ThunderCast

ThunderCast, the official Thunderbird podcast is back for another season! Let's kick things off with some insights on our roadmaps and what's ahead for our desktop and email clients.
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Creators and Guests

Host
Alessandro Castellani
Director of Desktop and Mobile Apps
Host
Heather Ellsworth
Staff DevRel Engineer, Community Programs Lead

What is ThunderCast?

An inside look at the making of Mozilla Thunderbird, and community-driven conversations with our friends in the open-source software space.

Alessandro Castellani: Welcome, everybody, to another episode of Thundercast! It's actually the first episode of Thundercast, our new podcast from Thunderbird. My name is Alessandro, and with me, as usual, or usual for the very first time, but it's gonna be, as usual, the very lovely Heather. Hello.

Heather Ellsworth: Hello, it's so nice to be here!

Alessandro Castellani: It's so good, finally we're back. It took us a long time to be back and doing some podcasting, right?

Heather Ellsworth: Yes! I missed it, and some of you might have seen myself and Monica and others in our monthly community office hours.

Alessandro Castellani: And so it's nice to be distributing yet another medium to our lovely community.

Alessandro Castellani: Yes, exactly. And the question might arise, like, why are you doing this also alongside the community office hours, and the videos that we publish, and all the mailing lists, and all the blog posts, all the communication out there? Do you really need to do also a podcast?

Heather Ellsworth: I mean, if you're asking me, I'm very much a social butterfly, so yes, I do. I need to talk and say hi to everybody.

Alessandro Castellani: Of course, yes. No, absolutely, the answer is absolutely yes.

Alessandro Castellani: Outside communication is never enough.

Alessandro Castellani: always finding a way where different people consume media in different ways, and it's our objective to be as open as possible and share about everything about Thunderbird, but also things adjacent to Thunderbird. We're interested and showing

Alessandro Castellani: Some suggestions and other things all around the technology, open source, and ethical way of doing things, because sometimes

Alessandro Castellani: some of us, but our audience also, they… we all forget that we are humans, and there are humans behind the machine, and it's good to be out there and show our face, or share our voices, and talk about all the things that we like and we don't like, so there's a little bit more of a personal connection that it builds around the product.

Alessandro Castellani: And this helps us also to stay honest, honest with ourselves, and build a better product that doesn't diverge from what users want.

Heather Ellsworth: Yes, and we like to listen to our community and what they want and need, and so a little bit later, we'll tell you guys how you can reach out to us and request topics or make suggestions.

Heather Ellsworth: Just say hi!

Alessandro Castellani: Say hi, please say hi, we're lonely here.

Alessandro Castellani: Yes, alright, perfect. We can jump into a couple of updates coming from Thunderbird. First of all, we got the usual releases for this month. Oh, by the way, this podcast, Thundercast, is gonna be a monthly release cadence.

Alessandro Castellani: We're starting with this type of cadence, we'll see if we have the capacity and also the content to be able to do it more often, maybe a couple times per month, but once a month gives us enough time to create a good episode for everybody, and also it ties with the releases of our applications.

Alessandro Castellani: We got a couple of new releases, as usual. We had version 148 for desktop, and version 17 for Thunderbird for Android.

Alessandro Castellani: The Thunderbird for iOS is still on alpha test flight. We have the objective, maybe before the end of the second quarter, so around June, July, to start releasing a beta. There is, like, partially functional beta. You can sign up with your email service and…

Alessandro Castellani: Read your emails, that's gonna be very exciting.

Alessandro Castellani: But yes, please, if you're not on monthly releases on desktop, switch to monthly releases, keep yourself up to date. And on mobile, there's, we also publish at the same time the regular monthly release, but also the, beta release. There's a beta channel that you can easily switch.

Alessandro Castellani: We are planning to also release an alpha channel for Thunderbird for Android, so for you that like to live on the edge or experiment with

Alessandro Castellani: Early features and stuff like that, you can consume all of that.

Heather Ellsworth: Is that alpha channel gonna be, like, a nightly build, or like a…

Alessandro Castellani: Really bleeding edge.

Alessandro Castellani: Probably every day, or building at least once every two days, and updating it right away. We're trying to automate as much as possible, so we don't need to, like, manually…

Alessandro Castellani: publish, upload, and do all the silly things that the Play Store asks us to do.

Alessandro Castellani: Yes, so… Exciting.

Heather Ellsworth: I know that a lot of people are excited for that iOS,

Heather Ellsworth: release, that initial release. There were a lot of questions about that at Fostum, and

Heather Ellsworth: In the US, I know that most people

Heather Ellsworth: I'm not one of them, but most people are on iOS.

Alessandro Castellani: Of course. Well, it turns out it's pretty difficult to build a Dibel application from zero, especially on a platform. iOS is such an interesting place, because throughout the years.

Alessandro Castellani: we did our due diligence, right? Like, we researched competitors and all the other things that are happening on that platform.

Alessandro Castellani: Throughout the years, we noticed that

Alessandro Castellani: a fair amount of email applications, they were created. None of those were fully open source, so there's no, like, available open source project or library that maybe we could have acquired to start from an already built, established base.

Alessandro Castellani: But the interesting aspect of iOS is that

Alessandro Castellani: they were, in the past 10 years, 5 major email applications. I don't remember their names, sorry.

Alessandro Castellani: I should have write it out, but there were 5 major email applications that they were always acquired by Apple and then deprecated.

Alessandro Castellani: So, there's that trend there, and it's…

Heather Ellsworth: We're not.

Alessandro Castellani: We're not gonna do that, because it's impossible for us to do it, unless Apple decides to buy the entirety of Mozilla, which just sounds pretty insane.

Heather Ellsworth: Never say never.

Alessandro Castellani: Yeah, I don't know, we're gonna say no.

Heather Ellsworth: I'm just kidding.

