On January 26th 2012 , the Thunderbird team is organizing a Testday. Our objective is to make sure that we aren't breaking anything for people that will update from 3.1.x to 10.
Instructions on how to participate and how to join are available here : https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:QA_TestDay:2012-01-26
Ce premier décembre 2011, les Jeudis du Libre de Bruxelles sont
accueillis pour la première fois par le Betagroup Coworking et l'ICAB
et reçoivent Ludovic Hirlimann pour la seconde fois de la saison.
Au mois de septembre, Ludovic avait présenté le fontionnement général
de la messagerie électronique et les moyens de la sécuriser. Ce
mois-ci, il revient pour une présentation plus pratique de la mise en
oeuvre des moyens présentés lors de la première séance: Thunderbird, ce
qui arrive et pourquoi ça arrive, la mise en oeuvre de certificats SSL
avec CAcert, et de clés numériques avec GnuPG.
*Le thème de cette séance :*
Conférence:
Thunderbird, ce qui arrive et pourquoi ça arrive.
Atelier pratiques:
Devenir assureur CAcert.
Échanger des signatures de clés GnuPG.
L'animateur conférencier :
Ludovic Hirlimann (Mozilla).
*** Attention nouveau lieu! ***
Betagroup Coworking,
4 rue des pères blancs,
1040 Bruxelles.
Arrêt Arsenal. Tram 7, 25; Bus 34.
Merci au Betagroup Coworking et à l'ICAB.
Horaires
Date : 01/12/2011
Accueil : 18:30
Début de la présentation: 19:00
Fin de la présentation et des ateliers : 21:00
Après 21:00: diner dans le quartier.
Pour participer à la session
Merci de vous inscrire:
http://jdl-bruxelles-2011-decembre.eventbrite.com
Pour participer à la session CAcert:
Pour participer à la session GnuPG :
Last week we had our last (to date) community testing effort and the focus was Thunderbird 10 and Lightning 1.0. This was a first for me, dealing with two products during the same week and dealing with a product I don't use too much. I was not too confident that the test cases available for Lightning were up to date - but I thought that some testing was better than none. So I did My usual call to testers using the too many ways we have to do that :
I would like to apologize to the people who wanted to help but got confusing instructions f from me.
I would like to thanks standard8 for getting into #tb-qa and answering people.
And I would like to point out our results :
And I've learned a lot on something I thought I mastered so next time it won't happen the same way for sure.
Last week-end I had the pleasure to attend MozCamp Europe 2011 in Berlin, Germany. As always those events are for me the occasion to meet the people involved in the product I work on.
It was interesting to listen to old face that were ranting. It was nice to see and meet new people or people I wouldn't expect to see in Berlin (nice idea to mix an AMO editors meeting with the event). I arrived a bit late on the first evening, but not as late a some, so I had the pleasure to enjoy a german-like diner and the time to meet most of the french crowd that was around. Giving us a taste of history as our first social act was nice - even If i had seen the video before. Ended up having drinks with a few old timers and that did wrap up the evening.
Like in whistler I shared my room with Tonnes - a contributor from the Netherlands. Tonnes mind you translate most of the knowledge base article from both sumo and sumomo. While we chatted he told me that was roughly around 20 hours of his time devoted to the task on a weekly basis (a good part of it being sucked into following what Mozilla does and where it goes).
The next day started with a bunch of updates on where Mozilla was going and that was quite interesting - even if I skipped the end to go sign up some pgp keys with two Berliners.
The afternoon was pretty packed - with JB presenting's his vision of where Thunderbird will go. Then Protz giving a 101 demo on how to build and make interesting extensions for Thunderbird - Both presentation had full rooms (room name was mosaic) - which was better than what we had achieved at the last mozcamp. I then followed Florian's presentation of Instantbird - and I still owe him a why I prefer Adium email.
We ended the day having diner in a cave - diner was nice but the place was a bit crowded and very noisy for some. I did meet a new mozillian over diner - but I believe that it was more due to luck than anything else (big hello to mcsmurf).
The next day was more based around private conversation and introducing people to each other. Overall a very long week-end but very productive too. Of course I ended up taking pictures and they are available on flickr.
It's been a while since we had a testing event. Some of it was probably my fault as I needed to adjust myself to the new release process we adopted since Thunderbird 5.0. Since then I've been lonely testing releases and new features as they came out. It's time to spend a good amount of time testing Thunderbird more thoroughly. We will use litmus as our main testing tool. In litmus you will find groups of test (eg one for address book, one for imap, one for news). Each group is made of one or more tests that needs to be run. As I want to distribute the workload and not only have a few areas tested, I would like you to sign up and tell me that you want to participate to this event.
What is required to participate :
- what to test (eg groups of test I've assigned to you)
- a link to the test in litmus
- a bugzilla bug number which we will use to track bug found during this event
- more detailed instructions on how to use litmus and bugzilla
- You organize yourself to run the tests when you have time
- You do the tests and give us reports and file bugs if the tests aren't successful
That's it. I will Post results in the middle and at the end of the event.
At the same time we would also like to run the same kind of event for lightning as it's the most used extension with Thunderbird. The workflow will look exactly the same. Just make sure that you tell me you want to test Thunderbird, Thunderbird/Lightning or just Lightning.
Right now the number of people who signed up is below 10 and it would be nice if I could get a few more volunteers in order to be able to have a large coverage of our tests. The best way to reply to this is to send me an email.
If so we would like to get some feedback from you - see this Thread on the Thunderbird enterprise mailing list.
Once upon a time I used to be a Desktop linux user , and OS/2 user and a BeOS user. Back in 1999, around the M8 release - Be Inc. did a port of mozilla. This meant that my favorite os would have a better browser than Netpositive that couldn't even render /.
At this time I was working for ITSgroup, installing, deploying Computer Associates software at clients - and my laptop was able to only run Linux or Windows. My home only had a slow modem with very pricey access fee to the net. So I decided that I could use the bandwidth available at work ( a whooping 2 MB ) to test Mozilla on either Linux or Windows and report bugs. I thought that fixing bugs on linux, windows would also fix bugs on the product Be would release.
And Be went to the toilet, and I switched to the then very nice toy os that Mac OS X 10.0 was. I tried to participate to opendarwin, tried mach-o builds when they were experimental. But Mozilla at that time was really unusable on mac os. But I kept using it on my work machines because of the tab feature. Trying to report bug when I could.
One day I stubble upon something called Chimera. Ho and that was able to browse the web, and it was fast, slick and efficient, so every now and then I would download the latest version and run it. I don't remember how, but at some point I made the connection with Camino and Mozilla - something I was familiar with. That was just before the release of Camino 0.7. The Camino effort almost got killed when Apple released Safari. Unfortunately Safari didn't let me log on my favorite site at that time the mighty ubix.org. So I kept using he browser that worked for me: Camino
In July of that same year, the mozilla/netscape teams got fired and I wanted Camino to make progress , so I started to annoy Mike Pinkerton, Simon Woodside to make Camino more a community effort. I started this blog for that purpose - see my post from that time in the mozilla/camino section. #camino appeared on irc.mozilla.org and we started working towards 0.8. A few months later the build requirement changed, and I couldn't help with dev so I started working on making l10n work for Camino. At the same time I needed a proper email client so I used Thunderbird and tried to report bugs.
In 2004 Tristan made more noise about Fosdem, and agreed to give me a ride back from Brussels if I attended. So I went and had a blast - I met Patrick the author of enigmail, Alex from svg and jssh fame.
In 2006 my personal life went upside down so I decided not to continue Camino related activities, I got a job offer in Holland from Alex who I had met at fosdem again in 2005 and 2006. I took the offer as QA lead for Joost a video client based on xulrunner. That started my professional life doing quality assurance. In 2008, we stopped doing mozilla related things and at fosdem I talked to Peterv and he simply said send a resume over if you want to do more Mozilla related things. That got me thinking - It reminded me david's email about the start of mozillamessaging and I ended up applying for their QA lead position. After tow rounds of interviews (I refused after the first round because I was starting to see someone and thought I wouldn't have the time to do a proper job) I started in February 2009 working full time on Thunderbird.
Then I've got good news for you, using a nightly build will make anything you do on your mobile faster. To install it just read the instructions at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms/Android#Download_Nightly. The speed difference is very, very noticeable - worth installing.
Le jeudi 1er Septembre 2011 je présenterai les solutions disponibles sur le marché pour chiffrer et signer ses courriers électroniques. Cette présentation se fera dans le cadre des jeudis du libre à Bruxelles. Le plan de la présentation est plus ou moins le suivant :
Les détails logistiques sont disponibles sur le site des jeudis du libre ou sur upcoming.org.
I'm looking for a movabletype plugin that would let me implement BrowserID on this blog. I've googled, I've twitted, and I've searched the movable type plugin directory but didn't find anything. Anybody interested in creating such a beast, to my knowledge the skills required are :
Bonus point if it supports earlier releases of Movabletype.
We (the Thunderbird team) released Thunderbird 5.0 about a week ago. It's currently being offered to 10% of our users as an update from 3.1.11. When we release new versions we try to monitor early upgrader feedback in bugzilla, in getsatisfaction and on a crash stat reporting page. Our current top crasher is related to Lightning and Windows.
None of the developers can currently reproduce the bug, so we are counting on our users to help us debug the issue so we can fix it.
If the signature is cal::UTC() you can help us - if not we'll get to fixing your bug later.
