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."
IMAP (Score:3, Informative)
As far as I can tell labels don't work at all if you use IMAP, multiple machines, multiple clients, and have more then one folder.
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Re:IMAP (Score:5, Informative)
Yes. I haven't checked 2.0b1 out much yet, but in 1.5 and 2.0a1 you can associate a SMTP account with a POP3/IMAP account. Then when you click compose, you can select any SMTP account from the dropdown, but by default it will select the appropriate account for the IMAP/POP3 account you're browsing at the moment.
Unfortunately even with this I have accidentally sent e-mail from the wrong account (well, an unexpected one at least) several times. Hehe, oops... guess it's a good thing I have the same name attached to each from address, as opposed to my IRC/IM nickname...
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NO! NO! NO!
Leave all the GUI/HTML nastiness to Tb/Netscape/Mozilla/Opera/FoxMail/Evolution/etc.
Please, please, please, do not ruin last properly working MUA out there. And do not give anyone (very very bad) ideas.
P.S. I know, my post might look funny, but it is sad reality. Tb has pretty constant number of bugs which are never getting fixed. Many were filed in times of Mozilla Messenger - and yet unfixed. As of now, Tb still cannot properly produce error message when more than single mail box is c
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labels and gmail (Score:2)
What I'd like to see is labels working with the tags from Gmail. Of course, this isn't possible because Google won't use IMAP and doesn't include the tags in the message headers...
Re:IMAP (Score:5, Informative)
I use multiple machines over IMAP, I use webmail/Thunderbird/Outlook and I have many folders (both IMAP and local) as well as multiple accounts.
My tags translate fine between them all... granted my Thunderbird tags aren't available in Webmail (and I'm not sure about Outlook I don't use it often)
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Just want to say, Dovecot rocks! I started on Courier because that was all that was out at the time, but it was way too slow with the 5000+ mails I have in some folders, and a pain in the ass to configure and crashed a lot to boot. Then I went to Binc, but it was just as slow, if not as crappy otherwise. Finally, I went to Dovecot, who came up with the brilliant (obvious) idea of indexing Maildirs! I can't get over how fast it is. Supposedly they keep a close eye on security too. Well, I recently changed to
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.
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Re:automatic grouping (Score:5, Informative)
Go into the inbox (or any other folder you have) window and press "g"
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Now what key to I press to get grouping by my address book?
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View->"Sort By"-> "Grouped by Sort"
There are lot of options by which you can sort and then group.
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You may all now tell me why Outlook rules suck.
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The one feature I can't live without (Score:2)
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Re:The one feature I can't live without (Score:5, Informative)
It's a shame that the Mozilla people didn't implement things like this the correct way; create a well-defined interface for address books, spell checking, etc, and then supply a default implementation for platforms that don't support them. Even Windows has a system address book, and yet Mozilla insists on using its own.
edit incomming mail (Score:5, Interesting)
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Also for sent mesages its sometimes useful to add notes. Like: [They IMed me and said this fixed the problem]
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It doesn't let you edit the received message. It makes a copy which you can edit and must mail or save as a draft.
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http://www.extensionsmirror.nl/index.php?showtopi
But we want to change the *body* of the message
Re:edit incomming mail (Score:4, Informative)
My voicemail system leaves a message in my email box with the subject "Voicemail from <telephone number>". I always edit that subject to reflect the contents of the voicemail message. Since 90% of my voicemail messages are coming from 2 telephone numbers, this is really a requirement if I want to find a specific message ever again.
Another feature I miss in many email clients (probably Thunderbird 2.0 too, haven't checked that one yet) is the ability to freely edit email threading. Sometimes I want to break a thread into two parts, or I want to link two emails into a thread, for instance emails discussing the same subject but different subject headers. This is also something Mutt does very well.
The third reason I keep using Mutt is that it displays mails originating from myself in a different way. All mails from someone else show the "From" header in the index. All mails from myself show "To <recipient>" and are displayed in a different colour. This allows me to store both incoming and outgoing messages in the same folder, allowing for gmail-ish mailboxes that contain the entire discussion.
As long as there isn't a GUI mail client that can do all this, I'm not moving away from Mutt.
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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.
