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Mozilla Thunderbird 0.6 Released
KonijnenBunny writes "May 3rd sees the release of the 0.6 version of Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail and newsgroup client, featuring improved junk-mail controls and a new brand identity, including a new Firefox-style icon.
I switched from some murky client which didn't exactly have a bright outlook regarding spam to Thunderbird a while back and was not dissapointed. Grab this latest version at Mozilla.org." Mac OS X users can also enjoy the new Pinstripe theme, which matches the previous theme of the same name applied to Firefox.
Is it the garish pinstripe theme of old or the new, improved, and subdued pinstripe of Panther?
Try to win your boss over away from the "we're a Microsoft Partner" way of thinking! Show him that everytime you violate the standard to appease IE, you are taking money out of your pocket and giving it to Microsoft, and are moving one step closer to a Microsoft-only Internet, complete with Microsoft-only viruses and trojans.
While I agree with your general concept (which I think is that standards are a good thing and we shouldn't use browser-specific extensions on public-facing Web sites), I don't really understand how making sure sites work in the browser that 90% of my customers use "takes money out of my pocket and gives it to Microsoft." If my customers can't get to my content, they keep their money to themselves and spend it elsewhere.
Don't make any consessions for IE. In fact, turn IE users away at the door. Put up some links for them to get with the program and download a standards-compliant browser.
Uh, dude. C'mon. I really think you've gone over the hedge here. People don't want to be hassled when they go to a Web site -- they just want it to work. I'm all for making sure things work in Moz, Safari, etc., but most bosses rightly won't let their employees turn their Web sites into some kind of crusade for the software they prefer.
i wouldn't blame thunderbird, I find that with all GTK apps and have done ever since they went 2.0.
. SpamFi lters.html
QT3 seems faster and better, GTK 2.0 seems better but slower.
good spam filter advice with kmail here
http://www.softwaredesign.co.uk/Information
Well, there's no KMail build for Windows, so I wouldn't really know.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
Too bad they removed my ability to send messages. Oh well, looks like its back to .05 for me.
I know that some people will flame on about the "small tools" approach, but it would really make sense to tightly integrate Mozilla Calendar into Thunderbird. Like it or not, people have expectations, and the general expectation is that their email program will be a full PIM suite (Calendar, Tasks, Contacts). As nice as Thunderbird is, there's a large segment of the population that will take a look at it and say "No calendar? Then I'll stick with Outlook." And that's a shame, because getting rid of Outlook is one step on the road to getting rid of Windows.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
I'd say true geeks use the correct names for companies and their products.
Martin
I used Thunderbird for quite a while, but ended up going back to Evolution. Evol seems faster to me - which is surprising because TB is supposed to be some kind of light weight e-mail client. But I'm also aware of the fact that TB isn't even at 1.0 yet, so I'm sure code optimizations are in the works. But Evol also has more "polish" ... though again TB will improve in that area as newer versions come out.
I actually moved my e-mail to IMAP just so I could more freely switch between e-mail clients. No more exporting/importing.
"I don't really understand how making sure sites work in the browser that 90% of my customers use "takes money out of my pocket and gives it to Microsoft.""
Yep, the money's not really going to microsoft is it, so much as to your competitors. But, for anyone who gets the 90% argument from their boss:
"Designing for 90% of browsers is our policy? Here's a question. If I answered 10% of the sales calls with "hello [companyname], could you please fuck off", how would that affect our sales?"
"Now imagine if our website gave that same impression to 10% of customers"
You're deploying a "technology preview" to 1500+ users? Thunderbird is great and all (I use it), but that's ballsy.
*sigh*. Is it EVER gonna get a single local mail tree for all POP accounts feature? Is it even on the list of planned enhancements? Until it gets this, I WILL NOT SWITCH TO IT. Nor will quite a few other people. I wish the developers would get a clue.
This issue pisses me off, a lot. Because I'd love to switch from OE, but I won't put up with not having this feature.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
No, that's a build for Cygwin.
