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Mozilla Thunderbird 0.2 Released
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla Thunderbird 0.2 is out! For those who haven't heard about it yet, Mozilla Thunderbird is mozilla.org's new standalone mail client and sister product to Mozilla Firebird. According to MozillaZine's article on the release, new features include 'a redesigned Options dialogue, spell checker improvements, enhancements to the default theme and better performance and stability'. More information can be found at the Mozilla Thunderbird Project Page and in the release notes (which include the important information that a clean install is vital). Builds are available for Windows (7.3Mb), Mac OS (11.1Mb) and Linux (9.5Mb) or you can download the source (29.1Mb) and build it yourself for extra geek points."
Thunderbird / Firebird?
Why not pick a diffrent GMC product name just to confuse us!
Hornet
Gremlen
I don't enjoy this mental image of a drunk on the street with drinking from his paperbag while browsing the web.
Exchange server support. Unfortunately I must use it at work and at school, which also means I must use Outlook.
SCO is suing Mozilla for making stuff on Linux. And Ford is suing Mozilla for using the word Thunderbird. And I'm being sued for not being funny.
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English
Norwegian
It's from Norway, it must be good.
Check out the unofficial processor optimized builds, available in a variety of flavors.
...but I still don't have any friends. :( ( no emails magically appeared )
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Been running it for a good hour or so now, and I must say it DOES start-up alot quicker then 0.1 and it seems to be alot more stable as well. The update was easy (unzipping a folder yay) and everything seems to be working as well if not better then before. Kudos Moz :)
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
But here is what you do not understand. The new products (thunderbird, firebird, ect) are gaining momentum quickly.
I have been using ThunderBird for email for quite a while now, and recommended to everyone. I even got my father to switch. The new suite is absolutly incredable. Quicker then the bloated netscape code, smaller, easier to use. This is what will keep the Mozilla Foundation alive, and im sure they know it too.
Besides when has market share had anything to do with if a OSS project stays alive?
We're running a series of Thunderbird articles, the latest article explains how to migrate from other clients. Send this link to your friends!
The blogologue
Phoenix is now Firebird. The Moz suite is being broken up into Firebird, Thunderbird, and so on.
In the future you won't d/l the Moz suite, you'll d/l the Firebird browser, and the Thunderbird mail client if you, and so on and so forth... all components will be separate.
...will Mozilla Taurus be released?
While I love the idea of ridding my windows desktop from any microsoft software other than what is required (windows), Thunderbird needs to majorly work on it's speed before it is of any use to me. I use a 500 mhz k6-2 with 512 MB ram, and often I can't type an email message because the program is so slow. However, it deals with IMAP much better than outlook- which makes my life much easier. Plus I can match skins to firebird!
Thunderbird and Firebird are just the codenames for the development project. The final products will be integrated into Mozilla 1.6 Suite and called Mozilla Browser and Mozilla Mail.
Thunderbird can import. Messages and Settings. When I switched I moved my stuff over from OE. There are netscape/mozilla options too.
Tools...Import...Mail
Tools...Import...Settings
Anybody have a hotmail account hack for this yet?
It's the next version. It just happens to be split out into different apps.
I miss the little launchbar on the bottom of Moz though...
SYS 64738 NO CARRIER
They could call them, oh, I don't know, Hummingbird and Lovebird.
philcrissman.com.
With Microsoft confused as to the devlopment state of Outlook Express, This could be a golden oppertunity for the open source community to gain a significant foothold, because Microsoft might finally be fixing their bugs. I know it sounds crazy, but why else would they push everything back so far?
SAILING MISHAP
Bah! Let me know when Mozilla Mad Dog or Mozilla Night Train Express are released.
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
... If there is an improvment with imap accounts. Is there a setting to check all imap folders, what doesn't cause it to error on folders that cannot contain mail?
Does it handle gpg any better than it did before? Evolution users couldn't verify messages signed with thunderbird perviously.
.. the lack of Outlook Express for free.
;)
Its the killer net-wired computer app, and Microsoft is taking away the free treat. Interesting to see what happens with Mozilla's email client.
I wonder what Eudora Lite is like these days?
