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Mozilla Thunderbird 0.4 Released
Random BedHead Ed writes "The latest release of Mozilla Thunderbird, the standalone Mozilla mail program, has been released and is available for download here. A quick scan of the release notes shows some new improvements and features, including a new look, bug fixes, and for Linux users the ability to click on a URL in an e-mail and have it actually launch in your default web browser (how novel). Download and enjoy..."
Just curious..... does anybody think there is a possibility that Thunderbird will support Exchange Mail/Lotus Notes. Unfortunately we both use Domino and Exchange Servers at Deutsche Bank :(
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"I cant teach..... Im a Professor!"
from the mozilla/ firebird website, it says that firebird's developed and targetted mostly for windows - although it's cross platform obviously - but unfortunately it seems that the application's speed/ responsive under linux is quite slower than on windows... quite noticable...
could this be X's fault?
my blog
I've used Thunderbird 0.3 and now 0.4, but the same thing surprises me: Thunderbird's bayesian spam filter is not nearly as good as POPFile's (which I used before).
For example a particular spam mail, which is always identical, never gets marked as spam, no matter how much I train the spam filter.
I'd guess the "success ratio" of Thunderbird's SPAM filter is about 80%-90% - with POPFile I got about 98%-99% success ratio.
Am I doing something wrong? Has anyone has similar experiences? I'd really like to use Thunderbird's spam filter instead of another program, as the "training" is integrated to the mail reading application (much easier just to click "Junk" icon, than to switch application and search for that same mail and then handle with it)
I think going after reverse engineering the Outlook MAPI is a terrible and never-ending task. As microsoft keep changing things to ensure incompatibility with Free softwares, its pointless to chase outlook. An alternative cross platform mail client like Thunderbird makes a lot of sense in this background.
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I have never used Mozialla to read email. I am wondering, does it have anything that will not allow the img src tag in email to work? In other words, can it open just the text without allowing any requests to be sent out? I know many spammers validate email addresses by sending spam with a small image, and when you request that image, they know they have a real email account. All you have to do is make the mistake of opening one wrong email. Then they start sending you 10 times the amount of spam. I think it would be benificial if there was an email program which has a setting so that no requests are sent. I guess what I am asking is this possible or does it already exsist?
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
One thing that makes MTB kind of annoying for (to be) former Outlook Express users is bug 30057 - "Use one Local Mail tree for all POP3 accounts"
Other than that it mops the floor with OE.
How about this one? It uses the open iCalendar (RFC-2445) format used in Apple's iCal, and can share and subscribe to calendars using WebDAV (RFC 2518). I don't personally use it any more (I use iCal), but I am able to read calendars published by users of it, and publish calendars readable by it (ah, the joys of open standards). I have never used Outlook, so I don't know if this will provide all of the features you need. Oh, and last time I looked (0.4 versions ago) it was unable to sync with my mobile phone's calendar (one of the reasons I switched to iCal).
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And Mozilla istelf has S/MIME for ages
It's been 4 or 5 months since I've started to receive empty html emails with the topic reading only "hello" or "hi". No text, links or anything in the main body.
My guess is that these email are sent by spammers targetting users who use bayesian spam filters, since marking such emails as Junk, thus training the filter, might actually mess things up.
I haven't actually looked at the bayesian algorithms, so I'm not sure about this.
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
as a current outlook expresser who desperately wants to change, i'll cast my vote for a centralized inbox option.. i operate about 10 different email servers and thunderbird by default gives me 10 different inboxes with 10 sets of local folders.
that's just ridiculous.
there desperately needs to a centralized inbox layout option like in outlook/oex. without that, i'm staying where i am.
prof.h.
I've tried 0.2 and most recently 0.3. I gave both of them about a week. Both times I went back to using Forte Agent. 0.2 was just not stable for me. 0.3 was stable, never crashed or lost stuff. My big problem is that after a few days of usage, it just started getting horribly slow. Also there are some usability problems that I start out thinking I can live with, but they eventually bug me too much:
- "thread" view is sorted wrong. They group by thread then sort ALPHABETICALLY. Sorry, group then sort BY TIME, at least optionally. Otherwise I've got recent threads at the top, ancient threads at the bottom, and thousands of emails between them. Browsing becomes nearly impossible; recent threads become needles in a haystack.
- No "backspace" when reading emails: both Agent and Thunderbird (and others) allow spacebar and "N"ext message to quickly browse through messages, Agent has a "backspace" key that remembers which messages you've read and backs you up through them. When you're in thread view of a mailing list that generates 100+ emails a day and you have 6 month's archives in the folder, once you leave a message you have almost no hope of finding it again without this feature.
- the spam filter is hopeless. I tagged well over 1000 spams, and it still was getting about 50% false negatives, and even worse, about 20% false positives. I'd pick up 50 emails, have 20 spams in there, it wouldn't ID 10 of the spams, and it would throw 5+ legitimate emails into the spam filter. POPfile got to be almost perfect far before this. Yes, I could use POPfile with Thunderbird, but I was hoping the feature would actually work.
- using it in large binaries groups is completely hopeless, especially on a good server with long retention. I went into a group that had about 300,000 messages on the server, and it just about coughed up a lung. It took it forever to do anything once that was loaded. Also it doesn't even appear to combine all parts of a multipart post into one display item; without this feature, you actually have to LOOK at all 300,000 items; this is ridiculous, other newsreaders have had this important feature for years.
There are other problems, but I've already forgotten them (I switched back to Agent two days ago).
