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Mozilla Thunderbird 3 Released
supersloshy writes Today Mozilla released Thunderbird 3.
Many new features are available, including Tabs and enhanced search features, a message archive for emails you don't want to delete but still want to keep, Firefox 3's improved Add-ons Manager, Personas support, and many other improvements. Download here."
a message archive for emails you don't want to delete but still want to keep
Well that was cleverly written :)
But tabbed email sounds interesting. It makes text editors, web browsers and many other apps so much better and makes so much sense for email application that I'm thinking why didn't Thunderbird have it before.
One thing I would surely like to see in email clients however - the gmail like threaded conversation view. It's just so much better and nicer to use, but still many email applications tend to have the plain-list-of-messages view.
... slashdot story summaries i don't want to delete but still want to keep
because hell just froze over. First we get Chrome for Linux, then Thunderbird 3. What next, Duke Nukem Forever?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I've been using Thunderbird 3 in beta for the last few months on an ubuntu system. TB 3 doesn't look dramatically different than TB 2, but the performance difference is *enormous*. TB 2 would crash frequently, it would periodically use all resources while it did heaven knows what, and Gmail IMAP was a disaster.
TB 3 is responsive, hardly ever crashes (perhaps twice in 3 months), search is *way* improved, and it finally feels like first-rate software. My hat is off to the Thunderbird team.
Every single time I see this discussion, someone pipes up to say "but thunderbird DOES do threads!".
That it does. And that has absolutely no bearing on the discussion at hand.
Conversation view as provided by gmail gives you a single page for each entire conversation AND it inserts your replies online as appropriate.
There's several other features that make conversation view work so well, but you'll have to actually try gmail to understand what we are talking about.
"hardly ever crashes (perhaps twice in 3 months), search is *way* improved, and it finally feels like first-rate software.".
The specific releases he is mentioning are beta. Standards for 'numbers of times crashing' are different. I am guessing, but the 'first rate software' quote may also be speaking of look and feel. Thunderbird was good, but lacked polish. I have not tried any of the 3 series, but I will now that it's golden
One of the early releases I downloaded had the amusing "feature" of downloading every message in the background - not just headers, full messages, with attachments. According to the bug report, this was intentional, so that your folders would be accessible without being connected to the network, but it never seemed to know where to stop. It was *constantly* and repeatedly downloading messages, and ate 40 some-odd gigs before I noticed it and went back to 2.
--riney
a message archive for emails you don’t want to delete but still want to keep
To be more specific, the message archive is for emails that you want to get rid of, but don't exactly want to delete. Like if you're in a mailing list and want to clean out your inbox, but you don't want to delete all of (or at least some of) your messages in that mailing list. It's basically just another way of organizing things. Sorry if I didn't make any sense before :\.
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
Ok, does anyone know how to turn off the tabs bar, or at least hide it when there is only one tab, like firefox does?
99% of the time I read my mail in the reading pane instead of popping open a new window, so the tabs bar is just sitting there with only one tab showing.
Plus pressing the write button opens a new window instead of a tab anyway...
Come as you are, do what you must, be who you will.
Now I can't get to my calendar anymore. Thanks for synchronizing an update with the Lightning extension
Morphing Software
I have been a Thunderbird user for as long as it's been around (and before it was "Thunderbird"), and I thought I would be one forever. Even once I started using Gmail for my personal email, I thought I'd need Thunderbird for my work stuff. But, you know, the university started offering hosted Gmail, and I decided to try it... and, months later, I don't miss T-bird at all.
Thing is, I was one of the hold-outs. While quite a few staff and faculty here are still on desktop email, almost all of our students have preferred web mail for quite a few years now - even when the only web-based option was that gosh-awful "Webpine" (Hey! Here's a great idea! Let's use our awful, counter-intuitive, ugly Pine command line program as a design template for a new web-based email client!). So I wonder for how much longer any desktop email programs will even be considered relevant.
