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Less is More: Thunderbird 0.7 Review
comforteagle writes "In part two of our look at Mozilla's less is more approach to thunderbird and firebird, Gareth Russell has finished the examination with a look at the newly released Thunderbird 0.7. Part one dealt with firefox and was discussed here on slashdot as well."
I had to go back to 0.6 because of several crippling bugs. 0.7 stopped checking for mail in many of my IMAP folders so I went a whole day thinking I had no mail. :( It also has an annoying habit of not displaying the message body in random messages forcing you to go out to SquirrelMail to view them. 0.6 works perfectly for me though!
I love the new version - the interface seems 'clearner almost'. Also I like the extensions option in the menu that will bring up a page full of extensions that you can download. I did have one crash with it though. I had 2 windows open, and mulitple tabs in each window. All of a sudden it just puked on me .... oh well - it still kicks ass.
I was trying to get a setup going with T-bird under Windows checking multiple IMAP servers at once and it was having a very hard time doing it. I could never get it work well at all. Does anyone know if the newer versions of T-bird have fixed that problem?
Come play Heroes of Might and Magic Mini online.
I downloaded it twice on two different days for the Mac. It mounts the dmg file fine, but won't launch. In the console for OSX, you see complaints about the executable being corrupt or truncated, then just dies out. Happens on two seperate machines too. Nightly builds don't do it either :\
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Is that the stupid address autocollect feature would lowercase everything before checking if the cotact exists.
I'm tired of having multiple:
Fred.Mertz@Lucy.Com
Fred.Mertz@lucy.com
fred.mertz@lucy.com
etc...
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
Those extensions might not be 0.9 compatible. Seems that quite a few things changed between 0.7 and 0.9. I noticed that when I downloaded the new one that there was a warning somewhere about some older extensions.
That said, I'd love a couple of more features in Firefox, namely the Forms tool from Mozilla, and the ability to default cookies to a set maximum lifetime. (Forms tool is probably an extension, just haven't found it yet) I'd also love to be able to block cookies from entire subnets (probably haven't read the appropriate part in the manual about how to set this) such as *.doubleclick.net, and *.hitbox.com. Being able to do this upon the resulting "Prompt to accept cookies" dialog would be very cool and user friendly.
Those would be enough on Firefox. Thunderbird, the list is very very long on additional features. However, I'd like the current features to work more smoothly, and some interface improvements would be nice (have just downloaded 0.7, so I haven't delved into it yet, but I strongly suspect the UI friendly things I want won't be in there)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I was cleaning some malware off someones computer and I informed them most of the stuff they get is because of vulnerabilities in IE (they swear they never click Yes). So I installed firefox for them and told them some pages might not work in firefox because IE is so popular. That explanation was fine for them and i'm sure they'll tell some non-techie friends about firefox. While word of mouth isn't the fastest way to deciminate information it is the most compeling. Whats going to make you use a product more, a recommendation from a friend or some advertisement or post on a message board? Although Firefox won't stop all malware if IE is synanamous with spyware, adware & popups and Firefox is portrayed as the safe alternative, tabbeb browsing & fancy extensions aside firefox will slowly gain huge ground.
I would ask for a VIM plugin for message editing.
Now if only YahooPOPs could update their project to be compatible with Yahoo Mail I would be using Thunderbird again.
I just recently rebuilt my g/f's computer, removing IE, MSN, etc, and installing OO.o, Firefox, and the like. (Thank you the open cd ) She liked how fast her computer was now that the spyware was gone, but she could NOT stand how Firefox rendered the fonts on the Yahoo Mail page "incorrectly" (dear God! What will I do now!). Thankfully I ran across this nifty little project on source forge called Yahoo Pops which acts as a SMTP/POP3 server on localhost and bridges the gap between your favoriate email client and the Yahoo Webmail service. That evening I VNC'd into her computer, installed YahooPOPs and Thunderbird 0.6 and hooked her up with a cute theme with a rotating penguin in the top right (She's all about some Tux racer). I showed her how to use it and she loved it. No more ads, no more waiting for the web pages to load, spell checking, the whole 9!
But just when I thought I had sold her on the wonderfullness that is Open Source (I'm on my way to getting her to suse) Yahoo decided they are going to try to compete with G-Mail and offer 100MB to their free customers, as well as a few other minor "improvements". To make a long story short the upgrade broke YahooPOPs and thus Thunderbird. We were both very disapointed.
Now she found a way to open IE by typing "iexplore" on the run line and is using Yahoo Mail again. Its going to be hard to get her to try open source again, but for some reason she cant keep off Tux Racer. (PS: Go neverball!).
Any advice on ways to keep her using Thunderbird? Its really a great product and if my company wasnt tied religiously to MS Outbreak I would be putting it on every desktop in the place.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Hello, my name is Toccoa and I am a tab-aholoic. I greatly prefer the way groups of tabs are done in Mozilla; or at least based upon my current understanding of 0.9.
E.g. with a group of tabs on the tab bar
Mozilla: click on tab, all tabs open & start loading
Firefox: you get dropdown; for maximum hassle, the choice I want(Open in tabs) is always at bottom. Nor have I found way to set "add tabs" versus "replace tabs" preference.
If Mozilla did not exist, I would use Firefox. But for now, tabs mean I prefer Mozilla.
It's your fault you lost data, not theirs.
