> even better, or at least have confidence that we won't be losing a >> familiar tool that so many of us depend on so heavily all day, every day. >> Well, I read the post meaning "Users are not really asking for new features, they want stability and debugging, so we are going to focus on it and add new features very slowly." And, to be truthful, I can't think of a much-needed feature for an e-mail client, short of rethinking the whole concept from the ground up. The last major feature I remember being integrated into e-mail clients was spam filters, about ten years ago. Thunderbird added some niceties like auto-configuration of accounts (which were well received, but it's one of those things you use only once a year if that) and alternate views of the accounts (no so much, it was a bit confusing), and tabs (which I'm still trying to figure out if they make sense for e-mail) but nothing really game-changing. There's some work being done to offer alternate storage formats for the messages, but that's one of those things that 90%-plus of users never think about. It's almost ready, so it should land before the change in policy becomes effective. Differently from web browsers, where the standards are changing fast (demanding new features and support for new standards) and performance is a real issue (in e-mail, performance depends mostly on external factors, like server latency), the e-mail panorama is not changing rapidly. > > I can only think of one thing I might like to see - an integrated y-enc > decoder...but I could, can, and do live without that. I like what we have! > >From what I understand, the main reasons for not offering that are: 1. It's a feature desired by a pretty small set of users -- the ones that frequent binary newsgroups. And those tend to use specialized newsreaders anyway. 2. Which would make this a job for an extension, not the main program. 3. And the yEnc spec is horribly broken. Even the yEnc *creator* admits as much. >> I've fallen completely for the Sync feature, and have been dreaming >> about being able to Sync address books across my computers. It's quite >> a shock to hear the opposite, that the Mozilla folks are about to >> abandon further development of Thunderbird, and by extension Seamonkey >> too. Well, I understand that there is a project going on to overhaul substantially the address book, due to several important limitations. It's likely that it will make it better suited to syncing too. But it was still beginning, I hope that it is not scrapped... >> The idea that webmail is clearly superior is incredibly absurd! I'm >> glad it works for lots of other folks (though I suspect mainly because >> they don't realize there are superior alternatives). I use webmail >> often, and hate every minute of it.... I don't think anybody in the TB project believes that. But the habit of using webmail is growing for several reasons, all of which make a lot of sense for non-technical users: - People accessing personal accounts from computers they don't own (for instance, at work) -- it's easier than using, say, Portable Thunderbird. - People needing to access the same account from two or more machines (work and home, or desktop and portable) -- it's easier than setting up IMAP (if your ISP even offers it) or fiddling with the POP settings to avoid missing messages. - You don't have to set up anything (see above) - You don't have to worry about backups (and most people don't care about long-term archiving of messages anyway) Dedicated e-mail clients are becoming a niche product for heavy e-mail users. Webmail is slow, feature-poor in most cases, there are *still* ISPs who don't allow you to keep messages archived for very long, terrible if you have two accounts you want to keep very clearly *separate*. But many people don't care about those. Lately, I see quite a lot of people who don't even *know* there are things like dedicated e-mail clients. They think of e-mail like a message board, or Facebook. In fact, I know at least one person who did not even have an e-mail account -- she communicates *only* via Facebook messages (well, now she has one, if only because FB turned every account into an e-mail...). And she's not a kid either -- her oldest son is college aged... -- MCBastos This message has been protected with the 2ROT13 algorithm. Unauthorized use will be prosecuted under the DMCA. -=-=- ... Sent from my WOPR. * Added by TagZilla 0.7a1 running on Seamonkey 2.10.1 * Get it at http://xsidebar.mozdev.org/modifiedmailnews.html#tagzilla _______________________________________________ support-seamonkey mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-seamonkey
