There's a common but often-ignored meta-lesson here - begin by describing what the thing actually does, concretely.<p>"An exploration in messaging innovation being led by the team responsible for Thunderbird, to explore new ways to use Open Web technologies to create useful, compelling messaging experiences" has near-zero information content and happily eats up the invaluable initial attention and visual spaces. One has to scale up a substantial wall of text before reaching anything specific but not before being invited on a detour into the 'Guiding Principles'. I didn't go down that path but presumably the principles include 'Be vague'.<p>It may sound like mere grouchy nit-picking but I've found that this type of failure at basic communication in a project's description is often indicative of its future lack of success. The pages of the Chandler project used to be a wonderfully instructive example but even they seem to have cleaned up their act on their current website. A very incomplete list of words and expressions to avoid before clearly stating what a product does -<p>revolutionary<p>innovation<p>vision<p>open<p>passionate<p>watch a video/screencast<p>Any others?
Thunderbird is so painful to use that I have trouble imagining the Thunderbird team producing something great. I'd rather they fixed Thunderbird.<p>I'm tired of:<p>- Getting prompted for every single message whether I want to send in html or plain text format.<p>- Search that takes forever.<p>- Junk in my inbox, messages I wanted in junk.<p>- A UI that finds any excuse to pop a modal dialog in my way.<p>Can anyone recommend another FOSS mail client that it is both good, and cross platform?
Raindrop seems conspicuously similar to Wave, both in its title and its functionality.<p>It's interesting to see Mozilla getting more independent, post-Chrome.
the problem i see with it is that it's all client-side filtering. when you access your email account from another computer, a webmail client, an iphone, whatever, all of those messages are still lumped into your inbox unless you have server-side filtering.<p>i still use procmail on my server to shuffle messages into imap folders before any of the clients see them. mailing lists go to separate folders that i never have to look at on my phone and my inbox stays clean so that new mail notifications on my phone actually mean something important has come through.
The logo reminds me of Drupal:<p><a href="http://images.google.com/images?q=drupal+logo" rel="nofollow">http://images.google.com/images?q=drupal+logo</a>
So far it's exactly what I do in gmail.<p>Whenever I sign up to a new mailing list I simply click filter messages from this mailing list when the confirmation arrives, select skip inbox and archive and apply a label of the mailing list name. That way, all the mailing lists have their own label on the left bar with the number of unread messages in each and don't clutter up my inbox.<p>I can do the same with facebook/amazon/whatever but I actually care about reading my facebook emails right away (I only get emails when invited to events or have new messages) and don't get much spam from amazon and whatnot, I always unsubscribe.<p>I fail to see any innovation in what they've done.
It is clearly in the same vibe as wave... only google has already a version with wave, it is opensource and is much further at the moment.
I hope will not start to act like microsoft on innovation. Microsoft is getting used to "try to follow the leader, 10miles behind".
Additionnaly their post doesnt even mention the existence of wave... what to think about that ?
The thing I found most interesting, is the use of couchdb and python for Raindrop instead of XUL.<p>My hypothesis:
Due to CouchDB being used by both Canonical (UbuntuOne) and now Mozilla in new interesting 'products I'm more and less convinced that CouchDB will be become a the choice for data storage. It seems like a good replacement (although comparing the two isn't really fair) for sqlite.<p>Why? Because it supposedly (I haven't tested this myself yet) makes it very easy to sync between different couchdb instances (making it easier to have on- offline applications) and because you can 'run' a complete application from it using only html and javascript.<p>I've been reading Chris Anderson's (<a href="http://jchrisa.net/drl/_design/sofa/_list/index/recent-posts?descending=true&limit=5" rel="nofollow">http://jchrisa.net/drl/_design/sofa/_list/index/recent-posts...</a>) about how couchdb would transform both desktop and webapplications and nowadays I tend to agree more and more.<p>Curious as what other people think of this..
Wait, is this Thunderbird re-envisioned..? Are they seriously making this a windows client/download..??<p>EDIT: You can have it hosted by a service provider as indicated in one of their videos. Any chance of this being a success..? That's an honest, albeit, loaded question. Given the track record I'm not so sure...<p>It's a great idea that would probably have a better chance as a YC startup..
There are videos describing the various component of Raindrop on Mozilla Messaging's Vimeo page, <a href="http://vimeo.com/mozillamessaging/videos" rel="nofollow">http://vimeo.com/mozillamessaging/videos</a>
Scott Macgregor who used to head up the Thunderbird team seems to have built another email client (proprietary).<p><a href="http://www.postbox-inc.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.postbox-inc.com/</a>