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

Memory Footprint

[TrollBridge]

Maybe it's just my own perception, but Thunderbird seems to be a bit bulky, judging by how long it takes to open. Am I totally out of my league here, or is Thunderbird a little chunky?

Re:Memory Footprint

[ConceptJunkie]

It is a little sluggish, however, it's still an order of magnitude (literally) faster than Outlook when both have a large message store.

Outlook was taking 30 seconds or more to open a folder, which was one of the reasons I dropped it for Thunderbird several months ago.

Ironically, Outlook Express never had this kind of problem.

MOOX optimized versions?

[zippity8]

Has anyone tried these? I was googling for a torrent and came across this win32 optimized version (depending on your processor).

MOOX optimized versions
NOTE: This is a third party / unofficial build.

CCK please

[lopingrhondo]

I'm still waiting for a Firefox/Thunderbird CCK that will let me customize them in a way that would make distribution worthwhile here at work. NS through 7.1 gave us the ability to make custom accounts and mail settings before install. Yes, we use Netscape as the default browser/mail suite here. We do exist!

extensions

[alatesystems]

I wish the moz foundation would implore the popular extension makers to update their version string. If I upgrade when it comes out, I'm screwed on all my extensions. If I wait, I'm going "when can i upgrade, when can i upgrade?"

I lose either way. This time I'm going to wait instead of upgrading from .9 for a while until the extensions are ready.

"Find" is painful to use

[Sandor at the Zoo]

I read a number of mailing list digests, and Thunderbird's "Find" is sooooo painful to use. Here's the scenario: the digest has a list of Subjects from individual emails in the digest. I see one of interest.

I select the subject of interest. Instead of having a "enter selection for find" command, I have to copy and paste. Fine. However, if the Find dialog is already up, when I hit ctrl-F, the text in the Find dialog isn't selected; I have to select the text, then paste my subject into the box.

Then I click the Find button. It finds the text and shows it to me at the very bottom of the window. This is so annoying that it's nearly beyond belief. I have to scroll down a bunch to see any context whatsoever.

So, my request for two enhancements:

• When you hit ctrl-F, select the frickin' text in the Find dialog.
• When you scroll the message window to show found text, scroll the found area to the vertical center of the window, not the very bottom.

OK, so go ahead and flame me for a) not just fixing the application myself, and b) not trying to figure out how to file my own bugs.

In my own defense, a) I have a day job and a life at night, and b) I started to file some bugs and direction number 1 was "download Mozilla and see if the same bug appears there". I don't use Mozilla, have no interest in it, and don't feel like jumping through hoops to file bugs.

OK, call me cranky. :-)

Happy Holidays!

Palm sync?

[D'Arque Bishop]

First off, congrats to the Mozilla Thunderbird team; I switched to Thunderbird months ago and have been EXTREMELY happy with it, with one exception. Kudos on reaching 1.0.

Now, the exception I just mentioned happens to be Palm sync capabilities. I managed to get an extension downloaded and installed a version or two ago, but the data would only sync once (changes I made later to the Visor's address book wouldn't sync to Thunderbird), and I couldn't get the extension to install properly in later versions. I can't imagine that I'm the only one who wants to sync a PalmOS-based device to Thunderbird, or that I'm the only one who's had this problem. Checking Google has been little help, either...

Again, except for this one problem, Thunderbird works great for me. Is there any idea when I can expect this one annoyance to be fixed? (Or get some confirmation I'm the only one having this issue...)

Re:Icons

[gclef]

Actually, one of the things I'd love to see in Thunderbird, but may take a while, is tabbed accounts similar to the tabbed browsing for Mozilla. In other words, each email account would appear in Thunderbird as a tab. (You could put a little email icon in the tab if that account has new mail.)

That would (I think) clear up some valuable window real-estate for those of us with multiple email accounts.

RSS integration?

[Suppafly]

I never understood the idea of RSS integration into a mail client.. RSS is generally used to keep up with web data, so why wouldn't you have RSS built into the browser, not the mail client. RSS integration in a mail client is just bloat.

Still no call-out to a browser?

[devphil]

Coincidentally, I decided to switch to firefox+thunderbird (or, failing that, firefox+mozillamail) just last night. And they seem nice and all, but it's infuriatingly stupid that

• clicking on a mailto link in firefox doesn't bring up thunderbird, or anything else
• clicking on links in thunderbird -- whether in a message, or in a thunderbird dialog bix -- doesn't bring up a browser

I understand and appreciate that, unlike Windows, there's no standard *nix API for these sorts of things. But it looks like they didn't even try. (It Would Be Nice[tm] if the Debian builds of these programs taught them about /etc/alternatives; then there would be a semi-standard API.)

Yah, yah, I know, go get one of the zillion third-party extensions... Tried that. "Get extensions" is one of those links in thunderbird that did nothing.

(Other peeves: transitioning from Mozilla would be easier if they'd left the same keyboard shortcuts. And remembered window sizes.)