What we need to know is:
A few times a day I end up getting bugmail from bugzilla.mozilla.org by someone trying and testing features of bugzilla (like the security one). People don't realize that every time a bug is open a good number of emails are going to be send to groups of people (the number of people in the group will depend on the bug, the place it's filled in bugzilla etc ...). And each of those people will loose a few seconds for each email. In the end it's a lot of time that could be used to fix issues, and make the product better.
We do understand that people want to try and test the bugzilla product - and we are offering a non production database , just designed for people who want to test features in bugzilla. That instance of bugzilla is available at http://landfill.bugzilla.org - please use it to do any testing you want.
The product I work on as an issue when dealing with certain mime types, in particular with application/pkcs7-mime. It seems the Italian state, is sending a lot of encrypted and signed emails using the S/mime standard. These emails are unusable in Thunderbird - our mime library copes on it's content. Meaning that Thunderbird is not really usable for many of our Italian users, because they can't deal with electronic paper work coming from their Administration. Italian is our 5th biggest used language, so we tried to fix this issue in order to make sure Thunderbird would work for our Italian users. Before committing the fix our S/Mime expert had doubts on the fact that the fix did the right thing.
So here we go committing the fix , asking and getting feedback - unfortunately after a week or so we've figured out that we regressed, and some things that used to work don't work anymore. So those regressions with the doubts our S/Mime expert has made us - we backed the patch out.
We would still love to have a solution for our users. as fixing the client and receiving end seems difficult, we would like to find out what software is sending those malformed message. Once we know that - we could probably contact them and help them fix the issue.
I'm posting this in order to reach out to someone who knows someone that works as an IT staff for the Italian administration - so we can figure out what software they use and let the administration that something is wrong with it. You can leave a comment in the bug, or if you want things to stay private send me an email.
Update
I've been told that they use Openpec , I would love to get confirmation of that information.
As some of you might have noticed we are following Firefox's new about box design. Our new about box looks like :
When reporting bugs it's nice to post the build id in the bug. A build id is a unique identifier that let the people know exactly which version of Thunderbird you are running. The build id looks like Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; rv:5.0a2) Gecko/20110516 Thunderbird/3.3a4pre. This used to be in the about dialog. Now it's in the help menu in the Troubleshooting information page. And it looks like :
As some of you know, I spend a good deal of my day reading bug comments , replying to some, trying to understand why the user is seeing a bug and I'm not.
Since the release of Thunderbird 3.0 (actually since one of the betas), Thunderbird has the ability to easily setup an email account. Users just enter their email address and their password and we'll figure out the proper parameters. This work as been picked up by other email clients : evolution , kmail and Android's k9 (it's a gsoc project this year). The documentation on how it works is available at the following url : https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Thunderbird/Autoconfiguration. To make version 3.0 usable we populated the database and then we added the hosted mechanism.
Now and then we see some ISPs, coming to us and asking us to be integrated in the Database, to which most of the time we answer to implement the hosted mechanism. And here's why we tell them to host the file :
Conclusion is fairly easy, if you're an ISP and want to implement our Autoconfiguration mechanism in a timely and controlled manner - just host the xml file.
As of today we are starting a Full functional test for what will become Thunderbird 3.3. The formal testing event will end in three days.
All the major new visible feature have landed as we froze strings last week. Now we need to have more users using Miramar so we can spot issue that the few hundred of testers we already have, didn't find yet. To help us with this it's quite easy :
Make sure to send up crash reports. Make sure to let us know what's broken.
The Thunderbird team as been busy fixing, fixing, fixing bugs as well as changing a few things in the UI - notably the way we handle attachments. Today we have our string freeze, that means most features involving strings should have landed before the freeze in order to make it in 3.3 final. I think it's a good time to chase regressions so the most obvious ones can be fixed before we release 3.3 final. So I'm looking for at least 20 volunteers to sign up for some litmus testing.
If you sign up you should make sure to meet the following requirements
To sign up just send me an email. I'll send details instructions before the test begins on what to do, where to report things and where
to get help.
We also need more general testing so if some of you could spend some time running the nighlies over the next few weeks this would ensure a very good 3.3 release.
Thanks in advance for your participation.
ps : those who know, might tell me what they don't want to test :-)
I'm just back from a work week in Mountain view. Mozillamessaging is not more as some of you know already. This will not change anything with how we intend to ship Thunderbird. It will change a few things, I won't be using ludovic@mozillamessaging.com anymore, I'll be ludovic@mozilla.com, and might use something else in bugzilla, but haven't decided yet. I'll shout out when I make that change. But that's about it.
The week was full of meetings and meeting new employees, getting to know some employees I didn't know (I still have a lot to learn in that regard).
This year I had the chance to go to CeBIT and represent Mozillamessaging. I've been told in the past (well last year) - that the mozilla booth had been receiving a lot of Thunderbird related questions. So this year I went there to help the booth deal with Thunderbird and messaging questions.
I kinda of took a lot of notes while there so I could write this summary of what happened while I was on the booth.
Overall The Thunderbird demos I did went pretty well. I of course made a bunch of pictures during those 3 days.
I spend a bunch of time everyday reading email emitted by bugzilla the bug tracking system used at mozilla. We have a nice name for these, we call them bugmail. Bugzilla.mozilla.org is a tool used by the developers to track defects and make Mozilla's product better.
Once in a while we get people who come and use bugzilla as a support forum.
Some people are way more annoying, they come to bugzilla.mozilla.org to test the bugzilla bug tracking system. This is annoying because it sends email to a bunch of people and each of them needs to spend maybe 20 second to either discard the email , or go and act on the bug itself. Now 20 seconds don't seems much, but multiply it by 2 or 3 bugs a day, and a bunch of people reading the email, it starts to count a lot. Now this could easily be avoided if people knew about landill.
landfill is the place where you can toy with bugzilla and test even more than one version of it. It had a fairly decent bug database that people can toy with. So next time you want to play with bugzilla, or test bugzilla use http://landfill.bugzilla.org/
I'll be present on the Mozilla booth at CeBIT 2011.
So in no particular order if you want to :
Come to the Mozilla booth and find me. I'll be present from the 3rd of march 2011 (middle of the afternoon) to the 5th of March 2011.
Now too bad that my German is too rusty for me to write a post in German have it visible on http://planet.mozilla.de/.
This year I attended fosdem only for a day, as I was traveling back to Europe yesterday.
The day strated early as I needed to bike to the station to catch the first available train to Brussels. When I arrived at the station, I realized with horror that I had forgotten my IDs home. As I was planning to attend the pgp key signing party , this meant I had to get back home to get my key, so I took a taxi, and was able to get to my train on time. Then in the train I noticed that the guy two rows behind me was checking the fosdem schedule. So I ended up chatting about fosdem for a good hour and a half in the train. The guy was attending his first fosdem, and probably would love stuff like occ and wireless leiden, I need to make the connections here.
I missed the good keynotes (at least all the people I talked to said the keynotes were very interesting). But overall it was a nice and interesting day. Talking to people that I had not see for a while. Providing some Thunderbird support. Explaining things, demoing things. And taking a few pictures.
above is the flickr flash provided slideshow of my pictures from fosdem.
Did you know that almost every week the Thunderbird team holds a phone meeting? I say almost because there are a few weeks in the year without the meeting (that's usually when we are meeting face to face or during vacations like Christmas).
In these meetings we talk about almost everything that deals with Thunderbird , and the discussion is organized around areas of interests (ie Marketing, Support, Development). Most of the people talking at the meeting are the people working full time or involved in an important extension (i.e. Lightning or Thunderbird conversation for examples).
The meeting is open and live - this means that questions will be asked and answered. Everybody is entitled to ask questions, we have a roundtable section at the end of the meeting just for that.
At the end of each meeting notes are added to the meeting's wiki page - those notes are there to reflect the questions and answers that might occur during the meeting. You can also follow these meeting minutes on the "Meeting Notes from the Mozilla community" blog under the Thunderbird tag where there's also an RSS feed .
The meeting is being done over the phone. I usually use Skype to dial-in. Using skype makes my participation to the call free, as I'm calling an 800 number. So if you want to join the conversation just follow these instructions. And don't be afraid to participate !
In the timezone in where I live, 2010 (and yes that's only meaningful if you use the Gregorian calendar ) is approaching to an end, a few more hours and the year will be gone. I'd like to take the time to thank everyone who took the time to :
Without you the quality of Thunderbird wouldn't be as high. Thank you for your time and devotion. And I hope to see you as active in 2011 !
Merci Goofy!
Next Thursday, December second 2010 the people participating in quality assurance around Thunderbird will hold a workshop. The subject of the workshop will run around bugzilla and how to find duplicates.
Duplicates a little definition :
According to the dictionary
copied exactly from an original
identical
existing as a pair or in pairs; twofold
According to bugzilla
The problem is a duplicate of an existing bug. Marking a bug duplicate requires the bug# of the duplicating bug and will at least put that bug number in the description field.
Bugzilla statistics say that 40% of bugs end up being duplicates.
The goal of this workshop is to exchange on technique, tips and tricks on how to find and deal with duplicates. It should help :
Idea is to share the the way we do it, answer question for people who never did it and want to try join. The goal is to try to produce a simple documentation and make finding duplicates easier for everybody (I aim at something similar as Gary's regression finding tutorial)
Communication and discussion will be done in English over irc in the #tb-qa channel. If that last sentence puzzles you just click here.
The documentation will be written as we go along the discussion. Writing will happen on Etherpad.
