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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..."
Thunderbird is really very stable. I have been using it since 0.2a as my main e-mail software. (Including all the nightly builds.)
I can't think how stable 1.0 will be. Just give it a try. You'll like it.
less is more
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)
Coding and review is currently being done on extending the spell check component to work in broswer windows. So not there yet, but it's on the horizon.
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.
http://www.nasirudheen.blogspot/
Thunderbird 0.4 finally adds an optional extension to sync the Thunderbird address book with your PalmOS based handheld. Grab it from here.
Um... you don't have to use all of the features. In fact, Mozilla is just as usable out of the box as is IE, and any of the special things you may want to use later are usually about 5 clicks away.
:-0
It sounds like you don't know exactly what you want out of your browser. You want less bloat than Mozilla, but more features than Mosaic. There isn't really much in between (and IE has the worst of both worlds, so it doesn't count).
I'm sorry to say this, but your argument for not switching is very flimsy. At least you didn't say "because it's already there."
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."
And yet, conversely, Microsoft's little Internet Explorer does not even support tabbed browsing.
No, the difference here is that with Microsoft products you don't see the development process.
This is version 0.4 remember? Look at that number... do the developers think it's finnished? Even half-finnished?
Install a nice linux desktop with Evolution/KMail + any browser and everything will be at least as integrated as on Windows.
I was lazy and used Outlook Express for email, plus an old Hotmail account hanging around. After working with Firebird betas for awhile I gave Thunderbird a try and have used it ever since, even tapping into my Hotmail with the free and excellent Hotmail Popper. Unfortunately only for Windows, but still and excellent companion to Thunderbird. (Also works with any POP email client) And thankfully once Hotpop downloads the msgs the TBird spam filter goes into effect.
Jonah Hex
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
If you aren't able to get complete support for your needs, you or anyone could write an extension; modules that add functionality to Thunderbird.
I've heard people wanting this and that in Firebird and Thunderbird and others arguing that certain features would just bloat the programs. With extensions, people get the features they want, and people who don't want them can rest easy. Works well for the birds.
--- March, milde, march!
Done it - bullshit. Latest everything on gnome/kde is nowwhere near as integrated or consistant as windows.
Having said that - I still prefer KDE to windows despite the quirks because it is transparent, and some things are just plain great, KDevelop is a joy to use compared to DevStudio, which used to be my favourite IDE.
Does anyone know if or when Thunderbird will support either an Emacs mode or configurable bindings without editing the source code? I seem to recall somewhere in some Mozilla manifesto that Emacs bindings were supposed to take precedence. Thunderbird has a fine set of keybindings, but it's nothing like Emacs.
Yeah, here it is:
When these two bindings conflict (as in ctrl-A or ctrl-H), the emacs binding wins.
Not that I'm saying they should necessarily make this the default, but the above implies they recognize how large the Emacs userbase is; it would be nice to at least be able to configure it myself without having to recompile.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
...me and half the world that is.
The CALENDAR.
I use outlook everywhere because I need the calendar.
If they could provide a simple calendar program, like the Good'Ol palm desktop, they'd open the door for quite a lot of people.
I don't mean a large-scale office multi-user integrated calendar solution like MS Exchange.
Sure, you could get to that later on, build it on top of MySQL or something, I mean something simple I can use at home for myself. Something that people with non-corporate needs can use to organize their life (These people _do_ exist you know. One or two of them.)
Of course you'd be fighting an uphill battle to set some form of open standard for calendar/mail/addressbook syncing. An API for handhelds/smartphones to use (as opposed to "Does it sync with Outlook?"), Microsoft would be clobbering you on the head every step of the way - Windows Mobile 200X will not support you out of the box, Outlook will continue shipping with PDA's, ActiveSync will work flawlessly with Outlook and they'd be paying non-MS mobile vendors (like palm) to support Outlook-syncing in their (even non-MS) OS and not support alternative sync standards.
And yet, if such an API did come to exist, the Open Source community would complement the software support that the PalmOS/Windows Mobile/Symbian/Linux handhelds/smartphones will lack to sync to the desktop, not to mention the desktop software itself.
In my view, FireBird seems like the mother of all places to start pushing such an API.
Bit until that happens, I'll stick with Outlook.
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hotwayd lets you access a hotmail account through any mail client on linux. What it is is a local POP3 server that translates the POP requests into Microsoft's Hotmail protocol.
I have been solely using Mozilla Mail for about 5 years and it has been excellent. However, I have never used or found a use for "Local Folders". In fact, they just get in the damn way. I wish I could delete them!!! What are they for???
"Exchange Functionality"?
Exchange is a proprietary Microsoft implementation of an email server on top of a x.500-like directory/store.
You can "sort of" connect to it with IMAP, but many things don't work (refer back to "proprietary" above).
Anything which was 100% totally and completely Exchange interoperable would almost certainly infringe on trade-secrets and/or patents. Microsoft would then hunt you down and kill you and everyone in your family through to your great-grandchildren.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
And Mozilla istelf has S/MIME for ages
From the parent post: "Microsoft would then hunt you down and kill you and everyone in your family through to your great-grandchildren."
