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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.
I would have thought that they would have renamed it to fit in with Firefox. Thunderfox isn't that bad a name, is it?
I just think the new logo looks way cooler than the old one
I switched from some murky client which didn't exactly have a bright outlook regarding spam
That's geekspeak for Outlook Express, if I remember.
There's a great post by Jon Hick's about the design process for the new icon/logo.
Jon has been helping us with the visual identity work on Firefox and Thunderbird and doing some really great work.
Keep in mind, the artwork will continue to improve. Two issues we are particularly focused on improving are the small versions of the icons, and the visual consistency between the Firefox and the Thunderbird icons.
I don't mean to start a flamewar, but KMail REALLY does seem a lot more responsive (especially when manuevering about in the pulldown menus) than Thunderbird. Do you agree? If not, could I have done something wrong at some point?
I still feel it chugs along a bit slowly at times...
I use it at home on gentoo box and it feels sluggish compared with the outlook client I use at work on a machine with a much lower spec.
I guess I'll be waiting for it to meander its way onto portage at some point.
Thunderbirds are GO!
Sorry couldn't resist it.
Actually, that is not a bad point. It is a question if you want brand consciousness and a lot of jokes (you don't change the name to Thunderfox) or you want a similar naming scheme and a lot of jokes (you change the name).
On the other hand, they might run into trademark-problems once again if they try to change the name of the program to Thunderfox. There are only so many words one can use for a product/company per market niche.
I'd say this is one of those problems that are best ignored, however not renaming it is the easier way out.
How does this compare to Ximian Evolution? I've been using it for a while, but i'd probably switch if it was really worth it.
And the l33t shall inherit the 34r7h.
As I'm sure lots of people will ask, the Thunderbird name is staying.
For me, the most important new feature is IMAP IDLE Support. What this means is I can deploy TB to my 1500+ users. They can leave TB open all of the time and recieve instant notification of new messages. Our Courier IMAP Server which uses FAM for Enhanced IDLE Support means IDLE connections are using virtually NILL resources. Rather than polling every x number of minutes which causes a filesystem stat of the mailbox, FAM hooks into the Linux kernel, catches any changes to the mail folder, notifies Courier which in turn notifies the IMAP Client. This rocks!
I really hope so. I moved my parent's business PC to Thunderbird from Outlook about 6 months ago, and recently taught them how to use the Junk mail feature. The problem is that 0.5 seems to move a lot of legitimate email to the Junk folder (although it may be that my parents are marking things as junk when they just want to delete them - sigh).
Oh yeah, the new icon looks really nice too, almost as good as FireFoxs.
Mozilla is starting the drive to firefox 1.0, and Ben Goodger (the firefox guy) is requesting that everyone report/nominate their most favorite bugs so that they have a better chance of getting fixed.
That's all good stuff, but Thenderbird is a mail client!
Why is anything anything?
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.
When I delete an email it disappears at the GUI level, but when I vi the Inbox file the email is still there and so the Inbox folder is growing. Am I doing something wrong or does Mozilla email client really suck that much.
Thunderbird is most definetly NOT in Java. It's based on the Mozilla suite, which is all C or C++, and a lot of Javascript too.
Besides, even if it is slow (it isn't for me), it's still a lot faster than OE once you get a system full of viruses and stuff.
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
Thunderbird now comes with an installer for Windows making it easier than ever to start using Thunderbird!
The new Pinstripe theme fits in with the look of Mac OS X.
The algorithm for the adaptive junk mail controls has been heavily redesigned to learn faster and catch more spam.
To be consistent with the Mozilla Foudation's goal of brand identity, Thunderbird has a new logo and supporting artwork thanks to the fine work of the Mozilla Visual Identity team.
IMAP users can now benefit from support for the IMAP IDLE command which allows the mail server to push notifications such as new mail arriving as soon as it arrives.
Thunderbird supports server-wide news filters that apply to all newsgroups on a server.
Thunderbird includes Secure Password Authentication using a new cross-platform NTLM authentication mechanism for IMAP, POP3 and SMTP.
Mail filters can now mark messages as junk.
Offline support is an optional download component in the Windows installer and is no longer a separately-downloaded extension.
Mac OS X users now get new mail notification in the system dock.
The DOM Inspector is an optional download component in the Windows installer for theme authors.
Tools > Options > Compose > HTML Options allows you to set up default HTML compose options such as font, size and color.
Attachments can be opened directly from the compose window to verify their contents before sending.