Hi everyone,
It's been a while since I've organized any testing and asked for help, but here we go for our next major Thunderbird release.
In the course of the next two weeks we should build Thunderbird 3.3a1. I'm looking for volunteers to participate in our distributed testing effort.
The distributed testing effort is build in order for you to have a focus area of testing - so it doesn't take you too long to complete. By summing each and everyone pieces of work we end up with a complete coverage of our tests and a good idea of the quality of the build.
To participate just send me an email
When the build is ready I'll reply to you individually and you'll get
You'll just need to download and install the build I'll give you. go to the litmus test, read, test, and report.
I'm looking for someone who has proxies setup so I can assign him with proxy testing. Same goes for someone having a s/mime cert for some signing/encryption testing.
I'd like to bring up to your attention the work being done in bug 207156. Someone took the time to work on a new Outlook importer and fix issues and issues and issues. There's a build available and I think it would make sense to test that build and see if it can survive other people's outlook mailboxes. I don't think you should use the build for anything else than testing and here is a good test scenario :
Want to make sure the next major version of Thunderbird is going to kick ass ?
Want to participate to a great open source project , but don't know where to start ?
The Thunderbird dev team is busy , busy implementing new feature and fixing bugs. As we don't have the time to implement and fix all the issues we would like to see fixed, and we know that we can count on a few external contributors. So we've build a list of bugs and features that we would really like to see fixed. If you already contributed to Thunderbird and find any of these interesting well you know what to do :D (we'll make sure to review and take those patches in).
If you've never contributed and wonder where to start and how to get things started , here's a short list of things you should be reading, and that you should be aware of.
With that you should be set to start hacking on Thunderbird :D
And if hacking is not your thing, you can come and give QA a hand.
With this you should be set to start hacking on Thunderbird. And if hacking isn't your thing, you can join QA.
Three weeks ago, I asked for more people to join the beta channel for Thunderbird updates. I explained how to do so - and then got plenty of complains about people having followed my instructions but not getting any Thunderbird beta software.
I have good news for all the people that did it, we've just released version 3.1.5b and 3.0.9b on that precise beta channel. This means that the people who followed my instructions will be prompted for an update in the next 24 hours. For those of you unable to wait for the prompt, going to the help menu will bring the update a little bit faster. If all goes according to plan, these same version will end up on the release channel and will be offered to everyone sometime next week.
Make sure to file bugs you find in bugzilla, as that's why we are having a beta period. Also make sure to send all the crashers you might encounter as it's a good metrics for us.
My friend kaie is publishing this invention in the hope that it makes sense and can contribute to solve the Spam" problem.
In a nutshell, the idea is to assign an additional secret key (salt) to each email user account. The email sender uses the salt and the message contents to calculate a hash value and adds that hash value as a new email header. For each email domain a verification server is registered in the DNS that can be contacted to verify the authenticity of messages that contain a hash value in the email headers. An email recipient can contact a verification server and filter incoming messages based on the verification response. As soon as multiple email recipients report that a sender is sending spam, the sender's salt gets changed, and future verification requests for messages that used the older salt will fail and such messages can be rated as Spam.
For a full description of how this could work please see http://kuix.de/spamsalt/
kaie is looking forward to your feedback.
As some of you but not all of you might be aware, we have a few update
channels for the auto-update mechanism. Let me describes the one we have :
defaults/pref/channel-prefs.js file.
If you are currently running the 3.1 series or the 3.0.x series, we
would appreciate having a few more folks on the beta channel and getting
very early feedback on issue before we push releases to a wider audience.
I've been using Firefox 4.0b3 for a week or so now. As always when I switch to beta, I usually loose some functionality due to some extensions not being validated with the version of Firefox that I use. I've been using delicious to manage my bookmarks for the last two or three years, because it enables me to share my bookmarks (and I don't have a lot) with other computers, other browsers and with my friends (yes I'm a web social beast).
So this morning I was clearly happy to see that the delicious team had a nice extension in beta for me to try out. I was all happy about it and installed it. My bookmarks where back in place ;-) I then noticed that I had lost mouse gesture. I disabled the extension and woot mouse gesture was back. I then send a little email as a piece of feedback to the delicious mailing list.
Two hours later I was contacted on instant messaging by the Yahoo developer. And we tried to figure out what was going on. The only thing That was left was my personas theme. So I went to getpersonas.com , I then noticed that it solved my mouse gesture issue. Restarted Firefox and yet again lost gesture until I opened getpersonas.com in one of my tabs. So I have this weird bug about an extension, a theme that will work together if I load the web site where I got the extension from, I'd love to file a bug, but I have no idea, where/why/how.
I'm now Usul instead of _Tsk_ on irc.mozilla.org. It's one character shorter. It was available, and I'm a fan so I took it. I did that while watching the Dunes series on TV. I now have a nick that people can pronounce, I sure nobody will pronounce it the same way :-)
If you look at mozilla's crash reported and peek at the crashes Thunderbird get, you'll see that the number of crashes is very low on Linux. That's because people use the packaged version of Thunderbird on Linux which is slightly different from the official release one (so they don't give us build symbols and disable the crash reporter). So from a QA and dev perspective we are loosing a lot of crash information , because we think we have a good Linux installed base. This is about to change, as one of the Major Linux distribution (SUSE Linux and it's sister openSUSE) are about to send us all those crashes that are happening. This won't be in the 11.3 releases per-se, but it will be from any update package that user will install from now on. Thanks Wolfir for making this happen !
I came back from the Mozilla 2010 summit be more like the web edition, two days ago. I'm now still fighting jet-lag but doing way better than yesterday :-). This was a awsome great meeting. I've met a bunch of very interesting people (some of which will unfortunately get spammed on some bugs) working on plenty of position at mozilla. It was nice to finally meet some of the people I've been interacting with online in the last year and a half (Hi , Wayne, rkent, Gary, Archeopteryx, Neil ....). And I ended up having a bunch of very interesting conversations with our contributors. I probably ended up spending too much time with the French contributors (that I've known through previous events like FOSDEM), playing belote contrée. I hadn't play the game for quite a while so no regrets at all. I had setup a PGP and CAcert signing meet. PGP went well as 15 people came and participated while CAcert , only some assurers (not even all of them) showed up.
I'd like to thank all the people who did a amazing job preparing and organizing the summit - it was perfect !
Ho and yes I did make a few pictures while there :
So I've finally picked dates and time for both the CAcert event and the PGP signing party add , these to your summit agenda. Both event will be held on July 8th 2010. Both event will have the same meeting point. The hotel lobby's front desk.
While Yesterday I talked about the PGP signing party. I'm also organizing a CAcert signing party. I already have two signed up assurers (and I will do some assurance myself). Time and date are still uncertain but will be announced as loudly as possible a bit before the event. If you are considering participating to it as an assurer, please consider the following points :
If you intend to get assurance point, print some forms in advance as this will make the assurance process faster and easier for everyone.
The talks and schedule being done, the slot I had requested to organize a Key signing party (for both CAcerts and PGP/GPG) in during a breakout session is dead. The schedule isn't published yet so it still is a bit difficult to announce a date and time to meet. In order to prepare ourselves a bit more efficiently than with pen and paper, I've setup a Keyring on biglumber.
If you want to participate to the keysigning, please consider adding you keys to the event keyring http://biglumber.com/x/web?keyring=4739. Having everybody that wants to participate on file, will help people find each other in a PGP finding buddy quest. Than you can wander the attendee and try to find the person that you haven't met or signed keys with.
When I get a better idea of the schedule I will announce date and time where people will be able to meet and sign keys either on twitter or in #moz10 on irc.
I've asked for a Breakout Session at Whistler for this - I didn't get an answer yet, but as I need to get things on the grounds, so I'll post this anyway, so people can prepare themselves and if we don't get a room we can do it more informally
The web of trust is in other word , you as an individual, telling the world that you trust someone else and that you've tried to verify that person's identity to your best. And publishing that information so other will have access to it.
Note I am a CACert assurer, I'm looking for other CAcert assurers (get in touch with me, to let me know you want to be an assurer there ).
Recap:
If you have questions send me an email
As the QA lead for Mozilla messaging I'm looking for a few users. These should be willing to spend 30 minutes to an hour reading test and entering test results in litmus, mozilla's test management software. Those test are there to make sure that we are not regressing from earlier releases there. There are a few hundred of these tests, splitting the work between participants is a very important key to a successful test run. The more testers the more coverage we get out of these tests. If you're interested in helping just drop me an email with your computer's operating system. I'll send details instructions when we have RC1 builds and that we are ready for testing.
Over the last year - the Thunderbird QA team, has organized almost every week a triage event - where we were asking for contributors and users to come and give us a hand. The idea is that with more manpower and more people participating, we would get better bug reports and cleaner bug reports in the hands of the developers.
Usually we are very broad in the scope of the day. The few times we haven't been broad, and that we've been very concise on what we would be working on, more people showed up. With that in mind expect bugdays to be more focus on a very small area of Thunderbird in the next few weeks. If you want to participate, this change should make it easier for you to come and give a hand. This week's bugday is about deleting Attachments. Subject of upcoming bugdays aren't defined yet - they are generally announced on the Tuesday of the week. To get notified - either follow this wikipage or read mdat, where I usually post an announcement.