This is an exaggeration. Actually, Bill Gates would come to your house and raid your refrigerator.
For anyone still running glibc 2.2.5, try the French language release. It still works. Open with "thunderbird -UILocale en-US -contentLocale en-US" and it will start with English. You can download the French release at contrib-localized and it will go up in a few days. You can also find the old 0.3 release in contrib-localized.
I agree, all software should be named after an animal/celebrity/pokemon that can beat the mascot of competing applications in a fight, that way we can all play top trumps wihle browsing freshmeat.
ex$$
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.
Unofficially at http://www.metashops.co.uk/mozilla/
alias uptime="echo '5:33pm up 22342352324 days, 6:28, 2124315623 users, load average: 2432.40, 12312.31, 123123.19'"
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.
The way I understand it, all that would do is teach your Bayesian classifier that HTML tags are slightly junkish: they show up in some junk messges and (presumably) some good ones, but HTML on its own = junk.
So if you get an HTML email from a friend, the presence of (e.g.) your name and theirs should outweigh the "junkness" of the HTML, and it won't be marked as junk. But if you get HTML spam then the presence of words like "click here" should keep the balance on the "junk" side.
Bayesian sorting really is amazingly "smart" at stuff like this.
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.
"With extensions, people get the features they want, and people who don't want them can rest easy. Works well for the birds."
Birds are coding extensions for Mozilla now?
Those cunning oiseaux!
Hitchcock was right- lock all your doors and windows, and hope they don't have blasters.
graspee
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.
I disagree completely on this issue. Each new release of Exchange server is 3 years or so from the previous. And does my Outlook 98 machine install still interface with Exchange 2003? You bet it does! I'll admit that trying to hit some of Microsoft's moving targets is fruitless, but interfacing with Exchange should be one of the easier ones to hit if someone is willing to pick up the gun and aim. Heck, even just writing a perl script to talk behind the scenes to the Outlook Web Interface and translate the HTML into a common format should work. (BTW _ Isn't that how Ximian Connector works???)
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
Thundercougarfalconbird
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?
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 use Thunderbird to check my Hotmail account through a tool called Hotmail Popper. This tool may run into difficulties when the Hotmail site changes its look in a few weeks but right now it works great and I don't have to deal with opening a browser for some mail and a local client for others.
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)
Teen Angel - a Ghost Story
The Thunderbird page states "Red Hat Linux 7.0 and higher", which is of course bullsh*t:
./run-mozilla.sh thunderbird-bin /lib/libpthread.so.0: version `GLIBC_2.3.2' not found (required by ./libnspr4.so)
~/thunderbird >
thunderbird-bin:
I wish they'd either build it against 2.3.1 or change the posted system requirements... One can find versions built for older GLIBCs if one want's to trawl the fora and newsgroups...
Nice app, otherwise.
The heat from below can burn your eyes out
Once GRE comes out, this problem will hopefully be solved because any application based on Gecko/XUL/XPCOM will be sharing a single instance of GRE installed on the machine.
sure I'll have a sig.
I installed Thunderbird after it was last mentioned on Slashdot. One thing I found is it is a great way to backup mail from Outlook Express. You just delete the Thunderbird data (read the help file) and the next time you start it, it asks you if you want to import mail. Just click the Import option for Outlook Express, and it takes all the mail in OE and imports it into a plain txt format that, if all else fails, you could use Notepad to read (unlike OE, which would take an act of Congress to read if for some reason the data files were separated from the OE program).
As far as using Thunderbird full time, I would like to, but I actually have several years of e-mails stored in OE and when they are all imported into Thunderbird, it sure makes the old bird fly slow.
Note I also use e-Backup from http://www.inachis.com/index.htm to backup and restore an OE mail database. It has worked great and it is pretty good at replicating an OE setup between different machines as well (e.g. backup your home machine and restore it at work).
Yes, I am a microsoft basher and I'm wanting to move to Linux in the next year or so, but I will confess, outside of the virus thing, OE isn't as bad as some people make it out to be.
Usurper_ii
Ron Paul
One thing I forgot to mention when using Thunderbird to backup OE e-mail. If you use the method I mentioned above to import the mail, it will only import the mail from the default OE e-mail account. Since we have multiple users, you would actually have to change the default account for each account you wanted to import. One thing that would be very useful would be for Thunderbird to ask which identity it wanted to import!!!
But still, it is free...so it is hard to complain too much.
Usurper_ii
Ron Paul
The answer is simple.
The old mozilla that you know is going to be discontinued soon enough. Firebird and Thunderbird will be replacing it.
While mozilla is still being developed there is not too good of a reason to use FB/TB. You will not save much in terms of memory or gain much in terms of performance. That's okay though.
The purpose of this split is so people who _don't_ want both can have just one. These people will see a significant reduction in memory usage and gain in performance.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?