Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Mozilla The Internet Software

Thunderbird 0.9 Released 373

Posted by michael from the thunder-thunder-thunderbird-ho dept.
Simon (S2) writes "Thunderbird 0.9 is now available for download! New features include Saved Search Folders (aka Virtual Folders) which allow you to display messages based on previously set search criteria across multiple folders. Message Grouping allows you to organize e-mail in a folder by grouping them based on various attributes like Date, Sender, Label, etc. Thunderbird 0.9 also includes numerous bug fixes and other improvements. For more information, see the release notes. Builds can be found on the mozilla.org FTP server or in the release notes above."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Thunderbird 0.9 Released More

Thunderbird 0.9 Released

Comments Filter:

  • Fantastic job! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by daveschroeder ( 516195 ) * on Thursday November 04, 2004 @10:33AM (#10722900)
    The Mozilla Foundation has been really doing a fantastic job with thinks like Mozilla, Firefox (and Camino!), Thunderbird, and the new multiplatform Sunbird calendaring client.

    Kudos to the team both at the Foundation and in the open source community for turning out this first rate software!
    • I tried Thunderbird briefly, but ended up sticking with Evolution because of its ability to sync contact list and calendar with my Palm. Otherwise it seemed like a high-quality product, though.
    • and they'd be unstoppable. Seriously, the main problem I have with Gmail is the inability to sort by subject. I'm subscribed to about 50 mailing lists, and I don't want to search for each of them individually to find the latest posts for a particular group. It's silly.

  • Tiger Features? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @10:34AM (#10722909) Journal
    A lot of the new features sound like they are implementations of those described in the version of Apple's Mail.app that is due to ship with Tiger. I wonder if this kind of thing will dissuade companies like Apple from announcing new features so far before they are ready for release.

    • Re:Tiger Features? (Score:5, Informative)

      by simcop2387 ( 703011 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @10:37AM (#10722940) Homepage Journal
      This has existed already in Evolution, and i wouldn't be surprised if in other mail clients also.

    • Re:Tiger Features? (Score:5, Informative)

      by samael ( 12612 ) <Andrew@Ducker.org.uk> on Thursday November 04, 2004 @10:37AM (#10722951) Homepage
      They're also available in other products. The Bat! has had Saved Searches for a while.

      • Re:Tiger Features? (Score:5, Funny)

        by Mr Guy ( 547690 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @10:55AM (#10723152) Journal
        No no you silly person. If Apple has it, Apple was first. It's just the way it is, and the sooner we can all accept that, the happier we all will be. It's like Microsoft being evil, Linux being secure, and the government trying to exploit the masses. Other possible explanations are really just a waste of time once you acknowledge the truth.

    • Re:Tiger Features? (Score:4, Informative)

      by the quick brown fox ( 681969 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @10:45AM (#10723031)
      Microsoft Outlook 2003 offers them as well.

    • also Lotus Notes (Score:4, Informative)

      by dominux ( 731134 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @11:04AM (#10723254) Homepage
      the way Notes stores mail is a little different in concept to most other things, folders don't "contain" messages, messages exist in their own right in the database irrespective of what folders they might be in. It is perfectly valid for a message to exist without any folders including the message. Folders in Notes can have documents dragged into them which stores that association and you can get to the message through the folder. A saved search is what would be called a view in Notes, that is a folder which is based on a selection formula rather than manual fileing. It is perfectly valid also for one message to be shown in many many folders and views, but delete it from one it is deleted from all. Deleting a message is very different from removing it from a folder. Views and folders can also be categorised, this is basically the same thing as the group by feature. Notes views are indexed rather than calculated on the fly so I suspect they would be quicker for large mail files.

      Notes of course isn't open source and you can only do limited view customisation without the design client, I do like the user interface for creating these saved searches, it is better than creating a private view in Notes.
    • Unfortunately ever since Thunderbird .8 (for OS X) there has been compatibility issues between Thunderbird and the CodeTek virtual desktop for OSX. Codetek doesn't seem to want to get involved to fix the problem .. and the Thunderbird dev team doesn't seem to hold incompatibilities with commercial software as a high priority ...

    • Credit where credit is due (Score:5, Informative)

      by jrumney ( 197329 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @11:24AM (#10723574)
      The inspiration for this feature came from Usenet legend Kibo, who in the early 90's was grepping the Usenet spool so he could find and reply to every post that ever mentioned his name. Gnus (the Emacs newsreader) got this feature in 1995 under the name "nnkiboze" (other backends being nntp, nnmail, nnrss, nnslashdot etc).