We are going to release Lanikai 3.1b1. I'm looking for volunteers to work on a complete test using litmus. These are the areas that need to be tested :
Like I did in the past, can you send me a private email to ludovic@mozillamessaging.com, telling me on which os you would use to participate and three areas you would like to test ( I suggest that you make your choice in that way , 1st area something you care about and are eager to test, 2 area something you can easily test, 3rd something you never used before ) so I can organize things. The last two times this worked pretty well - except for some people ending up testing things they didn't care about. So i'm trying to make this better by letting you choose before hand. I still need to aim for 100% coverage so you still might end up testing areas you didn't ask for.
Me :Hello Nathan, you've been doing a lot of triage work over the last few weeks, could you introduce yourself to our readers (age, location ... things you think a releveant) ?
Nathan :Well, I'm a 21-year-old software developer, living in sunny California - I don't specialize in C++ code, unfortunately, though. As a number of Mozillians seem to be, I'm a committed Christian.
Me :How long have you been a Thunderbird user ? What was the first version of Thunderbird that you used ?
Nathan :I've been using Thunderbird ever since I switched over from Outlook 2007 in mid 2007 - I must have gotten a pretty brand-new version of 2.0, but I didn't notice that at the time
Me :From that answer am I concluding correctly that you are a windows user ?
Nathan :Indeed so - I've been reasonably happy with Windows for half my life, though I've dabbled in Linux a good bit also. I even find Vista to be tolerable.. whether out of misplaced stubbornness, or some other reason, I don't know.
Me :As said earlier you've been giving a much appreciated help over the last few weeks, can you tell us why ?
Nathan :Well, I really started to dig into Bugzilla, finding and commenting on bugs I'd noticed, during the 3.0 release cycle, starting about b2. Then in December last year, I realized I had some extra time, so I volunteered for Litmus testing. One thing led to another, and just a couple weeks ago, I started watching my first QA contacts (only half a dozen, right now), and here I am!
Nathan :That, at any rate, is the sequence. My motive, on the other hand, is mostly that I know I can track down problems in and around Thunderbird fairly effectively, and there's definitely a need for help, so I'm trying to fill that as much as I can.
Me :Indeed , was the learning curve time consuming ? Was it difficult to get into it ?
Nathan :There's a fair amount of policy and guideline material to read first, but I actually like the formalization of it - it makes common sense and experience a lot faster to get a hold of. Filing bugs is definitely an art form, as it requires so much communication in such a small space.
That said, I don't think it took me more than a few weeks of a few hours a week to get into triaging, if even that - maybe because I'm already a developer? And it's not difficult, really, it just takes some persistence.
Me :Do you enjoy doing it ?
Nathan :Most of the time, yes, it's quite satisfying. I suppose that's because I'm taking a load off other people (developers, other QA), and also because I'm helping the reporters in most cases. On the other hand, I see some genuinely unclear and frustrated reports, and that's troubling, partly because I can't do much to fix those - maybe no one can, in fact. But it all balances out, and I'm still on the plus side of the ledger.
Me :How much time do you spend helping the QA effort , say weekly ?
Nathan :A good question. Right now, I'm probably spending maybe 5-15 hours a week on it - I'd give you more specific data, but my time-logging program seems to have gone kaput, so that's just my best guess. If I had to, I could easily reduce it just by watching fewer components - maybe down to 2 hours a week, or even less. But that'd be no fun!
Me :Any advice you would like to give to someone pondering about giving a hand ?
Nathan :Dive in. Like Wikipedia says, be bold! Any mistake can be fixed. But do read the instructions first, and spend some time looking at existing bug reports before making major changes - it'll save a lot of embarrassment later.
Oh yes, and one more thing:
Get another email account for bugmail!
Me :Lol !
Are there areas where you have more interest in than other ? if so which one(s) ?
Nathan :Right now, I'm mostly focused on the visible front end and the IMAP support - perhaps because I have nearly two dozen IMAP accounts, and am definitely a power user. (Scratching the ol' itch, you know?) Some of TB's internals and soon-to-be internals (Gloda, Jetpack, STEEL, etc) strike me as really cool, but they don't touch me as directly; maybe soon, though!
Me :Power user heh ! Do you use extensions ? If so can you lists the one you use ?
Nathan :Sure thing! But there's quite a lot..
Nathan :Add-on Compatibility Reporter, Nightly Tester Tools, Lightning Nightly Updater
Nathan :Bugmail, CompactHeader, CustomizeHeaderToolbar, Display Mail User Agent
Nathan :Mail Redirect, Signature Switch, jsLib, TagZilla, The Real Reply
Nathan :Diccionario español Argentina, Addressbooks Synchronizer, Duplicate Contact Manager, FiltaQuilla, JunQuilla, Lightning, TaQuilla, ThunderNote, ToneQuilla
Nathan :I keep trying ThunderBrowse, but for some reason, I can never quite get used to it.. I guess I'll probably never be a Suite/SM type of person. Seems a good extension, though.
Nathan :Those are just the enabled ones.
Me :What version of Thunderbird do you actually run ?
Nathan :3.0.1 mostly; I have a copy of 2.0.0.23 (re-installed just the other day, in fact) for troubleshooting, and maybe a nightly or so scattered around for the odd regression test. I'll probably start using 3.1b1 soon after it comes out, though I'll still maintain a 3.0.x install for testing.
Me :Anything you would like to add ?
Nathan :Hmm.. well, I would like to mention, on behalf of every QA person in existence, that it really helps if you follow the instructions on the Bugzilla entry form.. really really.
Nathan :I'd also like to thank the whole MoMo team for hanging in on the long road to 3.0! It's a great release.
Me :Thanks for helping and taking the time to do this. Next Time I'm in Mountain View we'll go for a drink !
At the moment If you want to run a bleeding edge version of Thunderbird, you need to choose between running 3.2x and 3.1x builds. In fact, it appears that most people willing to run bleeding edge are now running 3.2x builds.
Whilst our most dedicated testers are running 3.2x builds, the engineering team is working on bringing features and bug fixes to the 3.1x branch. There's a discrepancy here. This means that the issues that might exist in 3.1x have a greater chance to be discovered after releases rather than before. It's easy to fix that, instead of running 3.2x builds, we would like our bleeding edge user to use the 3.1x builds (you can find them at http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/nightly/latest-comm-1.9.2/). By doing this simple switch you'll help to make the 3.1 series a great series.
The people in charge of the quality of Thunderbird , are organizing on a weekly basis a quality team event. These event cover most of the area where quality is involved. This means testing new feature, testing pre-release version of the software, and maintaining the known bug database. If you come to think about it, none of these activities require to be done on a given date, so why bother with an "event" ?
First of All the event is virtual, it happens online - this is for practical reasons, it would be very difficult to have people living in Singapore, the US east coast or The Netherlands to meet and work in the same physical place. We do bother to have an event because sometimes when looking at a problem or at something new being able to ask other if they see the same thing is valuable, because they might know something you don't or might have encountered the same issue earlier etc ... The value of the event is communicating with other people doing the same thing as you do, but with a different perspective. This is specially true for people who want to join. Asking the people that have been doing quality for quite some time will be available to help new comers.
We are using a distributed chat system called IRC, which is available with dedicated clients or through a web interface. As all the people available for a chat are not always in front of the chat window, you might not get an immediate answer. Typing a name a person being in the chat room will help you get noticed and get a faster answer. And don't be afraid to ask or participate , it's not that difficult.
Now that you know how those events take place, you might be interested in figuring out the subject that is going to be going on during the event. We publish a wiki page for each event that take place, and we have an other page referencing all past and future events (well most of the future events are being announced on a weekly basis). This week for example will be focused on duplicate events. I'm also announcing the events on Thunderbird dev mailing list.
And are a Enigmail user - please update to the latest enigmail nightly. As previous versions or some previous nightlies (from a few weeks to a few month) , might crash Thunderbird. Actually we believe that our top crashers is due to incompatible versions of enigmail being installed.
From an email to the enigmail mailing list :
I am starting to prepare a new version of Enigmail for Thunderbird 3.0.
I think that after more than 8 years of development, it's about time to
finally call it "1.0"!
For this, of course I'd like to have as many translations as possible
:-) Please send your translations directly to me. In case you don't know
how to translate Enigmail, instructions can be found here:
http://enigmail.mozdev.org/download/langpack.php#instruct
Attached is the diff file between v0.96.0 and the next version -- as you
can see it's really not much. In case your language wasn't updated from
v0.95.7 to v0.97.0, I have also added the previous versions' diff.
Please het in touch with patrick if you want to give a hand.
If you are crashing or having error messages while trying to send email, and that you are using a shredder nightly, and using enigmail to sign/encrypt your emails, consider updating to the latest enigmail nightlies which fixes those issues.
I'm going to start a new meme - as I find these funny and sometimes useful.
Rules :
My Five favorite/most useful websites are :
Now the fun part, people I'm tagging :
Flore , because becoming a mother doesn't imply stopping blogging.
Stéphane, because he uses the internet in a very different way than I do.
Allan , because he's moved on the other side of the pond and as been quiet since.
Smokey, because without him Camino wouldn't be in such a good shape.
Davida, for his vision.
If everything goes well By next week we should be building Thunderbird 3.0 release candidate 1. Once that version of Thunderbird is ready it needs to be tested. The testing effort is nothing but reading, doing reading and pressing buttons on a Web page. As there are good chances for that build to become the final 3.0, the Thunderbird Quality Assurance (QA) team wants to make sure that this build is tested to the maximum extend possible. For that we are organizing a week long effort to cover the Full Functional Test (FFT) suite Thunderbird has.
