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Thunderbird 1.0 RC1 Released
KingDaveRa writes "Mozilla.org has quietly released Thunderbird 1.0 RC1. 1.0 RC1 includes lots of bug fixes and improvements for features like saved search folders, the RSS reader, mail migration, and message grouping. The default themes have both been updated with new and improved artwork as well."
Is Thunderbird as "spread-like-wild-fire" as Firefox? I just don't hear people talking about TB as much as FF.
Even in newsgroups where you need a news reader to do anything, people still talk about FF. I'm using TB but I don't have the same enthusiasm to discuss it.
Is this due to lack of usage, or lack of competition, or something else? Or just me?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
using my OS, emacs
How does it do with mailto: links from Firefox in Linux? That's the one question burning on my mind.
Haec merda tauri est. Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
Im surprised that it took so long after firefox to be released in 1.0 that thunderbird went preview. Though i can understand why they did, I always thought that they would go 1.0 together.
I use thunderbird for all my mail, and it is much better then Outlook on windows. Good job Mozilla.
Problem with Thunderbird is that I never liked the way it handled multiple-acounts. And could not import multiple identities from Outlook very well. Hopefully this is resolved. Looking forward to Thunderbird dropping presents all over the place from the sky.
The Custom Mary
I'm a Thunderbird user and have been for a long time, about as long as it has existed. It's a fine email client, a good one, in fact. However, it's missing something. Missing what? I don't know. But it's missing something that would make people want to switch from the client they're already using. If it's your first client, or you're not happy with the one you're using, it's a good choice. But if you are happy, I'm not sure how to convince you to change to it.
Spam filters? Available in other clients, either natively or through add-ons. RSS reader? I think most people that read RSS already have a reader they like. It's not the fanciest looking client, and it still has some bugs. So, how would you convince someone to use it?
What I really wish Thunderbird would do is sync with my PocketPC. At the very least I wish it was easier to sync my address book. I also hope they have better support for vCard exporting. On a side note, does anyone know the timetable for the next major mozilla.orf milestone, Mozilla Suite 2.0, to be released?
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
with gmail providing pop3 access, you /could/ integrate the two :)
But really, I use both. gmail has taken over "web" duty from my old yahoo account and thunderbird controls mail from my domains.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
2. It would be really cool to have automatic virtual directories. I have my email sorted into subfolder by email address. I have rules set up to put emails into folders. Why not have this be automatic? Sort by email address, sort by folders. I wonder why no popular email client has this.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
1. Someone complains about Outlook Express on USENET or in a forum.
2. ???
3. Profit!---er... Download!
Is the Spambayes plugin for Outlook. I've used this for a while now and I simply love it. I never end up with spam in any of my inboxes, *BUT* here's the catch. I do have to check my "Possible Spam" folder every few days and see what's in there. Every so often a legitimate e-mail will end up in that folder. I can quickly & easily recover any messages I want, and then delete the rest as actual spam (which improves the training).
Why doesn't TB offer something like SpamBayes: Good Mail, Maybe Spam, Spam. I tried TB a few months ago and don't like the idea of having to check dozens of spam messages to make sure a good e-mail didn't end up in there. I've been using FF for a while now and love it, and I would love nothing more than to ditch Outlook, but so far my love of Spambayes is greater than my hate for Outlook.
I don't understand why people want a browser that has a POP and NEWS client built in? If I want to use
POP I use my POP client (not outhouse). If I want to use NNTP I use a NEWS client.
Why expose yourself to such a mess?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I used Thunderbird back in the Windows days (say, 9 months ago or so). Since I switched to Linus (Suse w/ KDE) I've been using K-Mail. It works great, integrates well, and does everything I need. Quite frankly see no reason for Thunderbird at this point. I do have a copy installed so I can walk my Grandparents through when they have problems, but thats it. If I still had Windows I would probably use it still.
Tbird is one of the few mail readers that support 'Secure Password Authentication' for people that want to read email off of a Windows 2003 POP server without Entourage on the Mac.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
I quite like TB as an email client. Its 'learning' ability for detecting spam is brillant. But as a news reader it lags a tad.
I know the new version has impoved grouping for threads, but I'll wait till i see it tonight before i pass judgment on that feature.
I am still waiting for:
* combining of encoded posts that are split,
* mark posts for download
As I'm a lurker in alt.binaries.pictures.wallpapers , encoded post handling is important (especialy when someone split a 400k wallpaper into 20k chunks).
"When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes
Contrary to what many people say its no competition for Outlook. Outlook Express, sure. But its really lacking in features for business and expecially corporate users. No built-in mature calendar, no real full featured palm syncing. How useful is syncing ONLY your address book? I'm not talking about a full blown Exchange client here, but there are certain basics people expect. Unfortunately judging by the response over the last few years those types of features and turning Thunderbird into something that competes with Outlook proper is not something the dev(s) is interested in.
