Thunderbird email client plug in - interested parties?

SuiteCRM Forum - English Language SuiteCRM General Discussion
1

Hello,

Due to the lack of a working plug in for Thunderbird, I have been looking over the idea of getting one developped.

The old Opacus one worked very well, but it is not longer being developed, and it broken on newer versions of Thunderbird.

Please express your interest by commenting here with you interest, and what features besides basic archiving of emails would be of interest.

Then, please contact me by messaging me here in the forums.

The idea would be to build it in steps.

1 - archive emails (inbound and outbound)
2 - ability to create leads, contacts and accounts
3 - ability to create calls, meetings, etc…
4 - Synchronize address books?

Besides the first one there is no particular order that they need to be done it. this can be decided.

You have other things that could be done with the plug in?

Thanks for your feedback.

Joseph

1 Like
2

Hi Joe - some of my staff use Thunderbird so we have interest.

What do the Thunderbird forums say - is it getting easier or harder to write plugins (like on browsers, that has become more tricky/restrictive over time).

Regards budget - have you past experience of costs to have someone build custom plugins for Thunderbird?

I would guess there is > $1-3 K costs to do this. (blind guess!)
We have 2 users on Suite + Thunderbird.
Ideally someone with 10 -100 users in that niche would get the most benefit and be happy to stump up the most?

What is your budget?

3

HI again

Thanks for jumping in.

This is the first time trying to build a plug in for thunderbird. Never had a need before.

I have looked for a couple of months now but never had any success. But, I recently found some one who seems to have the skills to hover between the suitecrm world and the thunderbird world.

I would have preferred using the opacus plug in, but not sure if there are going to ever come out of hibernation, or if it is dead. I used it until one day I renewed my license, and their site never gave me my code to make it work. After more than a year, I gave up pursuing it, and with out Thunderbird, email is painful in SuiteCRM.

I decided to give it anothr shot, and have been preparing SuiteCRM. Now, I want a plug in.

The idea is to:
1 - build a basic plug in to allow archiving incoming and outgoing email. This is really the MAIN reason I use the plug in. The other features were really nice, but for me, even if all the extra cool things were not there, I’d not use the plug in if the archicving was not there.

That would be step one.

Other steps would add features that used to exist in the paid version of Opacus. This depends on my budget, and also interest of other people.

The question is: How do i finance this venture? It needs to be created, and then maintained as SuiteCRM and TBird get newer versions.

Do we just give it away to every one? But then, how would we finance it if it was free? I am no programmer, so it needs a paid programmer to do it, and one that will be available to help us maintain it.

Budget? Good question? The person to whom I have been exchanging has only been about the first step.

Hopefully others will jump in and join the discussion.

Are people ready to pay for a working plug in, that is being maintained? We’d need to cover the costs of organizing it all, and programming it.

4

Can you expand on (1): archiving from where to where? Maybe I’m missing something, but an IMAP tool can easily archive 100% of any IMAPmailbox: standalone, outside of SuiteCRM?

What are the nice other features?

Are people ready to pay for a working plug in…

I’d pay say $200 per annum; for my situation of 2 staff with Thunderbird.
What’s your budget?

5

Hello,

When I say archive, I mean: copy email from Thunderbird to SuiteCRM.

The other features in the old plug in were:
+Synchronize leads, contacts and/or accounts between SuiteCRM and Thunderbird

  • Manually archive multiple Thunderbird emails to Sugar records at once
  • Create new SugarCRM objects(leads, contacts, account, calls, meetings, etc…) from within Thunderbird
  • Synchronise your SugarCRM contacts and leads with Thunderbird
  • Automatically archive inbound and outbound mail

If you have other ideas, I am open to them.

But, the first function for me of the plug in is to archive/copy emails from Thunderbird to SuiteCRM. Other features can follow.

As for budget, it depends on how many others might be interested. I’d prefer not spend more that $100 per year. But, regardless if it gets developed past archiving/copying emails to SuiteCRM form Thunderbird, I want to get this basic function working. The rest, time will tell.

The other question is if we share to with others who contribute, how do we keep it from being distributed far and wide to whose who will not contribute, making it more difficult pay for upgrades as Thunderbird and SuiteCRM come out with newer, possibly incompatible versions. Something to consider.

6

DJUser

Any comments or questions?

Might you know where to find a developer?

I’ve been looking on sites where freelancers go. Thunderbird plug in developers are few in numbers.

I am hoping to find something.

Joe

7

I personally know of at least three small businesses that would support something like this. We all used the Opacus plugin before they left us high and dry after taking our license fees and abandoning the project. I also have a developer who says they can build an Opacus like plugin. The Opacus license was $45 USD per user per year and we gladly paid it for the functionality.

The easiest way to move forward is exactly as Opacus did; fund the plugin and charge for an annual per user license. That mitigates your concern of developing the app and having it freely distributed without recouping costs.

How can I contact you directly to discuss?

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If I may suggest something… please don’t get dragged back to that model that ends up killing SuiteCRM in the long run… closed source pricey add-ons.

I know it’s hard to strike a balance, but try to find some model that is open-source and community-driven, even if it does retain some way of financing, especially in the beginning.

Here’s an idea, co-funding:

In short, it’s about selling the add-on until the initial costs are covered, and at that moment the add-on goes free and open-source.

