Mozilla Releases Thunderbird 2.0.0

An anonymous reader writes "The Mozilla Corporation has released Thunderbird 2.0.0. Among the improvements are Message Tagging, updated UI, Advanced Folder Views, Better New Mail Notification and Full Support for Windows Vista and 64-bit versions of Windows."

So far so good

[BuR4N]

Have been using it (2.0) for a day now and so far its a really nice experiance.

The greatest thing with Thunderbird is its "simplicity" (do not confuse with "simple, bare minimum") it just very easy to get into and when you'r ready there is allot of usefull features that the advanced user appricate.

Having used 1.5 for a long period of time its also one of the more stable programs I'v use every day, havnt so far seen a crash or something that dosnt work as intended.

Re:Good for them, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I do

Re:OS X CPU Hog

[BladeMelbourne]

TB2 has 0.00 processor usage according to activity monitor on a PPC Mini 1.42 GHz.

I would Digg you down as inaccurate, but wrong site.

Re:IMAP

[jimstapleton]

actually, he was commenting on webmail as the competing factor, not Outlook.

Personally, on Windows, I use Outlook Express (set to not auto-preview emails), because thunderbird wasn't deleting mails from the server as it was supposed to (everything over 5 days old), and seemed to corrupt my mail local mail store every week or two (TBird 1.5). In BSD I use KMail.

And you still can't import/export vCard files...

[Karpe]

Bummer.

Tagging

[Dan East]

Message tagging has existed for a long, long time in Thunderbird. You could already hit numeric keys to tag emails, which would change the color of the text in the list. This version formalizes tagging, by adding a toolbar button and assigning actual (user-configurable) names to various colors. I'll continue to use the numeric keys, because as usual keyboard shortcuts are so much faster than mouse-based UI. Still, it's nice to see Thunderbird's features continue to mature.

Dan East

Re:One wonders

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Most corporations use the groupware in Exchange/Outlook, Thunderbird can't really compete there as it does not have a proper exchange equivalent to talk to.

Actually, that's not true. Look here:

http://www.citadel.org [citadel.org]

Citadel is a good candidate for an open source "Exchange killer" and it works nicely with Thunderbird. If you have the Lightning calendar extension, it works with that too, and you can also connect your address book. Those are the big three, of course, but it goes deeper than that...

Re:So far so good

[Anonymous Coward]

I too used 1.5 (1.5.0.10) for quite some time, and hated it. Some of the complaints I had are:

1. If you set TB as your handler for news: URLs and click on such a URL, it will ignore any NNTP server you already have configured, but will ask you to configure an NNTP account instead (pops up the wizard).

2. No Next/Previous/Next Unread/Previous Unread etc. buttons in mail view window. Go->Next->Message is not really very friendly (and yes, I do like to use my mouse).

3. Weird handling of messages in IMAP folders. Click somewhere, action applies to a message elsewhere. Especially true with marking messages as "Junk".

4. Bayesian filtering simply doesn't work. I have fed several dozen emails from the same address with substantially the same text through the spam learner, but it still doesn't mark these as spam. Even MS Outlook learned much faster than that. Gmail was a fast learner too.

5. No per-folder turning the preview pane on/off. In fact, several things which ought to be per-folder aren't configurable that way (message threading, sort order etc.).

Some which I managed to fix using extensions:

1. No support for ROT-13 (which is a must for a newsreader).

2. No "Bounce Message" (a la Mutt's 'b' key) feature.

3. No "Minimise to system tray" option.

I personally consider TB to be FF's distant and poor relation. Now that Gmail has started letting people pull emails from other POP servers, I can actually get rid of TB from my computer.

Broken

[Xerotope]

This is what happens when I try and upgrade from 1.5:

"Error opening file for writing: \r\n\r\nmozMapi32.dll\r\n\r\nClick Retry to try again, or \r\nCancel to stop the instalation"

Thanks guys...awesome new release.

Re:Good for them, but...

[jonr]

I use fetchmail to get mail from several pop3 accounts, and dump them on my local server, then I use IMAP there.

Re:Still no Sent / Received Date options

[brix]

In the list of new features, I noticed the following:

Improved Support For Extensions: Extensions can now add custom columns to the message list pane in addition to storing custom message data in the mail database.

Perhaps this means that the problem is fixable by an extension now?

Re:Broken

[Control6]

I had the same error message. Do you have a Logitech Quickcam? I found that the Quickcam software which runs in the background on start-up was keeping a lock on the mozMapi32.dll file in the Thunderbird program folder. I had to use process explorer to kill off QuickCam10.exe before I could complete the installation.

Re:Broken

[Xerotope]

Yes, I had a Quickcam.

Once I closed Skype (which is the only app I had running which uses the cam), it installed fine.