I hope Thunderbird fans don't think I'm just bashing it. I suggest and install Thunderbird for any OE users I encounter. OE is just not safe to use. I'm just kinda let down because its hasn't turned out the way I had envisioned it.
Oh and as the other person pointed out, on Linux Evolution is very nice. Perhaps one day it will be availabe for Windows.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Why doesn't TB offer something like SpamBayes: Good Mail, Maybe Spam, Spam. I tried TB a few months ago and don't like the idea of having to check dozens of spam messages to make sure a good e-mail didn't end up in there
:).
Dude, I've used TB for year or two now, and get a few thousand spams a week on my work account - couldn't live without Tbird. TB's spam filter trains rapidly like within a day or so it seems, and is very accurate. My account would be unusable without it.
I have a work copy of Outlook 2003, which looked neat, but tried it for a few days with SpamBayes (well, I think it was spam bayes), and... I hated it. It took longer to train than TB, and I don't know about you, but I don't trust MS with freaking anything when it comes to security. Especially not my personal and professional emails.
Though see my sig for a humorous bug/feature of tbird
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
GMail provides specific directions for setting up POP access for many different mail clients, including Thunderbird:
# Outlook Express and Outlook 2002 (and older) (Windows)
# Outlook Express and Outlook 2002 (and older) (Mac)
# Outlook 2003
# Entourage 2004
# Entourage X
# Eudora 5.1 (and higher) (Sponsored & Paid Mode)
# Eudora 5.1 (and higher) (Light Mode)
# Netscape Mail 7.x
# Netscape Mail 6.2
# Netscape Mail 4.5, 4.6, or 4.7
# Apple Mail
# Mozilla 1.7
# Thunderbird 0.x
End of Line.
As a helpdesk techie, I think Thunderbird is going to have a rougher ride than Firefox.
The problem strangely enough, is that Outlook Express was so much worse than Internet Explorer. IE isn't a great browser, but for most people until this last set of security flaws (Infection via Jpg? Yeah, that's tied too bloody close), it's "Good Enuff" - they could work around it. the only other browsers out their had fanbases, but weren't so head and shoulders above to be worth dealing with. I never cared for netscape, didn't like the packaging of mozilla, and didn't wan't to pay for opera - So I tweaked IE's security and stayed with the one that was "Good Enuff".
So when Firefox came to maturity just as the last set of flaws finally did things even my ultra paranoid security settings (Never had an adware get through) couldn't compensate for, people were primed to leave en masse. And it's great - I can tweak it, it's portable, and it does stand head and shoulders over IE.
Outlook express on the other hand never was "Good Enuff", for anything besides simple Email. It's really only used by people that have never bothered to try anything else. Pine and Elm have more capabilities. Everybody else moved, and has gotten to using something else that *is* good enough, and doesn't have the security holes IE had to jolt them. I have fifty+ filters I'd have to port from Eudora, others use Pegasus, or elm, webmail, or whatever.
So the people who wanted to move, have. The people who haven't moved yet aren't just waiting on Thunderbird the way I was waiting for a browser I *liked*.
So it's not going to hit OE as hard as Firefox hit IE.
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
I have to forward it to an account where I can use Outlook, or launch a web browser and use SquirrelMail to open the IMAP folder and read the message. I had to install a plug-in to SquirrelMail to read MS-TNEF email. If the Thunderbird team doesn't want to put it into the default installation, they could at least develop an MS-TNEF extension/plug-in for Thunderbird.
This issue is the one that prevents me (and others) from abandoning Outlook altogether and switching to Thunderbird. Yes, I know there are some programs available that will interpret MS-TNEF. But, that requires a lot of manual effort and makes it difficult to convince the typical business user to use Thunderbird.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I like Firefox 1.0 so much that I've been putting it on my client's computers to spread the love... Maybe I should secretly replace their Outlook as well?
Mozilla does have an official calendar extension that works with either Firefox or Thunderbird, and it allows for shared calendars (either via a secure mod_dav setup, or via a highly-insecure FTP setup). I choose FTP, but then, the worst that would happen if someone were to stumble across my calendar would be that they'd know my work schedule and other such mundane info.
Using the FTP method, the calendar works like this. I add / edit something on my calendar, hit ok to confirm it, it then uploads a copy of the calendar to my server. When either my ol' lady or I open our calendar, it downloads the fresh calendar from the server. I instantly see any changes she made, she instantly sees any I made, and they're always in sync. Also, I could hand out the FTP info to anyone, and they'd have the same adding / editing options (I'd imagine piracy nuts / businesses would want something a wee bit more secure, but this works for me).
