Thunderbird/Feature Brainstorming

Since there is now a "Feature Brainstorming" page for firefox, I'd like to start one for Thunderbird as well.

Gobbledygook Spam

There is an increasing number of spams that have a message body that is complete gobbledygook but which have an attached GIF file that the spammer hopes you will open and read. ISP spam traps have a hard time with them, and it is tiresome binning them manually. Therefore I would like any email from someone not in my address book to be filtered into my junk mail folder if the email has an attached file with any extension defined by me (.GIF being the obvious first target). It's really just an extra message filter rule.

Spam filter 2

Using the destination address for filtering spam. I receive most spam on an hardly used emailaddress. An other emailaddress on the same mailbox is used more frequently. I know, I should contact the last people using the old address and remove is, but in the meanwhile I have not the impression the spam filter makes any difference.

Spam filter 3

I suppose it is not possible for the spam filter to access the internet and to check if the links in the mails are spam advertised or/and are pointing to very recent sites?

Virtual folders only.

The most important feature that I would like to see in Thunderbird is an extension of the "virtual mail folders" concept.

I would like to have all my mail physically stored exactly once.

All folders I use should be virtual in the sense that I can move any mail into any number of folders without the physical mail getting copied.

When I delete a mail, I would like to have the option to delete it from that place only (delete the link) or to delete it completely, i.e. from all folders that reference it (delete the real mail from its physical storage and thus all links to it).

The technical details only matter for performance reasons, but from a user's standpoint I do not care whether that one place is a mail folder file like the ones Thunderbird has now or a real operating system folder with one file per mail or something else, as long as I can still access my mail with operating system tools such as grep. I guess the whole concept of virtual folders could be implemented by putting all original mails into individual files in a directory, create another directory for every virtual folder and then use (hard or symbolic) links from the directory of all original mails into the virtual folder directories.

Nested flolders add subtotals within subfolders

Currently, the total number of new messages within a nested folder is not necessarily displayed in the parent directory. This causes messages to go unread and makes organization difficult for users who receive a large number of e-mails. Else, the user is forced to nest the most important messages in the root directory, rather than by category. Conversely, automated messages are sometimes safe to ignore, but a record of them is required. The current feature of filtering unread folders does not address the second case. Therefore, a feature which totals the number of unread messages within all child sub-folders could be a valuable option for parent folders. Prioritizing e-mails through filters is a possible workaround, but this is clumsy at best, since it requires the user to ignore categorization in favor of static priorities--The frequency with which a certain sub-category of emails must be actively monitored is not a always consistent.

Auto filing.

When a new mail arrives that belongs to a thread which already resides in exactly one of my virtual folders, I would like the new mail to go into that virtual folder automatically.

Synchronizing with PDA/Smart phone

So far Mozilla mails and contacts can't be synchronized with a PDA/Smart phone, at least not with a simple plain binary program (ala active sync). This is IMO the worst drawback against Outlook. This should be done in a cross-platform fashion using wxWidgets. There is however, a program called Birdiesync which will allow you to do so. Unfortunately, you have to pay $19.99 after the 21 day trial.

Customizable notifiers

Ala Incredimail we should let the user change the notifier he/she wants to use when new mail arrives. And also let the community design their owns, so we have a new "Add-on".

MailTicker

The Bat! style MailTicker is also needed.

Junk Mail Controls

Opportunity to backup Junk Mail training data. Export opportunity.

Better SmartCard and electronic ID cards support

Many countries have SmartCard style ID-cards with certificates. Thunderbird should be "easy to use" with them: easy message signing with these electronic ID cards and easy encryption with these cards. For example: Estonian ID card

New Filter Rule: message is signed. Because it is one opportunity avoid spam - allow only signed messages.

More Informative Mail Download Progressbar

Sometimes it would help to see more than just the standard single progressbar down in the status bar when receiving e-mails through a dial-up connection. At least it should show the sizes of messages to be downloaded - and in addition to the overall progressbar another one for the currently processed message would help as well. Now when I access my e-mail account from somewhere with bad dial-up connection I cannot tell whether the current message has an enormous attachment or whether Thunderbird or the whole system has frozen.

