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..."

Comments

Although it is in 0.4

[ErixTr]

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.

Re:Although it is in 0.4

[Tarqwak]

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.

Re:Although it is in 0.4

[jridley]

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.

Re:Although it is in 0.4

[seasleepy]

The thread view is sorted by thread and then time, at least in 0.4, and I think it always has been....
Also, since the spam filter is Bayesian, it's going to not work properly if you get lots of messages that aren't spam but have spammy titles. I don't know if that's your case or not.
Regarding the other things, I have no idea. ;)

Re:Although it is in 0.4

[Anthracks]

It's a little of both, actually. The SeaMonkey back-end code is still used (there is no sense in re-writing stable, proven code for POP, IMAP, preference handling, etc) but it shares the new lighter-weight Firebird GUI code. You'll note that if you compile Thunderbird, the MailNews directory is built (where all the back-end code lives). The one extra directory, mail, is the new GUI and any code specific to the functionality of Thunderbird.

Re:Although it is in 0.4

[Rysc]

I completely agree. It makes no sense at all.

Why build a SEPERATE set of trash/sent/draft/template/etc folders for every account? Why give me so many trees and so many inboxes? If I want to segregate mail by which account it's sent to, I'll use filters. That's what they're for.

At the very least they should provide an option to merge all folders in all acounts into a single "virtual" tree, and then hide the accounts. A hack, sure, but at least it would get the job done.

Re:Although it is in 0.4

[gullevek]

oh no! please NO! Gosh, I hate it so much that you can't do that in Kmail or Evolution. I want SEPERATE mail boxes. You ask why? Because I read serval different mail accounts. Work, Private, Alternate. I don't want to get them mixed and I have no interested in some major sorting rules (which are impossible to do if you recive the same ML at home and work account [see Kmail for this sucker bug]). I hope Thunderbird keeps there seperate accounts for each box.

and btw, if you want all in one tree, why don't you set up a basic rule -> all mail income on pop account 1 move to folder inbox in local acount. furthermore you can set for each account that the sent/draf/etc folder are in "x" mailbox.

Exchange Support?

[FrankConners]

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 :(

Re:Exchange Support?

[Gnavpot]

Thunderbird can use IMAP. I do it at home.

Even though IMAP is not Exchange's native language, i have seen some Exchange servers running an additional IMAP service. So you may be lucky.

But doesn't Deutsche Banke have an opinion regarding employees installing unapproved software on the company's computers? I would certainly hope so, even if it means that you can't use a proper mail client.

Re:Exchange Support?

[Bob9113]

I use Thunderbird at the office against an Exchange server. It doesn't interface with Exchange calendaring (at least AFAIK), but the mail works great. Set it up as a IMAP client. You can get the settings from your Outlook install.

Re:Exchange Support?

[Dom2]

Surely missing meetings is a bonus? :-)

-Dom

Re:Exchange Support?

[gad_zuki!]

>Even though IMAP is not Exchange's native language

Mail severs don't really have native languages. Exchange supports protocols just like any other mail server. POP3, IMAP, and MAPI.

I use tbird with Exchange and have no problems with IMAP nor with IMAP over SSL (which Exchange supports too). I just generated a non-authorized SSL cert and off I went.

A couple problems/issues:

Tbird does not support NTLM authentication, so if you're using IMAP or POP your password will be sent as plain-text unless you use SSL.

Microsoft really half-asses IMAP. If I open my contact folder and open a contact, I get a blank email. Same with notes. It doesn't seem like it would be much trouble to just deliver the ascii format of those contacts and notes in the body of the email.

That said, the changes in .4 are much welcomed and tb has been my prefered email client for a few months now.

I would still like to see something other than "Catching up with Microsoft" in the future. How about integrating with gpg and having an easy to use GUI to encrypt messages. Currently, you have to get gpg, install enigmail, and pray. A built-in encryption module could really help push encryption onto the masses.

Or even an installer for win32. (there's an unofficial installer btw)

Re:Exchange Support?

[ocelotbob]

Or even an installer for win32. (there's an unofficial installer btw)

I'm willing to wager that it's already in progress. The last few nightlies of Thunderbird (which has gotten a lot faster and even more awesome in the past few weeks) have been built with a windows installer, so I imagine that focus will be shifted to Firebird soon enough. IIRC, one of the things in the firebird/thunderbird/sunbird project was to streamline the installer as well, just give the crew a release or two to polish it up.

Re:Exchange Support?

[mshiltonj]

...there is the downside of missing meetings because the calendar isn't supported.

Missing meetings isn't a bug -- it's a feature!

firebird speed

[sewagemaster]

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?

Re:firebird speed

[jsebrech]

Firebird simply doesn't have as much linux developers. That's the thing with open source, you can't assign work to your developers. It's one thing saying "firebird needs to be optimised for linux/X", and a whole other thing to actually do it.