So, anyone know why Logitech is using the Mozilla API library?

Re:Good for them, but...

[Lunar_Lamp]

Thunderbird doesn't allow hotmail access per se, but there were plugins for previous versions that allowed you to access hotmail (and other webmails) through thunderbird: http://webmail.mozdev.org/ [mozdev.org]

Re:Is there a way to make it behave like Eudora?

[drinkypoo]

Is there a plugin or something that makes Thunderbird behave like Eudora in this regard? If there is, I would totally switch mail clients. I'm only hooked on Eudora because I prefer its UI...

The next Eudora will be a thunderbird respin. Just stick with Eudora, and it will turn into what you want.

Re:Still no Sent / Received Date options

[Have Brain Will Rent]

Ummmmm, press on the "Status" column header to sort all the "New" entries, delete the offending mail, press on the "Date" column header to return to sorting by date?

Re:Painful marketing

[anticypher]

I'm going to reply to you again, because I've had a few hours to play with the new version, and I'm not at all impressed.

So spotlight is broken, but that's been a feature request with much finger pointing for quite a while now. The built in search function is still pretty useless. No way to search all headers, or the entire mailbox including both headers and bodies, or to search multiple or all mail boxes in the same search. With 9 separate inboxes, it takes a while to find some poorly remembered email. Granted, I can always open a terminal, navigate to the directory, and perform some unix majic with grep and find, but that's a major blow to usability for their interface. It's not like people haven't been asking for a better search function since early days, but the developers have decided that people just shouldn't be searching their email. Eudora does it correctly, so my standards are not going to come down, maybe all the good TB developers will go over to Penelope.

There appear to still be bugs with the IPv6 implementation, both on the OSX and Linux versions. At least, there is still a config setting to disable IPv6 lookups.

Without too much regression testing, the old LDAP incompatibilities are still there. TB is pretty much useless in corporate settings using AD or other LDAP directory services.

The old indexing bugs haven't been addressed at all. After leaving TB running for a while, various inboxes highlight in blue to show new mail, but there isn't any. Sometimes a mailbox shows unread messages, but searching around doesn't turn up any. New messages sorted by procmail on the server aren't indexed properly if not seen first in an inbox.

The anti-phishing feature has always highlighted quite a few auto-generated emails and some client monthly mailings as suspect. I wish they would integrate some kind of baysian or learning or white-list features on that.

The completely separate address books, with no concept of either hierarchy or being attached to individual accounts (think friends&family, business contacts) is pretty 1993 in its thinking.

One of my biggest problems, is the inability to choose which outgoing SMTP service at the time of sending a message. Once again, Eudora got this right. Since I work in many locations, the ability to quickly change the outgoing SMTP setting without having to go to every account setting and changing it manually would be expected of a real email application.

The UI hasn't really improved at all over the 1.5 version. Sure, they've now hidden several spam controls in new places, and made a few other cosmetic improvements, but TB is still mostly unusable by ordinary users. There is still no way to make some commonly used functions into buttons on the main interface. That is the most asked for feature when I show people TB, how do they do their most common command with just a single button click.

Version 1.5 was really the first usable release, it should have been called 1.0. This is a minor bug fix release, count it as version 1.1, but there is NO major overhaul of either the functionality or usability.

the AC

Re:Still no Sent / Received Date options

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly why I haven't adopted it. Rest of it's great, but that's a deal-breaker. I don't want to see when the sender thinks they sent it, I want to see when it arrived on my server, because I know the clock on that is right, and not set to 2020. Looks like I'll be sticking with outhouse express for now then.

And as for the "fix it yourself if you're so bothered" comments, I can't; I lack the time, knowledge and probably the skill. It's a standard option that any modern mail client should either provide as default, or provide as an option, if it ever wants to be taken seriously.

Re:Still no Sent / Received Date options

[Spooon69]

Actually, the sorting by "Order Received" isn't even a true fix. Using IMAP if you move an email message from one folder to another, the moved email is considered "newer" since the order received is higher in the new folder. As for the Date issue, Thunderbird does it correctly, the other clients do it incorrectly (e.g. Eudora, Zimbra, Outlook 2003). You do NOT want to see the time the email was received, but the time the email was sent. Why? The email could have traveled for a while before reaching your server. The TB default is right, but I agree that it should offer the option of showing the dates "incorrectly".

Re:What about Webmail?

[xsyntrex]

I upgraded my existing 1.5 version to 2.0 and Webmail worked like a charm. Still getting duplicate messages on some accounts and my "Remove Duplicate Messages" is not compatible. :-(

Re: choosing smtp at sending

[f64]

i have SmtpSelect 0.1.1 installed with thunderbird 1.5.0.10. works like a charm. gives you the option to click-select smtp server for individual emails.