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Thunderbird in Crisis?
Elektroschock writes "The two core developers of Thunderbird have left Mozilla. Scott McGregor made a brief statement: 'I wanted to let the Thunderbird community know that Friday October 12th will be my last day as an employee of the Mozilla Corporation.' Meanwhile, David Bienvenu blogged: 'Just wanted to let everyone know that my last day at The Mozilla Corporation will be Oct. 12. I intend to stay involved with Thunderbird... I've enjoyed working at Mozilla a lot, and I wish Mozilla Co and the new Mail Co all the best.' A few month ago Mozilla management considered abandoning their second product and setting up a special corporation just for the mail client. Scott was more or less supportive. David joined in. While Sunbird just released a new version no appropriate resources were dedicated to the missing component. And while Thunderbird became the most used Linux mail client it has been abandoned by Mozilla for 'popularity reasons'. Both messages from David and Scott do not sound as if the founders will play any role in the Thunderbird Mail Corporation. What happened to Mozilla? Is it a case of pauperization through donations?"
No way. Thunderbird is stable, Evolution is not.
Thunderbird's renderer works, Evolution's is crap.
Also, while there is a tiny handful of plugins for Evolution, there is a HUGE selection of extensions for Tunderbird which are extremely useful, including one extension which can be used to automatically purge duplicate messages from one's inbox.
With that said, I do use Evolution as my primary email program both at home and at work, but only because the scalix connector is available for Evolution. Thunderbird can access via IMAP only, and cannot use Scalix's calendaring features.
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Not sure if you're aware but there is a Thunderbird project called Penelope for those Eudora users stuck by Qualcomm's decision to discontinue the product. I haven't tried the Eudora importers, though...
Outlook has been pretty safe since the XP release (Outlook 2002), and even the 2000 release with a patch. That's when they stopped allowing you to open executable attachments. There was still a minor risk of javascript nastiness, but they fixed that as well. The 2003 (11) and 2007 (12) releases of Outlook have been stable and safe. (Outlook 2007 doesn't use the controversial Ribbon toolbar like the rest of the Office 12 suite)
Outlook Express is dead, though if you're still using XP you have it. Outlook Express has also been the Microsoft mail client with the most issues, mostly because it's free and more or less neglected. The problem is that "Outlook Express" and "Outlook" actually share nothing in common except for the name and the fact that they both do email. Beyond that they're two separate codebases, managed by two separate teams. It's unfortunate that they're named similarly, since Outlook Express' issues have tarnished the fact that Outlook proper is actually a very good, secure, and competent email client.
If you're running Vista, Outlook Express is gone. It was replaced by Windows Mail, a more bare-bones mail and news reader that finally divorces the "Outlook" name from the free mail client. Alternatively, you can use the Windows Live Mail Beta software (different from Hotmail/Windows Live Mail web interface, as it's client software that can be used for other mail accounts besides just Hotmail). Windows Live Mail integrates with Live services (Messenger, Spaces), where Outlook Express and Windows Mail don't.
If you are still in midst of this conversion, you should take a look at Eudora Mailbox Cleaner - it can do the conversion for you and should give much better results than TB's own import.
KMail is a good option too, or Kontact if you want integration with calendars and a newsreader (KNode), or just run them each separately. I use KMail for all my email, I prefer the interface to Thunderbird's.
Thunderbird uses mbox format to store mail. There's nothing proprietary about it. I just copied the Inbox to a linux box and ran mail -f Inbox with no problems.
You should give credit to the right people. Two of those three are Opera innovations, that Firefox copied. Not that Firefox is not a good browser. I'm just saying who actually did this first.
Still it doesn't do exchange intigration all that well, but I think they're on the right track.
They wrote about it on the dot a few days ago.
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I don't know why this e-mail client doesn't get more attention. I find it similar to Thunderbird but much faster. Also, as far as I remember, included some tools to import from Eudora, which worked very well for me (while Thunderbird didn't).
