A look at Thunderbird 2.0 Beta 254
lisah writes "Linux.com has reviewed Mozilla's first beta release of the Thunderbird 2.0 email client and says that, while it 'won't knock your socks off,' there are plenty of reasons to try it out or upgrade from previous versions. The new Thunderbird does away with the limitations of labels and instead allows users to tag emails to their heart's content, in the same vein as Google's GMail. Developers also tossed in a bunch of other useful features like customizable pop-up notification of new email, better search capabilities, and a neat way to navigate through the history of recently read emails. Mozilla developers didn't get everything right, however, since the account setup continues to be something of a headache."
automatic grouping (Score:4, Interesting)
The best place to start would be to automatically create saved searches for all emails in your address book. If you wanted to go nuts with it, you could do a saved search of all unique email addresses in your inbox, if they number above a certain threshold. You could then also do some standard groupings that a user could select, like 'Yesterday, this week, this month, last month', common strings in the subject lines, etc.
edit incomming mail (Score:5, Interesting)
Import... (Score:5, Interesting)
Come on, guys. How hard can it be to add support for that to the import wizard? It just needs to be a frontend for copying the files! That feature has been lacking from Thunderbird and its ancestors for, like, ever.
Re:Import... (Score:3, Interesting)
Tabbed Messages (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Import... (Score:2, Interesting)
Can we finally use SpamBayes? (Score:5, Interesting)
"ham" - Messages which scored below a rather low value (10?) and are considered non-spam. Those messages get left alone in whatever folder they were found in.
"unsure" - Anything that falls in the middle gets moved to a "Maybe Junk" folder. For the most part, this stuff is spam, but the bayesian engine isn't quite sure. So it's worth checking for false positives (which are rare, but can happen until the engine is trained).
"spam" - Stuff in the spam folder scored so high on the bayesian value that it's almost certainly spam. The odds of finding a false positive in this folder are extremely low so I never bother looking.
Now for the real magic of SpamBayes... it remembers where a message was when it was flagged as "unsure" or "spam". If you find a message that was mis-tagged, you can tell SpamBayes that it made a mistake and it will add the message to its ham corpus and move the message back where it belongs.
(That and intelligent message notification are the two things that drive me nutz with Thunderbird 1.5 and prevent me from switching over entirely.)
Poor SMTP = Not Viable (Score:1, Interesting)
This is disturbing for three reasons:
1) It hinders adoption by making a common feature odious to use
2) It shows a complete lack of attentiveness by the developers to user concerns/requests
3) It diminishes the Mozilla/Firefox brand by not living up to the standards set by those programs
I'd love to use it - especially on Windows as an alternative to Outlook Express - but until it can properly support e-mail accounts and show some responsiveness to its users, I'm not going to bother with it.
State of email (Score:3, Interesting)
Some of the comments below will link to my lack of skills in areas of system administration and I encourage replies to those issues as much as any other feedback. Better yet - write a howtoforge article describing how to set such a system up under debian stable
My needs for an email system are:
- data should be stored on the server (centralised backup, provision for web mail when you need it, ability to have an administrator control it, access from multiple hosts)
- server-side spam filtering which can also take easily feedback from the client on what proved to not be spam, or what was and was missed.
- server-side addressbook
- should deal only with plain text - non plain text should be flattened to plain text. It would be nice to automatically bounce office files with a message to tell the person to send stuff as PDF or plain text.
- effective searching
- very responsive client for reading mail
- very responsive client for writing mail
- effective communication between client and server that doesn't require the user to wait
I don't really see how thunderbird's design lends itself to fitting into an infrastructure that meets those requirements.
Perhaps my biggest problem with Thunderbird and all mail clients that I've encountered is that IMAP proves to be inadequate. Communicating with an email server over IMAP makes for a klunky experience (*particularly* over a latent connection), and it shouldn't need to be this way. Perhaps IMAP is a bad fit for the task.
Time and time again we see people trying to build a 'Microsoft Word killer' without them ever stopping to think about whether a monolithic word processor is even a good idea (I suggest that it's not). Similarly, Thunderbird strikes me as a really good attempt at producing a product idea that is fundamentally flawed. We should be working to phase out monolithic email clients.
Surely all that should be required of a good client is this:
- Keep the client's disk archive of the mailbox synchronised with the server so that searching is easy, and do so inobtrusively (all the IMAP clients I've used are quite obtrusive and brittle as the number of possible connections rises), but reflect changes to the client back on the server (I don't think fetchmail does this)
- Composer that has access to the server's addressbook and sent folder and has a spellchecker
- Email viewer
Meh (Score:4, Interesting)
mutt (Score:4, Interesting)
When I first started using it at the office, I used to joke that when it came to Word document attachments, in the time that it took an Outlook/Netscape user to open the document in Word, I was able to open the document in catdoc, skim through, confirm that the document was not worth reading and delete the message.
Re:State of email (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:IMAP (Score:3, Interesting)
Speaking as an Exchange Server specialist... (Score:4, Interesting)
One lovely little thing about Outlook I've always thought useful though was the English language date parser in the "Meeting Request" form -- you know, where you can type in "two years from yesterday" and it parses it to the correct date? Bloaty but useful, if you remember it's there. (Anyone willing to tackle that one? LoL...)
