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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."
"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"
Yes. I haven't checked 2.0b1 out much yet, but in 1.5 and 2.0a1 you can associate a SMTP account with a POP3/IMAP account. Then when you click compose, you can select any SMTP account from the dropdown, but by default it will select the appropriate account for the IMAP/POP3 account you're browsing at the moment.
Unfortunately even with this I have accidentally sent e-mail from the wrong account (well, an unexpected one at least) several times. Hehe, oops... guess it's a good thing I have the same name attached to each from address, as opposed to my IRC/IM nickname...
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.
If by labels you mean tags, then you're doing something wrong.
I use multiple machines over IMAP, I use webmail/Thunderbird/Outlook and I have many folders (both IMAP and local) as well as multiple accounts.
My tags translate fine between them all... granted my Thunderbird tags aren't available in Webmail (and I'm not sure about Outlook I don't use it often)
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.
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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