GPL?
I thought it was released under the MPL like all the other Mozilla software?
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I've been using Thunderbird as my main mail client for years and overall I like it. My biggest issue with it is that in Linux it has a 2GB limit per mail folder. If it crosses that limit it losses all the mail in the folder up to that point. IMO that is the cardinal sin of programming - permanently lossing data. They've known about this bug for at least a year - because I made it known at that time and had some not so helpful feedback from developers. But it still happens.
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Mozilla software is tri-licensed under the GPL, the MPL and the LGPL. So, develeopers are free to use the GPL and create extensions licensed under the GPL as well.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird/
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Thunderbird is the ONLY mail client which handles IMAP properly on windows in my opinion... sure Outlook can do it, but it's very painful (delete, then purge for example, who's dumb idea was that). Also, components like Enigmail are awesome... nothing on outlook compares in my opinion... I really hope the old tbird continues...
Try mutt. It still beats the pants off of everything in the known world when it comes to properly formatting and replying to emails (since it allows you to use your favourite editor). It's the only way to properly trim quotes, still reply with 2 words and sending the mail, in under 8 seconds.
Most people don't spend $87 on Outlook but some $250 on Office 2007 Standard. Many will also get it (almost) free by BitTorrent, KaZaA, some neighbourhood geek or their workplace. In that case "it" will probably be the Enterprise or Professional Edition, not Standard.
Would be my next Linux choice. http://kontact.kde.org/kmail/
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Open Letter to the Thunderbird Community
Also note that both Scott and David say they'll still be working on TB. Scott's post:
David's:
Given the timing and very similar wording of their posts, I'm guessing that Ascher's right - they're going off to work on something together.
It does suck; those two know more about TB than anyone, and even when they were full-time employees, TB development was fairly glacial - it's just too big and monolithic for that size development team. But I don't know that this necessarily means the end of TB. I certainly hope not.
My newest machine is about 7 years old; I'm in a pinch that thousands of hours of intense concentration can show no way out. I play UT, surf, do all the things everyone else does, I even have an icon that'll bring up random episodes of Firefly, since there's plenty of power for media.
But I load OpenOffice and the world stops.
I fear that Thunderbird, under the direction of OO will become bloated and laggy as well! I had a friend who didn't know any better; her P2/300 was on loan to show her how to use Linux. She waited over 2H for it to load. It was insane. These guys really need to profile their code.
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There's tools like this for importing old mail into GMail:
http://marklyon.org/gmail/instruction.htm
As I said, there may have been other steps in this process that I've forgotten.
My point isn't that these solutions, in my case, were that hard. But figuring out what was wrong, and implementing them, took huge amounts of time and patience. An ordinary user would never have these means (knowledge of command-line Unix utilities, and insight into what might be failing) at his/her disposal. And they surely wouldn't have gone to these lengths to diagnose and correct the problems. (Although, to be honest, an ordinary user wouldn't have 10-15 years of email saved up that they wanted to convert to a new platform).
And - more importantly, and some of the reason for this rant - I think that import/conversion function, especially in FOSS software, have a greater need to be as friendly and bulletproof as possible, because the user's still quite possibly in the "I'm going to try it out and see if I want to use it instead of my old [proprietary] application if it doesn't work'. But in Tbird, seemingly, Import's it's at most an afterthought, and extremely fragile even AFTER you've used third-party apps like Eudora Rescue or Eudora Mailbox Cleaner to try and get around the known issues, limitations, and deficiencies in the code. That isn't the way it should be in an app that's trying to compete for mind and market share with some pretty damn good commercial or closed-source apps.
Yeah! Mozilla should stop ignoring Thunderbird. They should create a company whose sole focus is on email and other messaging technology. They should fund the new company with several million dollars so they can get off the ground. Yeah, that's what they should do... then Thunderbird will get the attention it deserves. Oh wait, that's what they're doing already. Nevermind.
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