Thunderbird:UX:Test Pilot

Test Pilot For Thunderbird

We need more information about how our users work. To that end, we're hoping to see a Thunderbird port of Test Pilot before too long. If you're interested in helping with the porting work, it's believed not to be too hard, and mailto:jono@mozilla.com has offered to help you get started.

Interesting Studies

Some ideas for studies:

Possible through automation

Thunderbird can collect these metrics automatically and without user intervention on machines where the user has installed the Test Pilot plugin.

• Crypto
  • SSL: Gather telemetry about the most popular ISPs that use SSL to protect communications with clients, namely SSL/IMAP and SSL/SMTP. Examples of data to collect would include ISPs that:
    • use self-signed certificates
    • use expired certificates
    • use revoked certificates (or have not set up revocation properly)
    • send incomplete cert chains
    • ask for SSL client-auth certs
    • use otherwise invalid certs (anything that generates an error)
  • S/MIME: Gather information about S/MIME usage and errors. (This might be tricky for a number of reasons. Need to think about this some more.)
• Performance
  • Number of messages per folder
• Search
  • What kind of searches are used, i.e. what combination of search criteria?

Requires User Action

These ideas require the user to complete a survey of some sort.

• Backup
  • Find out what kind of email backup people would want, if any
  • Example Questions:
    • How often do you back up your email?
    • Have you ever lost old emails before?
    • How much would email backup be worth to you?

Which pref are really used

In order to clean up the UI (as Firefox do in Fx4), we need to know which pref have been changed by the user from their default value to a new value. This will allow us to track the prefs that are maybe not understandable or never used.For instance, do the user care about "marking the junk message as read" pref?