Storage folder

Thunderbird will be perfect if it can use standard maildir of unix wolrd. My idea is : You can use for exemple Evolution and Mutt on the same maildir that Thunderbird... When you are away, you can acces at your mail with Mutt (and SSH for exemple). If a day, you prefer Evolution, you can use it, but another day, you can use thunderbird.... Standards are the futur and the most important advantage of the free software ;-)

Also consider backup of e-mail folder. Think about doing backup of a monolithic mailbox file compared to just backup a file per e-mail. If you use mailbox and get a new mail you must backup the whole thing (it may be hundreds of MB). The same for recovering, if you know the date a mail arrived you may just restore files (e-mails) newer than that date.

SMAP / Better IMAP

Thunderbird should have a better IMAP support and/or SMAP with ACL and other extended features like full control over undelete/expunge of mails. Thundebird has only basic IMAP-support at the moment.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Mail_Access_Protocol
• http://www.courier-mta.org/imap/smap.html

Password protected profiles

The title says it all...

Extended options for the message threads feature

Make a option panel for the message thread feature so users can make it look more like the conversations in Gmail. It would be very useful if for example incoming messages would be filtered and automatically added to the conversation they belong to.

Store and view messages in any file system folder

One of the most common recommendations made for organizing information on a computer is to group data files by topic. For example a businesses may create a separate folder for each project and into that folder place all the files (documents, spreadsheets, pictures, etc.) related to that project.

Individuals can do something similar with their personal data. For example a person may group files related to their personal financial data into one folder and files related to a home remodeling project into another.

It is often much easier to stay organized this way than the alternative method of storing everything by the type of program that created a given file. If you store files by the type of program that created a file it is almost impossible to keep track of how these files relate to anything else.

Unfortunately this is how almost all email programs work. All email messages are grouped (on the hard drive) into one folder or worse, a single file. Even if you "see" many folders in the program, to a file manager (e.g. Explorer) everything is just one big block of data that is difficult to break apart and store elsewhere.

Today if a client calls a business to ask about their project, an employee can potentially find almost everything they need in a project folder except e-mail messages. This was not a significant problem years ago when there likely was only a limited amount of project related email. However today most individuals and companies have a huge amount of email accumulating in their inbox and no practical way to pick out individual messages and store them with other related files.

Therefore it would be nice if Thunderbird gave people the option of sorting their messages into any folder located on the local file system (hard drive, network share, etc). This shouldn’t be too difficult since the "Local folders" feature already comes close to doing this already. Each "folder" is just a file that contains the messages.

Ideally a user would have the ability to add a real file system folder (and all of its subfolders) to the folder view. Then when they "move" a message into one of these folders, Thunderbird would simply create a new (or append to an existing) file that would contain the message. For example a user may add a new folder under the folder view and point it to say "C:\Projects". Then when they receive an email related to a given project they can simply drill down to "Projects\ProjectNumber" and drag the message from their InBox into that folder.

The idea can also be extended to saved searches / smart folders. Search folders (or regular folders for that matter) could have a "sync to local folder" option. Once set, any emails added to that folder would be automatically copied or moved to the specified file system folder. The sync process could also work in reverse. Thunderbird could poll the specified folders to see if any emails have been added through the file system.

The main work of implementing this feature would likely happen when a user tries to "view" an email file using a file manager (e.g. Explorer). What would need to happen is that when they click on an email file Thunderbird would have to start up and load this file for them to view. Since in this case Thunderbird would not be able to assume that a given email file is a part of the current users "folder tree", there would probably need to be some type of "file viewer" mode created in Thunderbird. However this isn't much different than what Thunderbird does now when a user restores their email from backup.

Bayesian Tag Suggestions

Now that tags have been added it would be nice if the same Bayesian tools used to identify junk main could be used to identify likely tags (similar to Popfile, but allowing mail to be stored in more than one bucket)

Ideally suggested tags would be separated from user set (or accepted) tags.

Address book

1) Make it possible to sync it with your mobile phone (fuction similar to outlook), this is a function Thunderbird really needs to stay in the running with outlook.

2) Let users change names, phone numbers,... in the list of your contacts by double clicking on that field (similar to the file renaming behavior in windows or editing your music database in iTunes), so you don' t always need to open the more advanced editing options window.