61
edits
Changes
no edit summary
|Feature non-goals=* Turn Thunderbird into an IM client for people who don't want to use it for their emails.
* Support as many IM protocols as possible: For a first version with IM features included, we want to focus first on a good UI integration between email and IM features. Support for more protocols can come later.
|Feature functional spec=====General IM UI====* IM features should be tightly integrated into the Thunderbird UI, so that they don't feel like something added after the fact.* Presence information, when available, should be provided wherever some contact information appears (at this point headers of emails, message lists, email compose UI, ...).* IM features shouldn't get in the content way of this section is users interacting with their emails.** Users who only want an email client should never see the IM UI if they don't configure any IM account.** It should be easy to change one's IM status or even to sign off from all IM accounts, to avoid interruptions / revealing presence.** Ongoing IM conversations should have visible indicators in the primary Thunderbird UI but they shouldn't hinder the user's ability to focus on his current task (reading an email / composing a draftreply / ...)*** More specifically, still open new unread messages should be notified unobtrusively to discussion)the user.
====IM networks/protocol support====
* Thunderbird will support by default only a few IM protocols
** XMPP is a good first candidate:
*** it's an open standard
*** it gives access to some quite popular IM networks (Google Talk, Facebook Chat).
** IRC and Twitter are also interesting candidates(they can come later though):
*** they are open (or at least documented)
*** they are widely used in the Mozilla community
* A plugin system should let users add support for more protocols (even closed protocols) with add-ons.
====IM accounts management====
* While setting up an email account, Thunderbird will attempt to detect if an IM account is likely associated with the email account (@gmail.com address? Existence of DNS SRV records pointing to an XMPP server for the domain?).
** If an IM account is found, the default action would be to configure Thunderbird to use it.
** It should be possible to opt-out from this behavior (checkbox "also use this account for instant messaging", checked-by default?)
* The 'Add Other Account...' wizard should offer a way to set up an IM account manually.
* The 'Account Settings...' dialog should let users configure settings of their IM accounts.
====Address book integration====
* Address book cards will support multiple IM contact info for each contact.
* Whenever possible, IM contacts will be associated with email contacts automatically.
* Users will also be able to add associations between IM and email contacts by hand.
* IM conversations should be stored in the profile, so that the user can use the transcripts for future references
* Stored conversations should be indexed in a way that makes searching both the email and IM archives at once efficient.
* The search results should show IMs alongside emails.
* It should be possible to turn off archiving of IMs or to keep them only for a limited period of time, in order to comply with some data retention policies companies may have.
}}
{{FeatureInfo
