There are tools and resources that you will need to become familiar with to make it easier for you to contribute to the testing effort. Take some time to read them. It's a good idea to bookmark some of these links/pages for future reference as you move forward to work with the QA team.

Just want to take a look at the latest released build and do some ad-hoc testing?

• Read the release notes
• Download the build, install, and run Apprunner to bring up Messenger
• Since the mail product is still in a pre-Beta stage and not all features are implemented, development is using a "dot" convention for unimplemented mail features. A "dot" (.) will be placed before each menu item name for features that aren't enabled yet.

• Get a Bugzilla account. You have to do this in order to enter or update/comment in any bug reports
• Important! Read the bug writing guidelines. You need to familiarize yourself with this guideline so that your bug reports contain the pertinent information for development to process your bug report.
• Understand the various components within the Mail/News product. You may need to get a Bugzilla account first.
• Want to review some open bugs already in the MailNews product? For example, here is a list of all open bugs in the Front End area.
• Some points to keep in mind:
• If you think that you've found a bug, you should (1) perform a search to see if the bug has already been reported, (2) check the mail-news development newsgroup to see if there has been recent discussion on a feature, and (3) if a search doesn't turn up a bug report, go ahead and file one, making sure you follow the bug writing guidelines. If you are unsure of how to perform a search, please check with me. Be sure to narrow down your search scope by setting program=MailNews and by typing some key phrases in the Description field. For example, if you found a bug with line wrapping, you may want to type "line wrap" in the Description field.

• Our "smoke test" page shows the minimum set of tests that we suggest development run after checking in code. If you just want to get your feet wet, you should download the latest milestone build and run these tests.
• Take a look at our test specifications page. Pick an area of interest and familiarize yourself with the tests for that area.

• Take a look at the engineering page. From here, you will be able to find out the development schedule to see when features are scheduled to be completed. You can also find links to development status, UI specs, and other useful information.
• Read MozillaZine! - Source for Mozilla News and Advocacy.
• Subscribe to following newsgroups. The traffic on these newsgroups is not overwhelming :-). If you're just subscribing for the first time, read the most current postings to get you up-to-date!
• mail-news development newsgroup - discussions on code, feature sets, and other items pertaining to Mozilla can be found here.
• general Mozilla QA newsgroup - discussion on QA processes, sharing information about builds, and other items for QA.
• We hope to have a newsgroup for MailNews QA soon!

After you've gotten a chance to review some of the resources, you will have a better idea of what's available to help you get started with the QA process of Mozilla Mail/News. We'd like to encourage your participation to be relatively independent - trying out the newly released builds and participating in bug reports and joining in on the test reviews and testing. As you familiarize yourself with the QA process, newsgroups, milestones, resources, and open bugs, you will find yourself participating more and more. Soon, your level of involvement will be limited only by the amount of time that you're willing to spend!

Please send feedback and questions to me.