What I can tell you though, is that despite firebird being slower on linux than on windows, it's not noticeably slower (for me anyway). And in addition, it is a fast browser, even on linux. On windows it even whoops IE's ass in various benchmarks. A lot of people have misconceptions about firebird's rendering speed because they're used to IE's render-as-soon-as-data-arrives model of updating the screen, which starts sooner, but ends later. If you want that in firebird, type about:config and set nglayout.initialpaint.delay to 0. One more thing: I have a pII/233 that I run firebird on. It runs at a usable clip, even on such a low-end system.

And obviously, whenever a graphical application is slow, it is X's fault ... NOT.

Re:firebird speed

[ocelotbob]

Sounds like a scheduling/latency issue. Try renicing X to run at -5, or upgrade to a test version of kernel 2.6, where a lot of the latency/sluggish feel of X in general will be mitigated, if not disappear completely.

Re:firebird speed

[FooBarWidget]

"That's the thing with open source, you can't assign work to your developers."

Actually you can - hire some developers.
Open source is just a development model. Open source doesn't automatically mean everybody has to be a volunteer. You can still hire as many professionals as you want.

Bayesian SPAM filter

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

Re:Bayesian SPAM filter

[OverlordQ]

1) Might ask for help in a Better Place
2) Apples and Oranges, POPFile isn't a spam filter, it's an email classification system.

Re:Bayesian SPAM filter

[biljir]

Sounds to me like the Orange is a better Apple!

Re:Bayesian SPAM filter

[mikecron]

Apples and Oranges-A Comparison

Re:Cool - Annoyance Eliminator!

[SEE]

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.

palm address book sync

[jark]

Thunderbird 0.4 finally adds an optional extension to sync the Thunderbird address book with your PalmOS based handheld. Grab it from here.

Re:too many features?

[bersl2]

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.

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." :-0

Question...

[John Seminal]

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?

Re:Question...

[karevoll]

In "Tools"->"Options"->"Advanced" you will find a checkbox for "Block loading of remote images in mail messages" :-) This option has been present for a long time (at least as long as I've known about Thunderbird) :-)

Re:Question...

[DeadMeat (TM)]

Actually, it is accessible from the GUI: hit Edit/Preferences, go to Privacy & Security/Images, and check "Do not load remote images...".

That said, one of my (few) complaints with the monolithic Mozilla suite is that the Preferences dialog buries useful stuff like that where you might not expect it. Thankfully, that's one of the things that's been revamped in Firebird/Thunderbird.

Re:It's so refreshing to hear-

[ernstp]

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.

Thunderbird is great OE replacement + Hotmail Xcng

[Jonah Hex]

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

Might not happen, but there's always a chance...

[showdax]

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.

Emacs Keybindings?

[Bob9113]

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.

The one "feature" that holds me back

[MikShapi]

...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.

Re:The one "feature" that holds me back

[TheRaven64]

I use outlook everywhere because I need the calendar.

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).

Re:The one "feature" that holds me back

[jark]

This was being worked on as an extension to Thunderbird. It uses the Mozilla Calendar as the basis for adding a calendar in to Thunderbird.

...unfortunately November 19 was the last time the site was updated and it is not even workable on 0.4.

Re:The one "feature" that holds me back

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Mozilla Calendar really needs to be folded directly into the Thunderbird system. People want a calendar in their email client, and that's that. The sooner this is done, the sooner Thunderbird can start kicking Outlook's butt.

The place where Mozilla Calendar is a bit weak right now is its server support. Sure, you can publish and subscribe using WebDAV, but that's not the same thing as having a true server-side calendar. And you still can't send and receive meeting invitations, or check other users' free/busy times.

Fortunately, there is a group at Penn State working on fixing this. They're writing a new calendar API that can be used to hook into arbitrary servers. That means that modules will be able to be written for any back end, such as Citadel, Sun calendar server, Kolab, or whatever else appears out there in the future.

Hotwayd does the same on Linux

[niceandsunny]

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.

Local Folders...

[Anonymous Coward]

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???

Re:It's so refreshing to hear / Reality Check

[Crypto Gnome]

"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.

Re:Bayesian SPAM filter - Empty "hello" emails

[zr-rifle]

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.

what's still WRONG with TB

[professorhojo]

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.

What's the point of using Thunder- and Firebird?

[ANicknameSimilarToMi]

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.

One word...

[wampus]

Thundercougarfalconbird

Re:This is great

[bigdaddydsp]

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.

System requirements posted for Linux are wrong

[motorsabbath]

The Thunderbird page states "Red Hat Linux 7.0 and higher", which is of course bullsh*t:

~/thunderbird > ./run-mozilla.sh thunderbird-bin
thunderbird-bin: /lib/libpthread.so.0: version `GLIBC_2.3.2' not found (required by ./libnspr4.so)

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.

Re:What's the point of using Thunder- and Firebird

[*SECADM]

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.