Mozilla Thunderbird 0.2 Released

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla Thunderbird 0.2 is out! For those who haven't heard about it yet, Mozilla Thunderbird is mozilla.org's new standalone mail client and sister product to Mozilla Firebird. According to MozillaZine's article on the release, new features include 'a redesigned Options dialogue, spell checker improvements, enhancements to the default theme and better performance and stability'. More information can be found at the Mozilla Thunderbird Project Page and in the release notes (which include the important information that a clean install is vital). Builds are available for Windows (7.3Mb), Mac OS (11.1Mb) and Linux (9.5Mb) or you can download the source (29.1Mb) and build it yourself for extra geek points."

Nice guide to Thunderbird

[n0nsensical]

English [nidelven-it.no]
Norwegian [nidelven-it.no]
It's from Norway, it must be good.

If you want a little speed boost

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out the unofficial processor optimized builds [mozillazine.org], available in a variety of flavors.

Moz 0.2

[OverlordQ]

Been running it for a good hour or so now, and I must say it DOES start-up alot quicker then 0.1 and it seems to be alot more stable as well. The update was easy (unzipping a folder yay) and everything seems to be working as well if not better then before. Kudos Moz :)

Re:The Mozilla project is dying!

[Popsikle]

But here is what you do not understand. The new products (thunderbird, firebird, ect) are gaining momentum quickly.

I have been using ThunderBird for email for quite a while now, and recommended to everyone. I even got my father to switch. The new suite is absolutly incredable. Quicker then the bloated netscape code, smaller, easier to use. This is what will keep the Mozilla Foundation alive, and im sure they know it too.

Besides when has market share had anything to do with if a OSS project stays alive?

Convert your friends now!

[blogologue]

We're running a series of Thunderbird articles [nidelven-it.no], the latest article explains how to migrate from other clients [nidelven-it.no]. Send this link to your friends!

Re:Why?

[cubal]

Phoenix is now Firebird. The Moz suite is being broken up into Firebird, Thunderbird, and so on.

In the future you won't d/l the Moz suite, you'll d/l the Firebird browser, and the Thunderbird mail client if you, and so on and so forth... all components will be separate.

Re:One feature I want...

[afidel]

Just ask the admin nicely to turn on pop3/IMAP support. Of course this doesn't solve the fact that there is no calendering support =(

Re:Thank you for the explination

[cloudless.net]

Thunderbird and Firebird are just the codenames for the development project. The final products will be integrated into Mozilla 1.6 Suite and called Mozilla Browser and Mozilla Mail.

Re:I'd Love too, but....

[Popsikle]

Thunderbird can import. Messages and Settings. When I switched I moved my stuff over from OE. There are netscape/mozilla options too.

Tools...Import...Mail
Tools...Import...Settings

Re:One feature I want...

[deek]

I second this, in a very big way. Proper exchange connectivity is the only thing that's preventing me from running Linux permanently at work.

Sure, I can use the Ximian connector for Exchange, but I don't want to pay for something that I only use at work (and work will not pay for it, because they don't support Linux desktops). Plus, I don't think it supports full exchange functionality.

IMAP doesn't cut it either. It'll allow me to view email on Exchange, but the contacts and appointments and tasks and mail filter aren't available.

I really ought to try coding it myself. Just never enough hours in the week.

Re:Why?

[MadChicken]

It's the next version. It just happens to be split out into different apps.

I miss the little launchbar on the bottom of Moz though...

Re:One feature I want...

[zakezuke]

Exchange server offers a nice web based system for e-mail, ok perhaps nice is too strong a word.

Exchange server offers web based e-mail.

Unfortunatly, both Exchange protocal and Mapi are closed protocals that require a license to implement presently from microsoft. This is not to say I wouldn't use a 3rd party generated exchange complient software, only that microsoft has teenage mutent ninga lawyers defending their protocals.

But try pop3 or imap, Exchange server usually includes both those standards as well unless the admin has disabled them some some ungodly reason.

