Mozilla Thunderbird 0.1 Released

An anonymous reader submits: The Mozilla Thunderbird (stand-alone Mozilla based mail/news reader) developers have just released their first milestone: version 0.1, available for Mac Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. The v0.1 release notes highlight some of the bigger features like customizable toolbars, UI extensions, contact manager sidebar, simplified UI, 3-pane mail window option, and spell checker. Also of note, Mozilla's usage share has risen from 1.2% in February to 1.6% now, a 33% improvement!"

Comments

Will it import my Mozilla Mail and settings?

[MarcQuadra]

But will I be able too painlessly move my email from Moz over? I've got two years of mail in my .mozilla folder and I don't intend to hack together some sick bastardized transfer.

Good but still needs work

[archen]

Is there any news on the PGP/GPG integration? I was reading enigmail documentation the other night and there was some talk about encryption going in all the way and not just as an extension. Enigmail goes a long way in making that easier but it's still way beyond most people.

Re:Good but still needs work

[Phantasmo]

PGP/GPG requires some knowledge of public-key cryptography (and computers) to be effective - that is, we don't want to saturate the userbase with newbies who don't bother to check fingerprints before signing, choose crummy passwords (instead of passphrases), etc. If you understand how to properly use a system such as PGP then installing a plugin shouldn't be out of your reach.

You get to the point where you want to worry about making smarter users rather than smarter software. It should be beyond most people.

Re:Good but still needs work

[realdpk]

As long as it is easy for an end-user to selectively remove trust, I don't see a problem with incorporating easy-to-use crypto for newbies.

If every one of my personal contacts had PGP/GPG easily available on their clients, spam would no longer be an issue to me, because I could just refuse unsigned mail, and then mail not on my allowed-keys list.

Thunderbird and Firebird

[cavemanf16]

While Thunderbird does have a few quirks to work out, it is pretty sharp, and I can tell you that it really rocks as a mail client! I like it's look & feel better than the standard mozilla mail client in fact. I've set it up to work with Fastmail fairly easily, and it does a great job of syncing up to my IMAP account. Better than Mozilla Mail from what I remember.

I'm also writing this on Mozilla Firebird which is a sleek and fast browser for Windows and Linux. I really don't use IE anymore except to access some corporate reporting type websites at work and to access all those lame webpages on the web that are designed for IE lusers instead of the entire web.

As soon as the Mozilla team builds a better OS/UI for Linux or Windows, I'll be switching my gaming computer over completely!

Re:Thunderbird and Firebird

[hendrix69]

While ThunderBird is ineed impressive it is unusable for users that have a bidirectional locale (Arabic, Hebrew, ...). There are many long and outstanding bidi bugs that have been left open since the begining of the Mozilla mail/news client.
As a result, Mozilla cannot be used by newbies that need bidi, only by experts (such as myself!), but even some of them (for example Me!) have switched back to one of the MS clients since they have flawless bidi support.

Real editor support?

[vanyel]

I actually like the mozilla/thunderbird mail user interface, and it would be nice to view attachments directly, but I still use mutt in a terminal window because I hate editing with a mouse. Are there any GUI mailers that support vi (or, heaven forbid ;-) emacs --- ok, I'm sure emacs *is* a gui mailer, it's everything else ;-) so never mind that...)? It looks like there is a gpg plugin for M/T, so the editor is the only thing holding me back...

I poked around with it on Mac OS X....

[dochood]

.... and I liked the look of it, the features (or the future features... didn't test all the buttons yet), and the spam filtering...

The one thing I don't like about it and Mozilla Mail is that you get one "From" address for each account. In Mail.app, I separate mail addresses with commas, and I get a drop-down to choose from.

If anyone knows how to do this in Mozilla and/or Thunderbird, please let me know. I like Mail.app, but Mozilla Mail seemed faster, and Thunderbird seemed even better.

dochood

Been using Tbird since April or May

[NeoSkandranon]

Finally the spam i get got too much for me, and i switched over to Tbird due to its filtering system. Love it. Never went back to Outlook, 'cept to export my mail and address book.

Only ONE complaint about Tbird, aside from some minor cosmetic work--at this point in time it requires a third party app to check any sort of webmail--yahoo, netscape, Hotmail/MSN, etc. This IMHO is a BIG setback, as programs like hotmailpopper et. al. don't cut the mustard (seemingly incapable even of marking messages read once TB gets them, deleting msg's as they're deleted from TB's inbox, etc)
Make Thunderbird work with hotmail and it will look alot more appealing to alot of people

IE Too tough? Bullshit.

[sglider]

You clearly have not tried Mozilla's firebird browser. It is a lightweight version of Mozilla 1.4, and is much faster than IE, not to mention more secure. IE is bloated -- and the full extent of its bloat isn't known because of its integration with the Windows OS. To give you an Idea, IE has a footprint of 13,000+ Kilobytes in System memory, while Firebird (with 8 Tabb'd windows) only has 3,700 Kb of RAM as a footprint.

only 1.6%???

