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.

New logo

[kronak]

I just think the new logo looks way cooler than the old one

Sluggishness

[gspr]

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?

Any optimisations?

[prog99]

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.

This is not funny, it is insightful.

[Anonytroll]

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.

Evolution

[pseudochaotic]

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.

IMAP IDLE Support

[jaylee7877]

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!

Better spam filters?

[nickos]

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.

icon

[Anonymous Coward]

"and a new brand identity, including a new Firefox-style icon."

Hint, hint, hint, hint...

Time for Slashdot to update its icon for Firefox & company now. No more dinosaur on amphetemenes... time for a real icon. Come on, guys.

Re:Evolution

[kronak]

I very much like Evolution because:

1. It installs much more quickly, and
2. It is better integrated with GNOME.

However, I have been hearing good things about the new version, so I guess you'll just have to install it and see for yourself.

Deleting Emails with Mozilla Mail Client

[Anonymous Coward]

When I delete an email it disappears at the GUI level, but when I vi the Inbox file the email is still there and so the Inbox folder is growing. Am I doing something wrong or does Mozilla email client really suck that much.

Re:Sluggishness

[Azureflare]

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:Is there hope for Mozilla?

[gnu-generation-one]

"If you work on a for-profit site, make every reasonable attempt to resist your manager's urging to violate the standard in favor of IE. Do whatever you can get away with without being fired!"

More to the point:

"Hi, I'm from [companyname] and we're trying to find [large quantities of some electronic product]. I've just been to your website and it says my browser isn't supported. Is there something you can do? No, it's not possible to use Internet Explorer on my computer. Really? I should get a Windows computer? So should I put you down as unable to supply [product name] then?

Nitpick++

[trezor]

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 that much.

And putting issues aside, Opera's M2 email-client is very fast as well (yes Opera has issues. For the web I exclusively use Opera, but M2 has protocol flaws).

Any day now...

[knewman_1971]

As much as I'd like to get away from Outlook, TBird just ain't gonna cut it for me. Having a different set of folders for each email account is something I can't get over. If I could only run Evolution in Windows, I'd be a happy panda. (BTW, please don't tell me to go change prefs.js.obscure.file.whatever. I'm niot interested in hacking my email client to make it work.)

database back-end

[chrisvdb]

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:New logo

[cronot]

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.

Exchange

[pickapeppa]

If only it could work with Exchange in a Networked environment. I am trapped by circumstance into hosting my organization's e-mail with Exchange on the server side and Outlook clients.

Re:OS X Mail

[rduke15]

One very annoying problem I found with Apple's Mail is that it hides server error messages from you. And it hides them very effectively! I found absolutely no way to see why the server rejected a mail.

In case of an error, Apple's Mail offers you a "friendly" drop-down list of SMTP servers, suggesting you try another server. While indeed, the "Relaying denied" error from using the wrong SMTP server may be the most common one, there are cases when that is not the problem. You then have to setup another mail program to be able to find out what is wrong.

When people I know have trouble with email, they call me. But they cannot tell me the error message. That would only be good if I could/would charge by the minute for incoming calls...

Re:Kmail for Windows

[dorward]

You may have to jump through hoops, but a build for Cygwin is still a build for Windows.

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.

Re:Include Mozilla Calendar!

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Yes, they do have it available as an extension. But they need to do several things:

• Include it by default, or at least make it SUPER EASY to install. (It's not click-and-run like some other extensions are, because it's not pure XUL -- there's a native library involved.)
• Allow Thunderbird to handle sending and receiving of meeting invitations (I understand this is in the works)
• Schedule meetings while looking at the invitees' free/busy times. Since Thunderbird already has LDAP support, it should be trivial to look in LDAP for someone's free/busy list URL.
• Most importantly of all, it needs to support server-side calendar store! The open source community appears to want to standardize on IMAP (just a folder called "Calendar" full of vCalendar objects), and that's just a dandy way of doing it. Nobody (and I mean nobody at all) has implemented CAP [beepcore.org] because it's so damn hairy. WCAP [sun.com] has a small following because it's what Netscape...iPlanet...SunONE Calendar Server uses, but IMAP is still the better solution because every mail program already supports it.