    • Why is it... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jeif1k ( 809151 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @02:18PM (#10726147)
      Guys, this is the Mozilla section. I already deleted the Apple section from my frontpage because I'm tired of the ceaseless Apple marketing and rewriting of history by Apple fans. Making incorrect claims that open source projects are copying features from Apple, when the opposite is the case, are insulting and just make Apple look bad.

  • So, have the devs been listening? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dragoon412 ( 648209 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @10:34AM (#10722910)
    One of the most requested features I see is the ability to minimize to the system tray. Have the devs even mentioned this being a consideration?

    I use Thunderbird, and I like it, but it drives me nuts having one more thing cluttering my taskbar when all I want it open for is to let me know when mail arrives.

  • Torrents? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gentoo Fan ( 643403 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @10:34AM (#10722912) Homepage
    I'd hate to assist in the clobbering of an FTP server -- I'm suprised such a popular software project (particularly one with not-so-small files) isn't using Bittorrent yet.

  • Saved Searches sounds good but... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by samael ( 12612 ) <Andrew@Ducker.org.uk> on Thursday November 04, 2004 @10:35AM (#10722923) Homepage
    I'd like to be able to tag messages with meta-data (like "To Do" or "Mum's Birthday" or "Project 257") and then be able to produce searches based on that.

  • What about performance and memory usage? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kbahey ( 102895 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @10:36AM (#10722925) Homepage

    This is not to disparage Thunderbird or anything. Thunderbird is one of two mail user agents (MUA) I use regularly, the other being plain old mutt when I am connected to the home server using ssh.

    The issue with Thunderbird is not functionality, but rather bloat. It takes up a lot of memory and is slow. Compared to for example, FireFox, on the same machine.

    • Re:What about performance and memory usage? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by the quick brown fox ( 681969 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @10:54AM (#10723141)
      I don't think it's necessarily fair to compare Thunderbird to a web browser. TB has a lot more data to juggle than Firefox, in general. FF just has to deal with a couple of webpages at a time, while TB has to keep giant lists of messages at the ready. Also, just in terms of raw amounts of data, your average mbox has a lot more data than your average HTML page.

      I've found TB to compare favorably, performance-wise, to other clients I've tried, such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Evolution. (Although it's been a long time since I've tried Evolution.)

    • I've been wondering the same thing but haven't had the time to debug it at all. Here's a line from top:
      PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
      31929 rufus 16 0 668m 359m 169m S 0.0 36.0 3:08.69 mozilla-thunder
      Yes, that is 350mb of ram it is using. True I have ~100 imap folders in my default view, a few of which have >100,000 messages, but I don't see the need to have the entire structure of each folder loaded persistently in ram.

  • Bayesian Folders (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 04, 2004 @10:37AM (#10722938)
    I want a folder that can learn what sort of thing I want in it. Like the spam filtering, but not just junk. So I could drag credit card notices to my Bills folder a couple times and then have it just happen. When somebody smarter than me implements this, then I'll be a Thunderbird supporter.

    • Re:Bayesian Folders (Score:3, Informative)

      by Man of E ( 531031 )
      Popfile [sourceforge.net] does this, I believe. Haven't used it myself (because it only works with POP3), but some people swear by it.

      • Re:Bayesian Folders (Score:2, Informative)

        by SizL ( 824056 )
        Popfile indead does this, and very well in my case. And I don't know when you last checked, but it speaks IMAP and NNTP too now. I use it on my own mailserver and get 95% accuracy in classifying my mail into some 20+ categories. I tried Thunderbird, but I don't like the way it handles IMAP accounts.

    • Re:Bayesian Folders (Score:5, Informative)

      by mikeboone ( 163222 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @10:55AM (#10723145) Homepage Journal
      Yeah, this is what's keeping me off Thunderbird. I am still using Outlook, but with the cool extension Outclass [vargonsoft.com] which is an Outlook front-end for POPFile [sourceforge.net]. It works really well. I know I could use POPFile's web interface, but it's so much nicer when it's integrated into the mail app. If Thunderbird can use Bayes for spam, open it up for other uses!

    • Re:Bayesian Folders (Score:3, Informative)

      by dabraham ( 39446 )
      There's actually an enhancement request for that with a bounty. There's even a patch submitted (check out bugzilla bug # 181866 (no link, bugzilla rejects links from /.)).