"Old man yells at systemd"
I just wanted to pipe in. I'm a Windows user (I know, kill me), but like most people on this site, I hate Outlook and Outlook Express. Vehemently. So I've been using Netscape 4.x's aging email client, Communicator. This post is geared for those who are still using it. Since Thunderbird is by the Mozilla folk, it behaves and looks a lot like Communicator. So if you're using Communicator but hate the fact that a) it can't render some HTML email that your stupid drone friends sends you, and b) all links open in Netscape 4.x, which is almost archaic now, I'd suggest you download Thunderbird and give it a try. You'll be able to import you Address Book and old emails/folders. Not your mail filters though, which pissed me off at first. So I re-did several hundred of them. But then I found Thunderbird's great junk-mail filter. It works great. The other neat-o factor is that you can apply filters to flag messages as Personal/Work/Whatever, and it color codes the emails! Very cool. Anywho, if you like Communicator, try Thunderbird. Especially as it gets more stable...
running around going, "THE NEW PHONEBOOKS ARE HERE!! THE NEW PHONEBOOKS ARE HERE!!" whenever I see someone make an excited news post about a 0.1 rev to a *mail client*?
I just hope the GPG support stays solid and consistent. I am about to try and upgrade here both on a Linux and XP system and I am praying that we won't be burdened with enigmail problems.
If this client stays as solid as it seems to be, and is able to maintain good GPG support, I think I am going to be *very* pleased.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
I'm trying to switch over from Mozilla to Firebird and Thunderbird, but I've run into a few niggles. On the Thunderbird side, for instance, is there any way to open links in a new Firebird tab? In Mozilla's MailNews, I like being able to middle-click to open URLs in a new browser tab :).
And, on the Firebird side, is there a way to turn on inline-autocomplete for the URL bar? (If you're not familiar with inline-autocomplete, it's when the top-match dynamically appears in the URL bar as you type.)
Other than that, I'm also looking for a DOM Inspector extension for Firebird as well. Yeah, there are some one-off XPIs to get the DOM Inspector in Firebird, but I'm concerned that they may not be actively developed. For instance, if the Firebird extensions API changes, I'm not sure if someone would step up to release a new DOM Inspector XPI :-/.
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
Why were they not a bit more aggresive with version numbers ? Its not like its a totally new code base so I'm wondering why they did not start at .4 or higher and work towards version parity (hopefully a 1.0 release in the very very near future) with Firebird so the Mozilla tools can be offered as a suite rather than a hodgepodge of different versions. I ask because telling your PHB you want to run 0.2 software in many cases is like telling him you have volunteered his services for clinical trials of a new protological device. Not something hes going to be happy about.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Does anyone know if the memory footprint has improved? It is the only thing keeping me from switching from OE (which has about 1/3 memory footprint) and the memory footprint section has not been updated on their web site.
1) Is it possible to upgrade your existing Thunderbird 0.1 settings into 0.2? I know Thunderbird is not an installer, its just an unzip and go application. So I worry about upgrading.
2) Does Thunderbird bounce mail? Unfortunately, I have no clue what bouncing mail means, although it has something to do with stopping spam with SpamAssassin. My brother says he'll only switch from Eudora as soon as it can bounce email.
Moving isn't hard (at least it wasn't in Windows 2k), copy the "Mail" folder in your users folder --> C:\Documents and Settings\me\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\default\0qql5ql7.slt\Mail
i l
Start Thunderbird and setup your account.
Go to -->C:\Documents and Settings\me\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\default\0qql5ql7.slt\Ma
and paste the mail folder there.
As far as recreating your filters goes, it shouldn't take you to long to recreate them. They are very simple to create.
I hope this makes sense, I'm just coming off a sugar low =(
A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it. -- Einstein
They won't be integrated at all. The whole point of Firebird and Thunderbird is to separate them from the main suite to reduce bloat and complexity.
I actually did the same thing recently. All it basically involves is copying the contents of your Mozilla profile directory into the directory of your Thunderbird Profile.
Since the two read the same type of profiles it should pick up everything, including settings and filters automatically.
There is some editing of directories and paths that you will have to update in your user.js file I believe.
Search the mozillazine.com forums. That is where I found the info when I needed to switch.
