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<p>(This message was originally sent to me personally, so I received
the qauthor's permission to repost on tb-planning with my (inline)
responses.<br>
</p>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 1/31/2018 1:58 PM, Klaus Hartnegg
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:55a57c2f-4f67-336f-0631-f94fd73d8db7@gmx.de">Am
31.01.2018 um 21:20 schrieb R Kent James:
<br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">What do people expect of their email
client in the modern world?
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
How about making an opinion poll?
<br>
That should include a question about how long people are using
Thunderbird, to see how longterm and new users differ.
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
We have two avenues available for an opinion poll. One is a donor's
opt-in mailing list, which currently has about 11,000 names on it.
This list would clearly allow a poll of preferences specifically of
donors. But (sigh) on the tb-council we have not even been able to
agree if donors' desires should be given special preference. I feel
strongly that they should.<br>
<br>
The other option would be a link on our start page. I'm not sure of
the hits that our start page receives, but our daily usage hits
(tracked by downloads of the blocking list) is around 10,000,000 so
the start page should be similar. You could imagine a polling link
there generating 100,000 responses. So this would not be a trivial
effort to undertake - but I it would still be worth doing. We need
to have though a pretty good idea of likely responses that would be
included in the poll so that we can automate the polling, as we
cannot manually process 100,000 replies.<br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:55a57c2f-4f67-336f-0631-f94fd73d8db7@gmx.de">
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">what would Thunderbird need to look like
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
For me it must just continue to be supported, because Outlook
sucks and Gmail spies.
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
In earlier message on a tb-council thread, I gave a brief
description of who I thought our target user is. Here is what I
said:<br>
<blockquote>I would say that our target user is someone who is using
Thunderbird to manage communications associated with their
professional life, and the subtypes of these would be why that
person is not using either Gmail or Outlook. Some of the reasons
would include:
<br>
<br>
- I don't like Outlook.
<br>
- I am a believer in open source software, and Thunderbird is the
go-to desktop product for that.
<br>
- I am using Linux
<br>
- I've used Thunderbird for years and I have no motivation to
switch
<br>
- My organization (or me personally) has selected an email
provider that uses IMAP and there is no reason to buy Outlook for
that.
<br>
- Security and privacy are important to me, and I believe that
Thunderbird is superior in those aspects.<br>
</blockquote>
So your reasons would fall into "I don't like Outlook" and "Security
and privacy ..."<br>
<br>
Before we do a large poll, we would need to make sure that we had a
list of reasons that would hit the vast majority of reasons someone
might indicate.<br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:55a57c2f-4f67-336f-0631-f94fd73d8db7@gmx.de">
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">rewrite of the address book
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
I don't care about the address book, but are very annoyed by bugs
in search (misses many emails) and calendar (cannot access
different accounts on the same server).
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
The point of focusing on the address book is not that it is the most
pressing need felt by users, but it is a good test bed for new
technologies because it is relatively isolated from the rest of the
application.<br>
<br>
Most of the pressing issues that users feel are caused by deep
problems in the code base that will not easily be solved without
major rewrites and redesign. But we need to have a technological
target for those redesigns.<br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:55a57c2f-4f67-336f-0631-f94fd73d8db7@gmx.de">
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">1) Platform. Users expect to be able to
access their personal information on a desktop platform (at
least Windows and OSX, but we would undoubtedly also want to
include Linux), on mobile devices (at least Android, iOS if
possible), and from a web browser.
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
Why? Every email server already has a web gateway, and the email
app of iOS is more or less ok. Of course both are only useful for
low email volume, and cannot do easy-to-use encryption. But
Thunderbird as an app would not solve the usability issues of tiny
devices. It may help with encryption.
<br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">2) Protocol. Users have a wide variety
of primary sources for information, and they expect their email
client to work well with all. That includes both open protocols
(IMAP, POP3, and SMTP for email, iCalendar and calDAV for
calendar, cardDAV for address book) as well as proprietary
protocols
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
I will never understand why calendar and rss-reader get mixed into
an email program. This feels like having to use Word to remote
control a thermostat.
<br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">*Big question #2: Security.*
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
Completely remove Javascript. Then each time Firefox needs an
update because Javascript, put out a note saying that Thunderbird
is of course never ever affected by such bugs. Right now these
notes say that Thunderbird is more or less not really affected,
but somehow maybe it is somewhat. Nobody understands that, because
it is not clearly communicated. This causes people to do stupid
things like trying to disable Javascript in prefs.js
<br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">end-to-end encryption
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
YES!! The importance of that will only increase. Could become a
killer feature if combined with admin-friedliness. But forget pgp,
that is unusable for 99.99% of the people. It must be like what
was promised for pEp.
<br>
<br>
Klaus
<br>
</blockquote>
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