Thunderbird 3: A user-centric platform for email, learning from the web

Thunderbird 3 is nearing release—in this developer-oriented talk, David Ascher and Dan Mosedale will talk about what Thunderbird 3 will mean to people who want to take an active role in managing their email lives.

Email clients have stagnated since the dawn of the web, and much buzz centers on twitter and facebook. Still, email remains critically important to most of us, whether it’s to do work, or to manage relationships which go beyond social networks. There have been great benefits from advances like webapps, but email clients retain some unique strengths which make them indispensable for hundreds of millions of users. With our work on Thunderbird, Mozilla is hoping to help bring email forward, teaching it about the web, while building on email’s core values, such as user control, interoperability, & universality.

Everyone knows the Thunderbird that was. In this talk, we’ll talk about the upcoming Thunderbird 3, as well as where we hope to take Thunderbird in the future. To start, we’ll briefly cover the recent history of Thunderbird, give a update on the new user-facing features implemented since Thunderbird 2 (speed!, workflow!, OS integration!) and talk a bit about what’s left to do before we can unleash Thunderbird 3.

Thunderbird 3 will be a much better platform for experimentation and extensibility. We’ll explain why that’s important, what it means in practice, and how you can build on Thunderbird, whether that’s a personal workflow tweak, or a business. If you sound qualified, we’ll likely try to recruit you in the project as well.

Topics that will be covered will include:

• what Thunderbird is learning from the web
• the new SQLite & JavaScript-powered message database
• the new tab model, and how you can work with them
• using HTML, jQuery and other webby tools

If you’re a web app developer wishing you could tweak gmail, a Firefox extension hacker looking to branch out, or someone building a business that centers on messaging—if you’re interested in being an active participant in your email lives, we want to hear from you.