Maybe I didn't read the roadmap thoroughly enough, but I can't see the long term plans for this. I switched my mail and news from Netscape 4.8 to Mozilla 1.4. So far it's been reasonable, even though there are some quirks, sluggishness and some rather obtuse UI choices. Mail in Mozilla 1.4 has finally reached a level that is good enough for my full time use. I would really love to get away from the integrated monolithic process of Mozilla 1.4, but when it comes to email, I'm very conservative about trying software before it's ready.
When is this supposed to be ready? What is the long term plan for version 1.0? Does anybody have a clue, or will it follow after Debian and release when it's ready? The Mozilla Foundation is very different to Debian, and I think they need to provide more foresight. How long do people foresee it being until they spin off a stable branch meant as a replacement to for Mail/News in Mozilla 1.4? Anpther year?
For Windows, try yProxy. It is a news proxy that intercepts and converts yENC on the fly. I use v1.2 which is free and not spyware or adware. According to the website, v1.3 appears to have some type of message of the day banner but I have not used it. You should still be able to search and find v1.2 (yproxy12.zip)
It makes any newsreader yENC capable. I have been using it to make my older version of Agent yEnc capable for over a year.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Much better than 0.1 and the last testing build I used [2003-08-20.] It feels even more responsive than Mozilla Mail [2003-09-03.]
FYI, I am not using the official 0.2 build but a special optimised Thunderbird build by Scott Walker [2003-09-03, tho the About dialog says 2003-08-29.]
Now the main things that need work are memory footprint reduction [23 MB right now], access to functionality [like being able to set/reset the master password] and some annoying bugs such as improper rewrap in text edit mode. The latter is present in Mozilla Mail as well, but it's been there too long.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
Why can't Thunderbird deal with multipart attachments? Forte can, Outlook Express can and Thunderbird/Mozilla News seem to be the only mainstream newsreaders that cannot. I think this should be high on their agenda. Remember, pr0n friendliness always helps higher download rates.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Just type response in a little box below the message and hit enter. Jobs done!.
Help fight continental drift.
...but it seems that two major things are missing, if I am going to be able to keep my mail organized.
1) filtering (to folders) outgoing messages. I want all messages from OR TO certain people to automatically go into my, say, "work" folder.
2) sorting messages by "the other party", whether sender or reciever. In Eudora its just called "who". Within my, say, "work" folder, I might want to find all correspondance with, say, Bob. I don't want to first sort by sender, then the recipient. I want to see them all Bob messages, together.
I moved from Outlook Express to Eudora years ago because it didn't have these essential features....please tell me thunderbird has them somewhere but I'm just not seeing them.
Why is it so difficult to get Thunderbird to import an entire address book from the Palm Desktop? Do I really have to be bothered to export every single name in my Palm address book to a Vcard or Address Archive, and then import them individually into Thunderbird? The day Thunderbird can import my entire palm address book will prove to me its effectiveness over any previous mozilla/netscape mail client I've used in the past. Has anyone else tried this process? Ever notice how the values get jumbled? Mr. A's phone numbers are showing up in the home address line, Mr X's E-mail address appears in the work phone line, etc. Its such an inconvenience it would be more effective if I just manually entered each address, but I won't, and I refuse to, because I own a computer, and not a rolodex that I have to fill out by hand.
I hate all sigs, even this one.
Found this link in the Release Notes that may be of help in that regard: http://texturizer.net/thunderbird/faq.html#2.2
Why didn't Ford sue AMD for the use of Thunderbird in their line of processors??
And soon to be followed by Waterbird for IRC and Earthbird for web page creation. Oh, and not to mention Tarmacbird for your addressbook needs! And the soon to be announced Bugbird for hunting down bugs in code!
Ceterum censeo Microsoftem esse delendam
There might be a plugin that does just that, hell they already have card games plugins, how hard could a launch bar be?
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
These standalone releases are temporary, of sorts. In time, the Mozilla 1.x suite will be this very suite of applications -- Firebird ("Mozilla Browser"), Thunderbird ("Mozilla Mail"), etc. You will be able to choose them separately at install time. I think you will still be able to download Firebird separately too, if you wish.
To be honest, it's all very complicated, and I probably have it wrong. I highly recommend you take a look at the Mozilla Roadmap. They clearly have a much better grasp of this than I do.
Overall, I'm sure this will solve some of the version number problems you describe.
The space unintentionally left unblank.