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Re:Import... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Import... (Score:4, Insightful)
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"c:\program files\mozilla thunderbird\thunderbird.exe" -profile d:\mythunderbirdprofile
Beats risking forgetting to back it up!
I modify the my documents folder location also (right click on it on the start menu) - saves a hell of a lot of effort on reinstalls.
Re:Import... (Score:5, Funny)
Pop-up notifier for e-mail? (Score:3, Insightful)
You see, there's only a handful of things that I want to be notified for immediately. And those things can be only identified via rules. (From a particular domain, or with a specific subject line.) Preferably *after* the anti-spam filters have cleaned the bogus messages out of the way (sometimes domains are spoofed).
Which, sadly, is one thing that Outlook rules does properly where Thunderbird 1.5.x (and older) has failed at.
Tabbed Messages (Score:5, Interesting)
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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.)
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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.
More in-depth technical stuff... (Score:4, Funny)
I have to say, it looks awesome! Any idea when we can get our hands on it?
UI Responsiveness? (Score:4, Insightful)
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And no, I haven't submitted a bug or anything, I know I should, but I haven't.
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
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There's a solution to this -- use the Web browser as an e-mail client. GMail fits every one of the points you list. I'm still not entirely happy with it (mostly because there's no reasonable way to do GPG), but I find that it g
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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)
The only way to do that is by IMAP. I know you don't like it, but unless someone writes a new protocol, you will have to live with it.
- 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.
I have the following setup:
Spamassasin filters my emails on the server and moves spam into the spam-folder. I open said spamfolder with thunderbird and let thunderbirds Junkfilter do its work (moving spam into the Junk-folder). The remaining mails are read and if necessary either moved into the ham-folder or the junkfolder. Every night a cronjob runs which learns the con
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Those requests are about as useful as asking for them to make the internet go faster. You want to store all your messages on the server? Fine. There's a drawback to that. It's called latency. You want speed and responsiveness? Then you're stuck with local.
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IMAP supports server-side E-mail notification and storage. Your mail client can cache the headers or the whole messages as they become available with no interaction on your part. IMAP servers can also handle multiple tasks simultaneously since commands are tagged (analogous to how TCQ works with hard drives) and can do server-side searching too.
What exactly can't IMAP do that is IMAP (the protocol's) fault?
Re:State of email (Score:5, Insightful)
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Hmm. It would be possible to have fetchmail ticking away in case you ever wanted to check email offline, but then to use a web-based email system
Just one feature (Score:5, Insightful)
So, if you can imagine... even with asking people to at least let me know what site is theirs, I have hundreds of messages with the Subject "Web Update" or "Website"
I would simply like the ability to edit the subject line of messages I receive for organizational purposes.
That would be the "Killer" feature for me...
Another novelty feature that could be useful is a Calendar view of messages, so I could graphically see when each message arrived and prioritize it appropriately.
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Re:Just one feature (Score:5, Insightful)
I just want to follow up on how this might be implemented, since I think it's a great idea. Thunderbird could allow you to insert an additional header, perhaps called X-ModifiedSubject, where you would enter your modified version of the subject line. When the messages are listed, the X-ModifiedSubject would be displayed as the subject if it existed. If there was no X-ModifiedSubject line, the normal Subject would be displayed, but in a different color from the X-ModifiedSubject, so you can easily distinguish the ones you changed from the ones you didn't, and not confuse anybody when talking about the email on the phone (since the sender won't know you've made the change). When you reply to an email containing a X-ModifiedSubject, Thunderbird should have you choose between the new subject (more descriptive) and the original subject (vague, but more recognizable to the recipient) when generating the subject line of the reply. I suppose any searches you do on the "Subject" field should search both the Subject and the X-ModifiedSubject.
For example, your mail headers might contain:
Subject: WebSite
X-ModifiedSubject: Need to update copyright date on website
That way, when you browse your mail listings you see "Need to update copyright date on website" instead of just "Website," and you can easily tell what the message is about without clicking into it and reading the whole thing.
