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Mozilla The Internet

Mozilla Thunderbird 0.6 Released 479

Posted by CowboyNeal from the stopping-spam-and-looking-good dept.
KonijnenBunny writes "May 3rd sees the release of the 0.6 version of Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail and newsgroup client, featuring improved junk-mail controls and a new brand identity, including a new Firefox-style icon. I switched from some murky client which didn't exactly have a bright outlook regarding spam to Thunderbird a while back and was not dissapointed. Grab this latest version at Mozilla.org." Mac OS X users can also enjoy the new Pinstripe theme, which matches the previous theme of the same name applied to Firefox.
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Mozilla Thunderbird 0.6 Released More

Mozilla Thunderbird 0.6 Released

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  • So they've not renamed it? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 03, 2004 @09:47AM (#9039720)
    I would have thought that they would have renamed it to fit in with Firefox. Thunderfox isn't that bad a name, is it?

    • This is not funny, it is insightful. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonytroll ( 751214 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @09:52AM (#9039781) Journal
      Actually, that is not a bad point. It is a question if you want brand consciousness and a lot of jokes (you don't change the name to Thunderfox) or you want a similar naming scheme and a lot of jokes (you change the name).
      On the other hand, they might run into trademark-problems once again if they try to change the name of the program to Thunderfox. There are only so many words one can use for a product/company per market niche.

      I'd say this is one of those problems that are best ignored, however not renaming it is the easier way out.

      • Re:This is not funny, it is insightful. (Score:5, Informative)

        by pavon ( 30274 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @10:18AM (#9040017)
        On the other hand, they might run into trademark-problems once again if they try to change the name of the program to Thunderfox. There are only so many words one can use for a product/company per market niche.

        Good point. FYI a quick search [google.com] only brings up one software package called thunderfox - a video game from the 80's, and a bunch of posturing on whether thunderbird will change it's name to thunderfox. Discarding those [google.com] just leaves us with people who call themselves thunderfox on the internet, and just happen to be talking about software. So if there is a software package called thunderfox, the authors apparently don't care about anyone knowing about it.

      • Re:This is not funny, it is insightful. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by scrytch ( 9198 ) <chuck@myrealbox.com> on Monday May 03, 2004 @11:00AM (#9040434)
        > Actually, that is not a bad point. It is a question if you want brand consciousness and a lot of jokes (you don't change the name to Thunderfox) or you want a similar naming scheme and a lot of jokes (you change the name).

        It is a similar naming scheme. Firefox, Thunderbird ... what the hell is a "Thunderfox"? It just happens to name a different commonly heard of imaginary animal (tho actually a Firefox is a red panda).

        I can only hope the ridiculous "Sunbird" name for the calendar product never takes off (and they get a better icon that's actually visible). It's not an official mozilla product anyway, so I'm not worried yet. Maybe "Sundog", but there's got to be another creature that'd fit the scheme.

    • Re:So they've not renamed it? (Score:5, Funny)

      by jdreed1024 ( 443938 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @10:08AM (#9039941)
      Thunderfox isn't that bad a name, is it?

      Not bad. But I think the male geeks out there need something a little more manly. Like, say, ThunderCougarFalconBird.

      Car Salesman: Spotted her the moment you came in, didn't you? She's a real beauty.
      Fry: Yup, she's beautiful coffee alright.
      Salesman: No, the Ford ThunderCougarFalconBird! Nothing makes you feel more like a man than a ThunderCougarFalconBird! So how much were you thinking of spending on this ThunderCougarFalconBird?
      Fry: Sorry, I'm not here to buy.
      Salesman: I understand, and it's great that you don't care if anyone questions your sexual orientation.
      Fry: I care! I care plenty! I just don't know how to make them stop!
      Salesman: One word: ThunderCougarFalconBird.

    • Re:So they've not renamed it? (Score:5, Funny)

      by FattMattP ( 86246 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @10:37AM (#9040157) Homepage
      Continuing with the creatures of the forest theme (bird, fox) I nominate Thunderbunny as the new name.

  • New logo (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kronak ( 723456 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @09:49AM (#9039740)
    I just think the new logo looks way cooler than the old one

    • Re:New logo (Score:3, Interesting)

      by cronot ( 530669 )
      Too bad these also are trademarked. Debian can't use it because apparently it would violate the DFSG (Some threads about it [google.com]) , so I have to stick with Debian's build of Firefox and Thunderbird that has crappy icons and logos.

  • Murky (Score:5, Funny)

    by Poster Nutbag ( 635382 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @09:50AM (#9039746)
    I switched from some murky client which didn't exactly have a bright outlook regarding spam

    That's geekspeak for Outlook Express, if I remember.