Thunderbird now supports the notion of multiple identities per mail account. This makes it easy to have several e-mail addresses which end up going into the same account. Read More about how to set this up.
In the case of a failure when copying a message to an online Sent folder, Thunderbird will now ask if you would like it to try again.
0.6 on Windows includes several improvements to Simple MAPI that allow it to work with older versions of Microsoft Office.
Pasting data from an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet no longer pastes random HTML garbage before the actual spreadsheet data into HTML compose.
Fixed several situations where LDAP connections were left open when using LDAP auto complete or performing searches on LDAP directories.
Improved view source behavior.
Mail notification for POP3 messages that are marked deleted or marked read by mail filters no longer occurs.
The "Mark All Read" keyboard shortcut now works for Linux GTK2.
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!
well said. i'm in the for-profit category, so in practice, i can't actually turn people away at the door ;-)
however, we ensure our html is standards compliant and support ALL major browsers - the days of every site saying "we only support ie and netscape" are long gone (as far as i'm concerned anyway).
we support mozilla/firefox, ie, opera, netscape, safari, konqueror (think that's it!) on all applicable platforms.
mozilla have given us the browser and now developers can play their part in turning things around.
--From the thunderbird webpage--
Upgraders: DO NOT install Mozilla Thunderbird into a directory containing program files from a previous version. Overwriting files from a previous release WILL cause problems. To re-use the directory of a previous install, the directory must be deleted and recreated, emptied, moved, or renamed. You should not file bugs in Bugzilla if you choose to ignore this step.
The program directory does not contain profile information; any existing accounts, account settings, options, e-mail, and news messages will remain intact. This release does not require changes to your profile to function properly.
Important: If you used a prior version of Thunderbird and installed themes OR extensions, you need to do the following or Thunderbird may NOT run properly. Find your profile directory. There should be a sub directory called chrome. Remove everything in chrome. This will not affect your mail data or preferences.
There isn't? Oh no! I must do something about my imagination.
As my post above suggests, .6 adds IMAP IDLE support which is an advanced IMAP function only available in a handful of IMAP Clients/Servers but well worth it if you have it. I've found TB's IMAP support to be excellent. It's one of the few clients that can correctly show my Courier IMAP Server's folder tree with all other folders *not* being children of INBOX. It's very fast in grabbing message headers, even on large folders it seems limited only by the bandwidth. It also does a good job of cacheing the info so that the 2nd time I open up a large folder is much quicker than the 1st (unless of course another IMAP client has significantlly changed the existing mail messages). Offline support has also been added with a plugin although I have little reason to try it since most of the time I use TB, I'm connected.
Right-click the folder's name and use "Compact this Folder" from time to time. Removes the leftovers from old mails from the index file. Eudora has the same stuff, for example, so it's not an example for a sucky mail client, but for an architecture I don't really understand because I'm not a developer :-D
-- Power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
"If you work on a for-profit site, make every reasonable attempt to resist your manager's urging to violate the standard in favor of IE. Do whatever you can get away with without being fired!"
More to the point:
"Hi, I'm from [companyname] and we're trying to find [large quantities of some electronic product]. I've just been to your website and it says my browser isn't supported. Is there something you can do? No, it's not possible to use Internet Explorer on my computer. Really? I should get a Windows computer? So should I put you down as unable to supply [product name] then?
Not to be a Nitpick, but can I download the KDE environment for Win32, so I can compile KMail on my workmachine running Windows XP?
Mozilla might not be perfect, but at least it's platform independent.
And not to nitpick even further, but if there is one thing Outlook is, it is responsive. Still doesn't mean I would use it for anything in the world.
Nothing wrong with tight code, but for some applications speed isn't everything. Mail is probably one of those things where speed really doesn't matter that much.
And putting issues aside, Opera's M2 email-client is very fast as well (yes Opera has issues. For the web I exclusively use Opera, but M2 has protocol flaws).
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
As much as I'd like to get away from Outlook, TBird just ain't gonna cut it for me. Having a different set of folders for each email account is something I can't get over. If I could only run Evolution in Windows, I'd be a happy panda. (BTW, please don't tell me to go change prefs.js.obscure.file.whatever. I'm niot interested in hacking my email client to make it work.)
where is the "I feel for ya, but that's some funny ass shit" moderation?
Calendar extension for Thunderbird. Have fun :)
-- Power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Remember that Thunderbird is still pre 1.0 release which means that you should be prepared for "features" (bugs).