A FFT is made up of 45 areas of tests. Each area containing from one to thirty tests. Each test looks like the screen-shot below :
As you can see there are two columns. One containing what to do on the left. While the right column contains what to verify. The lower part of the screen being used to report how the the product behaved with regards to the test. Nothing really complicated.
As stated above there are a good amount of testing. To test Thunderbird 3.0 RC as extensively as possible the QA Team is looking for volunteers that are willing to devote from 20 minutes to an hours to do some tests. The idea is to divide work. Instead of having everybody concentrating on the Installation phase - we can have people looking at some parts of Thunderbird that are not tested so often. To Participate to this effort you will need :
I'm asking people to sign up so I can divide the work, and send them an individual email when the builds are ready. That email will contain precise instructions on what to test, on how to get in touch with the QA team if you have an issue while testing and don't know what to do. To sign up send me an email at ludovic@mozillamessaging.com , with the following information :
Testing now is the best way for you to enjoy the new features of Thunderbird 3.0 and to make sure the things you care about are working.
Can you introduce yourself abit to our readers :
How old are you ?
37 years old (too old I know :-( )
Where do you live ?
Calabria in southern Italy
What's your relationship with mozilla and thunderbird in particular ?
How long have you been using it ?
Thunderbird is my default (and only) email-client since 2003.
What os/platform do you use it on ?
Windows XP
What are your area's of interest when doing Quality assurance ?
Now I'm interested at all areas, anyway at the beginning I was
interested in particularly .at address book component and tabs
Why do you participate in the quality effort ?
I love TB and I like to try to improve it , as I can
Why ? What do you get from it ? Is it fun ?
It's very funny... and instructive.
What do you think about TB3 ?
Do you think you own part of it because you do QA ? Do you like it ?
Yes a little bit... and I like it too much
How do you use Tb yourself ?
Extensions ? - Which one ?
I use TB in my environment works (I'm a developer in my real life).
My extension are:
Thanks to Mozilla and Thunderbird QA boys.
Me:
So can you introduce yourself and gives us your age , the place you are from , the OS you use thunderbird on daily ?
nshopik:
my name is Nikolay Shopik, I'm 27 years old was born and grow up in Moscow, Russia. I'm on XP but have plans upgrade to Windows 7 as soon it will available
Me:
How long have you been using Thunderbird , what do you use it for (Email, Rss) ?
nshopik:
If I'm not mistaken since end of 2006 or early 2007, I only using Email. I was doing RSS in stand-alone app till 2004 and replace it with web based rss readers.
nshopik:
forgot to add I'm reading news too
Me:
Now let's get to the QA specifics part ....
Me:
How long have you participated at triaging Thunderbird MailNews bugs ?
nshopik:
I've been "signed up" in April 2008
Me:
can you described your sign-up process ? was it complicated ? was it hard to become an active member ?
nshopik:
My first bugs dates back to 2007, so I know little bit. Well it's not so difficult at all. I have done QA in my past for my own programs and friends of mine. Only problem you will face to be active member is free time
Me:
How much time do you spend helping Thunderbird quality assurance ?
nshopik:
When I was started in 2008 it took about of 8-12 hours per week. Now I have little bit lower available time and change my priorities on component specific bugs this takes no more 3 hours per week
Me:
Which components do you have special bonds with ?
nshopik:
I'm mostly interested in enterprise/universities environment specific bugs.You know every year TB is losing more and more regular users who tend to use web-based email. They already have problems understand all type of technologies and to know what IMAP or SMTP servers are and what its hostnames. People can barely remember their passwords contain 8 charters.
Me:
nshopik: this mean Ldap, kerberos . Is it fun participating ? what do you get from helping (joy , pride) ?
nshopik:
Yeah - LDAP, Kerberos, Certeficated based auth, Autoconfiguration via MCD and core IMAP, SMTP protocols. I'm really enjoying helping resolving issues, there some of pride. I'd like to help someone to resolve issue, this encourage people to suggest such product to others instead switching app. And others could be another user or who can even help with providing patch to resolve issue. Also I...
...don't like monopoly of Microsoft email-based products in enterprise segment. But I'm not MS hater I was Microsoft ONLY IT guy in past.
Me:
So do you feel like Thunderbird 3 is something that you've helped build ? do you feel like it's a bit your baby ?
nshopik:
Definitely. Yeah little bit.
Me:
Do you use extensions ? if yes can you list them ?
nshopik:
Not much, nightly tester tools, gcontactsync, that's it.
Me:
Anything you would like to add ?
nshopik:
I wish enterprises spend more resources on open source app like TB instead of throwing it out just after they find out it doesn't support just one feature or has some imporant bug for them unfixed. They do have much more money and/or money to do this.
and/or manpower to do this
Me:
Thanks a lot for your time
nshopik:
Sure, always welcome
Just received an email from Thawte :
Dear Ludovic Hirlimann, Over the past several years, security compliance requirements have become more restrictive, while the technology infrastructure necessary to meet these requirements has expanded greatly. Despite our strong desire to continue providing the Thawte Personal E-mail Certificate and Web of Trust services, the ever-expanding standards and technology requirements will outpace our ability to maintain these services at the high level of quality we require. As a result, Thawte Personal E-Mail Certificates and the Web of Trust will be discontinued on November 16, 2009 and will no longer be available after that date.Deciding to conclude these services was a difficult decision for us to bear, specifically because of the community that has been built around these products over the years.
To express our gratitude and sincere appreciation for being a part of our Thawte community, we would like to offer you up to $100.00 off the purchase price of our SSL and/or code signing certificates.
If you would like to take advantage of our offer, please forward this email to our sales department. Their contact details are listed at the foot of this message. Please note that this offer expires on November 16, 2009.
We have also made a special arrangement with VeriSign regarding replacing your personal email certificate. VeriSign's exclusive offer to you is for a FREE 1-year replacement personal email certificate - a $19.95 value. This offer will be open for 2 months after the service is discontinued and will no longer be available after January 16, 2010. Simply follow appropriate link below to request your certificate:
That email is not even signed - while the service was about digitally signing emails. But let's see the nice point in the email, they give you an alternative which is free for the first year. A good initiative, plus if you used to be involved actively in the Thawte web of trust, you get a free bonus.
I browsed quickly on the verisign website and it took me a while to locate the equivalent cert (and that page states that Apple Safari is a compliant email client).
The bad part is the lost of the community aspect of Thawte's certificates - the web of trust is gone. I was unable to find a web of trust mentioned on verisign's website.
If you are looking for other alternative - I know of Two. The first one is from Startcom, which offer the same Free certs Thawte will cease to offer. StartCom also offers Web of trust services using http://www.startssl.org/ as a website. The other good news about startcom is that the founder is involved with Thunderbird's qa process.
The other is the of course Pretty Good Privacy, Gnu Privacy Guard :-) which is based on the web of trust concept.
Next Thursday , the Thunderbird quality assurance team is conducting an online social event. The goal of that event is to migrate some volunteer users from their current 2.0.0.x Thunderbird profile, to the new 3.x series. If you are running older versions like 1.5 or 1.X series, you are welcome to join too :-)
The QA team wants to find out any issue(s) that might come up when people are upgrading, so the developers have time to fix them before we ship 3.0 final.
We are doing this on a specific date in order to provide support to the people who want to participate and figure out with them how to fix, report the issues they are having post-migration. This will happen online through a web based real time chat (the same discussion will be available on irc in #tb-qa)
So we are looking for brave souls willing to give a try to Thunderbird 3.0b4 and actually running Thunderbird 1, 1.5, 2.0 ...... so if you use any of those versions to :
This event will be held on Thursday October the 15th - The team as set up a web page with more information. So write down this date on your calendars and join us next Thursday and switch from older versions of TB to the latest.
If you are wondering the team as switched a long time ago - we still have a few machines that we will migrate along side other people who come and participate.
The first test builds of Thunderbird 3.0b4 are available here (hint for windows users they are in the unsigned directory.)
Along many bug fixes and improvements the major new feature is the way Thunderbird handles search and search results :
For a full list of what's new, please take a look at https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Thunderbird_3_for_users
We need our users to give it a try. Any bugs found with these builds should be marked blocking bug 515237.
If Thunderbird crashes, make sure to send the crash report and make sure to add a comment (as those comments really help).
If you could monitor Thunderbird's memory usage and report if it looks ok or not. For report please make sure to monitor Real+Virtual+ ... not just real memory.
OpenSuse users can fetch it from the mozilla:beta repository.
Interview conducted over email with Gary Kwong.
Can you introduce yourself a bit to our readers :
Hi! I'm Gary Kwong, now a 3rd year college student at National University of Singapore. I come from Hong Kong, and I love traveling around the world to meet people and visit new places.
What age you are ?
I'm 23 this year, I started touching Mozilla stuff in-depth when I just started high school, back when Thunderbird just branched out from the old Suite in 2003.
Where do you live ?
Singapore for school, Hong Kong for summer (usually).
What's your relationship with mozilla and thunderbird in particular ?
I started off creating Thunderbird installers in 2003, then started The Rumbling Edge in 2004. QA gradually increased since then, and there's nothing more fun than squishin' bugs. :)
How long have you been using it ?
4-5 years - Thunderbird taught me more about the email stuff (POP, IMAP, SMTP, eml format, etc.) way more than school did, wrt. the practical usage aspect. Even the QA process came out of Thunderbird too - it makes sense when generalizing and applying to other products in the IT industry (with some modifications, of course).