  • Background on the logo/icon design (Score:5, Informative)

    by sgarrity ( 262297 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @09:50AM (#9039753) Homepage
    There's a great post by Jon Hick's about the design process for the new icon/logo [hicksdesign.co.uk].

    Jon has been helping us with the visual identity work on Firefox and Thunderbird and doing some really great work.

    Keep in mind, the artwork will continue to improve. Two issues we are particularly focused on improving are the small versions of the icons, and the visual consistency between the Firefox and the Thunderbird icons.

  • Sluggishness (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gspr ( 602968 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @09:50AM (#9039758)
    I don't mean to start a flamewar, but KMail REALLY does seem a lot more responsive (especially when manuevering about in the pulldown menus) than Thunderbird. Do you agree? If not, could I have done something wrong at some point?

    • Re:Sluggishness (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Azureflare ( 645778 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @10:03AM (#9039908)
      Absolutely. I use kmail, and I really wanted to start using Thunderbird, because I use firefox all the time, and REALLY want to get away from KDE (I'm using XFce right now). Well, kmail still wins hands down; thunderbird is really way too slow, the menus are sluggish, new emails take forever to open (On a AMD 2200+). Granted, I haven't tried thunderbird 0.6 yet. I'll have to give it a try, maybe once it gets on mandrake cooker I'll rebuild it.

      I like kmail a lot, I just wish it wasn't so bloated with all the kde stuff. I only use a few kde apps.... kdevelop, quanta, kmail...

      I could replace those with GTK apps (anjuta, bluefish, evolution or thunderbird), but I really like the responsiveness of the qt applications. I like the gtk apps, but as long as I'm using kmail, I might as well just use the kde apps.

      Actually I'm a long time user of evolution. I would still be using it, if I hadn't one day corrupted my inbox by moving it to itself, and then trying to restore it...and erasing all my emails in my inbox. I still don't know how I did it. But I do regular backups every day now, just in case. I probably could go back to evolution... But the icons in evolution are just so BORING. I wish Ximian would release some Official icon sets, or at least have an official way to customize the icons of Evolution, like Thunderbird does. Then I'd probably go back to evolution. (as you can tell I hate the icons in evolution). Why doesn't Ximian add support like this? I've tried the crystal icon hack for evolution, but it doesn't get all the icons, and ends up looking messy.

      • Re:Evolution? (Score:3, Informative)

        by symbolic ( 11752 )
        Actually I'm a long time user of evolution

        I think evolution has potential, but it's got a ways to go - after I lost all my email from an update, I decided to dump it. I now use thunderbird. One of evolutions most annoying "features" was its inability to check mailboxes individually - it's always an all-or-nothing proposition. The stupid thing about it is that for those that you don't want to check, you have to cancel a series of password dialogs- every time, unless you set it to check certain boxes automa

    • Re:Sluggishness (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Palshife ( 60519 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @10:03AM (#9039910) Homepage
      Well, there's no KMail build for Windows, so I wouldn't really know.

    • Nitpick++ (Score:3, Interesting)

      by trezor ( 555230 )

      Not to be a Nitpick, but can I download the KDE environment for Win32, so I can compile KMail on my workmachine running Windows XP?

      Mozilla might not be perfect, but at least it's platform independent.

      And not to nitpick even further, but if there is one thing Outlook is, it is responsive. Still doesn't mean I would use it for anything in the world.

      Nothing wrong with tight code, but for some applications speed isn't everything. Mail is probably one of those things where speed really doesn't matter t

      • Re:Nitpick++ (Score:3, Informative)

        by scrytch ( 9198 )
        > And not to nitpick even further, but if there is one thing Outlook is, it is responsive.

        Clearly you haven't experienced the joy of searching messages. Especially if there's 5000+ messages in the folder. Thunderbird manages to do it as I type, and I can still do other mail operations. Outlook 2003 still single-threads it and prevents me from even composing mail while it's busy doing it.

        Opera indeed makes both of them look slow, but dear lord the bugs are heinous. I stick with Outlook where I have

    • Re:Sluggishness (Score:5, Informative)

      by Azureflare ( 645778 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @10:25AM (#9040068)
      Sorry for replying twice, but I felt I should do so in the circumstances. I previously posted about how I'm still use kmail, and I think kmail is more responsive than thunderbird.