That signature issue in particular is a good indicator, I think, of the general reason why Thunderbird (and Mozilla Mail before it) never really "spread like wildfire". I'm not sure what somebody was thinking. I mean, come on. You have to create some kind of text file outside of Mozilla with Notepad or something, save it somewhere (no default location), and then go in to the preferences and browse to the location of that text file that you somehow figured out how to create. And you can only have that one text file, so only one signature unless you go through that process again. And it's either there or it isn't.
The whole process is totally nonsensical to your average user. Other email clients will just let you choose a signature to insert from a list. That's the kind of thing people like. Thunderbird and Mozilla Mail have just been kind of rough in spots until now. Built in mail filtering not withstanding, it just hasn't had anything special to pull people away from Eudora, OE, Pegasus or Opera Mail.
And yes, we are talking about the average Windows user here, the 95% of the population that this software is supposedly being marketed to. In that world there are a lot of users who do not know how to create a simple plain text file with Notepad.
On Mac OS X the case for TB is pretty hopeless. Apple Mail integrates with the rest of the OS like clockwork and is a hell of a lot prettier. I'm actually kind of surprised to see Thunderbird getting to 1.0 so fast. In my opinion it still needs a lot of usability enhancements and beautifying to really compete with other email clients the way Firefox can compete on level ground with all the other browsers. Maybe a miracle has happened since 0.9, but I doubt it.
Of course I'll still be forcing my users to use it anyway, since it's a hell of a lot better than OE on Windows.
"Mozilla.org has quietly released Thunderbird 1.0 RC1" How is it "quiet" if its been /.ed?
I have this really funny quote that I like to put here. Unfortunately, there's this really annoying thing called a char
Did they manage to solve the POP3 problem that's preventing me to fully use Thunderbird? If no-one knows what I'm talking about, there are many cases in which Thunderbird just "hangs" while receiving messages from POP3 servers, like "Receiving message 1 of 10...". No solutions found 'til now.. I think it's a stopper.. I had to fwd all my e-mails to gmail in order to have a "central repository" for the e-mail.. Sigh.. Please solve it! ;)
If anyone can hear me, slap some sense into me But you turn your head, and I end up talking to myself
I made the switch to Thunderbird a while ago because Outlook Express kept locking up on me for unknown reasons. (That's right, not because of security issues - my OE was locked down tight. And yes, this would be on the Win32 platform.)
:P
However, I found many issues with Thunderbird which have convinced me that although Thunderbird has more options and probably more long-term viability, it is not the better e-mail client for the average user.
I'll list some of the issues I found in 2 weeks' time, just in regular use, below.
And yes, don't worry, I'll go waste* an hour or two of my time perusing a giant bugzilla database to see if there's any previous report of the issues I encountered. Wouldn't want anybody just reporting it and have some sort of moderator just label it a dupe, after all. Even though they are probably able to tell, from memory, whether it is a dupe or not, and I have to spend a serious amount of time to find out
( I moderate a private Bugzilla, so I do know the issues involved. )
* waste, depending on whether the issues get addressed. I'll happily concede if a majority of users believe that how I think things should work is not the right way.
1. Mail Filters not applied to Local Folders on incoming mail.
Problem: When fetching mail, the Mail Filters specified for the Local Folders group is not run automatically.
Solution: Tools > Run Message Filters... manually
Expected: Mail to be filtered automatically, dur.
2. Headers area does not scroll
Problem: When dealing with an e-mail with a lot of headers, viewing all headers causes the header area to be sufficiently large to extend outside of the screen, and there is no scrollbar to scroll down!
Solution: View > Message Source (Ctrl+U) manually
Expected: I'd expect a scrollbar where scrolling is required for proper operation.
3. Message filters have no quick summary preview
Problem: There is no quick way to see what a specific message filter does.
Solution: Double-click the message filter or choose Edit... to see the full details
Expected: See Outlook Express's Mail Rules dialog.
( yes, OE's mail rules ruleset is much more limited, but its user-friendliness is much better )
4. Cannot rename with change-of-caps only
Problem: When renaming a folder, say, 'test' to, say, 'Test', the warning about a folder with that name already existing pops up.
Solution: Rename to something else first, e.g. 'Test dammit', then rename to proper target, g.g. 'Test'.
Expected: I'd expect to just be able to change the case of a folder without it thinking I'm making 2 folders of the same name.