I switched my own laptop from XP-Outlook to Thunderbird 0.5 a few weeks ago, and I am delighted with the huge gain in performance, the improved virus protection, spam filtering as well as the fact that the new platform is Open-source.
However, when I did the import from Outlook, it mangled some of the email address and attachments, so I keep Outlook for backup purposes, so I can check old emails. I would not switch back, but just keep a record of all the files you use. Of course, we are all careful and audit-trail all of our work, aren't we!
To sum up: great product and project, but handle the delivery with care.
For those who are running Thunderbird on OS X, what made you choose this over Apple's Mail program? What features does Thunderbird offer that Mail does not?
Usenet. I'm quite happy with Mail.app for email, and Thunderbird for reading newsgroups.
In fact, turn IE users away at the door.
This is utopian and dumb. If you are running a business there is no way you would be so stupid as to turn away 90+% of your customers at the door simply because you don't like the way they are dressed. Idealistic, yes. Web standards are well and good, but the real world intervenes.
I am sure your date will go really well if you inform the cute girl that you equal her asking you out, with a "technology preview" of a mail-reader.
*grin*
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
The one annoying thing about TBird's IMAPSSL support is that you can't check a box when you create an account "Use SSL" or whatever right away like you can in Evolution.
... then it'll connect via SSL.
So, you need to add the new account, finish the wizard, wait for it to sit there and go "the server says ssl only, fool", then go into the account settings, check the box, hit OK, quit thunderbird, relaunch thunderbird
"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"
There were many things I liked a lot last time I looked. But these problems prevented me from switching.
*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.
Not much. Mail.app is much more elegant than Thunderbird, but it doesn't provide a newsgroup reader. I stick with Mail for - ahem - mail, and use Thunderbird for usenet. In fact, the #1 reason that I don't use TBird for Mail is that it doesn't integrate with Address Book.
What I would love as a feature in Thunderbird, is the use of a database back-end.
...).
When you get a mail the headers are parsed and stored in a database... the sender and other receipents are then linked to your contacts that are also stored in a database. Mail folders like we know them now are then just a certain view of your mail (all mail of the last week, unanswered mail, mail from contact X (also if he changed email address in the meantime!), and other user-defined properties (e.g. regarding project Y)).
Evolution does this to some extend (virtual folders and db storage). But they've stopped where it got really interesting (like the linking to contacts, tasks, user-defined properties,
It would also be nice if this db can be remote; this way a webmail application could use the same database. In some way this would then be a new IMAP server... but with more flexibility, support for complex queries, virtual folder, and not mail-only.
Does anybody else think this would be interesting?
No, outlook isn't very bright.
If only it could work with Exchange in a Networked environment. I am trapped by circumstance into hosting my organization's e-mail with Exchange on the server side and Outlook clients.
Thunderbird offers HTML email capabilities whereas Mail will only do "Rich Text" which is a very small subset. I tried Thunderbird on OSX as I loved it on Windows but I'm holding off until they integrate with the address book and show the number of new messages on the dock icon.
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.
I don't know the answer to this, but it does make me wonder something else.
How many folks on a Mac are really interested in using anything other than Safari and Mail? Camino, Mozilla, Firefox, etc. all run comparatively slow on my G4 iBook. Clearly a lot of optimizations have occured to make the "native" Panther apps run quickly. And they all integrate fairly nice together and have good feature sets so I just really don't see any incentive to change. It is just a question for you guys, would be curious to get some feedback.
Win32 is another story. The default mail and browser suck royal ass. And, Mozilla and friends run nicely.
I switched from Pine to Thunderbird a few weeks ago; here are the most important things I miss:
Another feature which would be nice to have (but not nearly as important to me) is support for mbox folders in subdirectories of the top-level mail folder.
Anyone know whether it's possible to do any of the above in Thunderbird? If not, what's the best way to make the feature request?
- Kevin B. McCarty
One very annoying problem I found with Apple's Mail is that it hides server error messages from you. And it hides them very effectively! I found absolutely no way to see why the server rejected a mail.
In case of an error, Apple's Mail offers you a "friendly" drop-down list of SMTP servers, suggesting you try another server. While indeed, the "Relaying denied" error from using the wrong SMTP server may be the most common one, there are cases when that is not the problem. You then have to setup another mail program to be able to find out what is wrong.
When people I know have trouble with email, they call me. But they cannot tell me the error message. That would only be good if I could/would charge by the minute for incoming calls...