#DeleteChrome
That seems quite an important extension - any idea when (or if) it will be supported by TB3?
To me, it seems like an error of judgement to mainstream release a new version when key addons have not been satisfactorily updated. For the likes of Lightening, it isn't just eye-candy... and, for many, I suspect, breaking existing (addon) functionality will be unacceptable.
That said, I'm looking forward to 'conversation' view - and I've craved an improved address book for years... though what I saw when I last took a peek at the Beta wasn't much better than in TB2.
Not sure, but More Functions For Address Book fixed that for me on TB 2.
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
Did you try setting mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new to true?
For as long as I can remember I've read on people's blogs (Tinymail's initial implementor's blog, for example) that GMail's IMAP has always been poor and that this is the fault of the implementor (Google), not the client. Van Hoof recommends Dovecot and Cyrus for IMAP service instead, but to be sure, people are probably more attracted to Google's gratis service and large mail quota even if it means allowing Google to index all of your mail.
Digital Citizen
Lightning isn't ready yet, it's 1.0 release is lagging behind TB 3.0. You can use the current nightly builds and they should work with Thunderbird 3. They're marked as Lightning 1.0B1pre. You can grab a nightly here:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/download.html#nightly
They said they're basically at 1.0 Beta 1 Release Candidate status and hope to have the official 1.0 Beta 1 release out within a couple weeks, at least according to the Mozilla Calendar blog. Details are in the Mozilla Calendar Blog (currently offline):
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar/
We're going to stick with recommending Thunderbird 2.0 for a little bit on PortableApps.com because Lightning isn't ready, and it is (arguably) the most important Thunderbird extension. And recommending nightlies to regular users is a bad idea.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
You can just click Manual as you go through it. I found the automatic mode worked well in the different servers I set it up with. And it checks IMAP before POP for them (as most folks should be using IMAP these days anyway).
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
(Note for those backwards people who still use POP: IMAP users normally download their message bodies on the fly.)
Sigh. Been using the beta for a couple of weeks, so I'm familiar with this download-everything behavior. This is not actually a new feature. What's changed is that it's enabled by default. Which is, I agree, pretty dumb.
Here's why they did this. This version has vastly improved searching (far and away, my favorite new feature) which doesn't work unless you have a local copy of the mailbox for indexing.
(I find this a godsend. In the past, I've turned on the local copy feature and then used Google desktop search. The problem here is that the user interface for GD sucks. Also, on one of my machines, I can't get GD to even look at the local mailbox file — no idea why.)
The way Firefox 3 does searching is Ultimately Kewl. (Won't try to describe it, go give it a try.) Naturally, they were proud of this feature and wanted everybody to try it. But just enabling such a potential bandwidth raper was dumb. Somebody should have designed a wizard or something so you could select the mailbox folders you wanted to index.
I am a PC repairman that covers a two county area. While I myself enjoy 2Mbs Cable (with no neighbors on cable,Yay me!) sadly new lines haven't been run by the cable/teleco duopoly since the mid 80s, so anyone even slightly out of town gets told "dial up or fuck off". So I have to know such tricks to help out my buttraped customers.
Considering that the telecos are gouging to the tune of $130 a month! (yeah, no shit, that's what they charge here for dial up) and have shut out WISPs and other attempts to service the area (and thus cut off their $130 a month dial up gravy train) frankly I don't see how we will EVER get nationwide broadband without nationalizing the last mile and opening it to competition. They have a duopoly and will viciously shut out ANY competition that dares to try to gain an inch on their turf. I had a friend a few years back that tried to service one of these areas by paying $15k for a T-1 run and renting out connections and when they teleco saw their $130 a month customers start to drop off they jacked up his price to over $4k A MONTH and told him "don't like it? Try to sue us!" and was told by every lawyer he could find that the minimum for a drawn out fight with a teleco was 1 million+ and 10 years of his life. Needless to say he abandoned the T-1 and walked away.
