• In Netscape-branded versions of Navigator 2.x, 3.x, and Communicator 4.x, the application had built-in support for email and newsgroups. In March 1997, the browser group brought all of their code to mozilla.org. At that time, the mail group was focused on enterprise customers and the features which shipped in Communicator 4.5.
• In the middle of Communicator 4.5, we attempted to bring all the Messenger code into mozilla, and do 4.5 at the same time. This "Normandy" effort failed, and was abandoned.
• After Communicator 4.5 shipped, the mozilla/5.0 effort had a major change in direction to use the Gecko layout engine and the XPFE user interface toolkit.
• Netscape's mail/news group is currently working on bringing the core parts of Messenger into the mozilla/5.0 effort.

All the support you've come to expect for SMTP, POP3, IMAP, NNTP, the three pane UI, searching and filtering, message composition, address book, preferences, etc.

What won't be in the open source mail/news client?

• As with other parts of the product, security-related code such as SSL, S/MIME, etc. will not be released to mozilla.
• This section describes some things Netscape's engineering team may not be doing. Just because we don't do something doesn't mean you can't do it. In fact, we hope you do lots of things we don't do ourselves. We're just setting expectations about what working code you should expect to see from us.
• In Communicator 4.5, we built database infrastructure to support very large address books. The reason to do this work was to support replicas of LDAP directories for offline use. Our open source DB, called MORK, may not meet the scalability target we had in 4.5.
• The mozilla classic code contains lots of stuff which has been done better, faster, smaller in the latest code. We won't be bringing any old code with us. Where there's a better way to do something, we'll be using the new way.

• Mozilla mail/news will be capitalizing on a number of the ideas shown in SmartMail. We will be using RDF and XPFE, although those technologies have evolved somewhat since SmartMail was shown. We probably won't be using much actual code from SmartMail.

Grendel is a separate effort to write a new mail/news client in Java. Although Netscape has never shipped Grendel, some people are working on it. Most Netscape people currently working on mail/news are not intimately familiar with Grendel, but we'd like to consider any good ideas developed for Grendel. Netscape's mail/news engineers probably won't be enhancing Grendel.