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On 02-Mar-21 7:19 AM, Magnus Melin wrote:<br>
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<p>Thunderbird Project Council Meeting<br>
<br>
When: Feb 15, 2021 at 8:00 PM – 09:01 CET<br>
Minuter: Magnus<br>
In the call: Magnus, Dirk, Berna, Christopher, Philipp<br>
Regrets: Ryan, Patrick</p>
<p>Hiring/personnel</p>
<ul>
<li>Discussed employment matters.</li>
<li>Magnus noted a new team member (Henry) is joining Feb 22.</li>
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And this brings the contacted/paid staff to what level? Does the
council feel this will be a long term staffing level?<br>
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<p>Product/Strategy</p>
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<li>Berna brought up RedHat not currently shipping Thunderbird
OpenPGP, and how/if we could cooperate with the Sequoia team
who is developing a solution for RHEL Thunderbird users.
Berna will organize a meeting between Sequoia/Thunderbird
developers.</li>
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So let me get this. The Redhat security group chose to break
Thunderbird by not shipping required component because it did not
suit their chosen security model as it included the encryption
library. Thunderbird does it's own security and that does not suit.
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1837512">https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1837512</a><br>
<br>
Now we are going to help fix Thunderbird so it runs on their product
from their repository, despite there being perfectly good
functional copies that can be installed from thunderbird.net. or as
a flatpack. I would have though that IBM would have been more than
capable of contributing to whatever was needed to rectify their
decision, but I guess a desktop mail clients is not important to a
server operating system manufacturer. It is also apparent that e2ee
is important to the council. General run of the mill users might
disagree. Do we have any information on take up of e2ee? Some
information from the metrics we are getting back on usage from
telemetry?<br>
<br>
How is the telemetry data going? Have we learned anything about our
user base from it? Like how many users there are even, or how many
use RSS or NNTP? What is the average age of the user profile/how
long have they been using Thunderbird? How many profiles they have
on disk in the profiles folder Vs the number in the prefs JS? Might
give a clue on the true level of lost profiles. We (the community
at least) are still largely in the dark about how the project and
the users it is supposed to be serving. I have my own perceptions
on what is important garnered largely through my involvement. But
the project is still not releasing number that might prove or
disprove perceptions.<br>
<br>
RedHsat (IBM) might be a big player in the Linux world but they
represent a very small part of the Thunderbird users indeed.
Seriously I think we have more pressing issues than fixing the
product for a truly small percentage of users that chose to use a
niche operating system that could fix the issue quickly by
installing another distribution. Or they could installing the
version from Thunderbird.net and get official instead of rebuilt
copies of the product. or even use the flatpack we have started.
Sorry, but I see time and money being wasted on a political decision
by RedHat to further their enterprise market. Their choice to not
offer a fully functional Thunderbird. Their focus is on,
enterprise and web servers, Thunderbird's core market is consumers
and small business. I have seen nothing to indicate that has changed
in decades. There is not even much of a market overlap between the
two. Except in the enthusiast market and they are rarely restrained
by things like corporate images, so they have plenty of choices.<br>
<br>
Once Thunderbird users get a button to press that says "Transfer my
Thunderbird to a new device", and another that says "Import a
backup for use on this device". I am opposed to squandering money
and time on niche enterprises like the political decision made by
redhat. (this is political because they don't like the placement of
a library and there are some very simple alternatives. They just do
not use their repository). We are loosing users because they just
can't get their data from their old device to their new. They can't
handle the double wammy of a manual backup of files and folders and
the profile per install making the restore of that manual backup non
trivial. This is where we need to be spending resources. It needed
love 10 years ago and it has so far received none.<br>
<br>
Lets get some of these basic user facing items fixed that affect
100% of users over time before we continue on with the ones that
affect less than 1%. Far to much time has already been invested in
e2ee for a user base that mostly does not use it and does not
understand it. This is where we need to be focusing on the usability
problems of the majority. Not on what is happening in some
enterprise focused Linux distribution that has a market share of
less that 2% of users. <br>
<br>
We have users who loose their user profile because of some
corruption affecting the prefs.js file. But the profile has no
intrinsic way to restore setting sto what were loaded successfully
yesterday. If the last save failed for some reason a backup should
not only be available but automatically loaded so the user get to do
mail, not learn how to use their operating system file manager for
the first time ever.<br>
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