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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.
That's like complaining that a Linux application stores user data in the user's home directory and system-level data in /etc. That's the standard, it's how all applications are supposed to work. FireFox follows Microsoft's standards to the letter, thus allowing multiple users to have separate FireFox profiles, and allowing non-administrators to run the software. (Woe is me! If only most off-the-shelf applications adhered to that standard) And yes, you can override those settings if you want.
The buzz word is not "email client" but "personal information manager". Of course, these are two different things. The later requires the former, but not the other way around.
Just as Firefox is a lean, mean, browsing machine, Thunderbird should be a lean, mean, email reading machine. If you want a calendar, then get something else.
1.0 means they have transitioned from alpha grade early release project to a first beta release.
Thunderbird is missing too many basic features to allow it to be rolled out to corporate users, or family members, or just about anyone not 100% geek. It still doesn't handle outgoing servers correctly. Filtering is difficult to use, can't deal with IMAP correctly, and sometimes just doesn't work at all.
The spam filtering still needs a lot of work, there needs to be an option to white list the entire set of local (and/or ldap) address books, not just a single one. When people keep separate address books for business and personal contacts, you then have to choose which book to whitelist. There's been a bug in bugzilla for quite a while now on that one.
LDAP incompatibilities, IMAP SSL handling, customisable UI, IPv6 support, the list goes on and on. I would have prefered if the dev team spent a few more months dealing with all the little problems that will keep this entirely out of business rollouts, and fixed the minor bugs which have lingered forever.
Maybe with the 1.0 early beta release, the current dev team will move on, and more capable Open Source volunteers will step up and finish the job. I, like many others, were driven away from the forums and bugzilla because of hostile attitudes and incessant bickering over extremely minor points. We tried to help, but some FLOSS projects aren't as deserving as others.
I haven't been able to convince anyone to switch over to 0.9 from outlook, or even Pine (so you know its got to suck). No major feature requests were addressed between 0.9 and 1.0, this is just a minor incremental release.
Yeah, call me cranky too!
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Seriously, I don't get how exactly this stuff is news. It's getting tiresome already. I wouldn't mind if it was once a year or something "Thunderbird 2.0 is now out", but it's every week or so and its brutal (Thunderbird 1.0.1b is out!).
Well, you could always do what the rest of us do when we come across a story on the Slashdot home page that doesn't really interest us:
Scroll down a few lines and proceed to the next one.
Give it a shot, you'll be amazed how well it works.