What os/platform do you use it on ?
Usually on the Mac Leopard, but recently on Ubuntu Linux too. I've touched Thunderbird on WinXP and Gentoo Linux as well.
What are your area's of interest when doing Quality assurance ?
Squishin' bugs - and especially being able to help others triage and resolve bugs too, so we have more manpower. Second opinions are sometimes needed.
Why do you participate in the quality effort ?
It's part of the grand open source crusade - my development skills aren't as professional as some others, so I found my calling in QA.
Why ? What do you get from it ? Is it fun ?
I find it exciting when I get a crash. No, seriously, it shows that anybody, as long as "If you put your mind into it, you can accomplish anything." (-quote from Back to the Future)
I learn a lot from the QA process, the bug filing procedure(s) and subsequent remedial action (be it a patch by others, or otherwise). I hope others can learn through QA too - it opens up doors to their lives, as they interact with people around the world working towards a common goal. One might become a better person, learn more skills, meet more people, etc.
(yeah, this sounds very philosophical but that's the way it is)
What do you think about TB3 ?
It's a long time comin'. There's more coming after that, I'm sure, so it's not like TB3's the end of the world. However, our route to TB3 has been long and hard, so I hope it won't have to go through the same large obstacles again.
Do you think you own part of it because you do QA ? Do you like it ?
Sure - being part of a vision that other people around the world also have, is a satisfying experience. :)
How do you use Tb yourself ?
Shredder - feel free to shred my bugmail (it has only eaten up some mail once, that was a few months back), else stable with many Gbs of data in various mailboxes. I use Archive often, but seldom touch Filters / Spam filtering.
Extensions ? - Which one ?
Bugmail, DOMi, Gloda Plugin: Bugzilla, Lightning, MozMill (it's the future in automated QA UI testing, folks!), Google Calendar provider, ViewAbout.
Anything you would like to add ?
Yeah! Thunderbird QA welcomes contributors from all walks of life, with all sorts of skills. As long as you have the passion and the willingness to learn, there's sure to be something available for you to be a part of.
As I explained a some days ago, emails can be signed and/or encrypted. To build your web of trust it's nice to participate to Key signing parties. In order to make this efficient for the people attending Eu mozcamp 2009, I've decided to organize a Key-signing party during the event. We will sign keys Saturday October 3rd during the afternoon coffe break at 15:00 CET.
You will need a few things to participate :
Getting a key is explained in gnupg's manual and all over the web.
You'll probably already have an ID with you as you'll be traveling to Praha (Prague) to attend the mozilla event.
To create the list of keys and participant we will use the biglumber service. I've chosen to use it both to try it and experiment with it as a key-signing service.
You'll need to register with the service this is achieved by uploading you public key there. Uploading the public key will create an account tied to the main email of your key. Once your account is created you will need to add your key to the event keyring. As other participant will do that the information needed to do the party will grow on it's own.
Keys submitted after October 1st 12:00 CET (Central European Time) - might not end up being signed by some participants. I'm setting this deadline so people have reasonable time to add their key, and time to print the keyring before coming to Prague.
Before leaving for Prague, you'll need to print the keyring and bring it with you. We will use keyring listings for the signing party.
As you can see the keyring already has my key, and the author of enigmail's key. Enigmail is the extension used by Thunderbird and Seamonkey to sign/encrypt emails.
Wayne as been dealing with many aspects of QA, he organized events and structured qa for a long time. His irc nickname is wsmwk, mine is _Tsk_, the interview was conducted over irc. I'll present other community members here in the next coming weeks and month.
_Tsk_:
Hi wsmwk , can you present yourself a little bit and tell us :
wsmwk:
_Tsk_:
How long have you been involved with Bugzilla and Thunderbird ?
wsmwk:
Thunderbird user since 2004 and before that the Suite and Netscape and it's ancestors.
Filed first bug in 2001. But became more active in 2005 when seeking an address book sync solution for Thunderbird.
_Tsk_:
How much time do you spend doing some triage per week ?
wsmwk:
It doesn't seem like much because it's a fun challenge. But probably 20-30 hours average per week
_Tsk_:
How big is your mailboxe(s) ? do you also use Thunderbird for News/RSS ?
wsmwk:
urk - TB crash
I have about 20,000 bugmail messages of bugmail, about 100meg of space of all mail related to mozilla. Total message store is ~1.5 gig, not including news.
wsmwk:
I do use Thunderbird news, preferring reading via news to google groups. (But I do miss my tin news reader)
_Tsk_:
I was a slrn user :-)
wsmwk:
RSS only for a few essentials. And worth noting, I use filtering on both news and RSS.
_Tsk_:
What do you find funny in the challenge of doing qa for Thunderbird ?
wsmwk:
The fun in the challenge is the satisfaction of ultimately helping someone (or the product) by getting a resolution to a problem, and of course the process of getting to the resolution - both the intellectual/sleuthing challenge of the detective work, and working with others all over the world.
_Tsk_:
are you still running 2.x are only running thunderbird nightlies at the moment ? Besides achieving a great work in cleaning up bugzilla last year - what is your best memory involving QA and Thunderbird ?
wsmwk:
Until mid 2008 I ran both version 2 and nightlies (on a controlled basis, not auto update) - on different machines. But for a year now I have used trunk builds exclusively.
A few great memories:
_Tsk_:
Do you feel that the upcoming Thunderbird 3 is like one of your creation/baby ?
wsmwk:
Yes indeed. Much like creating and performing great music with other people (a challenging but rewarding process), improving Thunderbird with other people to build a substantially improved and more stable product is quite stimulating. And I am anxious to see many other people get to use it.
_Tsk_:
Do you consider yourself like an advanced Thunderbird user ? or more like a normal average user ?
wsmwk:
Advanced, yes. Although I don't use or understand all aspects of the product, I do tend to push products I use to their limit. In doing so, and through helping other people, I know more tricks and bugs than I care to think about.
_Tsk_:
Are you a extension user ?
wsmwk:
The short answer is yes. The long answer is that's an problematic story. As a tester, and trunk user one prefers to run with no extensions, or as few as possible both for ones own stability and to be assured that when you see a problem you know it's the product and not an extension. But running trunk as production basically makes it impossible to not run extensions.
_Tsk_:
can you list the extensions you use ?
wsmwk:
The ones I run are all highly stable ones (even though many are force enabled using tester tools): Addressbooks Synchronizer, Bugmail, Bugzilla Link Grabber, Clippings, Console², Crash Me Now!, FiltaQuilla, glodaquilla, JunQuilla, MozMill, Nightly Tester Tools, ProfileSwitcher, Restart Thunderbird, STEEL, TaQuilla, TEBE, ViewAbout.
_Tsk_:
Do you report a lot of bugs yourself ?
wsmwk:
Honorable mentions that I've also run in the past year: Display Mail User Agent, JS Console output redirector, Show InOut, and ThreadBubble,
Roughly 450 bugs since 2001, almost all of them in the last 4 years.
_Tsk_:
I think I don't have no more question, anything you would like to add ?
wsmwk:
Two things to add.
I wish more people understood how easy and fun it is to be involved.
And I'm looking forward to a great Thunderbird 3 release, and then address book syncing capability in Thunderbird.next
I missed an important extension - quotecollapse
I formatted a bit to make this chat readable
Once upon a time, a long time ago I discovered something called Pretty Good Privacy (pgp in short) and tried to use it on my Atari to communicate with a friend - that really never worked.
10 years later I installed gnu-privacy guard and started using it so sign emails. The idea at that time was - that if every email was signed then we could easily filter for spam. I have encrypted a few emails - but my correspondence doesn't need to be generally encrypted. With signed emails we would come back to emails without spam - a useful tool to communicate. So I started trying to install gpg on my families computers so we could all signed our emails. That failed - they didn't see the point. And I myself got tired of having all my emails look like spam as they were all starting like :
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256
So I stopped using gpg and signing emails as I didn't see the point in putting those in my emails and making them harder to read for their recipient.
I recently picked up interest in signing email again, as there are a few ways to do it that are not intrusive for the other users. Both methods are involving S/mime, one will work with certificates. The other works with pgp. So I've started signing my email again with my key. This let's me know for sure if the email I'm getting is signed and I can encrypt emails containing sensible information easily (say I need to share a password, I will then encrypt the email.).
So why do I use gpg over certificates ?
Last week the Mozilla Messaging Team met in Vancouver for a All-Hand. This was a good opportunity for me to take pictures of the people that work for Momo. If you want to have a look at what some of the people in #maildev look like here's your chance : (and yes it's in Flash, bash flickr for that).
Update: for planet readers the flash slideshow is not visible you'll need to come to the blog entry to see it :-(
Like me you are probably very annoyed when the application that you are using crashes. This usually means loosing work, or loosing data. When this happens, the system or the application usually launches a crash reporter - this will gather information and send it to the developers. With that developers will be able to try to figure out what is going wrong, or how you are using the application in a way that they don't.
But some time they can't figure it out for a lot of reasons. One thing you as a user can do to improve that is write a small comment before sending the bug report. That little comment should say what you where doing when the crash occurred. For you filling in that little box and telling us what happens is maybe 30 seconds , for us in qa, for the developers it can be a very good indication on how to reproduce the bug and thus fix it.
So next time your application crashes take the time to fill in a comment before sending the crash report.