9

pgr,

I agree with you in concept but the unfortunate reality is that recent and future changes to SuiteCRM and Thunderbird result in ongoing coding being required to keep apps operational. That is exactly why Opacus “broke” periodically and the project ultimately failed.

This is obviously part of a much broader discussion but the need is there and we need to figure out a model that provides for the development and ongoing maintenance. I’m only looking to recoup costs but the ongoing maintenance requires an ongoing funding stream.

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Yes. This can be dramatic and I am a victim of this difficulty myself.

There are always to sides to this story. Opacus’ add-on existed and survived because it was closed source and provided revenue.

It fell for the same reason - when the owners got bored or demotivated, it wasn’t available for other people to pick up where they left off.

When it stopped being profitable, or worth it, for the developers, all the money that the community put into it stopped having any future value. People did testing for them, funded them, and were completely locked in to their whims. Not good…

Actually, if they’re not making money from this anymore, and they don’t want to pursue it, the decent thing to do would be for them to open-source the entire codebase.

Maybe someone can reach them on Twitter and ask them just that.

11

:slight_smile:

It would be great (and honourable) for the Opacus team to open source their abandoned code but I was a paying customer and they never responded to repeated attempts to reach out to them so I wouldn’t hold my breath.

I’d happily throw some funds behind this initiative if someone wants to spend time building a rudimentary archive tool for Thunderbird. The only functionality that I ever used in Opacus was archiving and I think that would meet 99% of users needs. Is there a roadmap to starting such an initiative?

12

I would still try (if I had a Twitter account, which I’m keen not to have) a friendly, positive approach asking for that.

A costumer complaint requiring boring work on a software that you’ve given up on… that’s one thing. You ignore that and hope nobody will take the trouble to sue you.

But a positive approach asking for something you can do at little cost and that generates praise… that’s something else.

Look online for Jonathan Cutting, and Enable Technologies.

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@pgr
I’ve tried many, many , many times trying to contact Jonathon and his team. They have cut off any forms of communication.

So, we can stop beating that dead horse. I will not trod my horse down that path again.

As for Opacus giving up. Do you blame them? Thunderbird developers made some huge changes to the way the plug ins needed to be. The amount of changes were a lot to absorb with the constant changes over the time frame when TBird developers work migrating from one plug in platform to another.

Time is money, and Opacus licenses were relatively inexpensive to the other plug ins we see on SuiteCRMplatform. How did they make their money back?

As for how to finace or not finance the idea, while I agree with @pgr, it’d be nice to get opacus to open source it, they have not replied to my request about that. A non response would seem to mean that they are not interested, for what ever reason.

I also applaud @pgr his idea about making an open source project and getting some one to code it. But who will code anything for free? Will not happen. We’ve be looking for a solution for over two years now, and not coder has volunteered their services.

I also agree that some of the plug ins seem to be pretty high priced and smaller users do have have access to them. I cannot speak for budgets available to larger companies.

It has to be:

1 - created with the basic features - copying email from TBird to SuiteCRM.
2 - Make changes on a regular basis to keep the code compatible with both Thunderbird and SuiteCRM
3 - the paid features were useful, so these would be added slowly after the main plug in is done, and while compatibility improvements are done.

The constant upgrade and improvement demands time to organize, manage and pay fro the upgrades. Who ever does this, needs to be compensated as well even if it is a small amount. If this person is allowed to make a living off it(at least a side income), why not. This person/persons are taking their time to manage the plug to make sure it is working for all of us. It can be a small community run project. But, as from all community run projects I’ve been involved in, volunteers burn out eventually.

You also have to look at it as: paying that licence fee for $X per year, did it save me that much money, and then some? If yes, it was worth it.

For all those interested in working to build a new plug in(a fee/licensing will likely created in order to create a sustainable project), contact me by private message.

14

Wait a minute - it’s already open-source!

image
image698Ă—188 31.5 KB

And downloading the xpi file, unzip it (it’s just a zip), it has a license.txt file confirming that GPL v3 license, and all the code in plain text.

This has two consequences:

  • it will be much cheaper to develop the new plugin, it will be just a matter of converting existing, working code

  • the new version will have to published under the same license

15

Not only that @pgr, the code is available at github repository. So if the idea is to add new features or adapt the already plugin to newer versions of thunderbird you could do fork it and made a pull request to do it.

1 Like
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nice find, pgr!

DJUser

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We miss on Opacus/TB functionality and would be very willing to pay an annual fee. I am sure there are many thousands of SuiteCRM users who are also willing to pay an annual fee. Good luck with the project.

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It’s a worthwhile project, but I can’t help but feel you’re over-estimating. If there were really thousands of people willing to pay, the project surely wouldn’t have died. I’d say it’s a few dozens, although it would have potential to grow if the project is good and the SuiteCRM core project also advances healthily.

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Hello Lagunajack,

Thanks for the positive words.

I am sure that there are plenty of poeple who never use teh foruims that coudl use the plug in. BUt, how will they find out about us?

If you are interested, let me know. If you know of others, put us in touch.

Thanks

Joseph

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As you said PGR, it is likely somewhere in between. But, time will tell.

Besides a handful of people I am still waiting for others who are interested.

Many likely never use the forums.

People will likely crawl out of the woodwork if this becomes available. Time will tell.

Have a great day.