
Introducing Raindrop from Mozilla Labs - mcxx
http://labs.mozilla.com/raindrop/2009/10/22/introducing-raindrop/
======
pvg
There's a common but often-ignored meta-lesson here - begin by describing what
the thing actually does, concretely.

"An exploration in messaging innovation being led by the team responsible for
Thunderbird, to explore new ways to use Open Web technologies to create
useful, compelling messaging experiences" has near-zero information content
and happily eats up the invaluable initial attention and visual spaces. One
has to scale up a substantial wall of text before reaching anything specific
but not before being invited on a detour into the 'Guiding Principles'. I
didn't go down that path but presumably the principles include 'Be vague'.

It may sound like mere grouchy nit-picking but I've found that this type of
failure at basic communication in a project's description is often indicative
of its future lack of success. The pages of the Chandler project used to be a
wonderfully instructive example but even they seem to have cleaned up their
act on their current website. A very incomplete list of words and expressions
to avoid before clearly stating what a product does -

revolutionary

innovation

vision

open

passionate

watch a video/screencast

Any others?

~~~
Adrenalist
I agree with your point. I had to do some digging to get more concrete
information.

 _When a friend’s link from YouTube or flickr arrives, your messaging client
should be able to show the video or photos near or as part of the message,
rather than rudely kicking you over to a separate browser tab. Notifications
from computers and mailing lists should be organized for you, not clutter your
Inbox or require tedious manual filter setup. It should be easy to smoothly
integrate new web services into your conversation viewer entirely using open
web technologies._

[http://labs.mozilla.com/raindrop/2009/10/22/introducing-
rain...](http://labs.mozilla.com/raindrop/2009/10/22/introducing-
raindrop/#post-1)

~~~
adamc
I read that far too, but it wasn't very compelling. Getting videos in my IM
instead of clicking on a link is revolutionary? They may proove me wrong, but
it didn't make me want to download it.

------
ericb
Thunderbird is so painful to use that I have trouble imagining the Thunderbird
team producing something great. I'd rather they fixed Thunderbird.

I'm tired of:

\- Getting prompted for every single message whether I want to send in html or
plain text format.

\- Search that takes forever.

\- Junk in my inbox, messages I wanted in junk.

\- A UI that finds any excuse to pop a modal dialog in my way.

Can anyone recommend another FOSS mail client that it is both good, and cross
platform?

~~~
aerique
Your Thunderbird experience is almost completely opposite of mine. Gnus is my
main e-mail client but there are a couple of Windows machines I run
Thunderbird on.

All of your points can be solved by going through the configuration options.
Maybe that shouldn't be necessary, but not everyone's the same.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Likewise. There hasn't been a lot of innovation in the Thunderbird client, but
it consistently and mostly stays out of the way. Search is pretty fast and
messages go where they're supposed to go.

In ~five years of using it across three machines, I've only had two instances
in which a folder got corrupted, and in both cases I was able to repair it and
recover the messages.

Also, when I migrated from Windows to Linux, transitioning my email profile
was utterly seamless.

------
babyshake
Raindrop seems conspicuously similar to Wave, both in its title and its
functionality.

It's interesting to see Mozilla getting more independent, post-Chrome.

~~~
weaksauce
I would say that it looks more like an extensible message classification
"email" client that aggregates more than just email.

The point about the name is interesting.

------
there
the problem i see with it is that it's all client-side filtering. when you
access your email account from another computer, a webmail client, an iphone,
whatever, all of those messages are still lumped into your inbox unless you
have server-side filtering.

i still use procmail on my server to shuffle messages into imap folders before
any of the clients see them. mailing lists go to separate folders that i never
have to look at on my phone and my inbox stays clean so that new mail
notifications on my phone actually mean something important has come through.

~~~
janl
I use procmail & IMAP on my server and raindrop as a IMAP client. Works well.

In addition, Raindrop, being written on top of CouchDB, supports n-master-
replication. You could just replicate your locally filtered messages to your
other devices with or without going through a central server.

