Do you know about the user’s experience priority list ?

Want to make sure the next major version of Thunderbird is going to kick ass ?
Want to participate to a great open source project , but don’t know where to start ?

The Thunderbird dev team is busy , busy implementing new feature and fixing bugs. As we don’t have the time to implement and fix all the issues we would like to see fixed, and we know that we can count on a few external contributors. So we’ve build a list of bugs and features that we would really like to see fixed. If you already contributed to Thunderbird and find any of these interesting well you know what to do 😀 (we’ll make sure to review and take those patches in).

If you’ve never contributed and wonder where to start and how to get things started , here’s a short list of things you should be reading, and that you should be aware of.

• First of all you’ll probably need to build Thunderbird so you should read this build Thunderbird introduction.

With that you should be set to start hacking on Thunderbird 😀

And if hacking is not your thing, you can come and give QA a hand.

Then you’ll probably figure out that most of the mozilla related documentation is available on the Mozilla Developer’s network. With a specific Thunderbird section.

Once you’ll realize that the code base is huge , you’ll love tools like mxr, that let you easily search the source code.

There are two places where you can ask for help. The first one is a mailing-list/newsgroup. the other is a bit more real time, and is more active on Pacific Daylight Time. It’s an irc channel named #maildev : just join and ask your question (just remember to be patient).

With this you should be set to start hacking on Thunderbird. And if hacking isn’t your thing, you can join QA.