Well your here, whats your suggestions?

BTW feedback and suggestions require someone to actually read them, are you volunteering?

The feedback you see in Firefox is only for Firefox and related products. https://input.mozilla.org/en-US/feedback/

Thanks for replying to my post James.

Would it be possible to have suggestions posted to the Thunderbird Forum?

From there, would it be possible to answer and perhaps forward solutions to a developers forum so that developers could focus on improving the current client?

I think that if the communication channels are left wide open and data is correctly channeled to a centralized location where the people that have the capabilities could address those problems, this could be the start of something very big.

I am not technically competent to answer questions of this nature, so I suppose that I am not the right person for this task.

However, there are no shortage of people on the net that volunteer their time to make a name for themselves and believe in the concept of Open Source, and support it in whatever way they can.

I am not saying that the burden of doing this has to fall on your shoulders, James.

All I am suggesting is, that if someone out there could write a few lines of code to channel the questions to a centralized forum of techies & geeks that truly understand how to create the solutions to common problems that people are having, then I see no reason why Open Source can't outperform even private software?

Just hearing the feedback and analyzing the data to learn that that the same problems are repeating themselves, can give developers the idea on what to focus on and what to put on the side?

All I can really do I suppose... is try to get the ball rolling.

Do you see what I mean, James?

How did you find this forum? Why wouldn't others find their way here in the same manner?

Zenos, perhaps they would find this forum if their problem agitated them enough.

But that's not my point.

Any successful organization is successful in part, because there is a steady flow of communication moving in an organized fashion.

All of us here are simply volunteers.

Nobody is getting paid a dime.

And yet, we all believe in the concept of Open Source and understand its importance.

Some more; and some less.

Nevertheless, so long as a system that allows for issues to arrive to the attention of the people who are the doers and the makers, then at least they are in a better position to decide on what to work on and what to set aside.

Within the normal use of any software product there will inevitably be user issues. There is no way for a developer to foresee all the needs of the users.

But if an idea button were to be implemented right in to the browser, then the developers could see the issues at a glance and work together to fix the problems one at a time,

Does that make sense?

And by the way, nobody is twisting your arm and volunteering you to do the task. You asked a legitimate question and this then is my answer.

Perhaps someone reading this will understand the wisdom of my words and put it to good use. If you are in such a position and would like to do it; and if you see the value in what I am trying to offer, "then good for you" !

Whether anyone does or does not, is not in my hands.

All I can do is strive to make the world a better place for myself and everyone around me.

And therefore, I made the suggestion I made.

Have a Great Day!

I would be surprised if input.mozilla.org is actually an effective tool to convey serious suggestions or concerns for Firefox. It's a one-way street rather than developing an idea in a constructive discussion in a user forum, then taking it sufficiently matured to the bug-tracking system as an enhancement request. And yes, topics have been carried from user forums (at least MozillaZine) to bugzilla in that way and eventually got implemented. So, that avenue works.

From the "Help" menu, you get to a page where "Community Support" is offered in one of the tiles, which in turn is pointing to the starting page of this forum, https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/get-community-support (apparently the idea of showing bunches of help topics before seeing the community support is to catch the "obvious" issues upfront before directing people to "live" support, similar to those annoying customer-support lines on the phone).

Thank you rsx11m for your very thoughtful reply.

You certainly seem to know your way around this environment.

What are your thoughts on how to practically go about implementing a "feedback" Or "suggestion" button on the Thunderbird email client?

The problem with "Feedback" is the suggestion that the author of such feedback (which includes suggestions) probably would expect someone official to read it. Thus, if you direct them directly here to the forum, those posts will be read by what's mostly user volunteers (despite this site being formally run by Mozilla). On the other hand, directly pointing them to bugzilla would result in a lot of "just steaming off" reports or support requests rather than really being helpful for debugging or improving the application.

I'd rather like the term "Community Discussion" pointing to the forum(s) as the starting point, since "Support" suggests "only talk to us if you have a problem" and thus not so much conveys the "suggestion" part. Where to put it is another question. One possibility might be to increase its visibility on the "Help" landing page, or to add another menu item underneath "Help Content" pointing to the get-community-support page (which in turn could be slightly modified to also convey usage for suggestions). As said, I'm not sure how much happiness you'd get on the devs end when suggesting a direct link to bugzilla from the menu.