      It seems to be stalled at the moment, but there is motivation, money, and work there. Voting for the bug raises the odds that it will get attention. Not by a whole lot, but some.

  • buggy? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jstave ( 734089 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @10:37AM (#10722944)
    I'm always a little uneasy about software that is in the pre-1.0 state. Can anyone speak to its reliablility?

    • Re:buggy? (Score:5, Informative)

      by mkoenecke ( 249261 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @10:46AM (#10723050) Homepage
      No worries; I've been using it for a couple of years now (I'm an attorney who uses it for both business and personal e-mail). I have not had even one problem with reliability or stability.

      Remember, it's a fork off of the Mozilla project, which has been past 1.0 for quite some time.
    • T-Bird is as rock steady as they get. It may stand in the shadow of Firefox, but just between you and me, I consider Thunderbird a better and more complete product (but that's mainly because it only needs to deal with standardized protocols and not an MS bastardized Web).
      • (Warning: Wild tangent follows...)

        See, you would think e-mail would be a world of nice, standardized protocols and perfectly compliant mailers and transport servers. The sad reality is that SMTP, RFC822 headers, and MIME are abused or incorrectly implemented all over the place, often in more subtle and insidious ways than HTML. (To be fair, some of the standards are pretty hard to write a 100% compliant parser for.) This is not too surprising when you think about how many e-mails probably get generated

    • I've been using .6 since its release with no issues whatsoever. I even upgrading from .5 without uninstalling, which was not recommended in the documentation!
    • Having used Firefox and Thunderbird extensively.. the latter has been FAR more stable than the former!

      Firefox has frustrated me no end, but Thunderbird never did. However Evolution2 is the way forward for those of us working in a GroupWise environment...

    • Re:buggy? (Score:3, Funny)

      by jrumney ( 197329 )
      I'm always a little uneasy about software that is in the pre-1.0 state. If it makes you feel better, it is released under the Mozilla Public License, which is up to 1.1 already. 1.1 + 0.9 = 2.0, so I think it averages out.
    • I've been using 0.8 for awhile, and the mail portion is good and stable. I have had a lot of problems with using Thunderbird to subscribe to RSS feeds, though.

  • I wonder. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Moby Cock ( 771358 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @10:37AM (#10722947) Homepage
    Does anybody know of any 'big-scale' implementation of T-Bird? I use it at home sparingly since I find I use more and more web based email and a real decent email client is just not needed. I know Outlook (and others) has countless corporate implementations, and I am wondering if T-Bird has been used similarly. If so, how does it hold up? Anybody?

    • Re:I wonder. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Aliencow ( 653119 )
      We use it on approximately 100 PCs (that's not big-scale but still)

      Right now, the network is a mess (started working here about 6months ago) - but I'm currently working on making MSIs for Thunderbird so I can keep it up to date easily. Someone did the same thing with Firefox and it's great!
  • I'm having a heckuva time getting the recent Thunderbird releases to work with my employer's Cyrus IMAP server. It's a pretty old version of Cyrus, and Thunderbird and it don't always talk well to each other. *crosses fingers*

  • Question for the Outlook "switchers" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by holden caufield ( 111364 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @10:40AM (#10722973)
    This is not a troll.

    I use Outlook for my personal email, and I'm strongly considering changing my mail client. Other than the security benefits of not automatically running scripts when viewing messages, can anyone who has switched to Thunderbird tell me what other features make this client a preferred choice to Outlook?

    I'll politely add that open-source isn't enough to compel me to change, nor is bayesian filtering (I already use SpamBayes).

    Thanks for your help, and really, I'm not trying to fan any flames!
    • I use Thunderbird because..
      I like the interface.
      It supports IMAP well, it allows me to have my newsgroups in the same app.
      It supports RSS too, which is a feature I love!

    • Re:Question for the Outlook "switchers" (Score:4, Informative)

      by gclef ( 96311 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @10:57AM (#10723182)
      There are a few reasons I use it for my home email:

      1) Mouse gestures. I'm on a lot of mailing lists, and being able to specify common actions as a gesture (right-click & drag right to select the next unread message, for example) saves me a lot of time digging through lists like Full-Disclosure.

      2) Message threading. It's not perfect, but it helps a lot to be able to group messages by thread (I think new versions of Outlook can do this, but my 2000 version can not).

      3) The Baysean filtering is nice, but as you've mentioned, you already have that.

      4) Themes. Yeah, it's trivial, but still...they're fun.

