Mozilla Thunderbird Reaches 1.0

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 is now available for download on Mozilla's FTP server." Here is the press release announcing the release. Virtual folders and RSS integration, coupled with the recent hype surrounding Firefox, might give this sucker some serious momentum.

Comments

Release Notes

[Tiberius_Fel]

Release notes are available here: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releas es/

Torrent

[youngerpants]

And as the servers take the same hammering they took when Firefox was released, heres a torrent crafted by my own fair hands

http://www.youngerpants.com/thunderbird.torrent

Re:But will it let me backup my mail store?

[Bricklets]

I'd be happy if I could just specify where the data is stored like most apps (even Microsoft ones).

Use the Profile Manager to specify where you want your data stored. I've kept my mail in the My Documents folder since forever.

optimizing a mail client is pointless

[SuperBanana]

came across this win32 optimized version (depending on your processor).

[siiigh]. Considering much of what a mail client does is either disk or display, and not very repetitive, processor-specific optimizations will do little to no good. Even search functions are largely disk constrained if the mailbox is big enough that search time becomes an issue on any modern system.

If it was a Pi calculator, or a game (in which a miniscule difference in per-frame loop time makes a huge difference in frame rate) I could see the point, but this is just silly

Re:extensions

[Finuvir]

As long as the extensions need nothing more than a version number bump you can upgrade now. You'll have to add the line

user_pref('app.extensions.version','0.9');

to user.js in your profile directory. Make sure Thunderbird is closed when you add that line.

Re:Memory Footprint

[TheRealMindChild]

Launch the executable with the command line flag -turbo. This will cause the libraries it uses etc. to stay loaded (The same works for firefox). Youll see much better speed.

Nice, but still not enough to make me switch

[gbulmash]

Downloaded it, installed it, played with it, uninstalled it.

I use Pegasus Mail (pmail.com). For all the nice features in Thunderbird, it still seems to me that Pegasus has much more powerful filtering rules. And, at least for my uses, has more features aimed at people who maintain multiple e-mail addresses.

Pegasus is free, but not open source. I urge people to compare it to Thunderbird. I've used it since 1996 and have never found a mailer I like better.

- Greg

Re:Any other choice?

[rduke15]

Open Source other than Mozilla, all I can think of would be Pine.

The "Program for Internet News & Email" from University of Washington. Version 4.58

If you need a multi platform program, this one seems to cover them all. Amiga, BeOS, VMS, you name it... It looks like it even runs on a plain text terminal, so I could probably set it up to handle my mail on my 486 Linux firewall. Or maybe on my coffee machine? I'll have to look whether there is a pre-compiled version for La Pavoni (because the Pavoni's don't come with a compiler).

But even though I do like text terminals, shells and command lines, I don't think that is how I would like to manage my email. Not even to spare my eyes all the pictures and colors the HTML spam throws at them.

For me, I'm still staying with Eudora, and only occasionally use Thunderbird when I want to send an HTML mail, and it's a bit too complex for Eudora, but not enough to use Dreamweaver and put it on a web site. Eudora is neither open source nor even free (there is a "sponsored" version with ads), and does not run on Linux. However, on Windows (or Mac), it's still the best I know: plain text mail storage, separation of atachments, regular expression searches, and the most powerful filtering I have seen (on any arbitrary header and/or the body, including with regex'es, and with several "actions" happening sequentially with filtered mails)

Re:But will it let me backup my mail store?

[Flooded77]

If you're paranoid (like me), just get Mozbackup. It will make a backup file of your Thunderbird/Firefox/Mozilla profiles (and mail). I've had no problem with it.

Re:CCK please

[indicavia]

Hi! I don't know anything about this kind of stuff, but is this what you're looking for?
It says "Automated deployment of Firefox with extensions, themes, and pre-configuration"

God bless! :)

Re:Why won't they add a calendar?

[bhtooefr]

Sunbird is the calendar you're looking for. Also, there's an XPI (IIRC) that's been around for quite a while that will plug into Mozilla, Firebird, or Thunderbird (Sunbird is actually a fork of this XPI to a standalone program). It's called Mozilla Calendar. Both are available at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/

Re:Standards vs. usability

[drinkypoo]

However, many users don't follow Microsoft's standard here, nor do they want to. I couldn't care less where Microsoft wants to store my data, and I'm never going to use roaming profiles yada yada on my home PC.

I do, however, want all of my essential data to be stored on my RAIDed, routinely backed-up hard drive. I don't want it in a Windows-standardised yet strangely still hidden directory, which lives five levels deep on my (not backed-up) OS drive.

It's not the Thunderbird team's fault that you are incapable of using windows properly. You can use either the user manager to set your profile path, or you can edit the registry key ProfileImagePath. Either way you can change your profile directory from C:\Documents and Settings\profile (hardly five levels deep) to something else. Unfortunately, while mozilla chooses your application settings directory based on your profile path, the profile's prefs.js will have to be manipulated to reflect the new absolute path to your data because prefs files do not reference environment variables.

Microsoft provides a way to move your profile to another location. It is somewhat esoteric, but you chose to use windows, and should not be blaming the mozilla team for your inadequacies, or its.

With that said, it certainly would be nice to get a tool to move user profiles, especially unregistered ones. It is something I deal with at work on a regular basis.

This is wrong.

[eMartin]

This feature is not included with Firefox or Thunderbird, as it is with full Mozilla.

There is an extension that adds it back to Firefox (Thunderbird evenetually), but there are some side effects.

Re:RSS integration?

[jacobito]

Consider the fact that many mail clients (Thunderbird included) integrate NNTP news reading already, which is very similar. RSS/Atom feeds, like NNTP newsgroups, are generally arranged topically (or by folder, or by web site...) and presented serially and chronologically; they lend themselves well to the interfaces typically used by mail clients, which, unlike web browsers, are designed not just for browsing data but for managing data. I personally don't think the web browser is a good client for consuming RSS/Atom feeds; the usage patterns of feeds and web pages are far too different. In fact, I never use Firefox's built-in RSS/Atom support.

Re:Still no call-out to a browser?

[adamfranco]

Here you go, some "HowTos" I made up:

To get Firefox to open the Thunderbird (or any other) email client when clicking on a "mailto" link, do the following steps:

1. Enter the address "about:config" in the Firefox address-bar. This will allow you to set new preferences.
2. Right-click somewhere on the window and select "New" --> "String".
3. In the window that pops up, enter:
network.protocol-handler.app.mailto
as the name of the preference.
4. Hit OK and then enter the path to your thunderbird executable in the next window. For me it is /usr/local/bin/thunderbird/thunderbird

To get Firefox to open when you click on links in Thunderbird, a similar process is followed.

Since thunderbird doesn't have an easy way to use about:config, you need to edit the preferences file with a text editor.

1. Close Thunderbird first as it will overwrite any configuration changes when it exits.
2. Open the Thunderbird "prefs.js" file located in you home directory, probably named something like: /home/afranco/.thunderbird/Profiles/jafwe232js.def ault/prefs.js
3. Add the following three lines to the prefs.js file:
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.http", "/usr/local/bin/firefox/firefox");
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.https", "/usr/local/bin/firefox/firefox");
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.ftp", "/usr/local/bin/firefox/firefox");

--Adam