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Mozilla Releases Thunderbird 2.0.0
An anonymous reader writes "The Mozilla Corporation has released Thunderbird 2.0.0. Among the improvements are Message Tagging, updated UI, Advanced Folder Views, Better New Mail Notification and Full Support for Windows Vista and 64-bit versions of Windows."
Have been using it (2.0) for a day now and so far its a really nice experiance.
The greatest thing with Thunderbird is its "simplicity" (do not confuse with "simple, bare minimum") it just very easy to get into and when you'r ready there is allot of usefull features that the advanced user appricate.
Having used 1.5 for a long period of time its also one of the more stable programs I'v use every day, havnt so far seen a crash or something that dosnt work as intended.
http://www.intellipool.se/ - Intellipool Network Monitor
I do
The single lacking feature stopping me from using it? Heck, even if it ties in with that other calendaring application from mozilla, at least recognizing outlook calendar requests and calling the other app.
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I use Thunderbird to download my POP3 email and my Webmail at home. I have multiple POP3 accounts from my ISP, and a couple of GMail ones too, and my wife have one from Hotmail, one from Yahoo and one from her job. I shared the thunderbird profile between my Linux partition and her Windows partition so, no matter what partition we booted on, our email is all there. This is a way to save time and get all email with a One Click (tm) without having to surf through several ad-infected pages to read a couple of messages. All props to thunderbird, for providing this useful piece of software for free (as in speech and as in beer).
Most I know (that don't frequent slashdot) use the emails they get from their ISP's, which are mostly set up with POP3 or IMAP and they don't really know much or care about Gmail and the likes apart from using them as log-ins to chat applications.
I'm not suggesting this is Mozilla's fault, I'm just stating what I understand to be the real stumbling block for TB - and TB2 hasn't fixed it. It's a real shame.
Incidentally, TB really didn't need an overhaul, as far as I could tell. Prolly one of the most stable apps I've used in a long time, and quite powerful enough. Still, I'll have a look...
Meta will eat itself
This article came out a couple of days ago. It's a calendar plugin for Thunderbird 2 that syncs with google calendar. In my opinion, it's not an "Exchange killer," as the title states, but it could be very useful.
Thunderbird is by far the best mail client for Windows, and from my limited experience the best email client for Linux (though I haven't used Linux much recently). Mail.app (the Mac mail program) runs circles around Thunderbird and any other mail client I've ever used.
Thunderbird has been moving in the general direction of parity with Mail.app, but it isn't there yet. Mail.app still wins handily for its superior preferences menu layout which includes account info and mail filters all in one place. It's also integrated with the OS X address book and spell-checking dictionary. Once Leopard comes out, Mail.app will be integrated with the system-wide calendar process (another new Leopard feature).
And before anybody calls me a Mac fanboy, I still have a strong preference for Firefox over Safari. Safari is so light on features, especially those I take for granted with Firefox, that it's simply not usable (although Firefox should steal a feature or two from Safari to be even better).
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They are still blindly using the Date: field for received and sent mail. The so called fix is to sort by the 'Order Received' column. That column is inaccurate when you start moving messages around between folders. I really wish the TB developers would wake up. I know of no other mail client that doesn't parse out the Received date from the headers and make it available. In fact it is the default date for most other mail clients as well. I've lost count of the number of people who have brought this up to me when I tell them to check out TB. TB (imo) is a superior email client to outlook express except for this one issue that they keep ignoring.
This is based on a beta from a few weeks ago, feel free to correct me if they woke up between then and the release and fixed this issue.
POP3 is perfectly secure in SSL mode. IMAP is supposed to add some features, but is not inherently more secure than POP3. Maybe think before you write such generalising statements. As should you.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I use Thunderbird both at work and at home.
This release contains probably a lot of improvment under th hood but what really misses is:
For Mac OS X users like me, I would add:
This would be a proper 2.0 release.
I would also suggest also to write or improve extentions connecting TB with proeminents CRM software (Salesforce, Surgar CRM, ...).
PS: I tried Sunbird but was not convinced.
I had the same error message. Do you have a Logitech Quickcam? I found that the Quickcam software which runs in the background on start-up was keeping a lock on the mozMapi32.dll file in the Thunderbird program folder. I had to use process explorer to kill off QuickCam10.exe before I could complete the installation.
Yes, I had a Quickcam.
Once I closed Skype (which is the only app I had running which uses the cam), it installed fine.
So, anyone know why Logitech is using the Mozilla API library?
2. Configuring a gmail account just got much easier in Thunderbird. Just go to Tools>Account Settings then click 'Add Account', select the account type as gmail, enter your name and gmail address and, uh, you're done. Lather, rinse and repeat for your 4 other gmail accounts.
3. gmail's spam folder is not accessed when you use POP3. You only get what "slips through." Maybe one of these days I'll return to a client . .
I'm going to reply to you again, because I've had a few hours to play with the new version, and I'm not at all impressed.
So spotlight is broken, but that's been a feature request with much finger pointing for quite a while now. The built in search function is still pretty useless. No way to search all headers, or the entire mailbox including both headers and bodies, or to search multiple or all mail boxes in the same search. With 9 separate inboxes, it takes a while to find some poorly remembered email. Granted, I can always open a terminal, navigate to the directory, and perform some unix majic with grep and find, but that's a major blow to usability for their interface. It's not like people haven't been asking for a better search function since early days, but the developers have decided that people just shouldn't be searching their email. Eudora does it correctly, so my standards are not going to come down, maybe all the good TB developers will go over to Penelope.
There appear to still be bugs with the IPv6 implementation, both on the OSX and Linux versions. At least, there is still a config setting to disable IPv6 lookups.
Without too much regression testing, the old LDAP incompatibilities are still there. TB is pretty much useless in corporate settings using AD or other LDAP directory services.
The old indexing bugs haven't been addressed at all. After leaving TB running for a while, various inboxes highlight in blue to show new mail, but there isn't any. Sometimes a mailbox shows unread messages, but searching around doesn't turn up any. New messages sorted by procmail on the server aren't indexed properly if not seen first in an inbox.
The anti-phishing feature has always highlighted quite a few auto-generated emails and some client monthly mailings as suspect. I wish they would integrate some kind of baysian or learning or white-list features on that.
The completely separate address books, with no concept of either hierarchy or being attached to individual accounts (think friends&family, business contacts) is pretty 1993 in its thinking.
One of my biggest problems, is the inability to choose which outgoing SMTP service at the time of sending a message. Once again, Eudora got this right. Since I work in many locations, the ability to quickly change the outgoing SMTP setting without having to go to every account setting and changing it manually would be expected of a real email application.
The UI hasn't really improved at all over the 1.5 version. Sure, they've now hidden several spam controls in new places, and made a few other cosmetic improvements, but TB is still mostly unusable by ordinary users. There is still no way to make some commonly used functions into buttons on the main interface. That is the most asked for feature when I show people TB, how do they do their most common command with just a single button click.
Version 1.5 was really the first usable release, it should have been called 1.0. This is a minor bug fix release, count it as version 1.1, but there is NO major overhaul of either the functionality or usability.
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