    • Re:Question for the Outlook "switchers" (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Nevenmrgan ( 826707 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @11:05AM (#10723266)
      - It's faster than Outlook (though slower than Firefox). In the latest Outlook, message rendering can take up to a few seconds - the UI is just not very responsive.

      - Leaner UI overall. I like Outlook's corporate functions, but I just don't use them that often at work, and never at home. Also, Outlook suffers from having 15 different ways to get to your folders - they keep adding new panels and icons. I don't consider this a good thing at all, since it rarely - if ever - increases my productivity or improves my user experience. It just makes me click around idly.

      - Significantly faster (and better) quicksearch (there are even rumors of search-as-you-type in the future!)

      - As with any other Mozilla product, they listen to the users' comments. If a reasonable, much-requested feature doesn't make it to the release, I'll bet my hat there's an extension that does it.

      - Shockingly, it's a better client for Ma and Pa User. Fewer buttons, leaner out of the box, no office environment mumbo jumbo. (I'm not even going to take seriously suggestions to use Outlook Express in that case.)

    • Re:Question for the Outlook "switchers" (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nvivo ( 739176 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @11:12AM (#10723355)
      My reasons to switch:

      1. Profile, preferences, rules, contacts, etc are easy to backup. You can have all your files in one place and you choose where.

      2. IMAP support in Outlook really sucks... in a way i can`t even describe it. Thunderbird is perfect with IMAP, and no need to purge messages manually...

      3. Saved Search folders in 0.9 are great. They are like views in databases, but for your messages.

      4. RSS support to keep you up with the news.

      5. Great extensions makes Thunderbird even better.

      6. It looks much better than Outlook Express.
    • One of the great feature, that has been added recently, is the RSS feed reader. You can add as many feed as you want and it handles each item in the field just like a e-mail message. This means that you can keep an history of the feed you've subscribed and do search. You can even forward feed item like normal e-mail.

      I've dropped using RSSOwl and bloglines to use Thunderbird exclusively for reading my RSS feed.

    • Re:Question for the Outlook "switchers" (Score:4, Interesting)

      by truthsearch ( 249536 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @11:28AM (#10723650) Homepage Journal
      In addition to what other posters have listed,

      - Administration - One simple screen for e-mail accounts and another simple screen for other configuration options. I find the Outlook barrage of configuration windows and tabs VERY annoying. It's also difficult to see exactly how POP/IMAP e-mail accounts are configured in Outlook. If you see the options in Thunderbird you'll see what I mean.

      - These new Virtual Folders (mail's not really moved into them, but it's a view over all your mail based on criteria you specify). I use Outlook 2002 (XP) at work and I don't see any way to do the same without creating rules to copy mail to folders.

      - Message threads. I see no way to do this in Outlook 2002.

      - Less features. Outlook has more features, but I don't have any use for most of them. So Thunderbird is less cluttered for me.
    • Best IMAP and LDAP support out right now. LDAP support ESPECIALLY.

    • Re:Question for the Outlook "switchers" (Score:5, Informative)

      by Ark42 ( 522144 ) <slashdot@@@morpheussoftware...net> on Thursday November 04, 2004 @11:45AM (#10723935) Homepage
      I have trouble getting many people to switch to TB even though they quickly took up FF. The things keeping back these people I know that are now using FF + Outlook are:

      1) Buttons work differently, such as the delete button doesn't also close the message if you opened the message in a new Window (These type of problems are solvable with the Buttons! extension)

      2) The context menu for Copy To and Move To is very annoying for them to use since they typically have 100s of folders nested across their accounts, and they can't seem to find the folder they want fast enough, where as Outlook will just pop up a little window with a folder tree for Copy/Move operations.

      3) The address book contacts editor has most of the useful information on the first tab, but the Company Title and Notes section are on the 2nd and 3rd tab, and users find it annoying to have to use these extra tabs for such common pieces of information, when all the other stuff on the 2nd and 3rd tab is unused. Somehow, they wan't those two fields duplicated onto the main tab for the contacts editor.

      4) Having to open the address book in a new window, and the contacts sidebar tab really doesn't help anybody I suggested it to here. Users really seem to wait a contacts folder in their folder list to see the list of contacts.

      5) The contacts list is not easily sortable like Outlook and blank fields seem to sort above A forcing them to sort Z-A and scroll down to find the stuff in the middle. I guess they just want A-Z sorting to put blanks after Z.
  • Anyone who's messed around with multiple email clients, backups, and archives knows that you'll likely make a mess of your folder structure. Does Thunder have or plan to have a feature to delete duplicate emails?