Yesterday while I was flying from Amsterdam to Vancouver and discovered that I could send SMS and/or Emails from within the MD-11, using the individual console that is provided to each passenger. So the process of sending an email goes like :
So it seems the message is first sent to a gateway and then to the users, the headers look like :
Delivered-To: me@xxxxx.net
Received: by 10.216.17.200 with SMTP id j50cs623508wej;
Sun, 9 Aug 2009 10:22:27 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.151.78.19 with SMTP id f19mr1236114ybl.182.1249838547080;
Sun, 09 Aug 2009 10:22:27 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path:
Received: from post1.aircom.aero ([57.77.136.81])
by mx.google.com with SMTP id 5si6771352gxk.115.2009.08.09.10.22.25;
Sun, 09 Aug 2009 10:22:26 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 57.77.136.81 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of Fly-KLM@aircom.aero) client-ip=57.77.136.81;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=neutral (google.com: 57.77.136.81 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of Fly-KLM@aircom.aero) smtp.mail=Fly-KLM@aircom.aero
From: KLM Royal Dutch Airlines
Reply-To: Fly-KLM@aircom.aero
To: me@xxxxx.net
Subject: Message from a passenger onboard a KLM flight
Date: Sun, 9 Aug 2009 13:22:24 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <20090809172224.AC1D1662F@post1.aircom.aero>
Your message has been submitted for delivery.
Message delivered to Email Gateway
------- OriginalMessage -------
To: yyyy@xxxxx.net,me@xxxxx.net
From: me@xxxxx.net
CC:
Subject: depuis l'avion
Body Text: ams-yvr coucou
- Message sent on board KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. You can reply during the flight; this will be delivered directly to the sender's seat on board the aircraft
An then the headers for the full message look like :
Delivered-To: me@xxxxx.net
Received: by 10.216.17.200 with SMTP id j50cs623507wej;
Sun, 9 Aug 2009 10:22:26 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.151.46.3 with SMTP id y3mr2710025ybj.133.1249838545258;
Sun, 09 Aug 2009 10:22:25 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path: <300411GDWWZDYB@message.aircom.aero>
Received: from mconnect.aero (mx3.gmsmail.com [57.250.220.30])
by mx.google.com with ESMTP id 3si5665141gxk.105.2009.08.09.10.22.23;
Sun, 09 Aug 2009 10:22:24 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 57.250.220.30 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of 300411GDWWZDYB@message.aircom.aero) client-ip=57.250.220.30;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=neutral (google.com: 57.250.220.30 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of 300411GDWWZDYB@message.aircom.aero) smtp.mail=300411GDWWZDYB@message.aircom.aero
X-SITA-SMTP-ID: QhhOXlML62FUQS9A+yvT2g
X-Junk-Score: 2 [X]
X-SpamCatcher-Score: 2 [X]
Received: from [10.4.143.48] (HELO sms-gw1jao.prod1.gmsmail.com)
by imail1jao.mconnect.aero (CommuniGate Pro SMTP 5.2.13)
with ESMTP id 37964392; Sun, 09 Aug 2009 17:22:27 +0000
Message-ID: <3190310.1249838544256.JavaMail.root@192.168.220.37>
From: ludovic hirlima <300411GDWWZDYB@message.aircom.aero>
To: xxx@xxxxx.net, me@xxxxx.net
Subject: depuis l'avion
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Sender: inflight@message.aircom.aero
Date: Sun, 09 Aug 2009 17:22:27 +0000
The good news is that you don't get charged if the message is not sent before you land.
Update
As noted in the comments I had not obfuscated my email address , I'm now getting spammed - using that email that I had not obfuscated !!! here's the spam :
Delivered-To: me@xxxxx.net
Received: by 10.216.17.200 with SMTP id j50cs678458wej;
Mon, 10 Aug 2009 15:27:15 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.150.215.20 with SMTP id n20mr9291591ybg.135.1249943234261;
Mon, 10 Aug 2009 15:27:14 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path:
Received: from post1.aircom.aero ([57.77.136.81])
by mx.google.com with SMTP id 4si10896287gxk.114.2009.08.10.15.27.12;
Mon, 10 Aug 2009 15:27:13 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 57.77.136.81 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of Fly-KLM@aircom.aero) client-ip=57.77.136.81;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=neutral (google.com: 57.77.136.81 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of Fly-KLM@aircom.aero) smtp.mail=Fly-KLM@aircom.aero
From: KLM Royal Dutch Airlines
Reply-To: mrsamkwame@gmail.com
To: me@xxxxx.net
Subject: GOOD DAY
Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:27:11 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <20090810222711.E9C3E6661@post1.aircom.aero>
From Sampson Kwame Dear Friend, My name is Sampson Kwame I am the regional manager of Standard chartered bank of Ghana tarkwa branch in the western region of - Message sent on board KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. You can reply during the flight; this will be delivered directly to the sender's seat on board the aircraft
Like last year and the year before I'll be attending the Open Community Camp that is organized near Leiden, The Netherlands.
This year however I will be speaking about what mozilla.org is and provides , it's missions etc .....
If you are involved with Thunderbird (Mvl, MacMel, ...), I'd love to have a beer face to face with you guys, I think the Camp is a great place to meet you. What do you think.
This upcoming Thursday the QA team of Thunderbird is organizing a Linux Bug day - we will try to target and add information to bugs that affect the linux platform. With the help of packages maintainers from Fedora, OpenSuse and Ubuntu, people using these distribution will be able to install a nightly build of Thunderbird using the systems package management tools. The bugs that we would like people to comment on are in the UNCO state - meaning - they need more information (crash stats, steps to reproduce, etc ...) for to be able to be fixed by the developers.
More information on the event and how to participate is available at : https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:QA_TestDay:2009-05-14
Since last Friday, auto-configuration as been enabled in Thunderbird nightlies. This means that configuring an email account will just be - in most cases - your email , your password and your name and Thunderbird is going to "guess" the settings. Sometimes guessing works - sometimes it does not. When it does not we get the information from a list that we maintain. Unfortunately we can't have account for all Internet service providers all over the world - this is why I'm writing all this, you can help us by making the list bigger, adding your ISP will help (especially with security settings for authentication.) Instructions and list are editable.
So the release date for Thunderbird 3.0b3 the last beta of Thunderbird 3.0 is approaching. This means that features are landing, and that we need to make sure that everything works correctly. To do so two things need to happen, first the new features needs to be tested on a broader scale than the development team can do (more hardware combination, servers combination, more extensions etc ... ) and at the same time nothing else should regress.
To achieve the first task - we have organized a Testday. It's a day where we invite everybody to test the new features recently added to Thunderbird. Why do we do it on a specific day ? It's easy to gather people on one day. It's easier to give people interested in joining the test effort information on what's new, how to test the new features and describe them. It's also a great way to have different people testing the same part to talk to one another. We traditionally do that on irc on #bugday. I think the communication while testing is important for at least two things - it helps you get the help of other people if you are having some issues while testing. It might help you file your first bug - if you are unsure of things just ask some people will be glad to help. As a way to communicate more efficiently, mozillamessaging as setup a web base chat, if you don't want to use irc just point you browser to chat.mozillamessaging.com and talk to us there.
Thursday April the 23rd 2009 is the day where the new features are going to be tested. Information on what will be theres to be tested is visible here.
To make sure that Thunderbird 3.0b3 will be of the highest quality available we will also run a series of tests, that have been run for alpha1 and for beta2. We don't organize an event for that - because it takes much more time to do regression testing than testing the new features. To participate to this testing you will need an account on litmus, some time, and a build dated from the 28th of April 2009. To test you need to point your browser here, and decide which of the tests you want to run, read the instructions to run the test and report the results from your run. If the test is not clear - say so , so we can try to make the test clearer. If the test does not pass, meaning you have found a bug, please make sure to create a bug in bugzilla. Not creating the issue in bugzilla means that the testing you have done is going to be lost .
Thanks in advance for the time you are going to spend to make Thunderbird a great quality product.
The Thunderbird quality assurance team is most of the time available on irc, so if you have question just come and ask. As stated above the web based chat is an experiment.
As some of you might have noticed last week, the Quality Team (Wayne, Gary, Joshua, Wada, Magnus, Phil, Hansen, and a few others (and I'm sorry that I forgot your names)) of Mozilla Thunderbird is celebrating one year of bugdays. Last year as been amazing as the bug database for Thunderbird as been cleaned up a lot (that database is accessible to anyone at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org).
In order to celebrate we've setup a nice deal for you, if you comment on two bugs , or change status on two bugs - The idea is to revive bugs that have not been active for some time now. Once you've done that come to the #tb-qa irc channel on irc.mozilla.org, and give us the bug number you would like us to have a better look at, and we will make our best the bug gets in the state were it can get fixed by the developers. We are providing list of bugs and hints on how to join and do it at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:QA_TestDay:2009-04-02
The way we maintain the bug database for Thunderbird is mainly through volunteer work. People that care enough to report bugs, people that care enough to read bugs and people that care enough to follow bugs. Helping the classification of bugs - finding duplicate bugs and making sure that all the information provided is there.
Some people who would like to join can't because :
And that's why we organize events so people that are not too comfortable or that want help can find other users that have more experience and that are willing to help new users. We call these events bug days.
We use a wiki page to announce what the focus of the day is. We also use quality.mozilla.org to announce the events and make them available in ics format.
Our next event is this Thursday. Feel Free to Join.
Interested to know before hand how the next version of Thunderbird (be that a beta release, a full release ) is going to look like ?
Interested in experimenting with new features before they are made available to a wider audience ?