5. Save dialog uses an internal variable, rather than the actual filename field, causing issues.
Problem:
Step1: Save an e-mail to a file called 'test'
Step2: Start saving an e-mail to a file called 'test', but rather than hitting the Save button select the previous 'test' file and rename it (hit F2) to 'test2'
Step3: Hit the save button
Watch as Thunderbird complains how the file 'test2' already exists. Now check the filename field.. still reads 'test', right ? So it shouldn't try saving to 'test2'
Solution: Go to filename field, add a character, backspace it, then hit Save.
Expected: I expect whatever application to save the file under the filename I actually specify in the filename field - and not what it has stored in some variable.
Note: ThunderBird isn't the only application to have this issue. Is it the use of a particular file dialog handling API ?
6. Mail imported from OE excludes 'read/unread' flag.
Problem: Mail imported from OE is all unread. Solution: Means you have to go mark all of them read, and then compare with OE side-by-side to mark unread that which was actually unread.
Expected: I would've expected the read/unread status to have come across properly.
7. There's no 'Stop processing any more rules/filters' option in Mail Filters.
Problem:
Filter A: [Message subject] contains [hello] move to
I still use Mozilla Mail (it's largely the same as TB) but there are a few serious issues that keep me unhappy:
- frequently fills in addresses wrong (bug 93453)
- searching body text is extremely slow (no indexing) and you can't make it faster by pre-filtering on subject (bug 154867)
- can't delete attachments from received mail (bug 2920)
- can't copy the name from displayed addresses (bug 232021)
- can't paste images into mail (bug 47838) although this is supposedly fixed in TB itself.
These bother me on a regular basis. Seeing something like "saved searches" go in while these much more basic things remain unfixed makes me wonder if there is anyone seriously working on TB/Moz mail. (I am trying to learn how to develop Mozilla - so far got a working build - but most of these are quite involved).
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
Somebody else probably agrees with you. Check the Thunderbird Extensions section of The Extensions Mirror and see if there's anything in there you might be able to use.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
There's just one thing I don't know how to do: Thunderbird displays all dates in the bizarre M/D/Y format. Is there any way I can persuade it do display them in either D/M/Y, which is more common in this country, or in Y/M/D, which is the preferred format everywhere? There seem to be no localisation options.
It's true that Outlook can do much more than Thunderbird, and as someone else already pointed out, Outlook Express would be a fairer alternative to compare against.
Still, I prefer Thunderbird even to Outlook, for a simple reason: I don't need those extra features. All I want is a mail client that can:
- read mail effectively (including avoiding HTML bugs, not filtering out genuine
.exes, etc.)
- provide a simple and effective address book
- provide decent mail processing rules
- back up and restore mail without losing data
without zillions of stability and security issues. I switched to Thunderbird after a system failure (caused by an official MS update, in fact) took out my MS-based mail system.I doubt I'm the only one in the world who really doesn't care about scheduling meetings and booking rooms using Outlook. I'd rather just have a simple, effective tool that helps me do my job. Trying to schedule meetings using Outlook is far less efficient than simply e-mailing, picking up the phone or (shock!) walking around and talking to people, IME.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Would it be possible to integrate Ximian exchange connector into thunderbird? That would be a feature that I'm sure MANY people would like.
/"\ /
\
X ASCII Ribbon Campaign - Say NO to HTML in email
/ \
Another cause KISS loses to "cute"...
Speaking of which, Thunderbird's IMAP support, while pretty, has one idiotic fault: there's no built-in way to purge deleted email messages. If you do manual purges with the purge button extension, you can't use the "move to deleted items folder" mode.
The "move to deleted items folder" doesn't actually remove the deleted messages from the inbox, just flags them as deleted. This sucks if your IMAP system is ever accessed from anywhere else (which is the whole freaking point of IMAP) because when you log in, you find that all the junk-email and deleted items are still sitting flagged right in your inbox.
This is a serious pisser.
Right click on folder, click "Compact this folder". It's idiotic, but TB is following the spec to the letter. Blame the spec.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
Beware if you have norton antivirus configured to scan incoming email and remove infected files.
I lost my inbox 1 day ago because norton flagged a virus and removed the inbox.mdf file. I didn't remember having this problem with other software.
For each email account, you can choose whether the mail goes into an account-specific Inbox OR a "global Inbox". So you can have all your mail in one big Inbox, if that's what you like.
Yeah, unless you want to use Thunderbird with your local mail spool (or "movemail" as the code calls it for no reason) -- in which case, you're out of luck: it doesn't use the global inbox (see bugzilla bug 263013) the mail notification sounds don't work (see bug 270186), and in general you get treated like a third-class citizen.
Which is inconvenient, ironic, and a shame, considering the disproportionate number of Thunderbird users who are on Unix-like systems, and thus have local mail delivery as an important (if not THE most important) account.
-- Watch the REAL Jon Katz.