I am really jazzed to see the work of the Mozilla Messaging team (Andy Chung, Bryan Clark, Dan Mosedale, David Ascher, Mark Hammond, and James Burke) out there.

Raindrop was so exciting to me, as it allows me to take ownership of how I handle communications.

Gmail is fantastic in that I have been able to extend my experience via Greasemonkey and the Labs tweaks, but it isn’t really open to me.

With Raindrop, you not only get to scrape out some flexibility in the client, but you get to do it the entire stack down. You can write code that changes BOTH frontend and backend. Have you ever wanted to do more than simple filters? Write handlers for particular content in an email? Help you mashup your email in any way? Raindrop will give you that.

It is early days of course. Mozilla is known for getting something out there early so the community can influence it, so jump in.

I am also excited to see that you can hack on things right int he client via an embedded Bespin. Awesome, I can’t wait to see what happens next guys!

There are a slew of interesting videos to check out too:

• UX Design and Demo
• Raindrop software architecture and components
• Automatically Organize / Identify Messages by Type
• Keyboard navigation
• Backend extensions
• Raindrop schema model
• Introduction to CouchDB
• Integrated community support
• First design iteration
• Second design iteration