      I just tried thunderbird 0.6. Let me say... Thunderbird 0.6 is VASTLY improved over 0.5. I don't know if it's because this isn't a packaged rpm, but the menus are SO much more responsive than 0.5. Opening a new email takes almost no time at all. I must say, 0.6 is a great improvement over 0.5. I think I may just move over to Thunderbird now, especially since I just found an extension for Mozilla Calendar for Thunderbird.

    • Re:Sluggishness (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Just Some Guy ( 3352 ) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Monday May 03, 2004 @10:41AM (#9040215) Homepage Journal
      KMail pissed me off so much recently that I wrote a little comparison [honeypot.net] of common Unix email clients. What irritates me is that KMail is so close to being my ideal GUI client, but they completely dropped the ball on some critical features. Namely:
      • I want a button to hide read messages. It seems like every other client on the planet does this, but not KMail. I read a lot of mailing lists, and I don't want to see the 10,000 messages in debian-user from 6 months ago.
      • IMAP filtering. Here, let me say that again: IMAP filtering. The Bayesian trainer on my email server works by reading messages in a particular folder in each user's IMAP setup and passing each of them into Spamassassin's trainer. Every single client I've used makes it easy to set filters so that I can mark a lot of messages in my inbox as spam, run one filter, and have all of them moved into INBOX.spam.train.spam - each, that is, but KMail. In a corporate environment where the admins want us to leave mail on the server for backup purposes, this is a deal-breaker. Sure, I can manually move messages around by clicking-and-dragging, but that just ain't gonna happen.

      If KMail otherwise sucked, I wouldn't care. However, it's obvious that they put a lot of time into making it a really nice client, except for the absolute critical flaws that make it worthless to a lot of people. I'll keep trying it each time a new version comes out; if they can fix these problems, I'll switch in a heartbeat. Until then, I'm staying with Emacs/Gnus.

  • Any optimisations? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by prog99 ( 319739 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @09:51AM (#9039765)
    I still feel it chugs along a bit slowly at times...

    I use it at home on gentoo box and it feels sluggish compared with the outlook client I use at work on a machine with a much lower spec.

    I guess I'll be waiting for it to meander its way onto portage at some point.

  • 5....4....3...2..1 (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 03, 2004 @09:51AM (#9039769)
    Thunderbirds are GO!

    Sorry couldn't resist it.

  • Evolution (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pseudochaotic ( 548897 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @09:54AM (#9039794)
    How does this compare to Ximian Evolution? I've been using it for a while, but i'd probably switch if it was really worth it.

    • Re:Evolution (Score:3, Informative)

      by juhaz ( 110830 )
      I switched recently from Evo (on Linux, on Win32 I've been using TB for long time) to Thunderbird.

      Some reasons:
      1) It STILL has few "freeze" bugs where it just goes unreactive and can not be recovered without killing the damn thing and restarting it. Those have been there forever, and for a software that old, absolutely should not exist any more. Heck, thunderbird is much younger and nevertheless lot more stable.

      2) (this might be related to the first, or the milder case of same disease) It's very unrespons

  • IMAP IDLE Support (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jaylee7877 ( 665673 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @09:55AM (#9039806) Homepage
    For me, the most important new feature is IMAP IDLE Support. What this means is I can deploy TB to my 1500+ users. They can leave TB open all of the time and recieve instant notification of new messages. Our Courier IMAP Server which uses FAM for Enhanced IDLE Support means IDLE connections are using virtually NILL resources. Rather than polling every x number of minutes which causes a filesystem stat of the mailbox, FAM hooks into the Linux kernel, catches any changes to the mail folder, notifies Courier which in turn notifies the IMAP Client. This rocks!

    • Re:IMAP IDLE Support (Score:5, Insightful)

      by XCorvis ( 517027 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @10:19AM (#9040027)
      You're deploying a "technology preview" to 1500+ users? Thunderbird is great and all (I use it), but that's ballsy.

      • Re:IMAP IDLE Support (Score:4, Interesting)

        by FooAtWFU ( 699187 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @10:44AM (#9040241) Homepage
        Is it as "ballsy" as just inviting viruses by using, say, Outlook?

      • Re:IMAP IDLE Support (Score:4, Informative)

        by His name cannot be s ( 16831 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @12:55PM (#9041806) Journal
        You're deploying a "technology preview" to 1500+ users? Thunderbird is great and all (I use it), but that's ballsy.

        Eh? I've always been stymied by people who view anything less than "1.0" as "not ready for the enterprise"

        In the Open Source world, version numbers are somewhat irrelevant. One day it's .37 and the next it's 1.0 ... Even the linux kernel, when going from 2.2 to 2.4 and from 2.4 to 2.6 was fairly arbirtrary... it's not like alot of changes didn't go in after the version rollover. (and critical bug fixes too)

        Simply put. All software has bugs. Version numbers are simply markers for points in time. While some builds are more stable than others, you shouldn't sit pining for a 1.0 version, when 0.6 is probably damn fine, and less bugs than Outlook.