Well it's possible and kind of easy, the QA team of Thunderbird as setup a low traffic [1] mailing list where we announce Test days (which are
when new features get tested by a wider audience). Those announces are made when the feature is ready, and unlike on nightly builds it should be fairly stable when the announce is made.
So how can you join this mailing list ?
JunQuilla provides junk mail management features, including "uncertain" folders to assist in training and finding near-misses, as well as columns to show the percent match of a message to being spam.
FiltaQuilla adds additional actions to the email filter, including remove tag , mark unread, mark replied, remove star, launch file, and suppress notification.
ToneQuilla adds a filter actions to play sound files. My wife thinks this is great, because I play "we are in love" whenever she sends me an email!
GlodaQuilla provides several custom columns to the message pane that are useful to database developers.
My name is Ludovic Hirlimann, I'm the new QA lead for Mozillamessaging. I started a bit over a week ago. My email is ludovic @ mozillamessaging.com.
I have of course an IRC nickname : _Tsk_. It's the contraction of The softkid, and the underscores were added because Tsk was never free on ircnet back in the days where I was hanging on #atari. The softkid was chosen when I started computing - trying to crack Apple ][ software. At that time one of the games that I had copied had been cracked by The softman from the solex crack band. I just loved the name of the band too much - hence my nickname.
I've been playing, using computers since 1982 - when my dad got an Apple IIe home. I've been using email for 16 years - using my dads account on a unix box. I've owned a few pieces of interesting hardware, and ran Linux, OS/2 and Beos. Beos had a crappy web browser named Netpositive, and Be decided to port Mozilla in 1999. I was only able to run mozilla on Linux and Windows at that time but I did it because I thought that bugs that I would find would benefit the browser as my OS of choice. At some point I got interest in MacOS X - and the browser situation was bad with a special version of IE for the mac - and then I got hocked into Chimera/Camino and the mozilla world.
I have a few interest online - they are available in form of a Foaf file.
My immediate goals are to make sure Thunderbird 3.0 ships as bugfree as possible. My Long term goals are to ensure that the quality of the product does not decrease over time.
I was tagged by flore.
The rules:
* Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
* Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
* Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
* Let them know they've been tagged.
Seven Things:
1. I use to grow cristals - I loved the blue one, that I made from Iron sulfate.
2. I wanted to be archeo-chimist when I was younger, making history and chemistry (which I loved at that time) into my work.
3. I started doing more computer stuff on My apple II e for making Character sheets for Reve de Dragon - a very good RPG.
4. I regret not staying at islandsbanki in 1998 when I was offered to.
5. I've started photography two years ago - trying not to end up like my grandpa, who takes way too many pictures and then does a montage with sound , while reading "guide bleu"
6. I made a very crappy comics strip when younger - whish i never did it.
7. I owned pigs in Madacasagar - using the http://www.zob-madagascar.org/.
Tagging:
* Allan : Great Hacker and Project lead.
* Alex : Being a great Hacker too
* Max : for using SVG.
* Hub : For standing for his ideas - even if I don't stand with all of them
* Wolfgang : For being the great build engineer he is and passionate by everything he starts.
* Danbri : for being so knowledgeable and spread this meme
* Simon : for being what he is.
I've been kindly asked by email to share my views on Open letter to the Thunderbird community, and I will comment on the tb issue as a whole.
First of all I would like to thanks David and Scott for making tb, I wish them luck for whatever they are going to be working on in the near future. I started using tb in around 0.6 because at that time Apple's mail.app was not really happy when exchanging some file formats with other users (and in particular with something called Lotus Notes). I've used it ever since on my home machine and at work with the latest job I got. I remember why tb was created back in the early days of Firefox, basically because one big administration company contacted mozilla when mozilla decided to drop the suite and that company/administration wanted a replacement for email, hence was born Minautor. Ever since it's birth the project never got main stream attention while Ff was getting all the lights. In the last year getting TB releases as been something tedious, and at last fosdem a few of us where saddened by the situation. Things got worst when API where rewritten with only Ff in focus breaking tb, as I will try not to argue when it comes to camino for API breakage, I tend to disagree for tb as it's a supported product from MoFo. Now I was thrilled by the MailCo announce, meaning that tb would get the proper work force for some low level issues to get fix (UI is pretty stable and as been worked on for a long time, but some low level issues and code have not been touch in year). I'm now sad because the main devs, those who know how the product works are leaving, meaning that the team that is going to take over will have a hard time catching up on all those internal things - Which means that tb development will get a slowdown in the next few month - for that I am very sad.
So comming back to the letter, I whish we learn why the guys where leaving, I whish we had some goals other than making tb suck less expressed in public on the future of tb. And a nice milestone planning would have been a very good thing (and I would have expected a planning without dates).
I would like to be able to quote messages in Thunderbird the same way gnus does something looking like :
Toto Goa wrote :
TG> yadayada hhjh
TG> hjhjhjhjhjjhj
I think this can be done via an extension. Would be nice to have such thing.
Est un livre écrit par Georges Silva. Il est disponible ici.
Dès que j'ai eu connaissance de l'existence de ce livre je me suis pressé de l'obtenir et de le parcourir pour apprendre quelques trucs sur le logiciel de messagerie que j'utilise. Pour un utilisateur de longue date (j'utilise Mozilla Thunderbird depuis la version 0.6), comme je le suis il n'y a pas grand chose a apprendre , sauf le chapitre sur les extensions. En effet je n'utilise qu'une seule extension pour Thunderbird : enigmail.
Pour les utilisateurs novices , qu'ils utilisent windows, linux ou bien Windows, tout est dans le livre et dans le bon ordre. de l'installation à la configuration , à la prise en main. C'est bien écrit, les copies d'écran sont présentes. bref à lire absolument si vous envisager de passer à cet excellent logiciel de courriel.
4/5
At home I run Mac OS X and run one Mozilla Application : Thunderbird, with one extension enigmail. I also run Camino of course which is based on the mozilla codebase. At work I usually can't use Thunderbird as I'm connecting to exchange or domino servers, and it would not make sense to use Thunderbird yet. Some time ago dbaron posted instructions and a perl script. He released theses tools in order to track down memory leaks in the mozilla codebase. I've started an effort to find leaks with these tools in Camino, I assume some people will hunt leaks in Firefox, but Thunderbird - would it make sense to hunt such leaks ? I've never found Thunderbird sluggish, or memory eating, but I suppose some leaks in the codebase could also be found using those tools.
je viens de mettre à jour mon logiciel de courriel. Je suis passé de Thunderbird 1.0.2 à 1.5. Cette mise à jour c'est opérée sans difficulté sur mon Macintosh. Il m'a suffit de copier la nouvelle application sur l'ancienne et de la lancer. Thunderbird a mis à jour enigmail tout seul comme un grand. Pour l'instant, après quelques heures d'utilisation je ne constate ni dégradation de performances ni aucune autre régression.
Par défaut dans toutes les versions de Mac OS X, Mail.app est le logiciel par défaut pour la gestion du courrier électronique. Or quand on veut utiliser Thunderbird et dire à l'OS que c'est le logiciel qu'on veut utiliser, il faut d'abord lancer Mail.app puis indiquer dans celui-ci que l'on veut utiliser par défaut. Je trouve que cette approche (et c'est la même chose lorsque l'on veut changer le navigateur web par défaut), n'est pas cohérente avec les habitudes prises chez Apple en matière d'ergonomie. J'utilise Thunderbird comme seul et unique logiciel de messagerie sur mon mac qui fonctionne sous 10.3.x, Mail.app n'est pas configuré et n'est plus présent dans mon doc. Chaque fois que je cliquait sur un lien de type mailto:, j'avais Mail.app qui essayait de se lancer sans succès. Je devais donc utiliser le menu contextuel de Camino me permettant de copier l'adresse email, et la copier dans Thunderbird. Je m'en suis lassé et j'ai décidé d'y remédier. En lisant les différentes FAQ sur Thunderbird, j'ai lu qu'il fallait d'abord que je configure Mail.app, et puis à la fin d'une discusssion sur un forum j'ai découvert l'excellent RCDefaultApp. Cet utilitaire qui s'installe dans les panneaux de configuration permet de choisir le navigateur par défaut, de changer le logiciel de messagerie, de même que pour le FTP, la lecture de Usenet et des fils RSS. A l'aide de ce petit utilitaire gratuit j'ai configuré Thunderbird comme le courrielleur par défaut sur ma machine.
Ars technica has reviewed Mozilla Thunderbird. Overall a good review.
I've just upgraded to Thunderbird 0.8. To download it I pointed Camino to versiontracker.com, so this way I help marketing the product without having to much to do. I copied the image onto my existing application and launched it. No problem at all (not like when I upgraded from 0.6 to 0.7). It seems to me that the application launch time is shorter that's a very good point. A very bad point is a mail client using 32 Mb of disk space and a download archive of 11 Mb, that is way to much for a mail/news client. The mac version still has an about item in the help menu which duplicates the same item in the Thunderbird menu - this needs to be fixed on mac os before a 1.0 release.
is out so I wanted to upgrade. I closed my running version of the product. copied the newly downloaded Thunderbird in my /Application folder and started the product, my profile was lost and a new created profile was created. I removed that new profile but 0.7 did not work better, so I trashed it. And did not even bounce ! And nothing got written into the system log so I could understand what was going on. (I should Have trashed 0.6 before upgrading I know, but still this is unpleasant). Going back to 0.6 got my profile recognized and my mails back. Will try later another upgrade.