About two months ago, I brought you all the first in my new series of Mozilla developer interviews. It was a quick Q & A with Brian Ryner. The response to that was very favorable and I decided to try to turn it into a regular event. Feedback here suggested Scott MacGregor as someone that you all were very interested in so I opened up a post to gather questions. Scott was happy to participate and here are his answers.
First, a question from me (Asa). "How and when did you get involved with mail development and are there other applications that you've worked on or would be interested in working on."
mscott: I started working on the Netscape 4 e-mail client after I graduated from MIT in the summer of 1997. After Netscape went open source, I began working with folks like David Bienvenu, Seth Spitzer and Alec Flett to create the Mozilla Mail Client (part of the Mozilla Application Suite). In February of 2003 I started the Thunderbird project in my spare time and shifted my Mozilla focus to that. David Bienvenu and I now work on Thunderbird full time as employees of the Mozilla Foundation.
patrick asks "In the TB-section of mozilla wiki it states something like 'menus 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 who put that sentence there and what it means for the future?"
mscott: I haven't read those Wiki comments yet so I can't say what someone meant by that. We're always looking to improve the over all usability of Thunderbird and are always open to suggestions. In fact one of the new 1.1 features is a redesigned Options UI which I think is a huge improvement over the existing interface and something I'm very excited about. Other recent usability improvements include: managing SMTP servers, and an improved RSS feed subscription interface.
Olly asks, "Will we see some sort of Exchange/eMAPI compatibility"
mscott: We currently support Microsoft's public Simple MAPI protocol for interacting with Windows Applications such as Word, Excel, etc. I don't forsee us adding proprietary Exchange code to the Mozilla codebase any time soon for Exchange compatibility. I would point out that Exchange has the ability to act as an IMAP server, you just need your system administrator to enable IMAP support.
miguel asks, "Why is Thunderbird so sexy?"
mscott: It must be the Thunderbird mascot.
Ian Pottinger wonders, "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."
mscott: One day I'd like to set up a web blog. Right now I already spend so much time writing code and communicating with folks on the Mozillazine Thunderbid forums that I don't think I'd use it very much and it would quickly fall into a state of disrepair.
Donny asks, "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)?"
mscott: We don't have any plans at the moment to alter this behavior. For folks looking for a more powerful solution, I'd suggest using saved search folders to attain the same goal.
Dere asks, "Will it be possible to use 'group by sort' and the 'virtual folders' together?"
mscott: We'd like to make this work eventually.
Henrik wonders, "Do you plan to extend the "manage identities" feature, so that an SMTP server can be associated with an identity?"
mscott: This is one of the new Thunderbird 1.1 features and exists already in the current 1.1 nightly test builds. Enjoy!
and my wrap up question is "What does the emergence of reasonably capable web email tools like gmail mean to you?"
mscott: I think you'll always have folks that receive a certain volume of e-mail in a given day which works fine for web based email. And using Firefox with a provider like gmail is going to be great for that. I also think you'll have a subset of users who deal in much larger volumes of e-mail or are in an enterprise based setting which requires the power of a thick e-mail client. And then you'll have a set of users that can benefit from both! I actually use Thunderbird with my gmail account so I can get the benefits of a good web mail service while leveraging Thunderbird's features. For instance, I've found that Thunderbird's junk mail filters make an excellent complement to the gmail spam blocker in catching things that get passed it. Between the two of them, I get great coverage.
Thanks, Scott, for taking the time to participate here.
A big thanks to all of you who asked questions and certainly to Scott MacGregor for taking a break from all that Thunderbird work to respond with some great answers.
Who do you all want to hear from next. I can't make promises, but let me know and I'll try to make another one of these Mozilla developer interviews happen.
