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* Should IM conversations happen inside Thunderbird (removing the need for the user to have another IM client on his system), or should they happen in the user's default IM client (like http links are viewed in the default web browser)? (In the first case, Thunderbird would connect directly to IM servers through IM protocols, on the second case, Thunderbird would integrate with the IM software installed on the local system to share data.)
** Using the default IM client seems like a false good idea because:
*** It appears like it would save implementation time and help us ship something sooner... but if we end up having to ship our own stack later, integrating with the default clients first is a waste of time/resources.
*** There's no guarantee that the clients we would like to integrate with (the clients with significant usage from our target users) provide useful APIs.
*** Possible security / privacy issues: we can't offer any guarantee on the way IM conversation data is handled locally and transfered over the network by third party IM clients.
** Integrating some protocol implementations by default doesn't dispense us from having a plugin system for protocol which, by their closed nature, can't be implemented directly (obvious example: Skype).
* Should IMs go above the current content (the emails the user is reading or the email he is composing) or be contained in some specific area (tab? folder? other window?) where the user would have to go to exchange IMs.