Alessandro Castellani: Or we can do the opposite, we can acquire Apple.

Alessandro Castellani: But no, like, that's the thing, right? Like, we… there weren't really available libraries, open source libraries, to do any of the things that we wanted to do, and all the…

Alessandro Castellani: Email interactions and servers and protocols, all the stuff.

Alessandro Castellani: needed to be investigated and built from zero, but also we needed to use the iOS components. iOS is a lot more strict in terms of the libraries and components

Alessandro Castellani: you just have those, and you use those. It's very difficult to create something extremely custom or out there. You need to abide to the rules of that operating system.

Alessandro Castellani: Oh, yeah, hopefully it's gonna be a… Beautiful…

Alessandro Castellani: application, the first open-source iOS application out there that is widely used. It's gonna be exciting.

Heather Ellsworth: Are there really not other open source applications at all, or is it just email that didn't have any open.

Alessandro Castellani: Email, primarily email. Okay, yeah. There are some open source code out there, for, like, built that are the base of iOS applications, but for email specifically.

Heather Ellsworth: Gotcha.

Alessandro Castellani: There's one, but it's deprecated, hasn't been updated in many, many years, so we didn't feel comfortable just starting from…

Alessandro Castellani: That, like, unmaintained base, like, yeah, more technical debt. No, we don't want that.

Heather Ellsworth: I mean, it's kind of cool that we get the opportunity to bake in whatever design we want in architecture… not design, but I mean, like, code design, code architecture, so that, you know, we really are starting from no technical debt.

Heather Ellsworth: But, yeah, it is quite a mountain to climb.

Alessandro Castellani: Yeah, yeah, slowly, slowly climbing. This is the good hike right now, so… Gotta be good,

Alessandro Castellani: There is some… Also exciting stuff happening with our Thunderbird Pro services. Heather, you wanna…

Alessandro Castellani: Tell us a little bit about that.

Heather Ellsworth: Yeah! So, as many of you have heard, we are coming out with Thunderbird Pro Services.

Heather Ellsworth: And we have started to invite some of our top community contributors.

Heather Ellsworth: To kick the tires and give us honest, feedback. And I believe, as of yesterday, we had about 30 people signed up. There's a waitlist that you can join if you're interested. You can go sign up at tb.pro.

Heather Ellsworth: And yeah, it… right now, it consists of Thundermail, which is our exciting email provider based on Stalwart.

Heather Ellsworth: And Appointment, which is a calendar scheduling tool. It's very convenient to not have to public, like, to publish your…

Heather Ellsworth: calendar to be able to schedule meetings with people. So, you kind of have this appointment connected to your calendar, and then you provide a shareable link to someone, and they can see all of the time slots that are just available.

Heather Ellsworth: And then we have Thunderbird Send, which is a end-to-end encrypted, large-file sharing service.

Heather Ellsworth: Yeah, so we are still kind of talking about, ultimately, if…

Heather Ellsworth: you know, what exactly that final price will be, and what those final, you know, offerings, storage, that kind of thing. We're tweaking things a little bit, based on feedback, and, but we're very excited to be able to provide this. Now, all of those

Heather Ellsworth: Services, even though they are going to be, like, a paid subscription package, they're still open source, so,

Heather Ellsworth: if there was a very motivated engineer that wanted to set up and run these things, they could. Because that is part of our, you know, mantra, our ethos is open source, and yeah. So that's exciting.

Alessandro Castellani: That is extremely exciting. We already have a couple of users from Appointment that they forked it, and they deploy it on-premise on their own infrastructure, and they use it internally for their own team.

Heather Ellsworth: And they… Oh, interesting.

Alessandro Castellani: Reported a couple of bugs, and they helped us to improve a couple of things, so…

Alessandro Castellani: The power of open source is…

Heather Ellsworth: The power of open source, yay! I hope they contribute changes back up, too.

Heather Ellsworth: Yeah. No, that's great. I'm glad to… glad to hear that.

Alessandro Castellani: Awesome. Yeah, I know everybody's excited about Thunder Mail. We all want to step away from Google and Microsoft and all this corporation stuff.

Alessandro Castellani: To me, the most exciting thing is sand.

Alessandro Castellani: I do a lot of music production, and sometimes I need to share, like, heavy files with my friends or my band members across the globe, and I always sometimes use Drive, or sometimes Dropbox, or sometimes WeTransfer.

Alessandro Castellani: And every time, I think, every time I try to upload something, like once a month, suddenly the price changed, or the file size limit changed, or, oh, now, the files are not encrypted anymore, anybody can read and download.

Alessandro Castellani: Doesn't matter, it's my silly music. But still, it's such a disappointment how these platforms…

Alessandro Castellani: from useful, they become kind of an annoyance, and they're like, ugh, another compromise that I have to make.

Alessandro Castellani: So, having something built in…

Alessandro Castellani: encrypted, that I can manage my files, so just pay a flat fee, and it's integrated with my Thunderbird application. It's gonna be such a time saver.

Heather Ellsworth: Yeah, that is cool. I actually find appointment to be really useful, because if I need to collaborate with, people outside of Thunderbird and schedule a time, it's such a pain to email, oh, here's my availability for the next week.

Heather Ellsworth: Right? And it's really nice that it…

Heather Ellsworth: It's essentially, the public part of my calendar that I want.

Heather Ellsworth: Which is when I'm available. Yeah, so I've gotten to use that in,

Heather Ellsworth: File a couple of bugs and see them fixed, and yeah, it's a very useful tool.

Alessandro Castellani: It is extremely useful. Yeah, so we started our early bird lunch. Some of you, if you sign up to our initial mailing list to get on the line, you're starting to receive some invitations to get

Alessandro Castellani: Some will get some very nice discounts to start using it for free at the beginning, so check your emails. Or, otherwise, go to tb.pro, our website, and sign up for the waitlist.