Quick, tiny review

[rnelsonee]

I just wanted to pipe in. I'm a Windows user (I know, kill me), but like most people on this site, I hate Outlook and Outlook Express. Vehemently. So I've been using Netscape 4.x's aging email client, Communicator. This post is geared for those who are still using it. Since Thunderbird is by the Mozilla folk, it behaves and looks a lot like Communicator. So if you're using Communicator but hate the fact that a) it can't render some HTML email that your stupid drone friends sends you, and b) all links open in Netscape 4.x, which is almost archaic now, I'd suggest you download Thunderbird and give it a try. You'll be able to import you Address Book and old emails/folders. Not your mail filters though, which pissed me off at first. So I re-did several hundred of them. But then I found Thunderbird's great junk-mail filter. It works great. The other neat-o factor is that you can apply filters to flag messages as Personal/Work/Whatever, and it color codes the emails! Very cool. Anywho, if you like Communicator, try Thunderbird. Especially as it gets more stable...

Re:Confused

[Sonicboom]

I thought they were named after the brother/sister guitar and bass made by Gibson.

The Firebird is a 6-string guitar, and the Thunderbird is a 4-string bass - both made by the Gibson guitar company. [gibson.com]

Below are links to the respective instruments:
Gibson Firebird guitar [gibson.com].

Gibson Thunderbird bass guitar [gibson.com].

Re:Something I've been wondering

[Anonymous Coward]

Composer++
http://webperso.easyconnect.fr/danielg lazman/compo ser/composer++.html

Re:Why do I think of Steve Martin...

[xlv]

...whenever I see someone make an excited news post about a 0.1 rev to a *mail client*?

It's based on the mozilla source code, and this 0.2 release is based on the latest Mozilla 1.5 beta so it's not really brand new untested source code...

Re:I'd Love too, but....

[vgaphil]

Moving isn't hard (at least it wasn't in Windows 2k), copy the "Mail" folder in your users folder --> C:\Documents and Settings\me\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\default\0qql5ql7.slt\Mail

Start Thunderbird and setup your account.

Go to -->C:\Documents and Settings\me\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\default\0qql5ql7.slt\Mai l

and paste the mail folder there.

As far as recreating your filters goes, it shouldn't take you to long to recreate them. They are very simple to create.

I hope this makes sense, I'm just coming off a sugar low =(

Re:What about my hotmail?

[heavyVoid]

YES!!! there are ways to reading HOTMAIL from any pop3 email client (yes, even from linux!!!) take a look at:

http://hotwayd.sourceforge.net

Re:Thank you for the explination

[swtaarrs]

They won't be integrated at all. The whole point of Firebird and Thunderbird is to separate them from the main suite to reduce bloat and complexity.

Re:I'd Love too, but....

[WhiteBandit]

I actually did the same thing recently. All it basically involves is copying the contents of your Mozilla profile directory into the directory of your Thunderbird Profile.

Since the two read the same type of profiles it should pick up everything, including settings and filters automatically.

There is some editing of directories and paths that you will have to update in your user.js file I believe.

Search the mozillazine.com forums. That is where I found the info when I needed to switch.

Re:thunderbird is good

[nolife]

For Windows, try yProxy [brawnylads.com]. It is a news proxy that intercepts and converts yENC on the fly. I use v1.2 which is free and not spyware or adware. According to the website, v1.3 appears to have some type of message of the day banner but I have not used it. You should still be able to search and find v1.2 (yproxy12.zip)
It makes any newsreader yENC capable. I have been using it to make my older version of Agent yEnc capable for over a year.

Re:Memory Footprint?

[JPrice]

Well, for what it's worth, Thunderbird is currently taking up about 15 megs of ram on my W2K box, though I think part of it may depend on things like how much mail is in the currently active folder.

I just started up OE (having never used it before) and it clocked in at about 12 megs.

Re:GPG Support

[s2r]

Thunderbird supports enigmail. You can download the latest version on enigmail [mozdev.org] I was using a night build and there weren't any problems nor aren't with this release.

