Patrick Nagel wrote:

Plugin or not... always debatable, I guess.

Take LDAP addressbook support, for example - isn't that something that could also be provided by a plugin? It also requires configuring a backend system (an LDAP directory).

Absolutely - if there is a flexible framework almost everything except the framework itself can be a plugin - with some plugins required (see Typo3 for a great sample of this!). But unless this Plugin system is done its hard to implement something like this without patching the sources.... so first job: plugin architecture!

On a side note: funny that we're currently all using Thunderbird as our mail client ;)

I'm sure mainly because a desktop client is always ways better and better performing than any Web based application can be... and on your own systems you usually can install applications...

Mike