Which isn't the greatest attitude when you are trying to get some loving for an alternative browser by non-techies.
I had managed to convice a fair few people to switch from IE to Firefox 0.8, and they were enjoying it, and were prepared to put up with not being able to go to some of their favorite sites (yes, even with the pretend to be IE extension). But when the latest version of Firefox hit, and they decided to install it, the fact that it removed their bookmarks(for some), removed their extensions, and ruined their themes(which for some was the biggest hurt, they just prefered the eye candy more than anything), more or less made them revert back to IE.
Unfortunately many of them also have the google toolbar for IE, which means the usual pop-up killing advantage of Firefox is now mute, and so the reasons for convincing them to go back are outweighed by the frustrations they have just encountered.
I can only hope the joy of tabs will bring them back.
...I switched everyone at my work over to TBird from Outlook2k. Everyone likes it much better than Outlook. They all especially like the speed of mail download (something was going on with Outlook where it would sometimes take up to an hour to download mail from the POP server - especially on a Monday where the mail had stacked up all weekend). Very annoying when you're trying to get your day going. TBird grabs it all in a minute or two.
One thing everyone especially likes is the multiple mail account handling. Having separate folders for each account is very cool and makes organizing messages very intuitive. The only thing we're missing is Outlooks ability to insert multiple 'signatures'. Anyone know if this is currently possible in TBird? Having blocks of pre-typed text ready to go at the click of your mouse is a real time-saver. One kludge we came up with is to keep a message in the Drafts folder that contains the needed text but that's a rather clumsy solution.
We are a small company so this changeover is pretty insignificant in the overall scheme of things but... it's a start. With the warm reception TBird received from my users at work (they really were getting sick of Outlook), I figure they'll go install it on their home computers. Their wives and kids will see it and begin to use it. They'll tell their friends, etc., etc... Word of mouth is a GoodThing(TM).
Personally, I've been using TBird since it was first released and have never had any problems with it. Maybe I'm just lucky but it's been rock-solid for me. I currently use TBird on WinNT4 at work and on my laptop, which runs Mandrake 9.2. My wife, (who is not in the least computer literate), has no trouble at all with TBird on her Win98 box. This open source app is ready for mass use!
"Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing - and it was everything that I thought it could be."
The site http://xxxtoolbar.com/ tries to install a malicious program as XPI.
Is this a proof of acceptance or is it an alarm signal?
Every time there's a Mozilla story on Slashdot, several people make this comment and they all get modded up to +5. SeaMonkey (the suite) receives a very small amount of the official "Mozilla Foundation" support. It's essentially in maintenance mode, with only relatively minor work being done to it. Now *Gecko*, and the Mozilla-as-platform work, are still actively maintained, but that's not the same as working on SeaMonkey. SeaMonkey happens to benefit from work on Gecko, since both it, Firefox and Thunderbird run on the same engine, but a very small percentage of work going on now is beneficial only to SeaMonkey.
Compare the new features in Mozilla 1.7 to the new features in Firefox 0.9/Thunderbird 0.7. I think you'll find very few that are limited exclusively to SeaMonkey, and vastly more that are found in the new apps but not the suite. The suite is minimally supported because some major coporations and organizations have rolled it out and contribute back code, money, etc. to keep it going, but it's definitely not even close to the main development focus as the new apps are.
Rock over London, Rock on Chicago. Wheaties: Breakfast of Champions.
You are reverting back to where we came from --> "I think besides email, it should be able to browse newsgroups. oh yeah, and an integrated IRC chat client...and maybe an HTML composer."
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
At least one person has built nvu for OS X successfully, but reported that it was a bit buggy... so I imagine eventually there will be OS X builds on the site.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I found that 0.7 is much more buggy than 0.5 ... at least on win32, the new mail notification in the taskbar is broken (no icon), enigmail does not work anymore, cross imap server moving of email did stop working ...
:(
At least for me a huge step backwards from 0.5
Does anyone know if you can get addresses in your LDAP server onto the junkmail whitelist?
I mean the part in the junkmail configuration screen where you can say "don't mark mail from people in my address book as junk" and pick either your personal address book or your collected addresses (but not both, wtf?). But there doesn't seem to be any way to specify an LDAP server that you have configured.
Did the deed and upgraded OSX thunderbird to 0.7, only to see all my settings vanish
yes really, 5 news server with dozens of groups, all gone, thankfully I don't use it for email (sticking to mail.app)
FFS moving to 0.6 did not do this
did they actually test this....
People always critized microsoft that they cheated by having the browser in memory but this is a handy feature that kde does as well (well, gives you the option of how many konquerer's you want resident in memory).
I currently use ff,tb but I would use the suite if it had a file browser mode. And I'd love to be able to keep it in memory or even better components of it at least. Cause once you stray from kde/gnome, I find the choices if file browser a little lacking.
Now, I know there are tons of options out there, but I guess I prefer a similar browser to windows explorer, and I've tried the lot of em. From xfe, xfwm, endeavour, and just about every single one that looked remotely like a browser similar to windows explorer. It would be great if mozilla had this.
And off topic but I wish there was a way in linux to have things stay in memory. I know mozilla used to have this feature and it was removed to never return, but I think X or the wm should control this.
Say I'd like to have my file browser, file find,a text editor and maybe xchat always in memory. You should be able to specify applications that never leave the swap.