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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.
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!
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.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
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
It's that 'Express' in the title. It makes things go faster!
Yeah, it's chunky, but being able to run the newest Thunderbird is worth the cost of you upgrading to a 486.
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.
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