Yeah, I could fix some of these if I wanted, and I did look in to that, but setting up the build environment is fairly involved, and I couldn't fix all of them without spending significant time learning the guts of the system.
I *want* Thunderbird to work, I just can't live with it yet. And I'm afraid some of the things that bug me about it might be fairly hard to fix.
I fled from Evolution as soon as I found out about Thunderbird. Evolution is hideously bloated, hard to customize, and it's IMAP support is braindead...I couldn't create or subscribe to folders served by courier-imapd, and telnetting to port 143 to do the mods by hand was getting very, very old. Thunderbird is a far superior mail client, the only thing I miss about Evolution is the nifty gray-and-white message lists that look, well, more cool than Thunderbird's!
I'm still puzzled as to why there's no multi-column sorting in Thunderbird. I want to dump Outlook Express, but I really rely on being able to sort my mail, first by whether it's been flagged, and second by the date it arrived. Every time a new Thunderbird release arrives, I dutifully download it, attempt to do a multi-column sort (so that flagged messages are first followed by all other email in order from newest to oldest), and then get bummed out because the feature isn't there.
Habit is a strange thing.
But I NEED to be able to switch between HTML and plain text emails on the fly, between either one, with plain text as my default.
Currently, if you have plain text as your default, there is no way that I'm aware of to switch to HTML for a single email except by going in and modifying the profile of that user to send as HTML. I need to be able to do this on the fly, with a single button or menu item, not because I want to, but because several of my customers use HTML, and I want to be able to click "New Mail", and choose how I'm sending it. Same for Replies, same for Forwards.
Honestly, my Outlook 2000 does this pretty much how I want it (I could use an improvement or two in the quoting ability of replies, but that's neither here nor there). When Thunderbird does this the way I need it done, I will be the first one to switch permanently.
Until then, I use it pretty much only with the --addressbook flag...Thunderbird has a great addressbook, in my opinion.
What's the point of using Thunderbird and Firebird if you want a mail application *and* a browser? I always thought these projects were originally created to derive slim standalone applications from Mozilla with a smaller footprint. But memory usage seems no longer be a key issue.
For example, if I open Mail/News and a Navigator window, Mozilla allocates 25,800 KB memory. If I open Thunderbird and Firebird, they use 18,972 KB and 15,888 KB which is together 34,860 KB and much more. (OS: WinXP)
Personally, I don't expect this will change significantly (more than a few MB) till version 1.0 as developers are biased towards their own machines, for which memory is often a non issue (who can blame them). This is very pity, because it hinders many people (with old hardware) to use Firebird and Thunderbird as their standard browser and mail application.
maybe more inciteful than insightful on my part. I think that the main reason is that I actually like the kitchen sink approach of Evolution, because it's convenient to have that higher level of integration between the email & PIM facets.
on the flip side, I think that firebird is great because i don't need the complete works that mozilla provides when it comes to web browsing. don't need email integrated, don't need web design integrated, don't need chatzilla.
usual caveats: not for everyone, based on my own particular needs yadda yadda
How closely integrated will they (optionally) be?
One of the features of Mozilla that I have used thousands of times is "Open link in new tab" from an e-mail message.
As there is no standard interface (AFAIK) for tabbed browsing, I am a little worried that Thunderbird will not be able to do this for me, without specific integration with Firebird.
So, for now, I'm still using Mozilla (even though Thunderbird and Firebird look so new and fresh!). But for how long will Mozilla be available?
How about just getting the damn 'mark all as read' hotkey going in Linux.. it's been broken since 0.2... Even in the full version of Mozilla it's b0rked... It iritates me to no end having to navigate the menus just to mark an IMAP folder as read.
Maybe even a right-click -> Mark all as read would do...
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing an editor and a MTA.
One question about thunderbird 0.4, that I haven't been able to anwser by reading the release notes:
Is the Outbox repaired?? I downloaded 0.3 a week ago, used it ever since, love it, except that it's seemingly impossible to put the outgoing mail in the Outbox or (Unsent mail), and sending it when I connect (yes I'm still on dialup). Yes, I DID install the "Offline" extension, it's crap:
-no "send later" button (I have to use "ctrl-shift-enter"
-when asked to "send later" it puts the email in the "unsent messages", which is fine. But why, when the messages are sent, do they get transfered to my account's "Outbox" folder instead of in the "Sent messages" folder?
Is there any way to change that? I couldn't figure it out... I'm on dialup so there's no way I download the 0.4 version except if they have fixed the issue.
Thanks!
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
I've tried Necscape/Mozilla email clients, and one thing stops me from moving from Pine. Pine has smart saving, where I can set it so the default folder for sent mail is the recipients email name, rather than just a hold all sentmail folder. Plus, when I go to save a message that I've received it defaults to a folder with the name of who it's from.
When is another email client going to catch up to (and maybe pass) Pines 'Save' functionality?
Cheers, Liam
I really don't understand why they broke this thing apart, and then took 4 releases to get back to the original functionality! Apparently they have finally put in (for Linux only, but that's what I use) the ability to click on a link in an e-mail and get to the link in a browser window.
... if there is also demand for separate browser and mail, fine, but I can't believe there isn't any demand for the original all-in-one version. Having them as a single program seems to make so much more sense - click on a link in the e-mail to go to a browser window, then click on a link on the page to send an e-mail reply - why would anyone NOT want them integrated????
I have never bothered with any of the standalone mail clients, no matter how good some people say they are, because I believe the mail client needs to be integrated with the browser! So much of the e-mail I get has links to web sites that anything else is useless.
Personally, I think Mozilla ought to go BACK to an integrated package (at least as one option)
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