Please visit www.spicebird.com for more details and to download Spicebird.

Here is a list of things that we have been thinking about

1. Mail context: Take advantage of the mail index to provide additional details about each mail and it’s sender.  The current plan is to have an optional “context bar” on the right side of the window that will display a list of recent mails from the sender, recent attachments sent by the sender as well as others mails in this conversation.
2. Switch the chat back-end: We currently use Telepathy which is a very well thought out and an amazing framework for instant messaging applications.  However, it comes with a different set of problems.  Most of our work with Spicebird is currently going into chat and a significant part of it into fixing and maintaining Telepathy and related libraries on Windows (we are yet to start working on a Mac).  A switch to other library (probably Gloox) would hopefully let us concentrate more on our roadmap.
3. Drop support for chat protocols other than Jabber/XMPP: XMPP is now a well supported protocol in the instant messaging world.  It is extensible and makes it possible to develop applications on top of it that can communicate directly with each other - something that must be part of any communication and collaboration suite.
4. CalDAV support in calendar:  Yes, the calendar already supports CalDAV, but it is definitely not the right shape. Shared and group calendars as well as many other features of CalDAV aren’t easy to implement without ending up with ugly code/architecture!  We want to improve the situation there.
5. Addons:  This needs a lot of help from the community.  Most Thunderbird addons work fine by adding Spicebird to the list of supported applications in the addon.  There are a few addons that might need more work, but the Spicebird developers are always ready to help developers port their addons!
6. Language Packs: We did have people contribute some languages to Spicebird in that past.  But quite a few strings have changed in Spicebird and we hope to get back the translators to help us do the translations.
7. Mac builds:  We currently don’t ship Spicebird on Mac.  We are desperately trying to get this working as soon as possible.
8. Unified accounts management:  Currently the accounts management is pretty fragmented - each application lists the configured accounts in a different place.  We ought to come up with an extensible accounts framework where all supported accounts could added/deleted.  To start with applications could use their current dialogs for editing the accounts.
9. Add some social networking features to contacts: Let the contacts tab talk to various social networks and display contact information, their current status etc;  Possibly provide a way to communicate with the user through the social network.  The biggest problem with this is the number of networks that we can support.  There are too many social networks to mark this feature “done”.

Please feel free to comment on any of the above and add more to this list.  But please understand that we have limited resources.  If you are a developer and would like to help us with Spicebird development, please feel free to contact me.

Update: Another important thing we want to do is to launch Spicebird more regularly - probably keep less than 6 months between releases.  We would also try to release weekly builds (which may sometimes be very very unstable) and keep reporting progress more frequently.

Update: Fixed a few typos.

For the technically inclined, Spicebird 0.8 is based on Thunderbird 3.  It brings good things like indexed message search and improves on a few.  We also consider Spicebird 0.8 to be much more stable compared to the previous versions and are expecting the users to feel much more confident using it.

The announcement from Spicebird.com

Spicebird is a collaboration client that provides integrated access to email, contacts, calendaring and instant messaging in a single application. It provides easy access to various web services while retaining all the advantages of a desktop application. The application is based on projects like Thunderbird, Lightning and Telepathy and adds more functionality and integration among its components.

This release is a bug fix release with many small features additions. Changes include launch fixes, memory fixes, better support for non-English text, more chat preferences and more add-ons.

For a detailed description of this release, see the release notes.

Get Spicebird Beta.  It’s still a beta software, but you can expect your e-mail to be pretty safe with it

The release will include the much awaited ICQ and AOL messenger support, preferences for Chat, icons in the menus and many many more fixes!

Spicebird is a collaboration client that provides integrated access to email, contacts, calendaring and instant messaging in a single application. It provides easy access to various web services while retaining all the advantages of a desktop application. The application is based on projects like Thunderbird, Lightning and Telepathy and adds more functionality and intergration among its components.

This release of Spicebird adds the following functionality:

• Chat with friends on services like Yahoo, Google Talk, AIM, ICQ and Jabber
• Add iGoogle Gadgets to Spicebird
• Disable the applications that are unused
• Access Google calendar
• Experimental support for managing blogs
• Available in more than 10 languages
• Basic set of add-ons
• Import data from Thunderbird, Outlook and Outlook Express

For a detailed desciption of this release, see the release notes.

Before you start using it, please understand that it’s still a beta product.  However, it is stable and I have been using the alpha versions for all my e-mailing and calendaring needs for more than 6 months now.

• 7 bugs blocking the release (code)
• 5 of the 7 bugs already have patches up for review
• The other two being a build bug and another in calendar that we are struggling to reproduce!

So what’s left before the release?

• Setting up the addons repository (it’s already up there, but needs some testing and a good theme before the formal announcement)
• Making sure spicebird.com works fine in IE6 (It is an embarrassing and silly bug that was always there - we only use the standards compliant Firefox here)
• Some last-minute style improvements to Spicebird
• Finally, decide on a release date!