~~~
there
so you need two sets of filters? procmail and raindrop? does raindrop actually
move messages between folders or just present a filtered/sorted inbox like sup
(<http://sup.rubyforge.org/>)?

~~~
janl
Raindrop doesn't filter, but it adheres your server filters

------
chaosmachine
The logo reminds me of Drupal:

<http://images.google.com/images?q=drupal+logo>

~~~
pistoriusp
And the interface
([http://www.flickr.com/photos/43332657@N06/3996189794/sizes/o...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/43332657@N06/3996189794/sizes/o/in/pool-1279790@N22/))
looks similar to fever (<http://feedafever.com/#demo>)

~~~
janl
This is only one of many possible, experimental interfaces. There already are
alternatives, and they encourage for a lot more.

------
smokinn
So far it's exactly what I do in gmail.

Whenever I sign up to a new mailing list I simply click filter messages from
this mailing list when the confirmation arrives, select skip inbox and archive
and apply a label of the mailing list name. That way, all the mailing lists
have their own label on the left bar with the number of unread messages in
each and don't clutter up my inbox.

I can do the same with facebook/amazon/whatever but I actually care about
reading my facebook emails right away (I only get emails when invited to
events or have new messages) and don't get much spam from amazon and whatnot,
I always unsubscribe.

I fail to see any innovation in what they've done.

------
jerome_etienne
It is clearly in the same vibe as wave... only google has already a version
with wave, it is opensource and is much further at the moment. I hope will not
start to act like microsoft on innovation. Microsoft is getting used to "try
to follow the leader, 10miles behind". Additionnaly their post doesnt even
mention the existence of wave... what to think about that ?

~~~
lbrandy
They can't mention google wave in every post to their blog.

Try: <http://labs.mozilla.com/raindrop/faq/>

>How does Raindrop relate to Google Wave?

>Google Wave is attempting to create a new form of messaging. We applaud their
effort to innovate in the messaging space, and if it gains traction, we will
be looking at ways to integrate the messaging protocols from Wave into the
open, extensible user interface of the Raindrop platform. In the meantime,
Raindrop is focusing on complementing existing messaging sources.

~~~
jsz0
Sounds like a much more realistic approach than Wave.

------
BjornW
The thing I found most interesting, is the use of couchdb and python for
Raindrop instead of XUL.

My hypothesis: Due to CouchDB being used by both Canonical (UbuntuOne) and now
Mozilla in new interesting 'products I'm more and less convinced that CouchDB
will be become a the choice for data storage. It seems like a good replacement
(although comparing the two isn't really fair) for sqlite.

Why? Because it supposedly (I haven't tested this myself yet) makes it very
easy to sync between different couchdb instances (making it easier to have on-
offline applications) and because you can 'run' a complete application from it
using only html and javascript.

I've been reading Chris Anderson's
([http://jchrisa.net/drl/_design/sofa/_list/index/recent-
posts...](http://jchrisa.net/drl/_design/sofa/_list/index/recent-
posts?descending=true&limit=5)) about how couchdb would transform both desktop
and webapplications and nowadays I tend to agree more and more.

Curious as what other people think of this..

------
fjabre
Wait, is this Thunderbird re-envisioned..? Are they seriously making this a
windows client/download..??

EDIT: You can have it hosted by a service provider as indicated in one of
their videos. Any chance of this being a success..? That's an honest, albeit,
loaded question. Given the track record I'm not so sure...

It's a great idea that would probably have a better chance as a YC startup..

~~~
janl
TB re-envisioned: I don't know. Will they make downloadable windows version:
Yes.

------
sp332
There are videos describing the various component of Raindrop on Mozilla
Messaging's Vimeo page, <http://vimeo.com/mozillamessaging/videos>

------
ajju
Scott Macgregor who used to head up the Thunderbird team seems to have built
another email client (proprietary).

<http://www.postbox-inc.com/>

------
chrischen
I don't think they bought the domain raindrop.com yet, yet somehow the
screenshot shows the app at raindrop.com.

~~~
burke
The status bar also says "transferring data from 127.0.0.1" -- and there's no
"<http://> at the front. They just edited the address bar after the page
loaded.

~~~
chrischen
Oh yea I knew that. Sorry, it's hard to pass vocal inflections and speech
nuances into text and I forgot. When I said "yet somehow ..." I wasn't
seriously inquiring how they did it, just the fact that they did do that. :)

------
chaosprophet
Has anybody here taken a look at the code and/or managed to compile a (atleast
half-working) working build???

------
c00p3r
Mozilla Wave? Who is next? Apple?