Some of the best features in Outlook are buried -- VBA forms, because they don't show up in the preview pane (which many folk use in preference to opening the message), Journalling, because not all of us have the discipline or inclination to account for our time that tightly (and those who need it want to bill directly, too) and the email-addressable public folder (ES only) with it's extended rule set is nice.
Trouble is, of course, these features aren't really used. Some of this is just bad tuning, but a lot of it is just streamlined out of our day because the return on effort is bad.
A lot of brainy people got together and dumped features in bulk into Outlook, and the result is just too many features -- features that consume eyeball space, that aren't used and just get in the way. UI Clutter can be a real pain when you sit in front of a screen all day.
If people want mail and calendaring, no point in buying Outlook just for that. And even in sophisticated corporate environments, the niche features just don't get used.
Wasn't there a recent thread where folks said they're not interested in technology any more, they just want things to work? I really like simple, rugged messaging, and I think the appeal of Thunderbird for the masses is that it really does just one thing very well, and doesn't try to be a games console or a file explorer too. Not everybody likes to keep ten different rule sets in their head when they open a program. To be anywhere near successful, the next generation of Outlook should divest itself of all that nichy stuff. Any fool with a dollar can buy air time, but simple ideas have broader appeal, because not all users are nerds anymore. Microsoft's marketing should spend less on advertising and more on learning what the non-nerds really want to use.
Thanks for the rant. T-bird rules, ok?
I do this with my IMAP server (Score:5, Interesting)
I use bogofilter, but it's the same thing: spam, unsure, and everywhere else.
Advantages:
- Filters on the server, as messages come in.
- All the features you're talking about, from any IMAP client.
Disadvantages:
- Linux only (uses inotify to detect messages dropped to the "spam" folder)
- Any other filters (LKML goes here, girlfriend's stuff goes here) must be implemented on the server, currently Maildrop only.
- Filters on the server. If you have limited server resources, this may be a problem.
- Could conceivably lose mail during a retrain, due to the (admittedly stupid) way in which I handle retrains.
- While it works on any client, no client that I know of has decent keyboard shortcuts to help me out.
Basically, when a message comes in, it goes through bogofilter first, then maildrop. Maildrop looks for a bogofilter header, and drops it in the "spam" or "unsure" folder when it finds it. Otherwise, it goes to the rest of my maildrop rules, which mostly sort things into folders by mailing list.
There are also retrain folders: Retrain as spam/innocent. When a message is dragged to retrain/spam, it's retrained as spam and dumped in the spam folder. When it's dragged to retrain/innocent, it's retrained as innocent, with an extra header added (I think it's a bogofilter commandline option) to specify that it was reclassified (as it still might have a score of spam), and then is sent through the maildrop filters again. The maildrop filters look for that retrain flag, so it's guaranteed not to end up in spam this time, and gets sorted according to mailing list rules, etc.
This is where inotify comes in -- which means it MUST be a Linux server for this to work. As soon as the message appears in that folder, maildir structure guarantees it's just been rename'd in, so it's complete and safe to touch. Therefore, I can immediately retrain stuff, meaning the wait is less than a second, but I don't have to poll.
Boring implementation details follow:
The one major design bug is that I don't really know how to deal with maildir folders, so when I see a message appear in one of the retrain folders, I immediately open it, then unlink the file, to prevent Thunderbird or my own script from touching it until I finish piping it through the retrain process. I probably should be putting it in some temporary place, and indeed, maildir folders do have a "tmp" dir, but I simply don't know how to use it properly -- and I would have to rename it where I'm unlinking now. Basically, if the rename/unlink succeeds, it means I've beat the client to it. But if it fails, it means the client has done that stupid thing it does where the message is "delivered" to the folder as new, then the client marks it as read, which moves it from the "new" to the "cur" dir within that maildir.
I suppose I could build this into the IMAP server, but I like how this solution has already been ported from Exim/Courier-IMAP to Postfix/BincIMAP. I could write it as an IMAP proxy, but that's both more complicated and potentially slows down operation other than retrains -- an IMAP proxy would have to intercept and parse every line, whereas I only get to notice when an actual file is created in the retrain dir, and until that happens, my script does absolutely nothing.
So still no multi-line header display then (Score:3, Interesting)
It is a bit like tabs I think. You cant imagine how you lived without it once you get used to it.
Compact folders (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:State of email (Score:3, Interesting)
SeaMonkey/Mail (Score:4, Interesting)
O. Wyss
has anyone figured out how to find&kill dupe m (Score:3, Interesting)
Has anyone found a way to get TBird to search for duplicates and then delete extras?
I'd be happy to import into folder trees called pst1, pst2, etc., then tell it to delete any dupes copied in pst3, then search and delete for any copies in pst2, etc., so that I'm left with just one of each that I can then sort properly into my main tree. But the functionality isn't there. Someone wanna write a plugin?
May give it a whirl (Score:4, Interesting)
Does thunderbird 2 have this great feature? (here's where someone tells me its been in Thunderbird 1 for years!
N.