[Doppler00]

It's amazing that people would rather PAY money to purchase pop-up blocker software for IE than to use a better web browser.

I'm trying to get my friends to switch to Mozilla but it's very difficult to convince people to try a different web browser.

Re: Any OTHER OS browsers?

[trashme]

I so wish I could support some open-source-collaborative browser, but Mozilla and its spinoffs (like Firebird) seem to be the only alternative -and I don't happen to agree at all with the direction the browser development is going.

Out of curiosity, what direction would you like them to go in? You praised Opera for being small and fast. The Mozilla project is trying to make Firebird small and fast, just a browser. It seems like they are taking it in the direction you want.

Not enough.

[Dog and Pony]

Although the junk filter is pretty good, it still misses one or two junk mails a day, mainly because the spammers are getting really inventive and varied. And although in most cases you can just look at the subject/sender and mark it as junk anyways (and be right), it is not always the case.

And for the more normal non-geek user, it should really help them more with this.

I'm well aware of the odds (slim) that any non-geek uses Phoenix or Mozilla Mail for that matter at this point, but no harm in looking forward is there? :)

I think it should sanitize *all* mails not explicitly marked as safe - just make a little blurb (like the "Mozilla thinks this mail is junk" notification) that "This message tries to talk to a server. Do you want to allow that?" with a link to an explanation in the help files or something like that.

One thing that really could go a long way would simply to disallow all automatic loading of any url containing parameters. Of course, that could be bypassed by using parameters in the PATH instead, but it would probably weed out lots of these cases. What legitimate email would need to send parameters in an image url?

Re:I'd rather use the suite, thanks.

[Abcd1234]

First, if you like integration, wait a bit. The plan, according to the Mozilla roadmap, is to make things like Thunderbird functional as both a standalone as well as browser-integrated component in the form of an extension. However, it should be noted that intercommunication between standalone components *should* be doable, due to the existance of XPCOM (just expose certain Tbird functionality which Firebird can then call remotely). As such, I'd expect to see that feature eventually.

As for the resource issue, again, just wait a bit. Once the GRE is implemented and in common use, all these components will be able to share the same runtime. As a result, the various mozilla libraries will only get loaded into memory once and then shared by all the components just like any other shared libary.

So, no, splitting up the programs was definitely *not* a step backwards. The issues you list will be dealt with, and the result will be a far more flexible, customizable, and maintainable system. At least, IMHO. ;)

Re:Opera's M2

[adolf]

Having run Mozilla 1.4 for some time, I notice a few things that it offers for free:

Threaded replies

Highly functional spam filtering

Automagic contact-gathering

Automatically-created "views" for each contact? Just click "Sender," and things sort based on who sent it. Else, just enter some text into the "Subject or Sender contains" bar for some fast, arbitrary filtering. More complicated "views"? Use the "View" dropdown.

Why would in the world would I want to pay money for this stuff?

Re:Check out Outlook 2003

[fruey]

It's really sad, when Outlook users talk of simple features that real mail clients have had for years as "killer additions"

I'm not really flaming you, it's just a despairing situation. I use mutt, and I find it very difficult to use anything else. mutt is text only, but of course it can launch external viewers for graphics. It's super fast, and keyboard controlled. If you're handling large amounts of mail you can't use Outlook, because you're too reliant on the mouse. The rules are fine in Outlook but they're just not configurable enough to power sort email. Flagging has been available since Outlook Express 4, and you could easily sort by flag, shift-click to select, and move the messages. Now, this can be done automatically with some "flagged mail" folder. How is this killer?

I could do T (tag pattern) then write a regexp based on from, to, subject, body, etc, then have all matching messages tagged in a flash. Or I can tag some messages manually. Then ; to action the tagged messages, and in a flash copy them to another folder, forward them all to someone, reply to them all as one neatly formatted message, and so on. This is power email, and it's not in a GUI, and it doesn't take up massive resources. It is compatible with several mailbox formats, IMAP and POP. It can even write to several mailbox formats, it doesn't have an import/export hell.

Most corporate email I see is a complete mess thanks to Outlook. Notwithstanding all those stupid disclaimer signatures that aren't even line-wrapped properly and all that. OH, and don't even get me started on MS-TNEF and winmail.dat attachments which I still get from the occasional new client. Why should I run Outlook in order to receive mail from them, or why should I have to call them to change their settings, when MIME encapsulation, uuencode and base64 have been perfectly adequate for years before that client gained ground?

Outlook has a lot to do with this chaos, because it's such a prevailing piece of software... but I wouldn't call it a prevailing standard. The standard was set by PC-Pine (at least in my experience) on Unix/Linux around about the time of (maybe before) Win 3.11. Outlook is STILL playing catchup, some 10 years later. That's just plain crazy.