Plugging Presence Awareness into Mozilla Thunderbird

Presence awareness, that is the awareness of what distant colleagues are doing and their availability for interaction, plays a key role for coping with the lack of physical proximity and improving multi-site work. Despite its limited potential for signaling awareness and availability for interaction, email is the form of computer-mediated communication in widest use today and often the place where collaboration emerges. In this paper we present a plugin that uses the XMPP protocol to augment Mozilla Thunderbird mail client with presence awareness, thus reducing the friction of also running an IM system for signaling presence and availability.