Recently, Mozilla began talking about spinning off or abandoning Thunderbird altogether. And just the other day, Scott McGregor and David Bienvenu, the two principle developers of Thunderbird, left the project. (Or at least it appears that way; they’re no longer working for the Foundation, but they’re staying on as volunteer “module owners,” whatever that means.) Mozilla has also brought on David Ascher of ActiveState to launch “a new mail and communications software initiative.” What exactly does that mean? Well, it’s not clear. Apparently Mozilla is skimping on paying their PR people too. (Update 10/9/07: See Al Billings’ comment below for some links to Mozilla’s explanations for what’s going on there.)

I’ve tried to use Mozilla Thunderbird before. Every time I configure a new computer, I try to go Thunderbird. The prospect of a vibrant, evolving e-mail client with a zillion plugins is just too good to ignore. But here’s the problem: it just doesn’t fuckin’ work. Every time I try to use Thunderbird for extended periods of time, it crashes on me. Repeatedly. Ungracefully. Perhaps they’ve changed things since version 1.5, but Thunderbird doesn’t recover nicely from crashes the way Firefox does. You lose messages. It’s irritating as hell.

Don’t take my word for it; I’m not the only one who’s had problems with Thunderbird. The commenters on Slashdot aren’t exactly technoidiots — most of them, anyway — but in the Slashdot discussion “Thunderbird in Crisis?” I’ve learned that Thunderbird also:

• Permanently loses all your e-mail if a folder climbs over 2GB in size
• Has an import function that’s “more buggy than a New York City apartment in the summer”
• Only shows three e-mail accounts in your accounts folder, regardless of how many you actually have
• Doesn’t have its shit together where calendar integration is concerned

Thunderbird’s not the only e-mail client that’s in transition. The once-mighty Eudora software has been discontinued by Qualcomm, and Microsoft has changed its bare-bones e-mail client from Outlook Express to Windows Mail to Windows Live Mail in the space of a year. Yahoo’s webmail has been undergoing a facelift for the past, oh, thirty years, and so far everyone except Walt Mossberg has greeted it with an overwhelming yawn.

You want to know why programmers lose their hair? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the state of electronic mail!

It’s been approximately 35 years since Ray Tomlinson tacked together two names and an “@” symbol to create the e-mail address. The latest estimates say that there are about 171 billion e-mail messages sent per day (of which 70% are spam). And yet just look at all the things you still can’t do reliably across platforms on e-mail:

• Confirm that your e-mail has been received
• Indicate high or low importance on a message
• Ensure that your message will reach its recipient
• Authenticate that the message sender is who she says she is
• Include basic formatting like bolding, italicizing, and underlining
• Have a reasonable expectation that your message won’t be intercepted by someone else

E-mail standards are still all over the place. When Mac users send mail to Outlook users, often the formatting is stripped out or filled with unintelligible characters. When Outlook users send e-mails to any other client, there’re still burdened with clunky, semi-invisible attachments. Some e-mail clients prevent you from opening attachments; others block CSS styling. Some, like Gmail, strip out just about everything but the plain text.

Hell, you can’t even count on e-mail software being able to display URLs correctly. Half the time, your long URLs end up getting sliced in half when they reach the 72- or 80-character line limit — itself an idiotic relic that should be moldering away in the Incan burial chamber of technology by now. This same limit is responsible for the incomprehensible way most e-mail programs thread long conversations. Certainly you’ve noticed that once you’ve got an e-mail thread longer than three or four messages, the whole thing devolves into an unreadable mess of “>” symbols and line breaks.

Not only have we not advanced in the field of e-mail at all; we’ve moved backwards. Your e-mail is actually less likely to reach its intended recipient than it was ten years ago, because of overly aggressive spam filters.

As usual, Google’s on the case, and as far as I can tell, they’re the only major player pushing innovation right now. I’ve got a love/hate relationship with Gmail, their flagship mail product (see my previous blog post “Why Is Gmail So Irritating?”), but at least they’re thinking outside the envelope. Once they integrate Gmail with their Google Gears offline API, they’ll have a rather formidable e-mail offering.

Here is Doctor Edelman’s prescription for how to fix e-mail: Don’t. Let it die, and start from scratch.

I’d like to see a bunch of major software vendors get together — Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, IBM, Apple, etc. — and come up with a new electronic messaging system. I don’t care if it’s open source, but the party should at least be open to independent developers. Make every user pay a nominal fee to an international standards body to register for it, and then charge a very small fee per message (say, a penny) to discourage bulk e-mailing. Have multiple methods of validation behind CAPTCHAs so that at least we’ll slow the spammers down. Only allow a restricted subset of attachments to be sent across it — no executables allowed — and do a virus scan of everything at the source.

Is it possible to eliminate spam on this new e-mail system? Maybe it’s not possible to completely eliminate it. Yet somehow I’ve never received a spam message on my Facebook account, and every friend invitation I’ve received has come from a real, live human being. Certainly if Facebook has figured out a way to reliably authenticate the identities of tens of millions of users, it’s not an impossible task.

I’m not saying anyone has to kill good ol’ SMTP e-mail. After all, Usenet’s still around, isn’t it? We can all maintain our goofy anonymous Hotmail addresses for sending out party invitations and arranging illicit sexual liaisons. But we should have a real e-mail system where the grown-ups can safely and reliably communicate too.

And while we’re fantasizing about the impossible: why not throw a few more things into the mix?