Check out the D-Spam project. Very effective; claims to be 10x more accurate than a human. (If the parent-parent post is any indication of human skill at spam filtering, than 10x is a gross understatement. ~,^ )
I hate to break this to all mail client developers, but after using GMail, I doubt I'd ever be going back to anything else.
The main problem with have desktop mail clients is about spam. I access mail from 5 diff computers, so it takes 5 times as much effort to train the clients junk mail controls (since they dont share data). With gmail's central reporting, not only do optimize my spam settings, but I also benefit from other people's reporting.
All gmail needs is some sort of inbox monitor and I'd be all set.
I'd really like to have my mail in both clients... anyone out there manage to export from thunderbird to Outlook Express?
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
Now I can have an email client with a cool spam filter which I can rely on and not having to resort to Spambayes (which is pretty good except it suck quite alot of CPU) because the spam filter built in Outlook is crap...
Thanks to Mozilla for releasing Thunderbird 0.6, bye bye Outlook!
You could accomplish this by including a ISP customized option, this allows you to add your own radio button instead of just Email Account and Newsgroup account. The file you wish to create is \defaults\isp\US\custom.rdf. This allows you to set defaults for your user's such as the IMAP and SMTP server addresses, SSL support and preference settings. I was unable to find a definitive site for creating the customizations but Google helped me piece things together.
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.
did someone try this release in win95? the system requirements say >= win98
Just downloaded the OSX version and still don't see any way to import or use the native OSX address book. It may seem like a small point, but when your trying to roll out a new mail client, being able to keep you old address book is a very handy thing indeed. Cheers
A lot of people are posting interesting suggestions and comments and some people are posting the reasons why they don't yet use Thunderbird.
To those of you who actually want to see your suggestions implemented, I suggest you file a bug or at the very least, submit it for discussion at the Mozillazine Forums.
When I switched from using Win/Outlook Express to Mac/Mail, the feature I missed most was the ability to forward html emails intact as I received them.
One of my websites takes user input in a form, and e-mails the results in an html table. Sometimes, I need to forward these messages to other people. With OE, this was no problem. But Mail would convert the forwarded messages to text-only, stripping out all the table code in the process.
I wasn't able to find a fix for this, so I switched to Thunderbird for its excellent html support. It works well for the most part, although there are some annoying Mozilla quirks (separate inbox required for each account, for example) and the bugs that come along with its "technology preview" status. I also miss some of the integration that Mail offers (with Address Book, iPhoto, etc.)
When will they get rid of this theming junk and integrate things with MacOS X the way it does things?
/proceeds to prepare for negative moderation.
Keep in mind, I only use Firefox when I am in windows or Linux/FreeBSD. But after using Firefox on MacOSX (even with the theme), it just seems wrong. It doesn't follow the interface guidelines. Camino is about the best gecko browser, but Safari isn't as braindead as IE, so less of a need for a decent browser. As far as Thunderbird goes, I just couldn't use it until it actually uses cocoa widgets. It is painfully obvious that the theme doesn't work like MacOS X.
Well there goes my karma.
Not from the index file, but it removes the actual message from the IMAP server. In IMAP world, deleted messages still exist and take up space until they are "expunged" which is what compacting does.
How does Thunderbird compare with Evolution, KMail, mutt, pine, Sylpheed, and Outlook?
[I use Mozilla Firefox for browsing but Evolution (on KDE) for email.]
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Instead of importing and exporting all the time, it would be nice if the mail client simply integrated, using the existing mail folders. There's always features of one client that you want in another, but it's a pain to use two different clients. The operating system (windows and macosx anyway, I don't know about linux) already has the address book / mail folder api's available, why not just use them?
http://www.rustyrazorblade.com
Pinstripe will use the OS to render widgets and backgrounds and such, so it will match the OS. Therefore, you will get garish pinstripes in OS X 10.3.
for newsgroups i have written a small app called OSXnews looks like Mail.app uses KHTML and supports a lot of the features needed for non-binary newsgroup browsing. It is still a Beta in development but you can find it at : osxnews.sf.net
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Until Safari allows me to allow or deny cookies from individual servers like the Mozilla family can, it will never satisfy my inner Cookie Nazi. I'll stick with Firefox until then (despite its many flaws).
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Mail.app's handling of multiple mailboxes is horrendous - it puts all the mail from multiple inboxes into ONE inbox! Holy cow, Batman, which acid monkey dreamed that one up?
Hmmm... I'm running Mail 1.3.4 and have 4 inboxes, one for each mail POP3 account (3 are on one server, the fourth is a different server). Now, the way it looks visually, the 4 individual inboxes are listed UNDER a parent "Inbox", but there are actually 4 separate inboxes underneath it. Are we talking about the same thing?