Alessandro Castellani: And you'll get notified as soon as we keep opening and do different phases of launching.

Alessandro Castellani: Super, super exciting stuff.

Heather Ellsworth: Yes, so exciting.

Alessandro Castellani: A couple of, housekeeping stuff. So, we did recently a user survey, from the Thunderbird desktop survey. So, we have these beautiful things called in-app notification inside Thunderbird that allows us to send

Alessandro Castellani: remote notification pings. Usually, we use them for the donation appeals, the one that probably some of you, a lot of you, will see at the end of the year, or in the middle of the year.

Alessandro Castellani: We use that to not needing to do some, like, push some code remotely, or do some in-between updates that are not needed. We can just, like.

Alessandro Castellani: ping our server and release some nice, very non-intrusive notification. One of those, we decided to do, like, a very small subset of users, so a lot of users didn't see that.

Alessandro Castellani: But we got a fair amount of users that saw a request for a survey. Just give us your feedback. We have a very interesting reality here at Thunderbird, which we have an average of 20 million up and down active users per month.

Alessandro Castellani: But then, if we actually calculate all the active community members and the people that do bug reports, we're probably, like, around 1 or 2,000?

Alessandro Castellani: So there's a huge discrepancy between actual users and the users that are active. So sometimes it happens that we get a…

Alessandro Castellani: False positive, or we get, like, a different opinion, or we focus on a problem that it seems very, very difficult, or very concerning, but actually affects a very small percentage.

Alessandro Castellani: Of our users. And we always try to learn what our users like, don't like, what they want, what they don't want. So…

Alessandro Castellani: being able to ping the users directly once a year and ask them, hey, give us your feedback, is extremely vital, especially because our telemetry is completely anonymous. We don't track users' information, we only actually learn

Alessandro Castellani: is the menu bar visible or not? How many times someone clicks on the app menu? All of these things that… they help us to improve the UX, but they don't really tell us the story. And instead of going the evil route of

Alessandro Castellani: tracking all the data, we actually ask the user, tell us what you like and what you don't like.

Alessandro Castellani: And the survey was very interesting. Overall, very positive. I think we are on the…

Alessandro Castellani: like, higher percentile of good engagement and positivity. People are happy and satisfied about the product, but it's such an interesting widespread… we have some users that they tell us.

Alessandro Castellani: I love the product as it is, don't change it, you're changing it too much, and then we have the complete opposite spectrum of people telling us.

Alessandro Castellani: I love the product, but it's too old, you should change it more often, you should put more modern things.

Alessandro Castellani: So we're still elaborating that data and trying to find, like, a good middle ground, but it's always like that, like, compromise, understanding how to satisfy the…

Alessandro Castellani: majority of the users, but there are so many different opinions and point of views, and it's fascinating to learn all these things.

Alessandro Castellani: And alongside this, we're doing some user testing. We're trying to improve the quality of the features that we're shipping.

Alessandro Castellani: By doing user testing, sometimes we ping directly in our community, especially for UX and UI, user interface and user experience testing. So if you're willing to participate, if you're curious about testing new features early, join our community. We have our topic box, you will find all the links to join all the stuff.

Alessandro Castellani: In the description of this podcast, in whatever podcast application you decide to consume this audio.

Alessandro Castellani: But yes, you can join user testing, security testing, or just testing early releases when we first launch the exchange support, or we're implementing Graph API. When we're doing the future, implement JMAP, we will ask user to please test a test build before we release.

Alessandro Castellani: a final, or even, like, a beta version. So, if you're interested and willing to give us feedback and to live on the edge, please join our mailing list and our community. We'll much appreciate.

Heather Ellsworth: Yeah, I just want to add that, on developer.thunderbird.net, there is a Getting Started page that has a link to our Matrix channels and our topic box, and I'm sure we'll include a link to it, but

Heather Ellsworth: For people that, you know, don't want to go look at their phone to look in the show notes, that are just listening, but eager to Google, or…

Alessandro Castellani: Not good.

Heather Ellsworth: But… two.

Alessandro Castellani: To DuckDuckGo. To DuckDuckGo. Eager to search.

Heather Ellsworth: Yes. Yes. Please, you can go find how to reach out there.

Alessandro Castellani: Yeah.

Alessandro Castellani: And heather, I heard that you traveled last month to some place weird up north where they sell, like, beautiful waffles and fries and beer, and…

Heather Ellsworth: Let that happen. And chocolate chocolate?

Alessandro Castellani: Lots of chocolate. Yeah, no, I was fortunate enough to be able to join the group of Thunderbirdies that went to Fostum.

Heather Ellsworth: Which is the annual, largest free software conference, that always takes place.

Heather Ellsworth: at a university in Brussels. And, it's always…

Heather Ellsworth: I mean, everything about Postum is kind of amazing, like, just the number of people, the…

Heather Ellsworth: caliber of people that care about Thunderbird and open source in general, the talks, and then, of course, the tasty things like the amazing beer and chocolate, and waffles.

Heather Ellsworth: There was a point where we almost got a 3AM waffle tattoo.

Alessandro Castellani: Oh, no. It didn't happen, it didn't happen. But next year…

Heather Ellsworth: There's always next year.

Heather Ellsworth: So, yeah, we were in Building F this year, which might mean nothing to people, but we were right next to, the Firefox folks, and, got to see…

Heather Ellsworth: a lot of… You know, familiar faces, but also, it's always really interesting to kind of…

Heather Ellsworth: see what questions people are asking, because it seems like every year there's some common themes in the questions. I remember last year there was a lot about exchange, this year there was a lot about AI…

Heather Ellsworth: there was, you know, and something about exchange too, right? But it's always a good, like, kind of pulse of the community, what they're concerned about, and what they want.

Heather Ellsworth: And Brendan, our… one of our leads in the Microsoft Exchange implementation world, gave a nice talk.

