Mozilla Thunderbird 0.6 Released 479
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.
Pinstripe Theme? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Is there hope for Mozilla? (Score:5, Insightful)
While I agree with your general concept (which I think is that standards are a good thing and we shouldn't use browser-specific extensions on public-facing Web sites), I don't really understand how making sure sites work in the browser that 90% of my customers use "takes money out of my pocket and gives it to Microsoft." If my customers can't get to my content, they keep their money to themselves and spend it elsewhere.
Don't make any consessions for IE. In fact, turn IE users away at the door. Put up some links for them to get with the program and download a standards-compliant browser.
Uh, dude. C'mon. I really think you've gone over the hedge here. People don't want to be hassled when they go to a Web site -- they just want it to work. I'm all for making sure things work in Moz, Safari, etc., but most bosses rightly won't let their employees turn their Web sites into some kind of crusade for the software they prefer.
Re:Sluggishness (Score:2, Insightful)
QT3 seems faster and better, GTK 2.0 seems better but slower.
good spam filter advice with kmail here
http://www.softwaredesign.co.uk/Information
Re:Sluggishness (Score:4, Insightful)
It's Great! (Score:2, Insightful)
Include Mozilla Calendar! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Murky (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Evolution (Score:2, Insightful)
I actually moved my e-mail to IMAP just so I could more freely switch between e-mail clients. No more exporting/importing.
Re:Is there hope for Mozilla? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, the money's not really going to microsoft is it, so much as to your competitors. But, for anyone who gets the 90% argument from their boss:
"Designing for 90% of browsers is our policy? Here's a question. If I answered 10% of the sales calls with "hello [companyname], could you please fuck off", how would that affect our sales?"
"Now imagine if our website gave that same impression to 10% of customers"
Re:IMAP IDLE Support (Score:5, Insightful)
One local mail tree? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Kmail for Windows (Score:5, Insightful)
I can get Thunderbird on windows with no additional effort (IE just the installer.) For kmail I have to step through loading the POS that is Cygwin, load KDE, then load kmail and hope nothing fucks up on the way down.
The new icon doesn't scale (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:What's New: (Score:2, Insightful)
Thunderbird now comes with an installer for Windows making it easier than ever to start using Thunderbird!
Sucks. This means that you have to go into the Control Panel & do all the blablabla to uninstall the application. I found it much easier to simply delete the app folder & unzip the new version in the same place. But I guess that the average user is rather familiar with a "real" installer...
Re:Pinstripe Theme? (Score:5, Insightful)
How many folks on a Mac are really interested in using anything other than Safari and Mail? Camino, Mozilla, Firefox, etc. all run comparatively slow on my G4 iBook. Clearly a lot of optimizations have occured to make the "native" Panther apps run quickly. And they all integrate fairly nice together and have good feature sets so I just really don't see any incentive to change. It is just a question for you guys, would be curious to get some feedback.
Win32 is another story. The default mail and browser suck royal ass. And, Mozilla and friends run nicely.
Re:Overhead (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:database back-end (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyway, at this point I would trust my email to an application that doens't allow me to access it through text-based tools either. But I do hope that computing will once evolve to the point that we can actually work with them without caring what's under the hood. (Like I do with my car now...)
We're in the information age, and having tools that help us manage this huge amount of information in a not-too-intrusive way are becoming more and more necessary... having a well-structured db with all your emails (and maybe other means of communications, like sms/voice calls/etc), linked to other personal info would be such a tool (for me).
Chris.
Re:Include Mozilla Calendar! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Kmail for Windows (Score:4, Insightful)
It absolutely is not. It requires the (questionably licensed) cygwin DLL, so it essentially runs under the cygwin runtime, causing it to be brittle and slow slow slow. Apps running under cygwin have a hard heap limit (I have been screwed running perl over large datasets this way) as well as DLL relocation problems.
KDE should compile okay for MinGW, which can be said to truly be a Windows port, but its main problem is the availability of a free Qt: X11 only. Personally I can't understand why there isn't also a native port of the X11 client libs to windows either -- the server has been implemented dozens of times over after all.
> Otherwise we'll just have to say that all those old applications written in Visual Basic aren't Windows builds, they are VBRUN300.dll builds.
I don't think in most circles you'll get away with calling a (non-native) VB application a "native" windows application either. At least the VB runtime is maintained by more than one guy.
Re:Evolution (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:IMAP IDLE Support (Score:2, Insightful)
But, as good as Thunderbird is at blocking spam and viruses, if it starts deleting people's email because it's not fully tested, there will be hell to pay.
Re:One local mail tree? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's Great! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How do people archive old mail using Thunderbir (Score:3, Insightful)
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 over you local folders (i.e. "all messages from year 2004"), select all, and move to the 2004 folder. What else do you want?
You can still scan them as "regular files" with Emacs if you want. Just can't modify them outside the application. Most of my 'ancient' email forays are informational, not to "do" anything with them.
As far as remote access. Run VNC through SSH. The only thing on the wire is the screen bit changes. Not quite as lightwieght as text mode Emacs, but over DSL should work good enough.
keeping all the mail on the mail host works in IMAP (again you can have whatever hierarchy you want of folders in most setups). The problem is quota. Most likely you "home dir" quota is significantly higher than your "IMAP" quota. My mail archive over several years is gigabytes. No one is going to give you gigabytes on an IMAP server.... Google inlcuded. :-) (gigabytes because folks love sending Word and Powerpoint in email instead of shared file mechanisms.).
Re:One local mail tree? (Score:1, Insightful)
Multiple SMTP Server Overhaul
We currently support multiple SMTP servers. However, the way we associate SMTP servers with accounts and how the user picks the outgoing SMTP server to use is a mess. We need to look at the issues involved with how we present and manage multiple SMTP servers to the user.