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/

Re:Release Notes

[Eil]

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.

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.

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.

Re:Memory Footprint

[Paleomacus]

It's that 'Express' in the title. It makes things go faster!

Re:Memory Footprint

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's chunky, but being able to run the newest Thunderbird is worth the cost of you upgrading to a 486.

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!

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! :)

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.

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.

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.

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

[MobyDisk]

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.

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

In Other News

[NardofDoom]

"Thunderbird Bad for Advertisers"

"My business has been cut ten fold by this communist software" say veteran spammer Ima A Shole. "I don't know how anyone expects to have free web sites if they don't let independent businessmen like me advertise porn and \/|@gr.r.r.a."

Huh?

[sammyo]

Shouldn't there be a name change at a full dot release?

Ba ding. :-) :-)

Re:Any other choice?

[Finuvir]

If I don't want Outlook Express, Mozilla Mail&News and Mozilla Thunderbird, what else *Open Source* e-mail clients can I choose in Windows?

Telnet

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

"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!

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.

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: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: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.

Why ADD a calendar??

[Savet Hegar]

Why does everyone think an e-mail program needs a calendar?

An e-mail program doesn't need a calendar any more than a web browser does. Nor does it need one any more than a file sharing program does.

If you want a calendar program, get a calendar program.

Re:Why ADD a calendar??

[COMON$]

Usually when you are corresponding to people it is nice to have their contact information integrated into the program that manages your appointments. A calendar is a simple program that can easily be integrated into any organizational program. Also FTP and Web have little to do with appointments. Whereas most of the appointments I make a day come from e-mails. Really nice to be able to tie that calendar entry into the thread that preempted the meeting I need to go to. I think the real question is why wouldnt you want a calendar in your e-mail program? Other than complying with occam's razor?

Re:Why ADD a calendar??

[chowells]

> Why does everyone think an e-mail program needs a calendar?

Because people with slightly more sophisticated scheduling needs than yours find it useful, for example, to easily be able to e-mail deatails of appointments and so on to other people. The integration between an email client and calendar can help to facilitate this.

Re:Why ADD a calendar??

[shellbeach]

For some people, work /= meetings.

work = work / meetings ???

Thus the amount of work you do is inversely proportional to the number of meetings you have ... OK, I'll agree with that!

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.

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.

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.

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.)

Re:Still no call-out to a browser?

[{X-Frog}]

Well for me it works.

I'm using gnome, so to do that all I needed to do was to go in Application --> Desktop Preferences --> Advanced --> Preferred Applications
And there, I set my default browser and my default mail client!

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

Re:Why won't they add a calendar?

[T-Ranger]

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.

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.

Still not feature complete

[anticypher]

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