        Better yet, ever heard of the "3.0" Microsoft Schedule?

        Microsoft tends to release software FAR too fricken early, known as 1.0 (Opensource would call that 0.2)... It's buggy, useless and not worth looking at.

        Then 2.0 comes out, delivers the bare minimum of functionality, but still sucks featurewise, and has some significant bugs (Opensource calls this 0.5)

        Then 3.0 comes out, delivers the promise of 1.0, not too buggy, but functional. Looks like a real app now. (Opensource calls this 0.8)

        Then 4.0 comes out, and Has tons of bells and whistles, and a huge userbase, 'cause they've gone thru 4 versions. Opensource calls this 1.0

        feh.

  • Better spam filters? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nickos ( 91443 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @09:56AM (#9039816)
    I really hope so. I moved my parent's business PC to Thunderbird from Outlook about 6 months ago, and recently taught them how to use the Junk mail feature. The problem is that 0.5 seems to move a lot of legitimate email to the Junk folder (although it may be that my parents are marking things as junk when they just want to delete them - sigh).

    Oh yeah, the new icon looks really nice too, almost as good as FireFoxs.

    • Re:Better spam filters? (Score:5, Informative)

      by jedrek ( 79264 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @10:20AM (#9040031) Homepage
      I'm sad to say this, but the Thunderbird filters are pretty crap.

      I switched to an IMAP setup at home - I have about 8-9 mailboxes on 4 different servers I check, getmail snags them all and courier serves them via IMAP. I use Thunderbird, TheBat and Mutt to read it. Nothing really special about the setup.

      I haven't had time to implement any kind of server-side spam filtering, so I've been using Thunderbird (it's on the always-on desktop) to filter junk mail. The filtering is poor, to say the least. I've been using TB for about 4 months now, training it. I get a lot of spam - 100-150 piece/day - and right now it catches about 70%. Recently, I fed it about 6000 pieces of mail, all spam. It caught less than half. The false positive ratio is also too high for my liking - about 5-8%.

      I probably wouldn't be bitching if it hadn't been for POPFile, which I used back when I was checking accts via POP. With POPFile, the accuracy rate ran at 98.5%. Nuff said.

      • D-Spam (Score:3, Informative)

        by DreadSpoon ( 653424 )
        Check out the D-Spam project. Very effective; claims to be 10x more accurate than a human. (If the parent-parent post is any indication of human skill at spam filtering, than 10x is a gross understatement. ~,^ )

      • Re:Better spam filters? (Score:5, Informative)

        by SimplexO ( 537908 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @11:15AM (#9040600) Homepage
        What's New?

        Improved Junk Mail Controls

        The algorithm for the adaptive junk mail controls has been heavily redesigned to learn faster and catch more spam.

        To get the best possible experience from the new junk mail controls, we highly recommend that you re-train the filters from scratch. Tools > Junk Mail Controls > Adaptive Filters > Reset Training Data. Be sure to train an equal number of good and junk messages. We recommend several hundred messages of each.

        The enable/disable option for adaptive junk mail detection appears to apply to all accounts (Tools > Junk Mail Controls > Adaptive Filters). It is, however, a per account option. To set the option for a specific account, choose the account in the 'Account:' dropdown on the 'Settings' panel, then switch to the 'Adaptive Filters' panel and set the option. Repeat per account as needed.

  • Meanwhile (Score:5, Informative)

    by arvindn ( 542080 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @09:56AM (#9039819) Homepage Journal
    Mozilla is starting the drive to firefox 1.0, and Ben Goodger (the firefox guy) is requesting [mozillazine.org] that everyone report/nominate their most favorite bugs so that they have a better chance of getting fixed.
  • How does Thunderbird do with IMAP and IMAP-ssl? I use Kontact/KMail now and really have little reason to switch, but I'm always up for trying new things if they have really made a nice interface.

    So who uses IMAP with T-Bird and how does it do?
    -N

    • Re:IMAP? (Score:5, Informative)

      by jaylee7877 ( 665673 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @10:11AM (#9039964) Homepage
      As my post above suggests, .6 adds IMAP IDLE support which is an advanced IMAP function only available in a handful of IMAP Clients/Servers but well worth it if you have it. I've found TB's IMAP support to be excellent. It's one of the few clients that can correctly show my Courier IMAP Server's folder tree with all other folders *not* being children of INBOX. It's very fast in grabbing message headers, even on large folders it seems limited only by the bandwidth. It also does a good job of cacheing the info so that the 2nd time I open up a large folder is much quicker than the 1st (unless of course another IMAP client has significantlly changed the existing mail messages). Offline support has also been added with a plugin although I have little reason to try it since most of the time I use TB, I'm connected.

