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."

Comments

Had to go back to 0.6

[AGTiny]

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!

Multiple IMAP

[ajakk]

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?

Won't start.

[sporty]

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 :\

One wish..

[boomgopher]

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...

Re:Few teething problems, but good overall

[Gr8Apes]

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)

Re:Few teething problems, but good overall

[The Salamander]

I would ask for a VIM plugin for message editing.

Just moved from Mozilla 1.6; will have to revert

[toccoa]

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.

Just this week...

[ScoLgo]

...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!

Malicious site for Mozilla users

[tmk]

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?

SeaMonkey is in maintenance mode

[Anthracks]

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.

Re:Thunderbird Wishlist

[silicon not in the v]

1. Integration with GnuPG and/or PGP. Yes I know of engimail, I think it's essential enough it should be built-in.

2. Integration with Jabber. IM + Email would be cool. I like how Windows Messenger does this, but with Thunderbird it would actually be secure :)

I don't think either of those is that great an idea. The point of T-Bird is supposed to be about a slim program. GPG/PGP isn't used by the majority of people, so I sure don't think they need to put it in the main program. Doesn't having an easily accesible extention take care of the needs of people who want that? And people use several different IM applications, so I don't think they should be integrating any into an email program. A calendar I can see putting in to let this compete with Outlook in the email/calendar app space in businesses.

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."