This is important stuff, and it needs to get implemented and put into the hands of users ASAP.

(And to answer the Slashbots' next question: yes, I'm already involved and working. Are you?)

Gmail

[bluenote39]

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.

Re:Sluggishness

[Just Some Guy]

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.

Re:IMAP IDLE Support

[FooAtWFU]

Is it as "ballsy" as just inviting viruses by using, say, Outlook?

exporting mail from thunderbird...

[feidaykin]

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?

Re:database back-end

[rduke15]

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 able to read them on any platform, I want to be able to read bits of these files if the hard disk badly crashed.

Replaced MS Outlook with Thunderbird 0.6

[Draculax]

Now I can have an email client with a cool spam filter which I can rely on and not having to resort to Spambayes (which is pretty good except it suck quite alot of CPU) because the spam filter built in Outlook is crap...

Thanks to Mozilla for releasing Thunderbird 0.6, bye bye Outlook!

Re:This is not funny, it is insightful.

[scrytch]

> 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.

anyone know if it works in win95?

[ranarene]

did someone try this release in win95? the system requirements say >= win98

Re:Sluggishness

[nfsilkey]

Funny. I am seeing the opposite.

On a P4 2.4 running Gentoo, KMail began its run well. Over time it developed into a sluggish, buggy mess. Sluggish in the sense that it would take eons to parse my ~36 mbox-based imap folders, even when I am local to the mail server. Buggy in that it would cache valid outbound messages in "Local Folders", "Sent Mail" as unreadable, unusable messages. A side-effect of my having KMail store sent messages in "sent-mail" in my imap tree? Who knows.

Thunderbird, since 0.3 under both Windows and Linux, has flown wonderfully. It did as well under 0.5 also. It appears that 0.6 (as of this morning ;) will repeat this level of performance.

What impresses me is the ability of TBird to perform so well under Windows as opposed to the cygwin/KDE/Kmail hack. This means that all of my "support-calls" for family and friends drastically decreased since mozilla has provided a legit alternative to the recreational home-user over Lookout Distress. :)

My $0.02.

Still no address book import for OSX?

[dalesmatrix]

Just downloaded the OSX version and still don't see any way to import or use the native OSX address book. It may seem like a small point, but when your trying to roll out a new mail client, being able to keep you old address book is a very handy thing indeed. Cheers

Re:Pinstripe Theme?

[Red Leader.]

I for one am not completely satisfied with Safari and Mail and use Thunderbird and Mozilla in OS X (I know I should use Firefox, but just don't, okay?). For the record, I have an iBook G3 900 and the software doesn't seem too slow.

1. 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?
2. Safari's right-click menus are generally useless. The options are poor and they seemed to have chosen different labels just to be different. When you right click in Mozilla, the options are ordered well (most importantly 'back' is right at the top) and textually make better sense to me.
3. Mail.app opens too many simultaneous connections. I had to alter my Courier IMAP server to allow 16 connections per IP in order to get my mail. What would happen if I didn't run my own server? No mail.
4. If Thunderbird would let you have multiple accounts with the same server I'd be totally happy. This is especially important for when you're accessing various IMAP stores through SSH - all the servers become localhost!

Re:Pinstripe Theme?

[rackbreaker]

When I switched from using Win/Outlook Express to Mac/Mail, the feature I missed most was the ability to forward html emails intact as I received them.

One of my websites takes user input in a form, and e-mails the results in an html table. Sometimes, I need to forward these messages to other people. With OE, this was no problem. But Mail would convert the forwarded messages to text-only, stripping out all the table code in the process.

I wasn't able to find a fix for this, so I switched to Thunderbird for its excellent html support. It works well for the most part, although there are some annoying Mozilla quirks (separate inbox required for each account, for example) and the bugs that come along with its "technology preview" status. I also miss some of the integration that Mail offers (with Address Book, iPhoto, etc.)

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

[otomo_1001]

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.

Comparison To Competitors?

[4of12]

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

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

Re:Background on the logo/icon design

[danharan]

Great work on the design!