Heather Ellsworth: Had some good conversations, and yeah, Fostim was great. There were several Thunderbird folks that attended that had never been before, and some that had never been to Europe before, so…

Heather Ellsworth: It was nice to meet them.

Heather Ellsworth: Initially, or like, you know, for the first time, but also to be able to kind of share this very unique and special experience that happens.

Heather Ellsworth: Annually.

Alessandro Castellani: Yeah. Yeah, it's… it's such an incredible conference, like, that… Dozens, thousands, and…

Alessandro Castellani: Tens of thousands of people that attend that conference, of all different demographics.

Alessandro Castellani: the passion in general of everybody. It doesn't matter, like, they all bring their own very unique perspective, and the questions that they care of a specific technology, or a specific approach, or where the product is going.

Alessandro Castellani: It is… it's so refreshing. Sometimes is…

Alessandro Castellani: One thing that I noticed, I went there, like, 2 years ago, I wasn't there, but I don't know if it's still the same. One thing that we notice is online, mostly, it's easier to get complaints and negative messages, but then when you meet in person.

Alessandro Castellani: it's… like, it's the opposite. They are still… there are, like, I wish you could do this, or when are you finished, this is, or like, when are you gonna release this, but overall, they all are wrapped around a, I love Thunderbra, I love this product, you're doing amazing work. Was the sentiment still the same, also, this year?

Heather Ellsworth: Absolutely. I would say even more so than a couple years ago when you were there, because there were still some people that came up a couple years ago with some animosity and wanna, you know, verbally battle about why the chat protocol that we chose, you know.

Heather Ellsworth: But this time, I didn't… I didn't see any of that. I saw a lot of same, you know, very glad to see Thunderbird is there. The booth was very busy all the time, when some other booths in our area were not so busy, which…

Heather Ellsworth: Kind of speaks to the level of,

Heather Ellsworth: emotional support they give to Thunderbird. But yeah, there were a lot of people that just came up, wanted a sticker, or even a couple of people I talked to that were lingering, and I would say, oh, are you a Thunderbird user? And they would say, yes, I've been for many years, and it's like, do you want a sticker? And they're like, oh my god, thank you so much. And it's like, no, no, no, no, thank you so much.

Heather Ellsworth: Take two. I mean…

Alessandro Castellani: Oh my god, so gracious. Look at us.

Heather Ellsworth: One of each. Because, I mean, anybody that's gone to Fostim knows that the sticker game is strong.

Heather Ellsworth: Every booth has, you know, lots of…

Heather Ellsworth: fun stickers, and we are no different. We even had, some fancy hats.

Alessandro Castellani: So, Wayne is one of our…

Heather Ellsworth: Popular…

Heather Ellsworth: community folks that he's been around for a long time, and he brought these baseball hats that had, like, LED screens, and then Sol, who's one of our designers, designed this cool, Thunderbird scrolling logo, and, we had so many people come up and be like, where can I buy that?

Heather Ellsworth: And I was like, oh, well, this is just for us to learn, you know. But, as we, you know, think about things to add to our, merch store, maybe we could find a way to do that, because there were so many people that.

Alessandro Castellani: Yeah, of course.

Alessandro Castellani: Yeah, I think Fosden is slowly turning into an arts and crafts fair, more than a technology fair. Like, yeah, the merch game is extremely strong. I feel like there's an unspoken competition between everybody at the boot, or if it's gonna have, like, the coolest sticker, the coolest poster.

Heather Ellsworth: That's so true! Like, the Firefox people had these, like, headbands that had little fox ears on them.

Alessandro Castellani: And…

Heather Ellsworth: all weekend, we were like, well, how… we need those, except we need to have blue wings on ours. How can we upstage them? It's a friendly competition, right?

Alessandro Castellani: Next year, we're gonna be, like, a full bird.

Heather Ellsworth: Which, Monica and I, we have definitely looked at, like, real good bird costumes.

Alessandro Castellani: Goodness, yeah.

Alessandro Castellani: Getting out of hand. It's carrying.

Heather Ellsworth: Is it? I don't know.

Alessandro Castellani: I mean, there was a… a…

Heather Ellsworth: big, VLC…

Heather Ellsworth: There were several. The Mariah DB people also had a big costume, and…

Heather Ellsworth: The Evernote people, there was an elephant walking around.

Alessandro Castellani: Whoa. Nice.

Heather Ellsworth: Yeah, it, it's, it's a lot of fun. It was a very good,

Heather Ellsworth: Very good event, and now I think a group of people are getting ready to leave for Scale, which is the SoCal Linux Expo in Pasadena, that it starts, I think, on Friday, but yeah, our teammates are leaving tomorrow to go to that, so that's exciting.

Heather Ellsworth: Very different vibe, but…

Alessandro Castellani: Very good. Yeah, extremely different, very more enterprise-oriented, a lot more serious, like, I would say, like, business casual.

Alessandro Castellani: Type of approach, but… I feel like a lot of, like, open source.

Alessandro Castellani: Passionate people, which makes the conference a lot better.

Heather Ellsworth: Yes. Well, the food is also very good in Pasadena, but… so it is in Brussels. Maybe I just like food, I…

Heather Ellsworth: Probably, yeah, that's the.

Alessandro Castellani: Attending a conference is just a consequence of your, like, food.

Heather Ellsworth: That's it.

Alessandro Castellani: Again, we're here to support you, it's fine.

Heather Ellsworth: Yeah, it's great.

Alessandro Castellani: Alrighty, I guess it's time to switch and talk a little bit about our main topic. While we're here, every episode is gonna be… is gonna have a main core topic.

Alessandro Castellani: This first episode, we are going to announce something we're so happy we're finally able to do, and thanks to Heather, primarily her initiative, and she drove all of this.