You're being Overly Critical, aren't you? :-) Speaking for myself, I use Free Open Source software because I don't want to "pirate" the programs you mentioned. Also known as keeping your conscience clean. I'm also doing my best to move people away from Windows and Office, but only where appropriate. I have realistic expectations - I don't want them to end up hating OSS apps cos they didn't fit their needs.
Having said that, you'll notice from my earlier post I'm not happy about the code bloat and huge memory footprint. The tolerance is there, but because of other reasons such as trustworthiness.
A personal note: while I do applaud your efforts to negate the bias around here, I'd be more impressed if you adopted a more neutral attitude. Thanks!
Cheers,
CD
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
There is a Mozilla Calendar project at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/.
I don't think it's got the advanced scheduling capability of Outlook (yet?) but you can share calendars by publishing them to a WebDAV server. You can get a free, open source WebDAV server with either mod_dav for Apache, or with the Jakarta Tomcat 4.1.x releases.
Tips and Tricks for Mozilla
Anyone notice the difference in memory usage between running Thunderbird 0.2 + Firebird 0.6.1 vs Mozilla 1.4 on Windows?
I've used Mozilla primarily on the Mac (OS 9), and one thing I've NEVER understood is why Mozilla, at its worst, eats up about 137+ MB of RAM. This is unacceptable. I suspect that much of it has to do with the growing amount of E-mail that i've collected in to various folders, but there has to be a better way.
I've been wondering if piping all the email to a true database engine wouldn't be an interesting option for those that want to endure the process of setting it up. MySQL is fast, lean, and I'm guessing that the initial load time when opening the e-mail client might be cut substantially.
I've run the weeklies since before 0.1, they all ran for me. I run Thunderbird under Windows XP Pro on a P4 system.
We need more specifics about your problem.
The best place for you to get this fixed is the Thunderbird Bugs forum.
Post a description of your problem with details and exactly what you do to get to the point where you can't run TB.
Just to throw you a bone, make sure you are unzipping TB with all the folders in the zip intact.
Sure they have neat themes but they can't even do SSL email! I was forced to change recently because my ISP blocked outbound SMTP. Lots of others have hit this problem but it has yet to be fixed.
Try Sylpheed, there's a native win32 version and of course *nix versions.
http://tinyurl.com/3t236
What!? 9.5Mb for the compressed Linux binaries in bz2 format and only 7.3Mb for the Windows ones in zip format?!? Something's wrong! We all know that Linux is better than Windows without exception, and that includes file sizes!! ;)
;)
Maybe the Linux version has a few more megs of installation instructions than the Windows one...
{ducks}
(Please don't kill me, I do use and love Linux!!)
---
Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves. -- AE
I think it is a pain to always have to create a new profile. When switching from Mozilla 1.0 to 1.4, a bug I submitted was "solved" by saying "create a new profile". I counted how much work that was, I filled in over 20 text fields and clicked about 30 boxes before I was back to normal. And still I lost all my collected adresses, saved passwords and local adressbook.
The "create new profile" is Mozillas equivalent to "format C: and reinstall everyting". More work should go to handle profiles so they are backwards compatible. It is really annoying.
I think you need GTK 2 libraries for Thunderbird to be installed. You have to upgrade to redhat 9 or atleast upgrade gtk for that( I am also facing the same problem BTW :-)
http://www.nasirudheen.blogspot/
I would be the first to say that the core Mozilla engine has come on in leaps and bounds over the past few years. Yes, the project has had ups and downs, but has eventually delivered a fantastic browser engine. However, as an end user, I don't have the time|inclination to sift through several variants of a browser (some of which seem identical to a non-clued-up end user). How about a single distribution package that just does a modular installation (or even use a custom network installer that just downloads the necessary components). The components for installation, including whatever GUI shell you would like, plug-in support etc, could all be selected from a simple checkbox GUI. The installer app could then just go an grab the components (or even the appropriate fork distribution as a first attempt) from the Mozilla site. This way, we just get Mozilla, not have to decide which of several variants are appropriate.
