Updated Roadmap Including 0.5 Plans

[mscott]

Hold onto your hats, I'm about to throw a lot of information at you!

Milestone 0.4 was based off of the Mozilla 1.6 beta branch and as such contained bugs and regressions that were fixed for Mozilla between 1.6 beta and 1.6 final which was released this January.

A lot of companies and end users are using 0.4 and making client evaluations based on what they see in 0.4. Furthermore, there is a large group of users that won't use "nightly builds", instead waiting for milestone releases before upgrading. We want to make sure both of these groups are getting the best experience possible right now. And the way to get there is to move them to a 0.5 release which is based on the Mozilla 1.6 final code base.

What does this mean?

Well, within the next week or so, we hope to release Milestone 0.5 which is based on the 1.6 final branch which was released in January. But there is more! We have merged a large number of the mail specific improvements that have been going into the trunk builds over the last two months (such as multiple identity support) into this branch. Thus producing a 0.5 build that will hopefully have the stability of 1.6 with much of the feature improvements found in the trunk builds.

Going Forward:
------------------
1) Builds from this branch will be called 0.5b until 0.5 is done. I hope to start getting test builds up on Friday or this weekend so we can get some testing done on it.

2) The existing "trunk" builds that are based on the cutting edge mozilla 1.7a trunk, will be called "0.5+". I'm taking this opportunity to switch to the Firebird based versioning system where the trunk builds are referred to as 0.7+ instead of 0.8a.

I'm hoping we can pull this off in a short time period and hope as always that we can count your testing help and input

Thanks and Go New England Patriots on Sunday!

-Team Thunderbird

P.S. The <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/roadmap.html">roadmap</a> has been updated to summarize these changes.

[DurianCS]

Thanks for the good news (I noticed already the trunk indication, I like that).
Altogether, it sounds ambitious, but praiseworthy.
I'm looking forward to these developments.

CS

[Dunderklumpen]

Great news. Looking forward for the MileStone.

[Pitreck]

Umm, personally i don't like Firebird versioning system, and i'm not the only one who thinks like that.
IMO naming branch builds 0.xb is cool, but trunk builds should be called 0.xa.
Just my 0.02€...

[nrg]

mscott: I do not see anything related to calendar in your roadmap but i do read it in "Minutes of the mozilla.org Staff Meeting of Monday 5th January 2004".

*Plans for the next few months*

- mscott and bienvenu (Thunderbird)
- Calendar

Is there already more information regarding this?


-nrg

[kepardue]

*Plans for the next few months*

- mscott and bienvenu (Thunderbird)
- Calendar

Is there already more information regarding this?

Yes, I'd like to know more specifically to what this is referring to myself. My last understanding was that it was simply to add features to Mail that integrate more closely with Calendar if it is installed, not really to work on the Calendar itself. I personally hope this is not the case and Calendar can evolve to be a mature PIM client to possibly act as a default extension of Thunderbird.

Ken

[jedbro]

Will your junkmail improvements be in 0.5?

[bww]

This news made my day

[mscott]

Will your junkmail improvements be in 0.5?

no, that work is several weeks away from even getting checked in.

[R4F]

I don't know who they are, but please give my thanks to all of 'Team Thunderbird' !

[sasquatch]

Looking forward to all the future improvements.

My junk mail doesn't work. Well, it picks up maybe one in 80 or so. I mark the bad ones, then delete from junk mail folder after a day, so they should get "learned".

I don't know, but haven't had time to fiddle around.

Thanks for your hard work!

[couldabeen]

sasquatch, take the time to fiddle around with the Junks Controls.
I let it take care of all junk deletions based on my preferences in the Junk Control panel, and I get 95% + , marked, moved, and then deleted at the time I have specified.

[wgianopoulos]

My junk mail doesn't work. Well, it picks up maybe one in 80 or so. I mark the bad ones, then delete from junk mail folder after a day, so they should get "learned".

Not sure if this is your issue, but if you have multiple accounts you need to turn on junk mail detection seperately for each one on the adaptive filters panel. Almost everyone messes this up. The options interface needs some tweaking in this area. not sure why the second panel is needed. We should just have one panel and add this box to the settings panel.

[MetalAZO]

I've read the long term roadmap and found grouping ex. "history like" really cool, why not also add grouping by message label (work, personal, etc). It would also be cool to be able to manage those label groups yourself, like add/remove them.
Before using Thunderbird I've been using Outlook 2000, Outlook XP and Outlook 2003 and there is something they have that helps manage email a lot easier. In "Favourite Folders" part there is folder called "For Follow Up". In it you get all messages that have any kind of label from all folders (not just inbox) grouped by the label type. This makes searching for important emails so much easier.

I just wanted to add my $0.02 here.

[guzzi333]

Why not integrate offline support in Thunderbird instead of an extension? It's essential for most business travelers and present in almost all other mail readers.