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Mozilla Messaging Devs Don't Want To Duplicate Outlook
Petr Krcmar writes "Thunderbird 3.0 Alpha 1 was released last month. A few months before, two main developers left the project and development was moved from the Mozilla Corporation to the Mozilla Messaging, the new subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. We had the opportunity to ask some questions to David Ascher, Mozilla Messaging CEO. The interview is about present and future of Thunderbird and about related projects like SeaMonkey, Spicebird and Mozilla Calendar."
Thunderbird 3 Alpha 1 Screenshot on some forum. Here is a Thunderbird 3 Alpha 1 Screenshot direct link.
You could use Outlook, which lets you set the default composition type. Additionally, it lets you change it easily from the Ribbon bar :)
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
totally agree. I really hate it when someone inserts a carriage return in the middle of a sentence just because that's where he hit the end of his text box. it makes for a very uncomfortable read, because my mind initially thinks it's the end of a sentence, and i have to reread it to figure out what's going on.
it's the end users's (application's) job to decide where to wrap the line, not the author's.
The Rs are actually vocallic.
That, though, should be mitigated by the fact that the C should probably be transcribed as CH.
</nitpick>
Ignore this signature. By order.
There is a Funambol plugin for Thunderbird/Lightning that can sync the calendar and address book with a SyncML server (and via that to any device which supports SyncML). For mail, I use IMAP, so its always on the server, whichever device or workstation I access it from.
There's a good book about this, called "The Mac is not a Typewriter:" http://www.amazon.com/Mac-Not-Typewriter-Professional-Level-Macintosh/dp/0938151312 It's not specific to the Mac, but it tries to dispel the old ways of thinking about how to create documents. (i.e. use the tab stops in your word processor instead of just hitting space a bunch, stuff like that, use only one space behind a period when using a variable-width font, etc.) It applies equally well to all GUI computers, but was written back when the Mac was about the only one out there.
This is one of those endless debates between old fogeys who hate everything that didn't already exist in 1975, and people who realize that, hey, paragraph breaks make a hell of a lot more sense than line breaks!
Comment of the year
Gmail's conversation view shows your messages and the replies of your correspondent in context. It is, if you will, a combined threaded view of your inbox and outbox at the same time.
The only problem with GMail's conversation view is that it uses Subject rather than Message ID. While the threaded view in Thunderbird does indeed use Message ID, it only ever shows one half of the conversation (and I'm not sure how or if it handles multiple correspondents in a conversation).
It's not an enormously big deal for me, but it's not a feature that's currently in Thunderbird. I would use it if it were available and I suspect that for GMail users it would be a big deal.
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
- right click on mail box
- select "properties"
- select "offline" tab
- check "select this folder for offline use
Click the "click to display message threads button" in the title line of the message list pane. It is the button with the speech-balloon like icon immediately to the left of the paper-clip button (attachment button.)I wrote an email parser about five years ago, and I can tell you that there is a good compromise to the problem you describe in the email standards implemented by virtually all mail clients (MUAs).
The header "format=flowed" lets you send text/plain messages that look great whether you are reading it with telnet or pine or with Thunderbird or any other modern MUA. The main rfc for email, RFC 2822, explains that the sending MUA should, but is not required to, break up paragraphs into lines of less than 78 characters terminated by a carriage return/line feed. If you specify the "format=flowed" header described in RFC 2646, you allow the receiving client to rewrap the email according to the receiving user's preference. Typically modern MUAs will rewrap format-flowed plaintext email to the window size.
The specification states that lines ending with a space and then a CLRF are to be treated as part of a single paragraph that can be rewrapped. Hard breaks are then done by terminating the line with a simple CLRF with no preceding space.
Most modern MUAs that I have dealt with can (and typically by default) send format-flowed email that has the standard line breaks every 78 characters for the benefit of clients that cannot rewrap, and contain contextual clues for newer mail clients to seamlessly reformat the message body. For example, Apple's Mail.app by default sends multi-part MIME messages, one part containing the rich text email and the other part containing format=flowed text/plain. No matter what email client the recipient is using, at least one of those options will look acceptable.
You can find a pretty good write-up of this at Dan's Mail Format Site.
Because Outlook's text editor sucks to the point that top-posting is basically the only way to make it work.
Outlook has two default text styles: "compose" and "reply." Assuming nobody bothers changing them, after the second reply everyone will be typing in the same font and color.
This means that you have to manually alter you text to make it stand out if you're replying to a reply.
Plus, as an added bonus, Outlook's quote is just an indent and a set of email headers. There's no nice ">" at the start of each quoted line or nice blue line like there is in Thunderbird.
And, because as already mentioned, Outlook's email editor sucks, Outlook really doesn't handle inserting new lines of text into quoted sections that well. Assuming nobody's done anything fancy with formatting it will simply unindent the line of text. However, you'll still be typing in the blue "reply" format unless you've changed that style, so the only queue that it's a reply is that it's not indented. Unless you're the first reply after an email is sent, then by default you'll be typing blue and their text will remain black. But after one round, this is lost.
