it's a bit plain to ask that maybe - in the TB-section of mozilla wiki it states something like "menues need severe decruftification" and something similar about the rest of the UI of TB.
While i am a 100-times-a-day-user of TB and am very pleased with it i just wanted to ask mscott (or you ask mscott in place of me) who put that sentence there and what it means for the future (and for the timeframe - 1.5 (is there even such for TB?), 2.0 ...)?
My personal suspections are although, that this sentence was just written to gain some respect from the lovers of "delicious delicacies" and the like. whatever. maybe i'm terribly wrong with this question and so on. i just want wo know ;-)

What are the big plans for the future?

Will we see some sort of Exchange/eMAPI compatibility? If you recieve a meeting request/task/whatever, will you be able to palm it off to Sunbird? Man, that'd be ace!

And on the RSS front - will we be able to click the Live bookmark icon in Firefox to subscribe in Thunderbird?

Why are the project pages *so* horribly out of date? I've even found a 'current' (December 3, 2004) reference to minotaur(!)...

How does it feel to have Thunderbird so much in the shadow of Firefox?

What are your thoughts on lightning?

One feature I miss from the Mozilla Suite is the ability to see the the total number of message in addition to the number of unread messages. Can we have the ability to choose what gets shown in the folder tree again?

Stike my last comment! I realized that feature is already available:
In Thunderbird Options, click Advanced. Then select the "Show expanded columns in the folder pane" options in General Settings.

Rather tha a really lengthy question here: Ask David Bienvenu what I think about the Address Book, and it's relationship to Thunderbird's future..... what are your comments/plans?

I don't know how to form this as a question, but the people on the adblock extension's forum would really like it if they could use the extension in Thunderbird, especially in the RSS feeds.

They can't because of some part of Thunderbird, so when, if ever, will that change?

Why is Thunderbird so sexy?

Kidding, just wanted to pass on some appreciation.

Thanks Asa. It is kind of you to give us this opportunity to address Mr. MacGregor.
I have these questions for Scott:

Have you given thought to starting your own blog? I am sure there are many more like me who would enjoy reading more about the behind-the-scenes work that goes into every Thunderbird release.

Web-based applications like Gmail, Google Groups beta, and Bloglines have nearly duplicated (and in some cases exceeded) the capabilities of Thunderbird. With that in mind, what unique value do you see in today’s Thunderbird and, more important, tomorrow’s?

Are there any up-to-date developer docs (beyond this which is outdated and inaccurate), especially for 1.0?

Or, for more general questions:
Are there any general UI change plans? While it's got a lot of good work, it still looks much closer to Mozilla Mail than Firefox looks like Navigator (not that it's necessary a bad thing, of course). Yes, I know it's got cool things like the RSS reader (I use it :D), it's just not as Earth-shattering when you first start.

patrick:

I put that sentence there, back when I was first seeding the Thunderbird Help documentation effort with content. (To anyone and everyone: if you have the time, please help! I'd love to see Help docs get into Thunderbird nightlies before 1.1, but I need help to make it work!)

First, let me say this sentence is by no means a feeling that came from anyone higher up in the Thunderbird development hierarchy. This is a sentiment that is entirely mine, and to the best of my knowledge it is a sentiment that the core Thunderbird developers have never expressed. (Note, however, that I didn't say whether Thunderbird developers would agree or disagree with it. I honestly don't know the answer to that question, although I have my suspicions.)

Second, it's obvious this was clearly an undirected thought. I left no specific examples of how the UI could be improved, and when questioned about this in the talk page I still refused to really elaborate in any meaningful way. So why did I add it? I was hoping to stimulate some discussion. (I also plan to do a Thunderbird UI critique sometime, but time constraints from school, Firefox and Thunderbird Help, and the rest of my life have as yet prevented me from doing so.) By writing what I did, I hope other people will become interested enough in the Thunderbird UI to submit ideas for how it can be simplified. Even a few little ideas that result from those sentences of mine would be useful to improving the Thunderbird UI scene. One or two sentences may not inspire much, but I'll take whatever I can get.

Third, I wrote it because I believe it - Thunderbird's UI is simply too large. Needless options abound, menus exhibit only a partial sense of thought for elegance, and the mechanisms for communicating with the user are at times crude (e.g., the dialog that pops up if you decide to save your account's password). I'm personally not at all satisfied with the UI of Thunderbird (particularly as compared to Firefox), and I know a good number of other people (whom I believe to be good judges of UI) who would agree with me. Personally, I think this is part of the reason Thunderbird's uptake has been far slower than that of Firefox, and I want to see that changed.

So, there you have it. Those sentences say something that I completely believe but have not had time to fully enumerate. If you agree with me, I would request that you think of ways Thunderbird's UI can be improved. What points of access for the various functions can be consolidated? Where can wording be improved? How can we take Thunderbird's UI and bring it up to (and beyond) the quality level of Firefox? This opportunity is still fresh - I don't know of any other email apps with UI of the same quality as that of Firefox (which is to say I know of none, not necessarily that none exist). However, it won't happen unless we (yes, I know this includes me) make the effort.

Patrick, I hope that answers your questions. I'll keep an eye on this conversation, so if you have ideas, thoughts, questions, etc. I'll try to respond.

There has been a several discussions going on in the forums regarding labeling emails, to be more exact doing this more or less the way Gmail does. Are there any short/long-term plans to change the current labeling way (or remove 5 labels limitation)?

I'd really, really like to see a better search function in T-bird. I'm up to 20,000+ messages. And yet when I want to find a message quickly, I go to my back-up on Gmail. I'd rather not. When can we expect real-time, dynamic indexing of messages so that the search feature works more quickly? This seems to critical and obvious to me.

Will Thunderbird get Export abilities by default?
I really miss this feature because I hate to loose emails and it already happend to my three times while using Thunderbird

A lot of people have asked similar things.

When Phoenix was created they tore down navigator.xul and created a new simpler and more intuitive UI. Initially I thought that Minotaur would tear down messenger.xul and create something less gludgy. Is there any plan for a major overhaul to improve the UI? Although Thunderbird is the best email client I have found the UI is still a hindrance to me.

My Questions:

Will it be possible to use 'group by sort' and the 'virtual folders' together?

Will it be possible to speed up the search, and the virtual folders?

When do you get rid of the slow and often broken .msf files?

Thanks for the great mail application...

There have been various comments about the future of the Mozilla suite as a whole. There hve also been comments about mailnews being replaced by the thunderbird UI in the suite, has Scott any views or plans on this?

My question:

Do you plan to extend the "manage identities" feature, so that an SMTP server can be associated with an identity?

In case my question is a bit confusing, I would like to explain it with an example. I have all my emails on an IMAP account. This account also gathers mail from various pop3 systems. Therfore I would like to send email with my standard address which is something like me@myImapProvider.com and from another address such as anotherMe@anotherServer.org. Unfortunately my IMAP provider does not allow me to send email with a sender domain different from his domain. For this reason, messages with the anotherMe@anotherServer.org shoud be sent through the anotherServer.org SMTP server.

I hope this question is understandable?!

Peace,
Henrik

P.S. Keep up the great work. TB is wonderful!!