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."

Comments

Pop-up notifier for e-mail?

[Anonymous Coward]

So... is the pop-up notifier for new e-mail as useless as the current system tray "new mail" icon from Thunderbird 1.5?

You see, there's only a handful of things that I want to be notified for immediately. And those things can be only identified via rules. (From a particular domain, or with a specific subject line.) Preferably *after* the anti-spam filters have cleaned the bogus messages out of the way (sometimes domains are spoofed).

Which, sadly, is one thing that Outlook rules does properly where Thunderbird 1.5.x (and older) has failed at.

UI Responsiveness?

[WuphonsReach]

Have they finally fixed the UI responsiveness issue? In Thunderbird 1.5, I find that the message pane is nigh unusable if Thunderbird is trying to retrieve mail in the background. Then there's the issue that Thunderbird gets a bit slow when dealing with folders with a few thousand messages (such as a popular mailing list where you keep a year's worth of posts for easy reference).

Re:Import...

[Nicholas Evans]

Which is exactly why Thunderbird's import wizard needs handle importing its own profiles.

Just one feature

[AVryhof]

I'm a web developer... and maintain hundreds of sites.

So, if you can imagine... even with asking people to at least let me know what site is theirs, I have hundreds of messages with the Subject "Web Update" or "Website"

I would simply like the ability to edit the subject line of messages I receive for organizational purposes.

That would be the "Killer" feature for me...

Another novelty feature that could be useful is a Calendar view of messages, so I could graphically see when each message arrived and prioritize it appropriately.

Re:Just one feature

[Bill Dimm]

I would simply like the ability to edit the subject line of messages I receive for organizational purposes.

I just want to follow up on how this might be implemented, since I think it's a great idea. Thunderbird could allow you to insert an additional header, perhaps called X-ModifiedSubject, where you would enter your modified version of the subject line. When the messages are listed, the X-ModifiedSubject would be displayed as the subject if it existed. If there was no X-ModifiedSubject line, the normal Subject would be displayed, but in a different color from the X-ModifiedSubject, so you can easily distinguish the ones you changed from the ones you didn't, and not confuse anybody when talking about the email on the phone (since the sender won't know you've made the change). When you reply to an email containing a X-ModifiedSubject, Thunderbird should have you choose between the new subject (more descriptive) and the original subject (vague, but more recognizable to the recipient) when generating the subject line of the reply. I suppose any searches you do on the "Subject" field should search both the Subject and the X-ModifiedSubject.

For example, your mail headers might contain:
Subject: WebSite
X-ModifiedSubject: Need to update copyright date on website

That way, when you browse your mail listings you see "Need to update copyright date on website" instead of just "Website," and you can easily tell what the message is about without clicking into it and reading the whole thing.

Better Whitelisting?

[Bill Dimm]

From what I've read about Thunderbird, the only options for whitelisting (passing to inbox without spam filtering) are your whole address book, or everyone that you've ever sent email to. Are there any plans to make it more flexible than that? Here are some things that I can think of that would be handy. Sorry if any are already included -- I can't play with Thunderbird until I upgrade to GTK2 (soon):

1) Ability to easily whitelist all email coming from a particular domain. This would ensure that you get all emails from a client company, not just one individual. Perhaps there could be a preferences setting that allows you to indicate that you want to be prompted each time you send an email to a new domain to see whether the whole domain should be whitelisted or just the recipient. I assume I could create a mail rule to filter a domain, as I currently do with Netscape Communicator, but that is pretty inconvenient.

2) Ability to easily whitelist an address without putting it in your address book or sending mail to it, e.g. by simply clicking a button while viewing a message from the address. For example, if I receive an emailed newsletter that I requested, it would be nice to whitelist it without cluttering my address book.

3) Are emails sent by someone on the whitelist visually differentiated from other emails in some way, such as coloring the sender name differently? That could make it easier to differentiate between valid emails and any spams that slip through the filter.

Re:Import...

[NSIM]

I agree, being able to import message folders should be an option, it's not that hard to, MozBackup on Windows can save an existing profile, everything, passwords, mails, accounts, plug-ins etc and import them into a new install, made life bearable when loading each new Vista build :-(

Re:State of email

[halfnerd]

OfflineIMAP would fix most synchronization problems. Dovecot is a fast IMAP server and Maildrop coupled with your favourite smap filter could take care of the server part. Couple that with a good mail client (mutt) and a way to synchronize contacts. mutt can be customized with own keybindings, so that way one could add support for training the mail filter. I keep my home directory in a darcs repository to keep it in sync between machines. Other people use Subversion.

Re:Compact folders

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

It's actually worse than that. Failing to compact folders will eventually result in bugs and apparent data loss, requiring higher order geek hackery to restore what's left.

Moreover, if you do switch on the prompt to compact folders automatically, it comes up so regularly that it makes Vista's password prompt for system-wide settings seem positively user-friendly. Also, the explicit menu command to compact folders sometimes does nothing, with no indication of why; I assume this is a bug, since it often seems to do nothing even if there's stuff to do.

Seriously, it's nearly 2007. Remind me again why users should ever have to care about this sort of implementation detail?