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A look at Thunderbird 2.0 Beta
lisah writes "Linux.com has reviewed Mozilla's first beta release of the Thunderbird 2.0 email client and says that, while it 'won't knock your socks off,' there are plenty of reasons to try it out or upgrade from previous versions. The new Thunderbird does away with the limitations of labels and instead allows users to tag emails to their heart's content, in the same vein as Google's GMail. Developers also tossed in a bunch of other useful features like customizable pop-up notification of new email, better search capabilities, and a neat way to navigate through the history of recently read emails. Mozilla developers didn't get everything right, however, since the account setup continues to be something of a headache."
At least it's a painless upgrade, but as a hardcore IMAP user I'm not seeing a ton of usefulness.
As far as I can tell labels don't work at all if you use IMAP, multiple machines, multiple clients, and have more then one folder.
Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to phish...
"You could then also do some standard groupings that a user could select, like 'Yesterday, this week, this month, last month', common strings in the subject lines, etc."
Go into the inbox (or any other folder you have) window and press "g"
Now what key to I press to get grouping by my address book? ;)
View->"Sort By"-> "Grouped by Sort"
There are lot of options by which you can sort and then group.
Huh? It's easy, it's just a drop down to change the SMTP server. I do it all the time to test qmail setups on different servers.
There's even a few add ons you can use, like this one and this one. I guess maybe it works different than you expect, but it works well for me.
Thunderbird has a couple of very nice new features:
1. Threaded messages with your replies included in the thread! This alone is going to may 2.0 better
2. New filter rules: forward and reply with template!
3. A little better speed...
Now all we need to make thunderbird closer to perfect:
1. A way to view conversation by recipient.
2. Better template managemetn
3. something that can identify non-spam commercial email and newsletters and get them out of the inbox.
-- $G
There is TB Header Tools Extension 0.6.6 ...c =1906&hl=header
http://www.extensionsmirror.nl/index.php?showtopi
But we want to change the *body* of the message
This is exactly one of the reasons why I keep using Mutt (http://www.mutt.org/). I can edit any message, and I often use that feature.
My voicemail system leaves a message in my email box with the subject "Voicemail from <telephone number>". I always edit that subject to reflect the contents of the voicemail message. Since 90% of my voicemail messages are coming from 2 telephone numbers, this is really a requirement if I want to find a specific message ever again.
Another feature I miss in many email clients (probably Thunderbird 2.0 too, haven't checked that one yet) is the ability to freely edit email threading. Sometimes I want to break a thread into two parts, or I want to link two emails into a thread, for instance emails discussing the same subject but different subject headers. This is also something Mutt does very well.
The third reason I keep using Mutt is that it displays mails originating from myself in a different way. All mails from someone else show the "From" header in the index. All mails from myself show "To <recipient>" and are displayed in a different colour. This allows me to store both incoming and outgoing messages in the same folder, allowing for gmail-ish mailboxes that contain the entire discussion.
As long as there isn't a GUI mail client that can do all this, I'm not moving away from Mutt.
This and several other difficulties and restrictions (like being unable to edit mail) are because Mozilla is based on an ancient but well established format for email folders - basically all the emails live in one enormous text file, and there is a separate index for finding it fast and caching headers.
But of course if it's just one undifferentiated text file, there IS no efficient way to edit or delete mails out of the middle.
Realistically, Mozilla should probably update to a decent database format but that is a huge change.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
It's a shame that the Mozilla people didn't implement things like this the correct way; create a well-defined interface for address books, spell checking, etc, and then supply a default implementation for platforms that don't support them. Even Windows has a system address book, and yet Mozilla insists on using its own.
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