It's rather good

[Compact Dick]

Much better than 0.1 and the last testing build I used [2003-08-20.] It feels even more responsive than Mozilla Mail [2003-09-03.]

FYI, I am not using the official 0.2 build but a special optimised Thunderbird build by Scott Walker [mozillazine.org] [2003-09-03, tho the About dialog says 2003-08-29.]

Now the main things that need work are memory footprint reduction [23 MB right now], access to functionality [like being able to set/reset the master password] and some annoying bugs such as improper rewrap in text edit mode. The latter is present in Mozilla Mail as well, but it's been there too long.

Re:Two questions

[JPrice]

With regard to your first question, Thunderbird keeps your mail folders/preferences separate from its installation directory. To install Tb0.2 you just need to delete your existing Thunderbird directory and put the new one in it's place. You can check out the installation instructions here [mozilla.org].

With regards to your second question, generally speaking "bouncing" is something that only mail servers can do. What Thunderbird can do is identify spam and filter it to a "Junk" folder (or just delete it right away).

Re:Two questions

[s2r]

Just delete the old folder and unzip the release file. All settings are kept.

Thunderbird has a Junk Mail Control that learns from the mails you received and marked them as junk. Next time the Junk Mail Control receives a message with many of the characteristics as most of the mails targeted as spam will mark it automatically as junk and move it to the Junk folder (if specified).

btw: Why evertime I post anything I get a -1? Not even a 0??

Re:Two questions

[SmartSsa]

bouncing mail from an email client is useless in the war against spam (it's only effective on real mailing lists, but mostly annoying anyways)... bouncing mail from a server is mostly useless too considering most spam lists ignore bounces or don't even accept smtp connections.

the only real way is to reject during transmission, and that's a server side config.

I've been using mozilla 1.5a for a while, and thunderbird 0.2a (time to upgrade! woot) and both of them are very good with their adaptive junkmail filters.

Try Extensions

[bstadil]

Try some of the Extensions [texturizer.net] after installation. I personally love the QuickReply program.

Just type response in a little box below the message and hit enter. Jobs done!.

Re:Trying to switch from Mozilla...

[mckyj57]

I'm trying to switch over from Mozilla to Firebird and Thunderbird, but I've run into a few niggles. On the Thunderbird side, for instance, is there any way to open links in a new Firebird tab? In Mozilla's MailNews, I like being able to middle-click to open URLs in a new browser tab :).

You can always drag'n'drop onto the tab area...

Please tell me I'm missing something....

[catbutt]

...but it seems that two major things are missing, if I am going to be able to keep my mail organized.

1) filtering (to folders) outgoing messages. I want all messages from OR TO certain people to automatically go into my, say, "work" folder.

2) sorting messages by "the other party", whether sender or reciever. In Eudora its just called "who". Within my, say, "work" folder, I might want to find all correspondance with, say, Bob. I don't want to first sort by sender, then the recipient. I want to see them all Bob messages, together.

I moved from Outlook Express to Eudora years ago because it didn't have these essential features....please tell me thunderbird has them somewhere but I'm just not seeing them.

Re:I'd Love too, but....

[teslatug]

Found this link in the Release Notes that may be of help in that regard: http://texturizer.net/thunderbird/faq.html#2.2 [texturizer.net]

Re:Memory Footprint?

[petabyte]

I've had thunderbird open on my 2K machine for several hours now. Its holding nicely at 10,296K. Its checking an IMAP account and a POP3 account every 10 minutes and beyond that sitting there nicely.

I don't have outlook express installed so I can't give you a comparison but there's a start.

Re:Trying to switch from Mozilla...

[joshwa]

You need an Firebird extension -- Tab Browser Extension [sakura.ne.jp] -- which sometimes works on its own, and sometimes needs help from the registry (this is a win32 problem only, AFAIK).

Related mozilla bug is here: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=172962 (copy & paste into new tab/window; bugzilla rejects slashdot referrers)

Inline autocomplete-- go to chrome://communicator/content/pref/pref.xul in Firebird (copy the location as above). Go to Navigator > Smart Browsing > Location Bar Autocomplete. Sorry, I don't remember the value of the actual pref in prefs.js.