I like the ease of being able to take an account offline by right clicking on an inbox icon. Most of the time I want my desktop receiving work email and don't want the iBook butting in, however when I'm off site with the iBook for work purposes I can have Mail fetch my messages.
I'd love to switch to Thunderbird, from rickety old emacs RMAIL, but one thing keeps stopping me. I get a lot of business email and I need to keep it archived and organized well. My archive is organized by sender and year: about 350 files for different senders each year, averaging maybe 10-100 emails in each file, dating back now over 11 years (about 3000+ files). Keeping this in emacs RMAIL is trivial, because they're all just regular files in my home directory that I can rename or move to new subdirs at will, and I can save emails out of RMAIL just by typing "o" and giving the name of the file. And since Emacs is lightweight enough (!) to run over my DSL connection, I never really need to run an email client anywhere but from my main work machine where my archive is, even when I'm travelling, so I haven't needed IMAP capability.
When I look at Thunderbird and other modern clients, I just don't see a way to keep track of old email as efficiently. I can create "local folders", I guess, but it doesn't appear that Thunderbird is going to treat these as regular files that I can shuffle off into a 2004/ subdirectory at the end of the year. And worse, since Thunderbird is heavyweight enough that I'm not going to run it down a DSL connection, it's going to create them locally, not remotely on my work machine, when I'm reading mail from home or on the laptop while travelling. IMAP seems to be a partial answer but it's going to keep its data on the mail host, not in my home directory, if I understand right.
Surely people have the same problem - how do you solve it?
I use Safari for Web and Thunderbird for Mail.
.6 release of Thunderbird is really fast on my 12" G4 Powerbook and looks great too. Its multiple email account management is much better than the Apple Mail.app IMHO. It also has better support for sending and displaying HTML mail.
...
The new
You can make Safari be friendly with Thunderbird (ie. Email links open into Thunderbird) by going to the Apple Mail.app and under Preferences setting Thunderbird as the Default MailApplication. Kind of obfuscated by Apple on purpose I am sure
While it doesn't show the number of new messages, it does keep popping up in the dock, and the icon gets a green tick mark, if there is a new email. I love it!!
All bow to his Noodliness!! His Noodle Appendage has touched me!
Is the nightly builds. It is SO easy to get nightly builds working. You almost never lose any of your settings, just delete the contents of the program directory, download the .zip containing the newest nightly build, plop it in the old folder, and viola, nice spanking new version. :) for that reason this .6 release isn't really a big deal to me!
Whens the last time IE or Outlook had an update?
"The saddest words of mice and men, are not those which were, but should have been."
The main reason I don't use mail clients like this is because they will not sync with my palm. I need to be able to make a calendar change in one application and have it on my handheld or vice versa. Does anyone know of plans to include this feature?
Now imagine if our website gave that same impression to 10% of customers
Not just any 10% of customers. Often it's the truly internet savvy users and/or people who know the score that are using the standards compliant browsers.
Turning away 10% of your customers is bad, but when that 10% is likely to be highly correlated to the smartest 10% of your customer base, you're in real trouble.
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.).
Actually I'm a long time user of evolution
I think evolution has potential, but it's got a ways to go - after I lost all my email from an update, I decided to dump it. I now use thunderbird. One of evolutions most annoying "features" was its inability to check mailboxes individually - it's always an all-or-nothing proposition. The stupid thing about it is that for those that you don't want to check, you have to cancel a series of password dialogs- every time, unless you set it to check certain boxes automatically- and that's not always a desired option.
Im sorry.... ive to go on record about this....
OSX's mail app is a TOY, just like safari is a TOY.
In my work, i depend on keeping about 20,000 emails in my inbox (yeah, all of those are mine).
I work on web based apps and i also depend on a decent browser that can do tabbed browsing in a scalable manner (say, 8 windows, 20 tabs open each)...
All of that at the same time in a 400mhz tibook laptop with 384MB RAM
The only thing ive seen that can handle this is debianppc, self compiled optimized libc6, same for the kernel, some hdparm optimizations, and mozilla thunderbird+mozilla firebird ( cant have the gnome stuff cause epiphany does not have the niceties firefox has, and evo keeps crashing like a stupid bitch on ppc)
NO SIG
If you want a replacement for Forte Agent, you should check out Pan (pimp ass newsreader). This is the best newsreader if you want text groups or if you want to leech binaries.