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State of the Thunder: Mozilla Connect Updates

10 responses

Welcome back to the latest season of State of the Thunder! After a short break, we’re back and ready to go. Michael Ellis, our Manager of Community Programs, is helping Alessandro with hosting duties. Along with members of the Thunderbird team and community, they’re answering your questions and keeping everyone updated on our roadmap progress for our projects.

In this episode, we’re talking about our initiatives for regular community feedback, tackling a variety of questions, and providing status updates on the top 20-ish Mozilla Connect Thunderbird suggestions.

Community Questions

Accidental Message Order Sorting

Question: Clearly the number one issue with Thunderbird that breaks for many of my clients is that if they accidentally click on a column header the sorting of the message is changed. “My messages are gone” is what I then hear all the time from my clients. It would be wonderful if the sorting of the message could be locked and not changed through such an easy operation, which often is invoked accidentally.

Answer: This is a great usability question and a complicated one. Alessandro recommends switching to CardsView, as it’s harder to accidentally change. This one one of the reasons we implemented it! However, we can definitely explore options to lock the message order in through enterprise policies. We would want to be mindful of users who wanted to change the order.

Michael discusses the option of a pop-up warning that could inform the user they’re about the change the message sorting order. Increased friction through a pop-up, though, as Alessandro and Jesse Miksic from the design team both point out, can cause its own issues. But this is certainly something we’ll look into more!

Move Focus Keyboard Shortcut

Question: Could there be consideration to add a keystroke to immediately move the focus to the list of messages in the currently open mailbox? Even better if keystrokes that would automatically do this for the inbox folder or the default account.

Answer: Alessandro notes Thunderbird already has this ability, but it’s not super noticeable. The F6 key allows you to switch focuses between the main areas of the application. So we’re approaching this problem from two directions: implementing tabular keyboard navigation and customizable shortcuts. We don’t have an expected delivery date on the latter, but we plan to have a searchable keyboard shortcut hub. We know our interface can be a little daunting, and we’re tackling it from multiple angles.

Option for Simplified Thunderbird?

Question: I work for a company which develops a Raspberry Pi-based computer made specific… specifically for blind consumers. Thunderbird is installed on this device by default. Many of our users are not tech-savvy. and just want a simple email client. I would love to have an easy method for removing some of the clutters with the goal of having a UI with fewer controls. Currently, users often have to press the tab key many times just to move to the list of messages in their inbox. For some users, all they really want is the message list and the list of folders, with the menu bar open, and that’s it. A bit like we once had with Outlook Express.

Answer: Alessandro and Ryan Sipes, our director, have talked about the need for a lighter version of Thunderbird a lot. This would help users who don’t need all the power of Thunderbird, and just want to focus on their messages (not even their folders). However, Ryan doesn’t want a separate version of Thunderbird we’d need to maintain, but to build a better usability curve into Thunderbird. Answering this question means having a Thunderbird that is simple by default, but more powerful and customizable if needed, without upsetting our current users.

Heather Ellsworth from the community team also supports the idea of a user preference for a lighter Thunderbird. At conferences and co-working spaces, she constantly hears the requests for a slightly simpler version of Thunderbird.

Thunderbird PPA

Question: I’m using Linux, one of the Ubuntu-derived flavors. And I have Thunderbird 128.14 ESR installed through the Mozilla Team PPA. I would love to know when the ESR version of 140 will be available in this PPA.

Answer: Heather, who works a lot with Linux packaging, takes this question. This PPA isn’t an official distribution channel for Thunderbird, which leads to some confusion. Our official Linux packages are the Snap and flatpak, and the tarball available on our website. A community member named Rico, whose handle is ricotz, maintains this PPA. In the PPA, you can click on his name to learn how to contact him for question like this.

Top 20-ish Mozilla Connect Posts

If you’ve ever posted an idea to make Thunderbird better in a blog comment, social media post, or a SUMO (Mozilla Support) thread, you’ve probably been prompted to share your suggestion on Mozilla Connect. This helps us keep our community feedback in one place, which helps our team prioritize features the community wants!

Where we’re falling short, however, is keeping the community updated on the progress of their suggestions. With a dedicated community team, this is something we can do better! Right now, we’d like to provide a quick status update on the top 20-ish Mozilla Connect posts related to Thunderbird.

Sync

We implemented this in the Daily build of the desktop app last year, using a staging environment for Firefox Sync. But Firefox Sync is called Firefox Sync because it’s built for Firefox. Thunderbird profiles, in comparison, have a lot more data points. This meant we had to build something completely different.

As we started to spin up Thunderbird Pro, we decided it made more sense to have a Thunderbird account that would manage everything, including Sync. Unfortunately, this meant a lot of delays. So Sync is still on our radar, and we hope to have it next year, barring further complications.