  • I want a "Export to mysql" option (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LoboRojo ( 758260 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @10:44AM (#10723024)
    For all of use archiving our email for years, wouldn't it be nice to be able to file messages in a real database? YES!!!!

  • Label threads (Score:3, Interesting)

    by elykyllek ( 543092 ) * on Thursday November 04, 2004 @10:45AM (#10723033) Homepage
    I'd like to be able to label threads, and for it to automatically label any messages added to the thread. That way I can view my unread and be able to tell if I previously labelled the thread as important.

    Any idea if this is possible or planned?

  • 0.8 to 0.9 Upgrade Freezes (Score:5, Informative)

    by elysian1 ( 533581 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @10:49AM (#10723072)
    People have been reporting [mozillazine.org] problems with upgrading from 0.8 to 0.9. It seems like there may be a compatibility problem with older profiles that causes 0.9 to freeze. I think I may wait a while before upgrading since 0.8 works fine for me.
  • I have a gmail account and its great. But I still would love have a mail client with gmail like features.

    Instead of folders, categorizing messages, so that a message can have multiply categories. I always hated using folders anyways and everything just ended up in my inbox.

    The search is best part of gmail. How does searching in Thunderbird compare ?

  • PIM features? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by IGnatius T Foobar ( 4328 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @10:55AM (#10723147) Homepage Journal
    I think the next important step for Thunderbird would be to allow it to be installed (via extensions and such) as a full PIM suite. Calendar, address book, etc. are features people look for, and if these were available, Thunderbird would start converting Outlook users at the same rate Firefox is converting IE users.

    Adding in the existing Calendar extension [mozilla.org] would be a good start. Adding in connectivity to an standards-based open source groupware server [citadel.org] would create the end-to-end solution we've been looking for all these years.

  • Related Story (Score:3, Informative)

    by Omega1045 ( 584264 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @10:55AM (#10723158)
    Reuters has a story about Firefox gaining on IE this morning:

    Story here [reuters.com].

    The story says Firefax now enjoys a 6% market share!

  • Link to homepage. (Score:4, Informative)

    by SoupIsGoodFood_42 ( 521389 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @10:56AM (#10723166)
    Here's the obvious, but missing link to the Thunderbird homepage [mozilla.org].
  • The new View > Sort > Group By Sort (G)

    You'll have to download it to see what it does :)
  • I'm just waiting for the thunderbird folks to create an *actual* lean and mean version of thunderbird. It currently is using 34 MEGS of RAM just to sit and wait for mail to come in.

    I thought firefox (currently using 55 MEGS of RAM) and thunderbird were supposed to be "lean and mean"?

  • Hmmm... (Score:2, Informative)

    by sn0wflake ( 592745 )
    After installing Thunderbird 0.9 I get a lot of timeout errors :(
  • Thunderbird still pops up an alert dialog when you click on a folder that is not selectable.

    This has been the one reason why i haven't switched to using Thunderbird. If you set it to check mail in all folders it pops up that dialog every time it checks each folder.

    Huge problem with imap servers that use mbox instead of maildir.

  • And filtering still doesn't work (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Mastoid ( 138665 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @11:32AM (#10723708) Homepage
    At least, filtering based on Body content.

    I'm on a mailing list that, due to its nature, must accept submissions from non-members and has a public address. Naturally, it gets swamped with spam. SpamAssassin catches most of it, but doesn't add headers or change the subject; instead, it politely sends a warning message (I believe report_safe is set to 1) and attaches the original message.

    Since I have no headers to work from, I have to create filters based on body content. Simple enough, right? If it contains words foo bar baz, delete the message.

    Except it doesn't work. Didn't work in .8, doesn't work in .9. In fact, when I go back and try to edit the filter to figure out why it's failing, Thunderbird has changed the Body check back to Subject and lost the condition check. This is highly annoying.

  • Forward Wrap (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jeffehobbs ( 419930 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @11:35AM (#10723761) Homepage
    One of the major annoyances my company is finding during our internal Thunderbird testing is this freakish behavior:

    1) user gets email.

    2) user replies to email, text wraps correctly.

    3) user forwards email and the text does not wrap at all, but instead runs off the screen horizontally causing annoying readability issues.