Alessandro Castellani: We… are going to publish our roadmap publicly in a much more useful and realistic

Alessandro Castellani: approach and fashion. Just to give a little bit of context, we always did roadmaps. Every year we do a roadmap.

Alessandro Castellani: for all the services and all the products that we ship. But then our roadmap leaves on a document somewhere.

Alessandro Castellani: And once every 2 or 3 months, maybe that roadmap is a little bit outdated, because other things come up, and we need to shift priority and change things. So, we sometimes copy the whole roadmap, and we put it on developers.thunderbird.net, and that

Alessandro Castellani: becomes stale after 3 months, it's not updated, and some users come in, like, oh, you wrote that you said you were going to do this, but you didn't do it. Why? None of that nonsense anymore. We're gonna do a much, much better job of

Alessandro Castellani: communicating with our audience and being open on there. So we decided to build a roadmap website. Heather, can you tell us what it is, and a little bit about it?

Heather Ellsworth: Yeah, it's exciting! So, the Roadmaps website, we are working on polishing right now, but will be available, at roadmaps.thunderbird.net.

Heather Ellsworth: And it is going to be a…

Heather Ellsworth: Kind of a human-readable version of the desktop roadmap, the services roadmap, and the mobile roadmap.

Heather Ellsworth: The idea is that each roadmap item.

Heather Ellsworth: should be accurately represented, you know, if we are working on it, or if we're planning it.

Heather Ellsworth: And it should be a quick, concise.

Heather Ellsworth: A high-level description that anybody of any technical level should be able to read and understand

Heather Ellsworth: And get on with their day. We don't want to bore people.

Heather Ellsworth: we don't want to be too technical. I know some people would like that, some people would not, you know?

Heather Ellsworth: I… for me and my goal, I think about, like, can I show a roadmap like this to, like, my parents, and would they have an understanding, more or less, right? And so, yeah, we are… we are working on some final polish for that to be…

Heather Ellsworth: visible soon. I'm excited for us to… for us to finally have this, and…

Heather Ellsworth: like Alessandro said, you know, they would go out of date. They're very fluid documents, and we didn't, you know, always do the best job of keeping them up to date, communicating changes. And so, to address that, we are starting some…

Heather Ellsworth: quarterly roadmap reviews. Yay! So, we'll meet with each, you know, team lead, and

Heather Ellsworth: Revisit the roadmap, talk about the priorities.

Heather Ellsworth: Tweak things if we need to, because, you know, things always…

Heather Ellsworth: You can't predict what kind of obstacles or new things pop up, always, that might shift your priorities. And so we…

Heather Ellsworth: we'll make those tweaks to the roadmap, and then communicate out to the wider community on Topic Box about what those changes are, and why they changed. So that should,

Heather Ellsworth: Minimize the gap of keeping the roadmap up to date, and be a bit more realistic, hold ourselves a little more accountable,

Heather Ellsworth: yeah, I'm excited to be able to share this out publicly.

Alessandro Castellani: Yeah, it's such a great initiative. It's gonna be publicly available in roadmaps.thunderbird.net. Is Roadmaps or roadmap?

Heather Ellsworth: It should be plural.

Alessandro Castellani: Plural, okay, I… yeah. Well, there's the link in the notes, anyway.

Heather Ellsworth: It is plural, it is, it is plural.

Alessandro Castellani: Roadmaps, yeah, of course, because there are gonna be all the roadmaps available, not just one product or one service. It's gonna be desktop, mobile, divided by Android and iOS, and all our services.

Alessandro Castellani: Yeah, I'm extremely happy about this. Every time we refine more and more the way that we do roadmaps, we try to be a lot more realistic, a lot more honest on the things that we can do and we cannot do.

Alessandro Castellani: And having this website that we update once a quarter, it's gonna help us to communicate a lot more. As Heather said, yeah, we try to keep it…

Alessandro Castellani: light, as a light read, just give, like, a good, concise overview, but we're also exploring the possibility to just put a link to the metabugs in Bugzilla, or GitHub, or whatever other platform our bug tracking is happening.

Alessandro Castellani: So if you are curious, you're a technical person, you want to learn more, you can actually see how those initiatives are split into multiple bugs, and what is the prioritization.

Alessandro Castellani: we are trying to be a lot more diligent about this. Not that we weren't diligent in the past, it's that in the past, even last year, we didn't have a lot of people, and it's all about human resources there. It's difficult to…

Alessandro Castellani: maintain a very large product with a lot of technical debt when you have just a bunch of engineers, like 5, 6 engineers. Even 10 engineers, as I said, we have almost 20 million active users per month.

Alessandro Castellani: And we only have… 13 engineers on desktop, and 4 engineers on mobile.

Alessandro Castellani: Another, like, 7 engineers for services is, like, so hard to…

Heather Ellsworth: I mean, we're growing, right? But we have to be very choosy about what we plan to do that has the largest reach among our users.

Alessandro Castellani: Exactly, exactly. So, let's jump a little bit and talk a little bit about the desktop roadmap.

Alessandro Castellani: You're gonna all be able to see that, all the things that we're gonna talk about on the website, but we wanted to talk a little bit about how we build our roadmap.

Alessandro Castellani: using the desktop roadmap as an example, and then talk about why some things are not on the roadmap, how do we prioritize things, and why the hell it takes so long to finish things, why are we so slow? Oh my god, we are the worst. It's so hard. No, it's fine.

Heather Ellsworth: But we're improving.

Alessandro Castellani: Alright.

Heather Ellsworth: Improving.

Alessandro Castellani: Yes, exactly.