One thing that Google seems to have recognized before anyone else is that communication is communication, no matter how you format it or what protocol it gets transmitted on. We have too many needless choices for our digital communications today. Why should I have to choose whether I want to use STMP, IM, RSS, HTML, SMS, MMS, VoIP, fax, or voice to send my wife a two-sentence message? I should be able to just click an icon on my desktop, type in my message, and click Send. Let our digital overlords determine the best route to convey the message to its recipient; I honestly don’t care. I don’t want to be bothered thinking about communication protocols any more than I feel like running IP traceroutes to determine the shortest number of hops between our machines.

So an ideal communication client would seamlessly handle every major format listed above in one interface. It would treat e-mails and IMs and blog comments and faxes the same. It would archive all your communications in a single database, so you wouldn’t have to check five different app logs to find it later.

This is essentially getting back to the vision that Tim Berners-Lee had for the World Wide Web in the first place: an easy-to-use method of universal communication. No more FTPing files down from an IP address you’ve scribbled on a piece of notebook paper. Just point at the hyperlink and click; all the work of translating the hyperlink to a specific file on a specific web server is completely transparent to the user.

There’s no reason we should have to muck around with multiple communication interfaces anymore. After all, what’s a web page except an e-mail to the world, cc everybody?

I like Google. I have great faith in their ability to bring new technology to the masses in an intuitive, highly functional package. Google Maps quickly supplanted MapQuest as my street directory of choice when it came out. And I’ve got high hopes for Writely, an online word processing application that Google bought earlier this year and promptly rechristened Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

So why is Gmail so irritating?

Gmail should be a slam-dunk for Google. After all, I can build a simple POP3 application on a ColdFusion web server in a couple of hours, and that includes time for me to consult the Macromedia documentation to fix my mangled CFML syntax. I’m not saying that that’s all there is to it, of course. (If you want to see a ColdFusion-based application gone horribly awry, look at all the flaws in MySpace.) But I don’t have some of the world’s best developers and billions of dollars in cash lying around either.

Here are my major problems with Gmail:

• Gmail breaks the browser Back button. To me, this is an absolute cardinal sin. Yes, I understand how difficult it is to make a functioning web application that obeys the Back button in a stateless environment like the web. But certainly Google can do better. I back up into blank, non-functioning pages at least two or three times a day, usually when following links from the Gmail module on my Google home page. And when Google isn’t breaking the Back button, they’re opening up new and unwanted tabs in my browser.
• Gmail breaks the Reload/Refresh button. Try opening an e-mail message, and then hitting your browser’s reload/refresh button. You get taken back to the list of e-mails. I get hung up on this several times a day too.
• The interface is very, very slow. I lose patience very easily with the “Loading” messages that pop up at the top of the screen — there are actually two different messages, one that appears in the top right and one that appears in the top left — and they’re up there a lot.
• No folders. Google assumes that we don’t care for the convention of filing our e-mail into different folders. Therefore Gmail does away with this metaphor altogether in favor of its own Label system, which I can’t seem to get used to. Couldn’t they at least give you the option of using folders, even if it’s not set by default?

• What’s with the Reply textbox? There’s a textbox at the bottom of every message that suddenly expands into a full-fledged e-mail reply once you click on it. It’s very bizarre and counterintuitive, considering the fact that the e-mail reply looks nothing like the textbox.
• Threaded conversations are just confusing. Message replies and forwards are all tacked on to the original e-mail to form one long chain of messages. It sounds like a good idea to have a record of the entire conversation in one place, but in practice things get very cluttered very quickly. When conversations start to branch off into multiple threads, it’s almost impossible to keep track. Furthermore, threaded e-mail conversations cause messages to jump around in chronology. That message that used to be halfway down the page suddenly jumps to the top of the page, rendering any attempts to order your messages useless.
• Why can’t I easily sort? Every other e-mail program in the world — hell, just about every other program period — lets you sort objects. Usually by clicking the header at the top of the column. Gmail doesn’t let you sort messages at all. What if I want to view all messages to or from a specific person? You need to type that person’s name into the Search box. What if you want to view e-mail in reverse chronology? Sorry, can’t.
• Gmail doesn’t play well with POP3 clients like Outlook. Sure, you can easily download messages to Outlook — which is more than you can say for some webmail clients like Microsoft’s own Hotmail — but Google renders some of most effective POP3 management tools null and void. Messages you’ve downloaded into Outlook don’t automatically get marked as read in Gmail. And Gmail doesn’t obey the standard POP3 setting allowing your client to automatically delete webmail messages after x days on the server.
• The “Compose Mail” link is hard to find. Maybe it’s just me, but I find it difficult to remember where the “Compose Mail” link is. Yes, it’s right there in the top left under the Gmail logo, but after using the program for a year, I still hesitate a second or two every time I need to use it. That’s generally a sign that there’s a serious design flaw at work.

There are all kinds of smaller problems too. Why, when you click on the “New window” link, is the new window too narrow to see your entire e-mail message? Why are message threads sometimes collapsed and sometimes not? How come clicking on the paper clip icon doesn’t take you to the message attachment like it does in every other application? In fact, why do you need to scroll all the way to the bottom of the message to download attachments?

The main problem with Gmail is one that I’ve started to see too much at Google: product arrogance. It’s the attitude that Google knows what’s good for you, and they’re going to proceed with their internal logic despite what the usability standards say and what the customers think. It’s the same Achilles’ heel that Apple has suffered from for years. (Why did Steve Jobs wait until 2005 to finally ship a mouse with a right-click button and a scroll wheel?)

There are some things I like about Gmail’s interface — the autosave, the fact that sent mail downloads to your POP3 client, the e-mail RSS feeds — but generally they’re outweighed by the annoyances. Enough that I’m seriously considering switching back to Yahoo! for my webmail. Their new interface is supposed to be very nice.