467397 - Make it easier for people to try/trial Thunderbird without fear of losing existing data

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: General, enhancement)

Description

[David Humphrey (:humph)]

It would be good to give people a way to try Thunderbird without fear of losing their existing mail, altering existing accounts, etc.  NOTE: I'm not saying they will--those bugs should get filed/fixed.  I'm talking about perceptions.  Some people have said to me in the past, "it's easier to try out a new browser than a new email client."

We should fix that.  Some ideas include:

* Create and host a dummy IMAP account that people can connect to, and seed it with mail from the Enron mail set (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~enron/) or something similar so it is full and usable.  Could fakeserver be used here?

* Do the same sort of thing, only pre-load mail into an XPI and do a custom build that includes the XPI

* How to deal with sending and receiving?  You really want to try both, as this is part of the standard workflow.

* This account could be used as a way of doing training too, such that documentation could reference this account, which could stay relatively static.

Comment 1

[cmtalbert]

Attachment: A packaging system to help with this effort

This is a set of scripts (bash and python) that will package a thunderbird build with a lightning build (so that lightning is installed by default) along with a test mail RDF file so that there is a simple way to create test mail accounts.

Comment 2

[cmtalbert]

Oh by the way, because this repacks for all three of the big platforms (mac, linux, win), then you must run it on a mac. (You need hdiutil)

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

same could be said for some addons