GNOME Desktop Integration

Yes, we’re working on this, starting with native desktop notifications. Ideally, we want to be integrated with more Linux desktop environments through expanded native APIs.

Color for Thunderbird Accounts

We already have it! You can access your account settings and customize the colors of each account.

Show full email address on mouse-over

Already have this too. If this doesn’t happen, it’s a bug, and we’d definitely appreciate a report at Bugzilla.

Don’t save passwords as plain text, but rather integrate with the OS storage system

We’re exploring this as both part of our increased native OS integrations and strengthening and security integrations with Thunderbird.

Thunderbird should, by default, have all telemetry as an opt-in option, or have zero telemetry

We’re already adopting opt-in telemetry for an upcoming release of Thunderbird for Android, and we want to make this the default for desktop in the future. While desktop is currently opt-out, Alessandro stresses we only have a few limited telemetry probes for desktop Thunderbird. And those probes can show how the majority of users are using the app and help us avoid bad UX choices.

Thunderbird for iPhone and iPad

In progress!

JMAP Support

Currently in the works for the upcoming iOS release, with plans for support on desktop and Android. Thundermail will also come with JMAP.

Firefox Translate

Exploring this is low on our list right now. This is both because of performance concerns and we want to be very cautious with anything concerning machine learning, which includes translation.

Watch the Video (Also on Peertube)

Listen on the Thundercast!

Our Next State of the Thunder

Anxious to know the rest of the top 20 Mozilla Connect posts? Join us on Tuesday, September 16 at 3 PM Pacific (22:00 UTC)! Find out how to join on the TB Planning mailing list. We think this will be a great season and who knows, by the end of it, we may even have a jingle. See you next time!

Tags: State of the Thunder

10 responses

Balázs Szulovszky wrote on

I want to know if there will be a solution to access Thundermail’s calendar feature on mobile with Thunderbird app or will there be a separated calendar app?

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Right now, the Thunderbird Android app doesn’t have a calendar function and we recommend using your phone’s built in calendar. We’re planning a support article on how to do this easily. Though that’s not to say there might not be a calendar feature in the future! You can show your support at the suggestion on Mozilla Connect by upvoting and commenting: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/calendar-support-on-thunderbird-mobile/idi-p/76394

Marco mMarchi wrote on

Hi everybody, when will Thundermail service start? How much will it cost? Will it store data in European Union? I’m very interested in that service for my job account.

Thank you

Marco

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Hey there! We don’t have a firm date on costs and when it will be available yet, but yes, we’ll be storing data in Germany. We’ll have more updates in an upcoming State of the Thunder!

Ralf wrote on

Thanks for the updates. 🙂

> Move Focus Keyboard Shortcut

Note that F6 doesn’t quite do what the question asked for: using F6, I have to press the shortcut a different number of times depending on where the focus currently happens to be. That makes it unsuited for quick muscle memory memory use “just do this thing no matter where I happened to click most recently”.

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Urgh, thanks for the update on how F6 is working (or not) for you. We’ll get this to the team and if you’d like, you can also add this in a comment to the Mozilla Connect post!

Fabian Wenk wrote on

Another idea regarding the “Accidental Message Order Sorting”. As I see it on Thunderbird 140 on macOS in Table view / Classic View layout. On the right side there is the icon to set which columns will be shown, this works with direct click (left mouse), but with right click it does show the menu as a right click on the mail body does (I am not sure if this is useful or not, just discovered that by accident).

When I do a right click on e.g. “Subject”, it does also show the same menu as with the direct click (left) on the top right columns icon. How about doing it like e.g. in a spreadsheet, where a click on the column does just mark that whole column, and then with a right click would give a dialog like in the menu View / Sort By but with first Ascending, Descending (and maybe Threaded, Unthreaded when on Subject) and below with all the possible other sort orders. Also when doing directly a right click on a selected column title it should give the same dialog. Further thinking could be to also adjust the listing order in menu View / Sort By (as I mostly use it to adjust Ascending/Descending), so that both dialogs are identical.

When filter messages is in use, then the click on a column would just mark all visible emails (which may also be useful to e.g. then move all into another folder), but then it either does not make sense to offer sorting, or if then it would only apply to the currently visible emails, but will be reverted to what it was when the filter is cleared. I do see use cases for myself where this could be useful.

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Thanks for the feedback on this! We’d love if you feel like also adding this in a comment to the Mozilla Connect post!

Fabian Wenk wrote on

I would have done that, but unfortunately there is no link to it in this blog posting and my search engine foo failed me as well to find the corresponding entry on https://connect.mozilla.org/

Could you please point me to the right entry?

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

So sorry – I think I was a little confused in my reply. I don’t think there’s an existing Mozilla Connect post for this, so please feel free to make a new one!

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