Alessandro Castellani: Alright, for the desktop ROMBA for this year, we have, multiple priorities. There are, of course, an infinite amount of things that we could do, but we decided to limit

Alessandro Castellani: the prioritization of top priorities to only 3 objectives for the front end, and 2 objectives for the back end. So in total, we're trying, before the end of the year, to finish 5 major initiatives. These 5 major initiatives for the front end are

Alessandro Castellani: First-time user experience, so when you launch Thunderbird for the first time, it opens up something. Right now, it opens up a tab that tells you to set up. We want to have a better guided experience, I'll…

Alessandro Castellani: how do you want your Thunderbird to behave and to be, like, you want a specific panel's orientation, but also improving the auto-discovery of your account setup, so you don't need to…

Alessandro Castellani: learn what a protocol is, if you're not a technical person. Like, do you want POP, IMAP, JMAP, or Exchange? No, we can help you automatically select the best options, and automatically connect all your other services, so…

Alessandro Castellani: Calendars and address book, it's all integrated. You do set up once, and everything… It's configured properly.

Alessandro Castellani: Then we are pushing to update our calendar interface, because.

Heather Ellsworth: Yeah.

Alessandro Castellani: interface. Thunder is extremely outdated.

Alessandro Castellani: And then we want to implement the front-end for conversation view. This is tightly coupled to the back-end initiative, because Conversation View is something that every email application out there has, which is… it's even difficult to describe for people that don't understand what it is without it.

Alessandro Castellani: It's basically when you open a message that have multiple replies, all the replies and the different messages are properly listed in the same thread, and there are also your replies in line with the messages that you received, and it gives you

Alessandro Castellani: the full conversation, you don't lose the conversation. We are building the front end for that, but that tightly couples with the two major back-end initiatives. The first one is the global database.

Alessandro Castellani: Thunderbird has a very old, 20 years old implementation of a strange database called MORC.

Alessandro Castellani: And we're stepping away from that, we're doing SQLite, it's gonna be so good.

Alessandro Castellani: And then the other major, major initiative is implementing support for Microsoft Exchange, both AWS and Graph.

Alessandro Castellani: And that will allow us to… all the people that have Outlook accounts, Office 365 account, all those, like, university or work, they can also use Thunderbird without any add-ons or any other things.

Heather Ellsworth: And to be clear, that kind of plays with the calendar update, too, because…

Heather Ellsworth: a lot of people that use Exchange or Microsoft services, the suite, they want calendar.

Alessandro Castellani: Yeah, that's… it's… it's gonna be difficult, like, we're gonna…

Alessandro Castellani: probably this year… I mean, this year we're focusing primarily on the… Email.

Alessandro Castellani: part of it. Once that's completely done, we're going to include and implement calendar and address per contact support. Microsoft also comes with a bunch of other connected services, like OneNote and Teams and other stuff.

Heather Ellsworth: That's…

Alessandro Castellani: For the future, maybe we will evaluate.

Heather Ellsworth: Yeah.

Alessandro Castellani: Our core main objective is… To have a… cohesive, consistent, and…

Alessandro Castellani: productive experience when you consume your email. And consuming your email means…

Alessandro Castellani: having access to your contacts, and having access to your calendar. It's not just email, it's the whole…

Heather Ellsworth: Sweet.

Alessandro Castellani: Of all…

Heather Ellsworth: But we need that new, beautiful calendar.

Alessandro Castellani: Oh my god.

Heather Ellsworth: First.

Alessandro Castellani: Yes.

Alessandro Castellani: Yes, we're gonna… yeah. It turns out, shocking revelation for everyone, building a calendar UI is not easy.

Alessandro Castellani: It's very complicated. I mean, like, those grades, tables in a responsive environment, and multiple pop-ups and dialogues, and especially our calendars, I don't know how many events you have in your calendar, but…

Alessandro Castellani: it's pretty insane, right? It can get insane.

Heather Ellsworth: Nice.

Alessandro Castellani: And then, Heather, we have the usual questions, like, why are you always only gonna work on 5 things? What are all the other things? Why don't you work more, and you don't do more things?

Heather Ellsworth: It's not that we don't want to, but again, the very limited engineering resources

Heather Ellsworth: Limited yet growing, but slowly and still, you know, finite. We have to kind of pick and choose wisely based on

Heather Ellsworth: common sentiment feedback, like, hey, I really want calendar to look nicer. Like, oh, okay, a lot of people want that, so let's work on that. But if, you know, some people ask about improving the chat.

Heather Ellsworth: integration, and… it is not as popularly requested as Calendar, so…

Heather Ellsworth: We'll get to that, and it's, you know, everybody's opinion and desire for features matters.

Heather Ellsworth: And you can submit them, or upvote them at connect.thunderbird.

Heather Ellsworth: No.

Heather Ellsworth: connect.mozilla.org.

Alessandro Castellani: Yes.

Heather Ellsworth: Under the Thunderbird project. My bad.

Heather Ellsworth: So, we have to kind of do this balancing act of, you know, the re-engineering resources we have.

Heather Ellsworth: With, you know, The requests, so the capacity versus…

Heather Ellsworth: the capability there. And we try and choose the items that impact the most people.

Heather Ellsworth: Positively.

Alessandro Castellani: Exactly. In the Roadmaps website, you're gonna see also all the other, like, planned initiatives, something that we're not actively working on, so you can get a glimpse on other things that we want to do if we have the capacity and we're willing… if we are…

Alessandro Castellani: fast enough to finish all the primary priorities, and we can switch on other things. But, as usual.

Alessandro Castellani: we don't just work on those things. Every day, we work on multiple parallel bug reports, especially if there's an issue, if there's a bug or a regression, something doesn't work.

Alessandro Castellani: we tackle that. We evaluate what is the severity, and then we stop whatever work we're doing, and we jump on fixing that. So there's a lot of context switch that happens pretty much every day, and we need to evaluate every time. We get an average of 80 bug reports per month.