    • Re:IMAP? (Score:3, Informative)

      by reaper20 ( 23396 )
      The one annoying thing about TBird's IMAPSSL support is that you can't check a box when you create an account "Use SSL" or whatever right away like you can in Evolution.

      So, you need to add the new account, finish the wizard, wait for it to sit there and go "the server says ssl only, fool", then go into the account settings, check the box, hit OK, quit thunderbird, relaunch thunderbird ... then it'll connect via SSL.

      • Re:IMAP? (Score:3, Informative)

        by jaylee7877 ( 665673 )
        You could accomplish this by including a ISP customized option, this allows you to add your own radio button instead of just Email Account and Newsgroup account. The file you wish to create is \defaults\isp\US\custom.rdf. This allows you to set defaults for your user's such as the IMAP and SMTP server addresses, SSL support and preference settings. I was unable to find a definitive site for creating the customizations but Google helped me piece things together.
  • Anyone know where I can get one? Not on the apt repositories yet :(

  • What's New: (Score:5, Informative)

    by karmatic ( 776420 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @10:02AM (#9039886)
    What's New:
    • Windows Installer

      Thunderbird now comes with an installer for Windows making it easier than ever to start using Thunderbird!

    • New Default Theme on Mac OS X

      The new Pinstripe theme fits in with the look of Mac OS X.

    • Improved Junk Mail Controls

      The algorithm for the adaptive junk mail controls has been heavily redesigned to learn faster and catch more spam.

    • New Brand Identity

      To be consistent with the Mozilla Foudation's goal of brand identity, Thunderbird has a new logo and supporting artwork thanks to the fine work of the Mozilla Visual Identity team.

    • Other New Features...

      IMAP users can now benefit from support for the IMAP IDLE command which allows the mail server to push notifications such as new mail arriving as soon as it arrives.

      Thunderbird supports server-wide news filters that apply to all newsgroups on a server.

      Thunderbird includes Secure Password Authentication using a new cross-platform NTLM authentication mechanism for IMAP, POP3 and SMTP.

      Mail filters can now mark messages as junk.

      Offline support is an optional download component in the Windows installer and is no longer a separately-downloaded extension.

      Mac OS X users now get new mail notification in the system dock.

      The DOM Inspector is an optional download component in the Windows installer for theme authors.

      Tools > Options > Compose > HTML Options allows you to set up default HTML compose options such as font, size and color.

      Attachments can be opened directly from the compose window to verify their contents before sending.

      Thunderbird now supports the notion of multiple identities per mail account. This makes it easy to have several e-mail addresses which end up going into the same account. Read More [mozilla.org] about how to set this up.

    • Recently Fixed Bugs

      In the case of a failure when copying a message to an online Sent folder, Thunderbird will now ask if you would like it to try again.

      0.6 on Windows includes several improvements to Simple MAPI that allow it to work with older versions of Microsoft Office.

      Pasting data from an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet no longer pastes random HTML garbage before the actual spreadsheet data into HTML compose.

      Fixed several situations where LDAP connections were left open when using LDAP auto complete or performing searches on LDAP directories.

      Improved view source behavior.

      Mail notification for POP3 messages that are marked deleted or marked read by mail filters no longer occurs.

      The "Mark All Read" keyboard shortcut now works for Linux GTK2.

  • Include Mozilla Calendar! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by IGnatius T Foobar ( 4328 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @10:06AM (#9039927) Homepage Journal
    I know that some people will flame on about the "small tools" approach, but it would really make sense to tightly integrate Mozilla Calendar [mozilla.org] into Thunderbird. Like it or not, people have expectations, and the general expectation is that their email program will be a full PIM suite (Calendar, Tasks, Contacts). As nice as Thunderbird is, there's a large segment of the population that will take a look at it and say "No calendar? Then I'll stick with Outlook." And that's a shame, because getting rid of Outlook is one step on the road to getting rid of Windows.

    • Already there! (Score:4, Informative)

      by locknloll ( 638243 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @10:15AM (#9039997) Homepage
      Calendar extension for Thunderbird [texturizer.net]. Have fun :)

    • Re:Include Mozilla Calendar! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by _aa_ ( 63092 ) <j&uaau,ws> on Monday May 03, 2004 @11:03AM (#9040458) Homepage Journal
      I have to disagree. I see a great advantage in having each application in a stand-alone context. I'd rather see mozilla-calendar stand-alone. Not everyone who wants an email client needs a calendar, and not everyone who needs a calendar wants an email client attached to it.