So please don't buy the "everyone can get broadband if they want it" bullshit. I can tell your from experience that there are still many areas that are being told "dial up or fuck off" and are being gouged truly insane amounts of money by the telecos. I myself tried to offer the local cableco $15k to run a line the whole 2 1/2 blocks to my mother, which would have also covered another 8 homes, 25 if they would have ran the whole half mile length of the road. Their answer? $75k UP FRONT, plus a FIVE YEAR no questions asked maximum package with NO price limits to what they could charge, or GTFO. Needless to say in the 29 years my mother's house has stood they have yet to move the whole 2 1/2 BLOCKS to where she is, so for her it is "dial up or fuck off". So yeah, for my customers and my mother it sucks, but it is a choice of that or abandoning their homes. Some choice, huh?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
http://www.smartcomputing.com/techsupport/detail.aspx?guid=&ErrorID=29874
Will help.
The problem is that TB3 has Master Password clicked on by default. The bug is that if you didn't have a master password set (just keeps your pop passwords), then your stuffed.
Back up your emails, uninstall TB3, reinstall TB2, assign a master password, reinstall TB3.
Smart folders are an acquired taste.
I personally monitor about a dozen mailboxes at work (IMAP shared mailboxes, project specific mailboxes, sysadmin type mailboxes that are shared via IMAP)...
It took me about a month to finally get comfortable with "smart folders". It was there in TB v2, but wasn't as prominent. Once I rearranged my folder structure a bit in the individual accounts, I'm actually quite happy with Smart Folders. I'm happy with all the inboxes clumped together at the top of the window.
Although sometimes I'll click the little arrows at the top of the folder list (that point left/right and are really tiny and easy to miss) to switch to classic view. Or I'll switch to only looking at "favorite" folders.
The UI design choice of using those tiny arrows to switch folder views is a poor one. Or at least I should be able to right-click up there and change to a different view, which is what I tried a few times with no luck.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
The account creator tool is a real pain in the ass. There's no simple option to just create a regular IMAP account. The menus kept resetting on me.
Yeah, it looks like a race-condition. There's some sort of background task that tries to verify that the settings will work, but it doesn't grey out the UI boxes while it does that.
It works well enough if:
- You prefer IMAP
- Your account domain matches up with the mail server domain
But I could regularly get it confused.
They're already working on 3.0.1. Figure out how to make it happen repeatedly, then submit a bug report.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Thunderbird 3 still has the search bar but results appear in a new tab. This tab does not show results as a list but in a fancy HTML based summary view. That's great if you were searching for a particular message but utterly useless for bulk operations. What if I want to drag and drop a few files around, or delete them or flag them as junk? Even as a summary view it is stupid since it only shows 10 results at a time with a More button at the bottom. FFS, stop mimicking an AJAX web application - the results are RIGHT THERE on the disk and you can certainly show more than 10 results at a time.
The workaround is to create a saved search but that's even more hassle for something that could be achieved in seconds in v2.0. So much for progress. I suggest if Thunderbird 3.1 turns up, they put an option or two in to control this behaviour and remember what the user has chosen. There is even a "save search as virtual folder" option in the quick search menu suggesting someone was thinking of doing something like this, it just appears to be inexplicably greyed out.
Thunderbird 3 has potential but it really feels like a regression in several important respects. It also inexplicably lacks things I would have expected to be improved. For example, you still can't select an email, and right mouse and create a filter from it. This is something that Outlook has had for donkey's years.
What has been working for me (no guarantees about the future!) is to use this exact path (for win32):
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/nightly/latest-comm-1.9.1/win32-xpi/
Note the "latest-comm-1.9.1". If I use nightly/win32-xpi/ instead --- that's what seem like it *should* work --- the extension doesn't work. Go figure. All of this may change, I am not sure what the differences are in the different locations.
I know that this works because I just installed the release version of 3.0 and Lightning on my wife's laptop.
I am disappointed that the Lightning folks have made it so hard to find an extension that works with 3.0. This seems *very* important.