An effort to manage the frustrating onslaught of e-mail messages that threatens to bury users is the driving force behind the Mozilla Labs Raindrop project, introduced this week. "We're hoping to give users the ability to see the important messages out of the messages that are sent to them," said Rafael Ebron, director of marketing for Mozilla Messaging.
He stressed that Raindrop is in the early phases of development and much of the project still is conceptual. The organization, he said, has posted the source code for download and is seeking feedback on a variety of design issues.
The Raindrop portion of the Mozilla Labs site describes the project. "Raindrop uses a mini-web server  to fetch your conversations from different sources (mail, twitter, RSS feeds), intelligently pulls out the important parts, and allows you to interact with them using your favorite modern web browser."
Not all browsers can use Raindrop at this point. "We are targeting HTML 5, which right now includes Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera," Ebron said. "We envision IE will be supported in future versions of Raindrop."
Messages Bubble Up
The idea is that messages deemed important by users will be empowered to "bubble up" to take precedence in a manner dictated by the user. The example used by Mozilla Messaging design lead Bryan Clark in an introductory video is the ability to highlight a message from his mother and de-emphasize updates from social-networking sites. Mozilla Labs said Raindrop is not an e-mail client.
The overall goal is perhaps best summed up by a Mozilla Labs FAQ answer about how Raindrop can complement Gmail. Raindrop, the answer says, is "trying to break out of an e-mail-centric view of messaging and provide a user-extensible platform so users have complete freedom to customize their experience."
The resulting functionality, Ebron said, could end up as part of Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client, as a stand-alone Web-based application, and in other formats. Since it is an open-source project, users are encouraged to develop their own widgets to provide new functionality.
A Vague Time Line
The time line offered for the project is rather vague. The early milestones focus on creating designs for IMAP and Twitter, implementing default configurations with a request for anonymized usage feedback, and creating a mobile web front end and "message store APIs" that tie into the back end of Raindrop.
Ebron, who characterized Raindrop as an experiment, acknowledged that the Mozilla Foundation isn't the only organization tackling this issue. "Other companies are looking at ways of consolidating messages and making sense out of all the different ways to communicate," he said. "We are doing that in a very Mozilla way."
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