Alessandro Castellani: We are actively fixing between 100 and 150 issues every month, so we are…

Alessandro Castellani: tipping the scale to the other side, we're fixing more things than we receive, but every time, even, like, receiving 80 reports, it means that

Alessandro Castellani: some of us will need to stop and look at those AT bug reports and evaluate them. Are these valid? Are these duplicates? What is the severity of this? Is this really a blocker that we introduce a massive regression?

Alessandro Castellani: Or is this, like, a very, very minor issue? There is… there's a workaround, so we can just not tackle it right away and pause it?

Alessandro Castellani: It's a constant…

Alessandro Castellani: Human-driven evaluation of what can we do, how can we do it, and should we switch to another thing?

Alessandro Castellani: Yeah, one of the many reasons why it takes a long time to finish things, other because… other than because our codebase is extremely complicated.

Alessandro Castellani: But we really appreciate support, and especially involvement of community members.

Alessandro Castellani: As we clean up the code, and we follow more strictly coding standards, and we modernize our codebase, we saw an increase and uptick in community contributions and PRs from community members.

Heather Ellsworth: Hmm.

Alessandro Castellani: And we love that. That helps us to speed up, because you, as a community member, you're not bound and tied to our prioritization. If you like something, like, you don't like the settings layout, or you have, like, a pet peeve of…

Alessandro Castellani: making the compose button a different shade of blue. You can suggest those things. You can code those little patches and submit them, and we will help you. If they align with our product vision, we will help you to lend them, and it's the beauty of open source, and we love it.

Heather Ellsworth: Yeah, one thing the community team wants to do this year is kind of improve what the,

Heather Ellsworth: Contribution journey looks like for…

Heather Ellsworth: each area. So if someone has a passion, like improving a button, or adding a feature or something, they would be able to get from start to finish, and we could mentor along the way as possible.

Heather Ellsworth: So, yeah, love contributions, and I know that it is a hurdle, to… You know, get through…

Heather Ellsworth: But we're here to help. So, even if you're not sure, hey, I want to make this change, but I don't know if they'll, you know, if they're even open to it, just come to our matrix, or send a email, and just kind of say, hey, this is what I'm thinking. What do you guys think? And…

Heather Ellsworth: Have a conversation. We're nice people.

Heather Ellsworth: I promise.

Alessandro Castellani: Very nice, yes. We try to be, yes. Yeah.

Alessandro Castellani: Yeah, there's also a very interesting aspect, and it's one of the last few priorities of this year roadmap, is that

Alessandro Castellani: It happens… not that often, but it happens sometimes that a community member

Alessandro Castellani: Proposes a drastic change that doesn't align with our product vision, or…

Alessandro Castellani: It's not a feature that we're willing to support long-term. Always remember that anytime we accept a piece of code, then we start… we become the owner of that piece of code, so we need to support it in perpetuity, and if something breaks, we'll need to fix it.

Alessandro Castellani: So sometimes there are some occasions where a specific feature, something niche that is not really aligned with what we want, we reject it, but that does not mean that cannot be part of Thunderbird, that's why we have our add-ons initiative.

Alessandro Castellani: The two top priorities for us this year is to drastically improve and extend the existing API for add-ons.

Alessandro Castellani: we want to make Thunderbird more flexible than it is right now, so if you really want to do something instead of pushing into the core, you can build your own add-on.

Alessandro Castellani: hook it to our official APIs, and then you can have the piece of functionalities and share it with the users. We know some of our add-ons developers, they also ask for funds.

Alessandro Castellani: And it's a good, like, shared economy that happens there, so there's also a potential economical gain if you build an add-on that is very well received

Alessandro Castellani: and consumed, you have that opportunity there. But also, the other major initiative there is improving API documentation. This is something that we're trying

Alessandro Castellani: It's very hard, we're trying to get a lot better, it is, is documenting our code.

Alessandro Castellani: We need to step away from the assumption of, oh, it's code, if people want to use it, they just read the code and they understand it. No, sometimes the code is extremely complicated.

Alessandro Castellani: And we need to document what the code is, and what the code does, not just for our users, but also for us, for historical reasons. Why we built it that way, why it behaves that way, so we don't do…

Alessandro Castellani: We don't need to do code archaeology every time we need to change something.

Heather Ellsworth: Yes, I agree. I think, also, the add-ons marketplace is a very nice little…

Heather Ellsworth: community-run area. I would, like to mention that the Experiments API is something that we are moving away from, so as you write your cool new add-ons, maybe avoid using.

Alessandro Castellani: Hmm.

Alessandro Castellani: Yeah.

Alessandro Castellani: Experiments are a nice little initial entry point to just test your ideas.

Alessandro Castellani: and see if they actually can work inside Thunderbird, but don't rely on those long-term. Especially for monthly releases, we cannot support experiments because we change so often, so the only reliable…

Alessandro Castellani: Things to guarantee that your add-ons will work in perpetuity is to use official API.

Alessandro Castellani: Especially when we change add-ons API, we deprecate or introduce a new one, we always migrate the old APIs to the new one, or we maintain the old API version for a while, and we offer a migration path that is extremely guided, so it's a lot more stable and reliable.

Alessandro Castellani: than doing experiments, even if

Alessandro Castellani: It's true, doing experiments is much easier, because you have no boundaries there, you can do whatever you want.

Heather Ellsworth: But using APIs, official APIs, are…

Alessandro Castellani: is the way to go, and if there are missing APIs, let us know on Mozilla Connect, or report a bug to request an add-on API addition. If something that you're trying to do doesn't… is not currently supported by official API, we can implement it.

Alessandro Castellani: Alrighty, so usually, moving forward, in this lovely Thundercast edition, we will use the next section to answer.

Alessandro Castellani: some of, questions and, community questions, so having a little Q&A section. In the past, in the previous, season of this podcast, we used to go around and collect questions from our community, but

Alessandro Castellani: the… a lot of those questions are… were, like, very engineering-driven, or very specific and technical, and we were collecting it from our, Baxilla forums, or from our technical meetings, all these things.