The question is - "How do we create an organized environment of qualified volunteers that are ready to read through and channel good suggestions to willing developers that are waiting to develop the next improvement in Thunderbird?

rsx11m you certainly seem to understand this environment based on the way you have answered and replied to my previous posts.

Would you be willing to take this project and implement it?

I'm sure that it would look very good on any resume! Thunderbird is a widely used email client and the mere affiliation with anything on such a large scale that helps so many people, may be a good incentive for potential volunteers to begin working on the development of the actual software.

It needs to be simple, though (from the users end, at least)

A '"Make A Suggestion button does not necessarily mean that there will be a reply to that suggestion. It is merely a funnel to collect new ideas that may or may not be implemented, depending on the overall value of the suggestion.

Anyway, I think you have a good idea of what I am proposing. The question is, 'are you up to taking on the task?'

I think you need to learn a bit more about how Thunderbird works and how it's developed. You write as if none of this was in place. The developers are overloaded; they don't need even more stuff in the intray.

Go and eavesdrop on a few newsgroups; get a feel for what's going on behind the scenes.

A suggestions button will generate a lot of data with a very low signal-to-noise ratio. It would need to be triaged by someone whose judgement the developers trusted.

That's a valid point Zenos.

Could you perhaps make a recommendation of someone that fits the profile you described?

I think your missing the point. Entirely. You are not gong to change anything on this forum, developers rarely pass through. The best you could expect would be someone to file a bug on your behalf

Way back at the beginning of this thread I asked if you were going to volunteer to read the suggestions. Regardless of how you slice it, Thunderbird is short of people to do what needs to be done. Features that would be "nice" really do not get out of the starting gate unless someone volunteers their time to do it.

Unlike others here, I find suggestions in support a royal pain. You can tell me you would like XXX feature, or that the program sucks lemons. Really it is of little interest to me, I just file that support request under "Can not be helped" and move on to someone that can.

The bug for this is Bug 685690 it has been open since 2011 and no one has picked it up. All the discussion in the world here will not change that.

Yeah, a simple "Feedback" button would create too much noise, thus serious suggestions likely get lost in the bulk of comments. I think the detour via user forums is quite helpful for filtering (while maybe there is a difference between this forum and MozillaZine) and has a track record of making changes. Examples include Bug 437139 and Bug 230448 on changing default reply and forward behaviors, which were essentially supported by frequent requests in the forums how to change those settings, and eventually successful after long discussions in both forums and bug reports. Thus, support questions may actually lead to enhancements, but aren't the only way to get there.

"Would you be willing to take this project and implement it?" - in this case, not really, given that the reviewers will likely ask the same questions about where to get the manpower as we do here. And as for my personal resume, I'd think that 157 fixed bugs since 2007 is a fairly ok record for a volunteer contributor.

Zenos said

How did you find this forum? Why wouldn't others find their way here in the same manner?

FYI, I found it by googling "mozilla thunderbird feedback", which must frustrate Matt to no end. LOL  :-)

That's not the point. This forum is of no use for submitting feedback or suggestions, as made quite clear by Matt's somewhat rude and unhelpful reply (albeit 2 days after yours). It also contradicts his earlier reply of 3/11, in which he states, "Well your here, whats your suggestions ?"

Well, my suggestion is this:

I and many others are using Abine's Blur (formerly MaskMe), which generates temporary forwarding email addresses on the fly, to help block SPAM, if & when it starts to arrive.

When I use one of these addresses, I often see "To protect your privacy, Thunderbird has blocked remote content in this message."

At present, the only filtering options offered by T-bird are:

- Show remote content in this message (only) - Edit remote content options... - Allow remote content for [sender]) - Allow remote content for <URI>

However, none of these would work for showing any future content sent to my Blur address, because

- the address from which the message is sent is unique for each message - the remote content is not always from the same location - I don't want to override T-bird's protection from unknown remote content altogether, and - I don't want to have to elect to "Show remote content in this message" every time.

Because the messages are always sent to the same address, which is unique to the actual sender, I would like to be able to enable remote content for all messages sent TO a particular address, just as when I create a Message Filter in T-bird.

This would be quite useful:

- Show remote content in this message (only) - Edit remote content options... - Allow remote content for [sender]) - Allow remote content for <URI> - Allow remote content sent to [my unique address]