Contribute to the online videogame encyclopedia: GamerWiki
my (unchecked) guess is that a goodly chunk of that is XPCOM and gecko, mozilla's component architecture and layout renderer, respectively. my hope is that eventually when that stuff stabilises enough we'll see a single download for the gecko runtimes, and then you can install thunderbird, firebird, etc. without having to download/install XPCOM/gecko along with the package.
then again, average-joe user generally doesn't care about download sizes and multiple copies of shared libraries - all they care about is how many clicks it takes from the website to having a usable app. perhaps they could just have a "if you don't know what you're doing, download this" package that has it all, with the smaller pieces for people that know what they want. i suppose the net-installers serve that purpose well enough, actually, as long as they can detect the presence/absence of the core libraries well enough...
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
Why the helll does an email client weight 7-11 MB? I really don't see what kind of functionality it has that requires it to be more then a few 100's of kilos big (not to say 10's of kilos).
Okay, the connector is 69 dollars. Not cheap and not exactly expensive. You're living in a Microsoft world but you like Linux, why not just buy it? At one time in my life I had a nice foreign car and I had to pay extra for parts, labor, etc. To me it was an opportunity cost worth paying for. I didn't want another Chevy so I paid a little extra. In the long run it made me a bit happier and it was nice owning something somewhat rare/different.
Just out of curioustiy: at what price-point will most people in your situation actually buy the dang thing? What if it was 29.99? How cheap are you?
Or better yet why doesn't Ximian offer a student discount?
It blows my mind that hard-core linux types will put 10 hours into figuring out some trivial problem but won't blow 70 dollars on a piece of software that will let them use Exchange.
"So Ted, what did you do today?"
"I wrote a script that gets my email from OWA 2000 and puts it in a comma deliminated file on one of my linux partitions. Then I wrote an app that will take this file and run a fake POP3 server for me to get the emails. Pretty good eh?"
"How much time did you spend on this, Ted?"
"I dunno, 3 or 4 hours."
"Dont you bill $50 an hour."
"Yep."
"Why dont you just buy the damn connector?"
*long pause*
"Cause Stallman says proprietary software is bad? Oh man, I need help."
i think you are misunderstanding something. XUL is not a GUI toolkit. it's just a cross platform interface definition language. XUL, as interpreted by mozilla's widget libraries, rely on the underlying OS to create widgets. on windows, they're the familiar windows widgets generated via the win32 api. on linux, there isn't an OS-specific widget library. well, you could say that Xlib/Xt/Xaw is somewhat of a widget library. but it's butt-ugly and a pain to work with. gtk is what mozilla uses to draw its widgets. there used to be the option of building mozilla using straight xlib, or using qt, but i believe that code is no longer being maintained.
as for using the same version of gtk - it's getting there. gtk2 support is not quite complete, tho it's quite useable. hopefully we'll start seeing gtk2 in default builds for all of the mozilla-based apps soon. (all performance arguments aside, i can't stand looking at gtk1.2 widgets after using gtk2.)
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
Unofficial FreeBSD builds can be found at:
r d/
//danne
http://home.arcor.de/t.hecker/freebsd/thunderbi
Hopefully, they will soon show up in the contrib directory of the official ftp also.
I'm already a fan of Firebird. Maybe someone here could answer a question I couldn't find in the FAQ. Can I use Mozilla Mail or Thunderbird to access my Outlook *.pst file to use my stored e-mail addresses (which I keep synced with my palm pilot through Outlook)? I would happily switch over if it did that.
If not, maybe this is a plugin worth making. It would ease the transition of many current Outlook users. Oh, and please don't tell me I can import the addresses. That's no use to me if I can't keep things synchronized with my palm pilot.
-- Who am I? How did I get here? My God, what have I done?!
Open Office has a spel checker, gnome has one, firebird has one, why don't they all use the same fabulous one. Less code and more functionality.Just a pasing thought, congratulations to the team.
It blows my mind that hard-core linux types will put 10 hours into figuring out some trivial problem but won't blow 70 dollars on a piece of software...
Hackers highly value their problem solving abilities. The satisfaction of finding a solution far outways the simplicity of buy it. It's just a matter of what's more valuable to a person, having a solution or building it.
Developers: We can use your help.
For all of you bemoaing the lack of the "groupware" features of Outlook, perhaps you should check out this list. Here's you best answer for Linux in the groupware-space. If your needs aren't met by something on this list, you might as well cozy up to Outlook for the time being. Groupware List