      I don't think the goal of the mozilla projects should be to destroy their "competition". That's what Microsoft does. Instead of immitating and trying to replace Outlook, mozilla should be innovative and different. And I think that they have been doing just that.

  • Important UPGRADE Notes (Score:5, Informative)

    by illegalien ( 313491 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @10:10AM (#9039956) Homepage
    --From the thunderbird webpage--

    Upgraders: DO NOT install Mozilla Thunderbird into a directory containing program files from a previous version. Overwriting files from a previous release WILL cause problems. To re-use the directory of a previous install, the directory must be deleted and recreated, emptied, moved, or renamed. You should not file bugs in Bugzilla if you choose to ignore this step.

    The program directory does not contain profile information; any existing accounts, account settings, options, e-mail, and news messages will remain intact. This release does not require changes to your profile to function properly.

    Important: If you used a prior version of Thunderbird and installed themes OR extensions, you need to do the following or Thunderbird may NOT run properly. Find your profile directory. There should be a sub directory called chrome. Remove everything in chrome. This will not affect your mail data or preferences.

  • Warning - Good for SysAdmins, But be careful users (Score:4, Informative)

    by Mr Very Angry ( 758914 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @10:16AM (#9040005) Journal
    Remember that Thunderbird is still pre 1.0 release which means that you should be prepared for "features" (bugs).
    I switched my own laptop from XP-Outlook to Thunderbird 0.5 a few weeks ago, and I am delighted with the huge gain in performance, the improved virus protection, spam filtering as well as the fact that the new platform is Open-source.
    However, when I did the import from Outlook, it mangled some of the email address and attachments, so I keep Outlook for backup purposes, so I can check old emails. I would not switch back, but just keep a record of all the files you use. Of course, we are all careful and audit-trail all of our work, aren't we!
    To sum up: great product and project, but handle the delivery with care.

  • What is new? (Score:3, Informative)

    by rduke15 ( 721841 ) <rduke15@gm[ ].com ['ail' in gap]> on Monday May 03, 2004 @10:19AM (#9040023)
    A few things are mentioned in the what's new page [mozilla.org]. Some are nice, but it's not clear for me whether the things I need to switch from Eudora are there now:

    • Can the filters now do more than one action?
    • Does it remember the folder state
    • Can I modify the From address by simply tyoing it in the From: line, without creating an account/identity for it?
    • Can we now move mails folder (on Windows) to somewhere else, and just launch it with an argument telling it where the profile folder is?
    • Does it still have that insane default folder structure? (c:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\default\sr5qf9vq.slt\Mai l\ etc. !!)


    There were many things I liked a lot last time I looked. But these problems prevented me from switching.

    • Re:What is new? (Score:3, Informative)

      by FooAtWFU ( 699187 )
      • Can the filters now do more than one action?
        • Yeah. They could do that last release too.
      • Does it remember the folder state?
        • Not quite sure what you're getting at, but I think it does (it'll re-launch your Inbox at the same viewpoint you left it and stuff like that)
      • Can I modify the From address by simply tyoing it in the From: line, without creating an account/identity for it?
        • No, I really doubt it. Though you could do a temporary address change in your Accounts settings. And pray that you remember t

  • One local mail tree? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jez9999 ( 618189 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @10:20AM (#9040039) Homepage Journal
    *sigh*. Is it EVER gonna get a single local mail tree [mozilla.org] for all POP accounts feature? Is it even on the list of planned enhancements? Until it gets this, I WILL NOT SWITCH TO IT. Nor will quite a few other people. I wish the developers would get a clue.

    This issue pisses me off, a lot. Because I'd love to switch from OE, but I won't put up with not having this feature.

    • Re:One local mail tree? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Seven001 ( 750590 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @11:53AM (#9041067)
      Whoever modded your post as flamebait needs to get a clue. Its not flamebait, its the truth. If they want people to switch from OE they need to add a single mail tree. Period. I am another one that won't switch until they do.

      Another thing that annoys me, not quite enough to keep me from using it if they do the local mail tree thing, is the assuming of outgoing mail server. It assumes on every account you add after the first that it will use the first's outgoing mail server. That is NOT something that should be assumed, it should be a selectable OPTION with the ability to add a new outgoing mailserver for that account.