    Does anyone know why this is? It still appears to be in Thunderbird 0.9. I'm confused as to if it is a bug or by design [ietf.org]. If it's a bug, it's kind of a big one. If it's by design, it's kind of a poor design and there should be an option or preference to have "reply" and "forward" act consistently.

    Otherwise, Thunderbird ROCKS -- nice work Thunderbird developers. It's fast, free and just getting better and better with each release.

    ~jeff

    p.s. Inline spell check would be nice

    • format=flowed? (Score:3, Informative)

      by boomgopher ( 627124 )
      I think what you're seeing is related to "format=flowed" in the content-type header of sent messages:

      Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

      Though this shouldn't force scrolling AFAIK, at least when I view it in T-Bird.


    • Re:Forward Wrap (Score:3, Informative)

      by ManxStef ( 469602 )
      Yeah, I've seen that happen before, both with replies (only from one friend -- seems their Exchange server's sending in a wierd format) and forwards. It drove me nuts for a while, until I noticed the following:
      (reply or forward first) Go to Edit, Rewrap. This should reflow the text :)

      It is somewhat annoying, though.
  • Firefox 1.0 RC2 [newaol.com] is out.

    This should be the last release candidate [RC] before the big 1; because in theory all the bugs should have been ironed out in this RC, but, nonetheless, Mozilla.Org is asking users who want to beta-test to download it and, in particular, check for bugs [mozilla.org] in these areas in RC2:

    • authentication (especially over SSL)
    • extension installation via update.mozilla.org and other sites
    • MacOS X builds
    • the new re-implementation of software update.

    Some non-English RC2 builds are avaliable too accor

  • Outlook Address Books (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JimPooley ( 150814 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @11:41AM (#10723858) Homepage
    So is it better at importing Outlook address books? I'm trying to make it the standard mail app at work, but our support staff won't budge from Outlook unless we can succesfully import 500+ contacts into the Thunderbird address book - including all notes held in Outlook's address book.
    (Mind you, even then it'll be an uphill task, despite the company having 14 Linux servers handling all our mission critical stuff, our tech. support guys are diehard Microsoft fans who are afraid of anything not by Microsoft!)

    • Re:Outlook Address Books (Score:5, Interesting)

      by dara ( 119068 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @12:57PM (#10725000)
      Unfortunately, the address book in Thunderbird is still very primitive compared to Outlook, Evolution, or Kmail. You can't use pictures, Geo locations, there is no place for Birthday, Children, etc. - only the four custom fields and Notes. There are only two email addresses that can be stored. How in the world could it import information from Outlook without losing it?

      In response to another poster, I'm sorry, but .csv is not good enough for an address book anymore. There are too many fields (many of which won't be used for all entries) so viewing your book as a spreadsheet becomes tedious. Plus, there is no way to store picture information in a .csv file.

      I'd prefer to use Thunderbird (or Mozilla) over Evolution or Kmail since I use both Windows and Linux, but I wish the three would get together and hammer at a way to have a really powerful address book standard, leaving no vCard info behind and storing any other info not included in vCard (e.g. Last Sort View State). And of course leaving no useful Outlook info behind either.

      Dara

  • Love TB and FF, but I will not upgrade (Score:5, Interesting)

    by beforewisdom ( 729725 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @12:24PM (#10724596)
    I love TB ( and FF ) but I will not upgrade until features are added that I absolutely must have.

    It used to be that upgrading either of these wouldn't effect my plugins, but these days I have to redo all of my plugins after each install.

    A major pain,... I will wait until a "must have" new feature comes out.

    Steve

  • can we assign a unique SMTP server per personna? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Locutus ( 9039 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @02:03PM (#10725938)
    The last time I checked, Thunderbird did not allow me to use a different outgoing SMTP server based on the personna(reply-to) used.

    This is a big problem these days because SPAM filters at the ISP block email where the reply-to address is not within the same domain as the sending SMTP server.

    It's a must-have feature me to move to it.

    LoB

  • Needs faster searching (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DJ-Dodger ( 169589 ) on Thursday November 04, 2004 @06:59PM (#10729391) Homepage
    I'd really like to switch to Thunderbird...but I just can't give up the instantaneous searching capabilities that the LookOut add-in gives Outlook. I've gotten so used to being able to search my entire Gigabyte-sized Outlook archive in less than a second that I just can't bring myself to give it up, despite the cool features I'm seeing added to Thunderbird.

    Anyone know of speedier search capabilities coming to Thunderbird anytime soon?

Slashdot Top Deals

Say "twenty-three-skiddoo" to logout.

Close