Second to this, they should probably work on their own first class mail and calendar server as at least open core, and probably as SaaS as well. As much as I li

Second to this, they should probably work on their own first class mail and calendar server as at least open core, and probably as SaaS as well. As much as I like some of the mail hosts out there, for some, the ability to self-host is big. The various pieces and software you have to cobble together are cumbersome, and even then, you don't get anything close to what Exchange+Outlook gives you. I would love for someone to do this, so we could have a nice, self-hosted store for our vital data but still access that data from all our devices, over VPN, etc. The problem, as always with these things, is who that someone would be. While many HN readers might appreciate the potential advantages, I fear the target market for such a product is significantly smaller than for Thunderbird, which for better or worse is itself aiming at a relatively small minority of users in the era of Google Mail and friends. For anything it's worth, I'd contribute financially to such a project personally and so would my businesses, since it would be a significant benefit in each case.