      I'll probably get modded as flamebait as well, but to me this new version did absolutely nothing. Yeah I'm sure they fixed bugs and tweaked it a bit, but I don't see how that little bit of stuff warranted a new version.

  • database back-end (Score:5, Interesting)

    by chrisvdb ( 149510 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @10:24AM (#9040066)
    What I would love as a feature in Thunderbird, is the use of a database back-end.

    When you get a mail the headers are parsed and stored in a database... the sender and other receipents are then linked to your contacts that are also stored in a database. Mail folders like we know them now are then just a certain view of your mail (all mail of the last week, unanswered mail, mail from contact X (also if he changed email address in the meantime!), and other user-defined properties (e.g. regarding project Y)).

    Evolution does this to some extend (virtual folders and db storage). But they've stopped where it got really interesting (like the linking to contacts, tasks, user-defined properties, ...).

    It would also be nice if this db can be remote; this way a webmail application could use the same database. In some way this would then be a new IMAP server... but with more flexibility, support for complex queries, virtual folder, and not mail-only.

    Does anybody else think this would be interesting?

    • Re:database back-end (Score:3, Interesting)

      by rduke15 ( 721841 )
      database ... Does anybody else think this would be interesting?

      No. I understand why you find it interesting, and why some mail clients use databse storage, but I don't find the benefits are worth giving up the huge advantage of plain text storage.

      I will definitely NOT use a mail client which doesn't use plain text storage. I want to be able to occasionally use text search tools on the raw files, I want to be able to read these files even if the application that created them is not installed, I want to be

    • Re:database back-end (Score:3, Informative)

      by afidel ( 530433 )
      It exists, it's called Exchange server. OWA for webmail and Outlook 2003 for local client. Outlook 2003 defaults to blocking executables by default, but unfortunatly still uses IE for its preview engine (sigh). Luckily OWA works with Mozilla darn well so I don't have to risk infection, it only lacks meeting notification which is an ActiveX plugin for IE clients but has no equivilant for degraded clients.

  • He's right (Score:4, Funny)

    by grahamlee ( 522375 ) <(moc.geelmai) (ta) (maharg)> on Monday May 03, 2004 @10:27AM (#9040089) Homepage Journal
    I switched from some murky client which didn't exactly have a bright outlook

    No, outlook isn't very bright.

  • The new icon doesn't scale (Score:3, Insightful)

    by poulbailey ( 231304 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @10:32AM (#9040120)
    I love the new artwork. It works great in the About box and as a banner on a webpage. It's good to see that Mozilla.org takes branding seriously. I don't think that it works well as an icon though.

    The new icon loses its bird-carrying-an-envelope meaning when scaled down. The first thing I thought of was a blue-haired LEGO guy and surely that's not good. The blue color also clashes slightly with the default Windows background color.

    Let's hope they tweak the smaller icon sizes for legibility.

  • My two biggest wishlist features (Score:5, Informative)

    by kbmccarty ( 575443 ) <kmccarty@@@gmail...com> on Monday May 03, 2004 @10:35AM (#9040143) Journal

    I switched from Pine to Thunderbird a few weeks ago; here are the most important things I miss:

    • The ability to mark certain lines not to be automatically wrapped when composing a text email. This is important when reporting error messages from compiler output, etc.
    • The ability to include a text file inline in the email message (NOT as an attachment) while composing it. Useful when including config files, quotes from more than one email at once, etc.

    Another feature which would be nice to have (but not nearly as important to me) is support for mbox folders in subdirectories of the top-level mail folder.

    Anyone know whether it's possible to do any of the above in Thunderbird? If not, what's the best way to make the feature request?

  • Gmail (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bluenote39 ( 766441 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @10:41AM (#9040199)
    I hate to break this to all mail client developers, but after using GMail, I doubt I'd ever be going back to anything else.

    The main problem with have desktop mail clients is about spam. I access mail from 5 diff computers, so it takes 5 times as much effort to train the clients junk mail controls (since they dont share data). With gmail's central reporting, not only do optimize my spam settings, but I also benefit from other people's reporting.

    All gmail needs is some sort of inbox monitor and I'd be all set.

  • exporting mail from thunderbird... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by feidaykin ( 158035 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @10:45AM (#9040254) Journal
    I wish they'd add an option to export mail into some other formats (like a .csv file or something). Also I read that it uses the "mbox" format that is supposedly understood by other clients, and I should be able to import thunderbird mail by choosing "Import from Eudora" however, that does not work with Outlook Express.

    I'd really like to have my mail in both clients... anyone out there manage to export from thunderbird to Outlook Express?

