Many of the comments I have seen floating around on the blogs, consistently reference Exchange integration or make an “Exchange killer”. My gut reaction is MailCo should not focus on creating another email or calendar server.

The server side of email is “almost done”. I don’t see a lot of gain, for a MailCo, trying to create yet another email/calendar service. While the last 10% is the hardest, it seems that Google Apps, Yahoo, Zimbra, and other email/calendar services are close to having that integration problem solved for the majority of those customers who are looking to leave Exchange for another email/calendaring service. Once one or two of these apps grows out of the “techy” only audience, those customers looking to leave Exchange will have options. The rest of the customers would require selling them on why they should leave Exchange, not sell them on a new destination. This is a much different conversation.

Many of those that are going to stay on Exchange want to for a whole litany of reasons. Not the least of which is their current tool sets for standards compliance. When you start looking at SOX, FINRA, and the other regulations corporations are trying to chase, staying on Exchange is currently a good solution. I know other areas of the world also have many regulatory hurdles to jump. There are many service providers out there that are using Exchange integration to provide the services that solve this compliance problem. If you want to write an Exchange killer, you not only have to convince the corporations that they should leave Exchange. You now have to show them, or provide for them, these compliance tools or a path to another service provider. This does not seem to be a game for MailCo or Mozilla to participate in.

MailCo should instead enhance it’s integration Exchange to the best of it’s ability. Integrate Lighting/Sunbird to try and work with the calendaring interface. Use the 2003 web interface like Windows Mobile and Evolution use to have another option instead of IMAP for the communication pipeline. I have not personally looked at what calendar info comes down the IMAP pipe from Exchange, but it would seem that the web information may be a better, “easier” point to have a two way conversation with Exchange.

If this path is not desired by the community and MailCo (cost vs gain?) then at a minimum the MailCo/Thunderbird site should be the source of information on how to get that integration to be the best possible with the current application. Lately it seems, that the best information on how to do these various things with Thunderbird is found somewhere other than a Mozilla domain. While it shows great community, it gives the feeling of a product with little support from Mozilla or the Thunderbird team.

I come down on the side that Thunderbird should evolve to be the central communication point. A solid, stable base platform that through the use of extensions can be extended to be a common intersection for various communication pipes. Exchange and email in general is just one of them. MailCo should not concentrate so heavily on one type of communication (email) with one type of server (Exchange) that it loses the opportunity to jump out front of the communication aggregation opportunities. After all, there is one tool with awesome integration with Exchange, that is Outlook. If that is the only requirement for a communication tool, then Thunderbird is not the solution you are looking for.

David’s recent entries about Thunderbird and MailCo have gotten me thinking. I believe there are lots of opportunities for Thunderbird to fly out of the Mozilla nest. I left a comment (#6) on David’s thinking-org-onomically post about targeting the road warriors of the corporate world. But I think the bigger issue is how should Thunderbird evolve long term?

David’s posts seem to have brought out some real concerns that MailCo can not be successful without Scott and David. There will most definitely be an impact from them no longer working full time, but I have yet to see any indication they are not going to contribute at all. Even if something in the new structure has made them uncomfortable to the point of leaving Moz, they have not indicated they are leaving the community. David A. indicated they are going to start there own new venture. If it is related to Thunderbird, even a fork, their knowledge will still be available to the community as a whole. I see no reason that David A. and/or Mozilla would make it a confrontational relationship. Open source communities have survived lead developers coming and going in the past, why should Thunderbird be different? I hope Scott and David remain involved in the project they have been immersed in, but new blood can also help a project reinvigorate itself and thrive.

So what should Thunderbird/MailCo do? It needs to move from being just an email client to become the communications toolbelt of choice. Email itself is becoming a smaller part of the communication universe. What is needed now, is a toolbelt to help consolidate all of the individual communication tools to one central control center. We now communicate via email, IM, RSS/Atom, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, MySpace, IRC and the list goes on. However, it is a full time job just trying to keep up. You have to visit many websites just to try and keep up.

There is a definite need for a tool to try and bring all of these conversations to one place. Not all of these tools have API’s to make this easy, but if it was easy everybody would do it. MailCo does not have to be the one to write the interfaces for each tool, if they provide a foundation and community Extensions could be written for each of these tools. Does anyone else think it is ironic that one of the best IRC communication tools (Chatzilla) is an extension for Firefox the browser instead of Thunderbird the communication tool?

If we could bring all of these communication pipes through one clearing house, is there a way we could try to thread the conversations together? Take the entirety of the MailCo conversation occurring on the web lately. What if you could have the conversation with some people on blogs, others on Twitter, start a conversation with David via email and see them all in one threaded window? Meanwhile you could plan a high school reunion with another group using various tools in another threaded window. Could MailCo automate some of this threading? Not all of it, some of it would require you tagging or moving conversations to folder, but you would have it in all one place. But could we not use some of the Bayesian probability tools we use for Spam to figure out the probability of a “message” belonging to a conversation?

Look at contacts. How many different addresses/handles/ids do I have? I have an email address, an IM address, a Twitter “handle”, and a nick I use on IRC. If Thunderbird could help bring all of these together, it would help in this consolidation of communication flow. If I am in the middle of a conversation on IM with David, and he “Tweets” about the topic, Thunderbird would recognize that it was him, review the content, and move that Tweet into the window.

Why can’t we have plugins that integrate (two way) with the various contact managers to help? If you were using Salesforce, Plaxo, etc, would it help to bring all the ways you know someone together?

Email has been done. I believe there are still things we can do to improve it, but the bigger opportunity is to bring all of the flows of the various communication pipes to one location. That is where MailCo should focus. This is a problem that needs to be solved, and MailCo just may be the ones to do it.