I can get Thunderbird on windows with no additional effort (IE just the installer.) For kmail I have to step through loading the POS that is Cygwin, load KDE, then load kmail and hope nothing fucks up on the way down.
I love the new artwork. It works great in the About box and as a banner on a webpage. It's good to see that Mozilla.org takes branding seriously. I don't think that it works well as an icon though.
The new icon loses its bird-carrying-an-envelope meaning when scaled down. The first thing I thought of was a blue-haired LEGO guy and surely that's not good. The blue color also clashes slightly with the default Windows background color.
Let's hope they tweak the smaller icon sizes for legibility.
Windows Installer
Thunderbird now comes with an installer for Windows making it easier than ever to start using Thunderbird!
Sucks. This means that you have to go into the Control Panel & do all the blablabla to uninstall the application. I found it much easier to simply delete the app folder & unzip the new version in the same place. But I guess that the average user is rather familiar with a "real" installer...
-- Power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
I wouldn't say that Mozilla has lost grasp on real world problems. They're simply attacking the issues from a user's perspective rather than from a sysadmin or organizational perspective. Firefox allows users to have a safe secure and powerful browser, an admin could accomplish about the same feats by locking down IE network wide, blocking ad sites and spyware downloads, etc. Thunderbird is the same way, SPAM can be blocked at the client level. Mozilla simply gives the user's and the admins the choice to make it a client issue or a network/sysadmin issue.
Maybe this is not mutually exclusive... keep the email content in raw text files, and put the metadata in a database (and possibly index the email content).
Anyway, at this point I would trust my email to an application that doens't allow me to access it through text-based tools either. But I do hope that computing will once evolve to the point that we can actually work with them without caring what's under the hood. (Like I do with my car now...)
We're in the information age, and having tools that help us manage this huge amount of information in a not-too-intrusive way are becoming more and more necessary... having a well-structured db with all your emails (and maybe other means of communications, like sms/voice calls/etc), linked to other personal info would be such a tool (for me).
Chris.
> a build for Cygwin is still a build for Windows.
It absolutely is not. It requires the (questionably licensed) cygwin DLL, so it essentially runs under the cygwin runtime, causing it to be brittle and slow slow slow. Apps running under cygwin have a hard heap limit (I have been screwed running perl over large datasets this way) as well as DLL relocation problems.
KDE should compile okay for MinGW, which can be said to truly be a Windows port, but its main problem is the availability of a free Qt: X11 only. Personally I can't understand why there isn't also a native port of the X11 client libs to windows either -- the server has been implemented dozens of times over after all.
> Otherwise we'll just have to say that all those old applications written in Visual Basic aren't Windows builds, they are VBRUN300.dll builds.
I don't think in most circles you'll get away with calling a (non-native) VB application a "native" windows application either. At least the VB runtime is maintained by more than one guy.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
...with the exception that Mozilla offers a (learning!)junk mail filter, Ximian does not.
"Good news, everyone!"
But, as good as Thunderbird is at blocking spam and viruses, if it starts deleting people's email because it's not fully tested, there will be hell to pay.
Of course you can. Now you can't do it with shell commands but you can create an arbitrary hierarchy with local folders that mimic what ever structure you want. I'm using Mozilla but I imagine you can just Right click over the root node in the tree you want to expand, choose new folder. You can then do a search over you local folders (i.e. "all messages from year 2004"), select all, and move to the 2004 folder. What else do you want?
You can still scan them as "regular files" with Emacs if you want. Just can't modify them outside the application. Most of my 'ancient' email forays are informational, not to "do" anything with them.
As far as remote access. Run VNC through SSH. The only thing on the wire is the screen bit changes. Not quite as lightwieght as text mode Emacs, but over DSL should work good enough.
keeping all the mail on the mail host works in IMAP (again you can have whatever hierarchy you want of folders in most setups). The problem is quota. Most likely you "home dir" quota is significantly higher than your "IMAP" quota. My mail archive over several years is gigabytes. No one is going to give you gigabytes on an IMAP server.... Google inlcuded. :-) (gigabytes because folks love sending Word and Powerpoint in email instead of shared file mechanisms.).