Mozilla Thunderbird 0.6 Released

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.

Background on the logo/icon design

[sgarrity]

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.

Oh, and the name is staying Thunderbird

[sgarrity]

As I'm sure lots of people will ask, the Thunderbird name is staying.

Meanwhile

[arvindn]

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.

Re:Thunderbird

[dolphinling]

Thunderbird is most definetly NOT in Java. It's based on the Mozilla suite, which is all C or C++, and a lot of Javascript too.

Besides, even if it is slow (it isn't for me), it's still a lot faster than OE once you get a system full of viruses and stuff.

What's New:

[karmatic]

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.

Re:Is there hope for Mozilla?

[next1]

well said. i'm in the for-profit category, so in practice, i can't actually turn people away at the door ;-)
however, we ensure our html is standards compliant and support ALL major browsers - the days of every site saying "we only support ie and netscape" are long gone (as far as i'm concerned anyway).
we support mozilla/firefox, ie, opera, netscape, safari, konqueror (think that's it!) on all applicable platforms.

mozilla have given us the browser and now developers can play their part in turning things around.

Important UPGRADE Notes

[illegalien]

--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.

Kmail for Windows

[dorward]

Well, there's no KMail build for Windows, so I wouldn't really know.

There isn't? Oh no! I must do something about my imagination [sourceforge.net].

Re:Sluggishness

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, as of not too long ago (a month maybe?), Evolution switched over to using the gtk icon theme stuff so what you want is now possible (where next stable release is 2.0).

Re:IMAP?

[jaylee7877]

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.

Compacting Mail Folders with Mozilla Mail Client

[locknloll]

Right-click the folder's name and use "Compact this Folder" from time to time. Removes the leftovers from old mails from the index file. Eudora has the same stuff, for example, so it's not an example for a sucky mail client, but for an architecture I don't really understand because I'm not a developer :-D

Already there!

[locknloll]

Calendar extension for Thunderbird [texturizer.net]. Have fun :)

Warning - Good for SysAdmins, But be careful users

[Mr Very Angry]

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.

Re:OS X Mail

[mattjb0010]

For those who are running Thunderbird on OS X, what made you choose this over Apple's Mail program? What features does Thunderbird offer that Mail does not?

Usenet. I'm quite happy with Mail.app for email, and Thunderbird for reading newsgroups.

It's not about standards, it's about XUL

[revscat]

Mozilla's success will ultimately happen -- or not -- because of the success or failure of XUL. Standards compliance is not reason enough for companies or individuals to switch to Mozilla, especially in large numbers. The only truly defining characteristic of Mozilla is XUL. If that catches on, Mozilla will survive. If it doesn't, it will remain a niche player, and will probably fade in significance.

In fact, turn IE users away at the door.

This is utopian and dumb. If you are running a business there is no way you would be so stupid as to turn away 90+% of your customers at the door simply because you don't like the way they are dressed. Idealistic, yes. Web standards are well and good, but the real world intervenes.

Re:This is not funny, it is insightful.

[pavon]

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:IMAP?

[reaper20]

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.

What is new?

[rduke15]

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:Better spam filters?

[jedrek]

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.

Re:OS X Mail

[revscat]

Not much. Mail.app is much more elegant than Thunderbird, but it doesn't provide a newsgroup reader. I stick with Mail for - ahem - mail, and use Thunderbird for usenet. In fact, the #1 reason that I don't use TBird for Mail is that it doesn't integrate with Address Book.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Sluggishness

[Azureflare]

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:Background on the logo/icon design

[kbmccarty]

Will the new Thunderbird icons be made available under the same license as the Firefox icons? There unfortunately seem to be some issues with using them in the packages provided by various Linux distributions; please see this thread for details:

Debian Legal thread on Firefox trademark issues [debian.org]

Re:OS X Mail

[Mr M]

Thunderbird offers HTML email capabilities whereas Mail will only do "Rich Text" which is a very small subset. I tried Thunderbird on OSX as I loved it on Windows but I'm holding off until they integrate with the address book and show the number of new messages on the dock icon.

My two biggest wishlist features

[kbmccarty]

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?

D-Spam

[DreadSpoon]

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:What's New:

[poulbailey]

> I found it much easier to simply delete the app folder & unzip the new version in the same place.

... then why don't you use the zipfile? You can download it here [mozilla.org].

Re:IMAP?

[jaylee7877]

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.

Re:This is not funny, it is insightful.

[Finuvir]

That's not the current plan. The current plan is for them to retain their current names. They did originally say "don't worry; it's just a codename" but since putting such effort into finding a unique trademark-free name they're now planning on keeping it (witness the new artwork and brand identity work).

Re:What is new?

[FooAtWFU]

• 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 to change it back... =/
• 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?
• • Unsure. Ask again later.
• Does it still have that insane default folder structure? (c:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\default\sr5qf9vq.slt\Mai l\ etc. !!)
• • I prefer to start with ~/.thunderbird/default/, but I'm pretty sure Yes.

Re:Kmail for Windows

[Microlith]

Thunderbird is built for windows. It requires no more than is available with the base windows install.

KMail on windows requires building a Cygwin install that may or may not NOT work at some point (I've had cygwin fail more often than not.)