  • Submit your suggestions (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 03, 2004 @11:21AM (#9040666)
    A lot of people are posting interesting suggestions and comments and some people are posting the reasons why they don't yet use Thunderbird.

    To those of you who actually want to see your suggestions implemented, I suggest you file a bug [mozilla.org] or at the very least, submit it for discussion at the Mozillazine Forums [mozillazine.org].

  • As a new MacOS X user, I have one question. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by otomo_1001 ( 22925 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @11:28AM (#9040765)
    When will they get rid of this theming junk and integrate things with MacOS X the way it does things?

    Keep in mind, I only use Firefox when I am in windows or Linux/FreeBSD. But after using Firefox on MacOSX (even with the theme), it just seems wrong. It doesn't follow the interface guidelines. Camino is about the best gecko browser, but Safari isn't as braindead as IE, so less of a need for a decent browser. As far as Thunderbird goes, I just couldn't use it until it actually uses cocoa widgets. It is painfully obvious that the theme doesn't work like MacOS X.

    Well there goes my karma. /proceeds to prepare for negative moderation.
    • As a cross platform product, it seems to me that it would be difficult or impossible to follow the Apple UI guidelines. There would have to be some sort of Mac-only build, which is simply not going to happen without a code fork.

    • When will they get rid of this theming junk and integrate things with MacOS X the way it does things?

      Hell, I'd be happy with the OS X-ish theme if only I could use the systemwide address book and keychain. I use Camino for web browsing, because it supports the system keychain for site passwords and such. FireFox doesn't. The last time I tried Thunderbird, I had to use its built-in Address Book, which was a major reason I did not switch over to it.

      So yeah, as long as the UI is passable and reasonably co

  • Comparison To Competitors? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @11:36AM (#9040879) Homepage Journal

    How does Thunderbird compare with Evolution, KMail, mutt, pine, Sylpheed, and Outlook?

    [I use Mozilla Firefox for browsing but Evolution (on KDE) for email.]

  • How do people archive old mail using Thunderbird? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by seaneddy ( 121477 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @12:19PM (#9041372) Homepage
    I'd love to switch to Thunderbird, from rickety old emacs RMAIL, but one thing keeps stopping me. I get a lot of business email and I need to keep it archived and organized well. My archive is organized by sender and year: about 350 files for different senders each year, averaging maybe 10-100 emails in each file, dating back now over 11 years (about 3000+ files). Keeping this in emacs RMAIL is trivial, because they're all just regular files in my home directory that I can rename or move to new subdirs at will, and I can save emails out of RMAIL just by typing "o" and giving the name of the file. And since Emacs is lightweight enough (!) to run over my DSL connection, I never really need to run an email client anywhere but from my main work machine where my archive is, even when I'm travelling, so I haven't needed IMAP capability.

    When I look at Thunderbird and other modern clients, I just don't see a way to keep track of old email as efficiently. I can create "local folders", I guess, but it doesn't appear that Thunderbird is going to treat these as regular files that I can shuffle off into a 2004/ subdirectory at the end of the year. And worse, since Thunderbird is heavyweight enough that I'm not going to run it down a DSL connection, it's going to create them locally, not remotely on my work machine, when I'm reading mail from home or on the laptop while travelling. IMAP seems to be a partial answer but it's going to keep its data on the mail host, not in my home directory, if I understand right.

    Surely people have the same problem - how do you solve it?

    • Re:How do people archive old mail using Thunderbir (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I can create "local folders", I guess, but it doesn't appear that Thunderbird is going to treat these as regular files that I can shuffle off into a 2004/ subdirectory at the end of the year.

      Of course you can. Now you can't do it with shell commands but you can create an arbitrary hierarchy with local folders that mimic what ever structure you want. I'm using Mozilla but I imagine you can just Right click over the root node in the tree you want to expand, choose new folder. You can then do a search ove

  • The great part about Mozilla.org projects.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MortisUmbra ( 569191 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @12:47PM (#9041715)
    Is the nightly builds. It is SO easy to get nightly builds working. You almost never lose any of your settings, just delete the contents of the program directory, download the .zip containing the newest nightly build, plop it in the old folder, and viola, nice spanking new version. :) for that reason this .6 release isn't really a big deal to me!

    Whens the last time IE or Outlook had an update?

  • PDA Sync (Score:3, Interesting)

    by stm42 ( 687893 ) on Monday May 03, 2004 @12:53PM (#9041781)
    The main reason I don't use mail clients like this is because they will not sync with my palm. I need to be able to make a calendar change in one application and have it on my handheld or vice versa. Does anyone know of plans to include this feature?

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