Alessandro Castellani: We would like to give an opportunity to users that have, like, all sorts of questions there, not just about engineering, but also

Alessandro Castellani: company, like, how do we operate, what we do, like, what are our intentions, or what are our opinion on some specific things. So, please send us an email.

Alessandro Castellani: with your question, we are an email client, so emails, we love them. We have a lovely address for you, it's podcast at thunderbird.net.

Alessandro Castellani: Send us your emails, and then we'll answer them live, of course, because we're privacy-respecting, and we want to allow you to ask questions without getting exposed online. Let us know in the message if you don't want us to mention your name. We will never share your email address, of course, but we can say this question is from Michael, this question is from Alex.

Alessandro Castellani: If you don't want your name, you can use a pseudonym, or you tell us, like.

Alessandro Castellani: Keep me anonymous, and we'll respect your wish.

Heather Ellsworth: No bad words. Please.

Alessandro Castellani: Nice.

Heather Ellsworth: Yeah, no, that'll be great. Can't wait to hear from our listeners.

Alessandro Castellani: Yeah.

Alessandro Castellani: And Heather, you have some final thoughts here?

Heather Ellsworth: Yeah, so we are technical people, but we are humans as well, and so I just wanted to kind of…

Heather Ellsworth: Leave our listeners with, you know, another thought when you're not checking your email. Maybe go outside. The weather is getting nicer.

Heather Ellsworth: I recently got a new bike that I'm excited to ride, and hiking season is upon us, and…

Heather Ellsworth: I saw a pretty cool movie that kind of ties into techie things called Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die.

Alessandro Castellani: Don't spoil it, I need to watch it.

Heather Ellsworth: I won't spoil it. I'll just say it's a dark comedy that is…

Heather Ellsworth: Social commentary on the future of AI.

Alessandro Castellani: Oh, no.

Heather Ellsworth: Yeah, there's been a couple of good movies. Another one that I saw was Send Help, which is like a…

Heather Ellsworth: B-horror, Sam Raimi, so good.

Alessandro Castellani: If…

Heather Ellsworth: That's your thing. But yeah, I mean…

Heather Ellsworth: do try and take care of yourself. I think that

Heather Ellsworth: Riding a bike or going for a hike is great for your physical and your mental health?

Heather Ellsworth: And sometimes, before you send that cranky email, it's good to go for a walk, and then come back and re-read it, and maybe…

Heather Ellsworth: Make it a little nicer.

Alessandro Castellani: So you're asking our audience to be nicer by… just go out. Just go out a little bit, and enjoy nature for a bit, and then you can tell us what's wrong, but…

Alessandro Castellani: That'd be nice, please.

Heather Ellsworth: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I mean, just in general, like, be kind, I don't know.

Alessandro Castellani: Yeah, sure, I love it, yes, I agree. Yes, I…

Alessandro Castellani: there was, I think, like, a few months back, I realized that even after work, my only reading material was, like, technical reading material, so to relax, I would read, like, an Engineering Manager 101 manual, or…

Alessandro Castellani: reading the new RAST API, or understanding, like, what is the… yeah, all these things, and I… yeah, like, I'm not…

Alessandro Castellani: I realized that I wasn't reading for pleasure or for fun anymore.

Heather Ellsworth: Hmm.

Alessandro Castellani: So I just dropped it, and I forced myself to, go back into books. And I'm now going through the entire,

Alessandro Castellani: all the books written by Brandon Sanderson.

Alessandro Castellani: Which has us, like, something like 15 books, and…

Heather Ellsworth: five trilogies, it doesn't stop, it just never ends. But I just finished the Stormlight Archive. Oh my god, they're so good!

Alessandro Castellani: And I am the last book of the Mistborn trilogy.

Heather Ellsworth: Oh, that's one of my favorite, trilogies for high fantasy.

Alessandro Castellani: Yeah, one thing that I started doing, usually in the morning after waking up with my coffee, I would just doomscroll on my phone and check all my notifications. I removed that. I'm just… actually, I'm gonna read a chapter, and then I will check my notification on my computer, not on my phone. So I'm removing a lot of applications from my phone, I'm not…

Alessandro Castellani: hooked that. I disabled notifications on a lot of the apps.

Alessandro Castellani: And I find myself less tired in the morning, reading a book before work. It just wakes me up in a different way.

Heather Ellsworth: Hmm.

Alessandro Castellani: scrolling?

Alessandro Castellani: Recommended, yes.

Heather Ellsworth: Yeah, I read, my fantasy book at night, right before bed, and

Heather Ellsworth: I always have that to look forward to during the day.

Heather Ellsworth: Not that you should always live for the future, but, you know, it's always a nice…

Alessandro Castellani: It's a fantasy, that's the…

Heather Ellsworth: Yeah, yeah. That's the objective.

Alessandro Castellani: leaving your fantasy world, it's better. It's better than reality, absolutely.

Heather Ellsworth: Yes, please, send us an email and tell us what your favorite fantasy trilogy is.

Alessandro Castellani: Yes! Well, I think we are at the end of this lovely first Thundercast episode.

Heather Ellsworth: Thank you so much.

Alessandro Castellani: better for your health and for being here.

Heather Ellsworth: Thank you, this was fun, and I hope people enjoy listening to us.

Alessandro Castellani: Yes, I'm sure they will. And if you don't, send us an email and tell us that you don't enjoy our voices, and we'll change it, we'll try to do better.

Heather Ellsworth: We'll change our voices, so it'll be fun.

Alessandro Castellani: Silly, silly accents or stuff like that. Yeah, we can do something like that. Yeah. But yeah, thank you all for listening, and we will talk to you in the next one.

Heather Ellsworth: Bye!

Alessandro Castellani: Bye-bye.