So until I can run an installer and get KMail on windows, it's not built for windows.

Re:Mirror , just in case

[Anonymous Coward]

Do the Firefox and Thunderbird have internal consistancy checking on their packages? I saw no mention of any signatures or checksums to verify authenticity on their site. Not to be a prick and I do not wear a tin foil hat but it only takes getting burned once by a fake package to be aware that fakes can occur.

Re:Evolution

[juhaz]

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 unresponsive every now and then when doing something, especially the IMAP support.

3) No bayesian spam filtering without resorting to external applications - which seems to trigger no. 1 very ofter.

Of course evo has some very nice pluses of it's own (calendar, virtual folders, etc.), so it's all about what you need...

Re:Better spam filters?

[SimplexO]

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.

Re:database back-end

[afidel]

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.

Submit your suggestions

[Anonymous Coward]

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].

Re:Nitpick++

[scrytch]

> 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 to use it: Outlook 2003 is great for organization, since I have several folders sorted and grouped (not so subtle RFE hint) differently.

I wonder, why not have a mail application use SQLite for the folder store? Or an arbitrary ODBC or JDBC URL? You get all that organization for free in such a case (including GROUP BY), to say nothing of more or less guaranteed data integrity...

Re:Compacting Mail Folders with Mozilla Mail Clien

[Anonymous Coward]

Not from the index file, but it removes the actual message from the IMAP server. In IMAP world, deleted messages still exist and take up space until they are "expunged" which is what compacting does.

Re:Pinstripe Theme?

[zhenlin]

Pinstripe will use the OS to render widgets and backgrounds and such, so it will match the OS. Therefore, you will get garish pinstripes in OS X 10.3.

Re:OS X Mail

[minus_273]

for newsgroups i have written a small app called OSXnews looks like Mail.app uses KHTML and supports a lot of the features needed for non-binary newsgroup browsing. It is still a Beta in development but you can find it at : osxnews.sf.net

Re:Include Mozilla Calendar!

[John_Booty]

Most importantly of all, it needs to support server-side calendar store!

Thunderbird can publish calendars that are compatible with Apple's iCal calendar format. It's not exactly a replacement for groupware-type stuff like Exchange, as far as I can tell, but you can subscribe to others' calendars and keep your own calendar online so that you can access it from whereever you want.

More info: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/faq.html# share [mozilla.org]

Re:So they've not renamed it?

[Spunk]

You are clearly in need of the Firesomething [cosmicat.com] plugin!

I'm certainly pleased with Mozilla Lightningwhale.
new window
Mozilla Moonbadger.
new window
Mozilla Moonstarfish.

Re:Pinstripe Theme?

[bwy]

Mail.app's handling of multiple mailboxes is horrendous - it puts all the mail from multiple inboxes into ONE inbox! Holy cow, Batman, which acid monkey dreamed that one up?

Hmmm... I'm running Mail 1.3.4 and have 4 inboxes, one for each mail POP3 account (3 are on one server, the fourth is a different server). Now, the way it looks visually, the 4 individual inboxes are listed UNDER a parent "Inbox", but there are actually 4 separate inboxes underneath it. Are we talking about the same thing?

I like the ease of being able to take an account offline by right clicking on an inbox icon. Most of the time I want my desktop receiving work email and don't want the iBook butting in, however when I'm off site with the iBook for work purposes I can have Mail fetch my messages.

Visual notification is here!

[univgeek]

While it doesn't show the number of new messages, it does keep popping up in the dock, and the icon gets a green tick mark, if there is a new email. I love it!!

Re:How do people archive old mail using Thunderbir

[Anonymous Coward]

I use IMAP. It's true that the mail resides on the mail host, but the "mail host" for IMAP can be your computer, which is what you're doing de facto anyway.

Takes a bit to set up but you won't be looking back. And you can also set up webmail with squirrelmail for internet cafe/kiosk access when you're away. It's very convenient, really.

Re:IMAP IDLE Support

[His name cannot be s]

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.

Re:Murky

[Plutor]

I guess that means that you guys didn't use Lookout [lookoutsoft.com], the single most useful plugin for Outlook. Since I'm forced to use it at work, at least Lookout makes it useful. Searching for old emails with Lookout is as easy as I can only assume GMail [google.com] will be.

And I'm not even kidding.

Re:database back-end

[egoots]

I thought it already used an internal database backend.

I was under the impression that the Mozilla Mail client uses Mozilla's "Mork" database engine to store all the messages as well as the address book data. I also assumed Thunderbird used the same infrastructure.

Re:One local mail tree?

[cortana]

I think you can do this already [mozilla.org], if you don't mind editing your prefs.js file by hand. You can give each identity a different incoming POP server.

Re:Evolution?

[symbolic]

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 automatically- and that's not always a desired option.

Re:As a new MacOS X user, I have one question.

[Tin Foil Hat]

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.

Re:How does this compare to Forte's Agent on Windo

[HoaryCripple]

If you want a replacement for Forte Agent, you should check out Pan [rebelbase.com] (pimp ass newsreader). This is the best newsreader if you want text groups or if you want to leech binaries.