The Mozilla Thunderbird team ran a survey last month to get a better understanding of the people that use the email client and what they'd want in the app or feel is missing.
The
results of the survey, from 2,300 Thunderbird users, are in and the team is revealing some of the more interesting facts.
For example, 70 percent of Thunderbird users are men, at least based on the ones that answered the survey.
Interestingly enough, 90 percent of those using Thunderbird also use Firefox, indicating a stronger bond to Mozilla products.
A lot of people that use Thunderbird, 65 percent, have it installed on two or more computers. And 70 percent of them also use an instant messaging service or a social network. That's slightly above the average so it may not really be that relevant.
Mozilla also set out to give an estimate of how many people use Thunderbird. Based on data from Thunderbird installs looking for updates from the Mozilla servers, there are about 7.8 million daily active users.
Extrapolating this number, Mozilla believes there are between 15 million to 20 million people using Thunderbird on a regular basis.
This mostly trivia though, the really useful stuff had to do with the things that people wanted to see in Thunderbird. Mozilla says that most of the things on that list actually already exist in Thunderbird or can be added via existing add-ons.
That's both good and bad news. On the one hand, if people want things that are already available, it means less work for the development team. On the other hand, this means that people are having trouble finding the stuff they need.
This means that Mozilla needs to do a better job at educating users about Thunderbird functionality but also a better job at an user interface that makes it more intuitive to find the things you want.
Related to this, Mozilla should also do more to surface add-ons that people might find useful but which they don't even know exist and won't look for them.
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