Mozilla Thunderbird: Last Great Email Client?
Mozilla has released an upgrade to the popular open source email client Thunderbird. For those of us Thunderbird users who have wondered by Outlook users put up with security (or lack thereof) of Microsoft's mail client, we're now asking is the real battle between Gmail, et. al. and Thunderbird?
New Thunderbird features include some found in Gmail and other popular Web apps. Scott MacGregor is quoted in TechShout.com
According to Scott MacGregor, lead engineer for Thunderbird at Mozilla, “Thunderbird 2 has powerful new features and proven security, delivering an improved email experience to users worldwide. In Thunderbird 2, we incorporated the proven benefits of tagging to email. Tagging initially gained popularity on blogs, photo and link-sharing sites, as an intuitive way to organize online information so users could easily find desired content.”
From Thunderbird 2 RC1; The holy grail of email? :
Clearly, Mozilla is eyeing Gmail users as setting up your account is as automated as possible, short of guessing your password. Not a bad target to aim at. My friends over at Lifehacker held a survey on what where its readers got their mail: 43% say webmail; 22% desktop and 33% that use both. By combining things we love about Gmail, Thunderbird 2 could be the answer we all search for.
Thunderbird 2.0 will be the last great email client. Web-based email is clearly rising in popularity but that alone is not reason enough to predict the demise of desktop mail. Web 2.0 technologies are great marketing buzz, but they are also real. IM, social networks, blogs, RSS, Wikis, and portals are gaining ground inside and outside of organizations.
Thick-client apps, of any kind, don't fit with the way we are working now. Web 2.0 technologies work better with smaller, lighter devices, like smartphones, and are getting closer to working as well as thick client app on workstation scale devices.
Security is a problem with Web 2.0 apps. Improved programming practices and more secure platforms are required but we will get there. Besides, keeping thick clients secure is taking too much effort now and is not working all that well. Let's drain the swamp, dump our thick-client legacy machines running poorly designed OSes that are too difficult to secure and build a more flexible, more useful and more secure computing environment around Web 2.0 technologies.
Email This!
Digg it!
Sphere it!
Del.icio.us
Reddit!
Newsvine
