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.

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.

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".

The Bat! style MailTicker is also needed.

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 ;-)

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