Now, I have a question as far as default settings. Why is spam filtering not enabled by default?

Mailbox Standards

[leperkuhn]

Instead of importing and exporting all the time, it would be nice if the mail client simply integrated, using the existing mail folders. There's always features of one client that you want in another, but it's a pain to use two different clients. The operating system (windows and macosx anyway, I don't know about linux) already has the address book / mail folder api's available, why not just use them?

Cookies

[Valdrax]

Until Safari allows me to allow or deny cookies from individual servers like the Mozilla family can, it will never satisfy my inner Cookie Nazi. I'll stick with Firefox until then (despite its many flaws).

How do people archive old mail using Thunderbird?

[seaneddy]

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:Pinstripe Theme?

[jest3r]

I use Safari for Web and Thunderbird for Mail.

The new .6 release of Thunderbird is really fast on my 12" G4 Powerbook and looks great too. Its multiple email account management is much better than the Apple Mail.app IMHO. It also has better support for sending and displaying HTML mail.

You can make Safari be friendly with Thunderbird (ie. Email links open into Thunderbird) by going to the Apple Mail.app and under Preferences setting Thunderbird as the Default MailApplication. Kind of obfuscated by Apple on purpose I am sure ...

The great part about Mozilla.org projects....

[MortisUmbra]

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

[stm42]

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?

Re:Is there hope for Mozilla?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now imagine if our website gave that same impression to 10% of customers

Not just any 10% of customers. Often it's the truly internet savvy users and/or people who know the score that are using the standards compliant browsers.

Turning away 10% of your customers is bad, but when that 10% is likely to be highly correlated to the smartest 10% of your customer base, you're in real trouble.

Re:database back-end

[Anonymous Coward]

> I want to be able to occasionally use text search tools on the raw files,

If you put your e-mail into a database, you don't need grep. You put it into a database so you can do better, faster, and more featureful searches. Want to search for a particular sender, you can do it. Want to search for a particular word in a subject, you can do it. Of course you can do those two things with grep, but you'll have to use regular expressions like "^Subject:(.*)search_word". While that isn't bad, it's a little awkward. When you want to do something like "search for all e-mails from bob that were also CC'ed to the boss but not my boss's boss" (yes, I just did that search Friday with my SQL-backed e-mail client), and doing plain-text searches becomes much harder. It took me 20 seconds with my database-backed e-mail client. How would you do that with grep? Putting mail, or really anything, into an SQL database is all about make searching easier.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

With Yenc support missing from the 050 version, my opinion is a loud and clear...No Way will I switch to Thunderbird as prime email and news client. Now if one does not use Usenet for binary collection then it might be. My prime email and news client at this time is Agent 2. I am waiting to try TB 060 to see if it is time for possibly switching. Another feature I want is full control over blasted HTML crappy email just about everyone seems to be sending. I have that control in Agent yet I can not find it in TB yet. Perhaps TB 060 will change that.

It boils down to personal tastes. For me, I think Agent shall remain my prime email and news reader client for the foreseeable future with TB as backup and playtoy. You may think the 100% reverse which is certainly your right.

Re:Pinstripe Theme?

[alexborges]

Im sorry.... ive to go on record about this....

OSX's mail app is a TOY, just like safari is a TOY.

In my work, i depend on keeping about 20,000 emails in my inbox (yeah, all of those are mine).
I work on web based apps and i also depend on a decent browser that can do tabbed browsing in a scalable manner (say, 8 windows, 20 tabs open each)...

All of that at the same time in a 400mhz tibook laptop with 384MB RAM

The only thing ive seen that can handle this is debianppc, self compiled optimized libc6, same for the kernel, some hdparm optimizations, and mozilla thunderbird+mozilla firebird ( cant have the gnome stuff cause epiphany does not have the niceties firefox has, and evo keeps crashing like a stupid bitch on ppc)

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

[.com b4 .storm]

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 consistent with Aqua, I care far more about the lower level compatibility. I'm beyond putting the effort into different address books for different programs - it's one of the reasons I switched to the Mac in the first place.