But there's still that "assuming nobody's done anything fancy with formatting" thing I just mentioned. Throw in bullets or numbered lists (and keep in mind, Outlook like Word loves auto-formatting things) and things can get a little screwy. Those generally will prevent your text from being indented.
I actually did do an "inline reply" to an email that used a numbered list in Outlook, and that had the effect of resetting the numbered list numbers - instead of keeping the number from the original email, it started counting over again from 1. Not a problem if you're replying to all the original items, but...
In short, it's because Outlook's email editor basically sucks. It wants to be an embedded Word instead of an email editor.
For those who've never used Outlook, I've essentially formatted my post in a general "Outlook reply" format. Keep in mind that the quoted section would just be indented, without the little quote lines that Slashdot has added.
From: Imsdal (930595)Sent: Tuesday, June 10 2008 01:05 PM
To: slashdot.org
Subject: Re:As well they shoouldn't
I hate having to figure out who said what in which e-mail when I'm at work (using Outlook).
Whatever happened to quoting and proper mail etiquette, anyway? When I started using message boards in the early '80s, almost everyone quickly learned to quote properly, to cut out the unnecessary stuff and so on. Now it seems to be a completely lost art. I have had people at work ask me, in all seriousness, why I didn't top post and what those strange ">" characters meant.
I agree that threading is important now, but it is (IMNSHO) a technological solution to a social problem. I find hat unfortunate..
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Ok, mission accomplished. All messages are downloaded, and new messages are available offline. That's extremely pleasing, so thank you for pursuing this. Left to my own devices I might have tested it when T'bird 3 came out, but certainly not before.
My recollection was that I'd tried this before with T'bird 2 so either it's a bugfix since an earlier 2.0.0.x release, or PEBKAC.
Thanks again.
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
Outlook as an Email Client is frankly rubbish
Outlook as a PIM without Exchange is still rubbish
Outlook as a front end to Exchange is quite good and the best there is currently....
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
From the Hacker's Jargon
/eeee'vil/. Compare evil and rude.
evil adj. As used by hackers, implies that some system, program, person, or institution is sufficiently maldesigned as to be not worth the bother of dealing with. Unlike the adjectives in the cretinous/losing/brain-damaged series, `evil' does not imply incompetence or bad design, but rather a set of goals or design criteria fatally incompatible with the speaker's. This usage is more an esthetic and engineering judgment than a moral one in the mainstream sense. "We thought about adding a Blue Glue interface but decided it was too evil to deal with." "TECO is neat, but it can be pretty evil if you're prone to typos." Often pronounced with the first syllable lengthened, as
-- don't discount flying pigs until you have good air defense
Outlook - Stores your mail either in a modified Access MDB database (offline PST) or a full SQL database (Online - Exchange server) so why are both slower at searching than Thunderbird which stores mail in textfiles!
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
LinkedIn is a social network with a focus on business users.
http://www.mhall119.com
There are plenty of Exchange replacements, the problem is that Outlook doesn't work with them.
http://www.mhall119.com
Of if only it did. Online it stores your email in a *huge* modified Access MDB database (Exchange). Microsoft have been promising SQL storage for Exchange for nearly as long as WinFS.
Your choices are:
- do not include original text
- attach original message
- include original text with no formatting changes
- include and indent original text
- prefix each line with ? (pick what you want to prefix it with)
You can also choose whether to reply above or below.
Thats pretty damn flexible.
It defaults to a very reasonable default for most people.
For most folks, top-replying is the correct choice because it serves most of the people most of the time. And, because as already mentioned, Outlook's email editor sucks, Outlook really doesn't handle inserting new lines of text into quoted sections that well. Assuming nobody's done anything fancy with formatting it will simply unindent the line of text. However, you'll still be typing in the blue "reply" format unless you've changed that style, so the only queue that it's a reply is that it's not indented. Unless you're the first reply after an email is sent, then by default you'll be typing blue and their text will remain black. But after one round, this is lost. Note that this kind of stuff only happens if thats how you have Outlook configured and leave everything default. And you have to be (crazily) using HTML email for this. It's all quite nice and sane when you've set outlook to do everything as plain text. In short, it's because Outlook's email editor basically sucks. It wants to be an embedded Word instead of an email editor. Outlook's email editor IS Word, at leats for HTML and RTF messages. Literally it uses the MS Word engine for it. Quite alot of brouhaha a while back about that because it really limited the kind of HTML you can use. For those who've never used Outlook, I've essentially formatted my post in a general "Outlook reply" format. Keep in mind that the quoted section would just be indented, without the little quote lines that Slashdot has added. Unless you've configured it to put quote lines like Slashdot has.
Keep in mind as well that for most people, top-reply works most of the time, thats why most email editors default that way. Otherwise for every single email that you read that has a reply you have to scroll offscreen to read it, instead of what you want to read being right there.
I will say that Thunderbird's default reply-formatting IS better than Outlook's. But its pretty minor, and you can make Outlook look very similar if you want to fiddle with the customizations.
Actualy, you can install the Mozilla Firesomething addon and you will no longer have to worry whether your browser has a reasonable name, as it will never last too long. And do not forget to enable changing the User Agent header for greater fun!
Ezekiel 23:20