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I don't think so. As I understand it, tagging is like folders, except that an email can have more than one tag, so it's really a way to categorize messages (e.g. "work", "football", "consulting", "purchase_order", "receipt"). What I think the poster is looking for is a way to provide a longer description of the email, similar to a subject line, for human reading rather than categorizing (e.g. "Meeting on January 10 to discuss installation problems"). When yo
Meh (Score:4, Interesting)
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Better Whitelisting? (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Ability to easily whitelist all email coming from a particular domain. This would ensure that you get all emails from a client company, not just one individual. Perhaps there could be a preferences setting that allows you to indicate that you want to be prompted each time you send an email to a new domain to see whether the whole domain should be whitelisted or just the recipient. I assume I could create a mail rule to filter a domain, as I currently do with Netscape Communicator, but that is pretty inconvenient.
2) Ability to easily whitelist an address without putting it in your address book or sending mail to it, e.g. by simply clicking a button while viewing a message from the address. For example, if I receive an emailed newsletter that I requested, it would be nice to whitelist it without cluttering my address book.
3) Are emails sent by someone on the whitelist visually differentiated from other emails in some way, such as coloring the sender name differently? That could make it easier to differentiate between valid emails and any spams that slip through the filter.
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.
thunderbird question (Score:2)
Switched from Thunderbird to Evolution (Score:2)
An email client that... (Score:2)
I'd love to see a "smart" email client that that can analyze incoming mail, strip quoted text, and turn the emails into a threaded forum-like format. The "top-reply [37signals.com]" is simply the way everyone [I exchange mail with] seems to go these days, and nothing sucks more than having to read a forwarded email bottom-to-top.
Does something like this (or something that makes achieving this easier) exist
yay for tags (Score:2)
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http://scott.yang.id.au/2006/08/organising-your-i
Nifty
wow, tags,..how about (Score:2)
1 hour (Score:2, Informative)
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?
Meta-Inbox (Score:2)
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Icedove! (Score:5, Funny)
2.0 is nice (Score:4, Informative)
1. Threaded messages with your replies included in the thread! This alone is going to may 2.0 better
2. New filter rules: forward and reply with template!
3. A little better speed...
Now all we need to make thunderbird closer to perfect:
1. A way to view conversation by recipient.
2. Better template managemetn
3. something that can identify non-spam commercial email and newsletters and get them out of the inbox.
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:Compact folders (Score:4, Informative)
But of course if it's just one undifferentiated text file, there IS no efficient way to edit or delete mails out of the middle.
Realistically, Mozilla should probably update to a decent database format but that is a huge change.
Re:Compact folders (Score:5, Insightful)
It's actually worse than that. Failing to compact folders will eventually result in bugs and apparent data loss, requiring higher order geek hackery to restore what's left.
Moreover, if you do switch on the prompt to compact folders automatically, it comes up so regularly that it makes Vista's password prompt for system-wide settings seem positively user-friendly. Also, the explicit menu command to compact folders sometimes does nothing, with no indication of why; I assume this is a bug, since it often seems to do nothing even if there's stuff to do.
Seriously, it's nearly 2007. Remind me again why users should ever have to care about this sort of implementation detail?
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.
Compatability with Exchange??? (Score:3)
on IMAP support on the Exchange server.
Could I use the new Thunderbird to do this?
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Luckily hashcash is basically stillborn, spammers can implement it almost as easily as your average user.
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However, the work can be done on the client OR the sending server (I know, because I can turn on hashcash stamping on my outbound mail, and/or process hashcash stamps inbound)
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It's a vicious circle.
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https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2234/ [mozilla.org]
Re:Poor SMTP = Not Viable (Score:5, Informative)
There's even a few add ons you can use, like this one [mozilla.org] and this one [mozilla.org]. I guess maybe it works different than you expect, but it works well for me.
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Even without the extensions, it never even occurred to me that this was a problem or difficult to use until I read the article and comments here. I routinely send mail from two different ISPs for personal use, and from several official addresses at domains belonging to groups I help to run. In all, I probably have eight or nine accounts set up, and several different incoming and outgoing servers to deal with. It might have taken me a minute or two to find the SMTP server options when I first started using T
IMAP? (Score:2)
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Not sure if it's quite what you want, but Gmail does offer POP access and SMTP. They have directions for setting up Thunderbird [google.com] to use it.