Will Be Solved in Time

[LFS.Morpheus]

These standalone releases are temporary, of sorts. In time, the Mozilla 1.x suite will be this very suite of applications -- Firebird ("Mozilla Browser"), Thunderbird ("Mozilla Mail"), etc. You will be able to choose them separately at install time. I think you will still be able to download Firebird separately too, if you wish.

To be honest, it's all very complicated, and I probably have it wrong. I highly recommend you take a look at the Mozilla Roadmap [mozilla.org]. They clearly have a much better grasp of this than I do.

Overall, I'm sure this will solve some of the version number problems you describe.

Re:Alright

[Overly Critical Guy]

Microsoft is still continuing development of Outlook Express. It was reported in a Slashback.

Re:Something I've been wondering

[edwdig]

The Composer++ project isn't aiming to make a standalone version of Composer. It's a testbed for new Composer features. Things get debugged there, then integrated into the main Mozilla tree.

Mozilla Calendar

[jefflinwood]

There is a Mozilla Calendar project at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/ [mozilla.org].

I don't think it's got the advanced scheduling capability of Outlook (yet?) but you can share calendars by publishing them to a WebDAV server. You can get a free, open source WebDAV server with either mod_dav for Apache, or with the Jakarta Tomcat 4.1.x releases.

Re:Mozilla Calendar

[afidel]

It sucks. I really, really wanted it to not suck but it does. I kept installing it every update and reinstalling it every time I upgraded Mozilla. It's not even fit to be a PIM at this point, let alone as a networked collaboritive calandering solution (which it will never be, that's not the goal of the project).

Re:Blah

[pryan]

I've run the weeklies since before 0.1, they all ran for me. I run Thunderbird under Windows XP Pro on a P4 system.

We need more specifics about your problem.

The best place for you to get this fixed is the Thunderbird Bugs [mozillazine.org] forum.

Post a description of your problem with details and exactly what you do to get to the point where you can't run TB.

Just to throw you a bone, make sure you are unzipping TB with all the folders in the zip intact.

Something's Wrong With the File Sizes...

[Joel Carr]

What!? 9.5Mb for the compressed Linux binaries in bz2 format and only 7.3Mb for the Windows ones in zip format?!? Something's wrong! We all know that Linux is better than Windows without exception, and that includes file sizes!! ;)

Maybe the Linux version has a few more megs of installation instructions than the Windows one... ;)
{ducks}

(Please don't kill me, I do use and love Linux!!)

---

Re:I upgraded...

[anethema]

It's actually funny. Recently hotmail seems to have improved their junk mail by 100x. I am getting no more junk mails in my inbox, and no more false positives in the junk mail folder.

Something really changed I think. Before most of the junk mail was going to my inbox, and usually one or two junk mails, plus a false positive were in the junk mail box.

Don't know what you did but thanks hotmail.

Re:Something I've been wondering

[Anonymous Coward]

The Composer++ project isn't aiming to make a standalone version of Composer. It's a testbed for new Composer features. Things get debugged there, then integrated into the main Mozilla tree.

This is sort of, but not quite true. Composer++ was originally some off-trunk work on composer that got integrated back into the main suite version. But Daniel Glazman [glazman.free.fr], who was responsible for Composer++ has been slowly creating a standalone version of composer. See for example one of the relevant weblog postings [glazman.free.fr]
or one of the relevant bugs [mozilla.org]

Re:The release notes don't mention ...

[seaton carew]

Is there a setting to check all imap folders

Why yes. Yes, there is!
Just put this in your user.js file in the profile folder:

// Check for new mail in ALL imap folders
user_pref("mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new", true);

Note that the prefs file can be tricky to find. On XP, it's usually in
C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\default\%random%.slt
Information for other operating systems here [texturizer.net]
Remember to quit Thunderbird first, otherwise it'll overwrite your changes.

Re:never a FreeBSD version

[danne]

Unofficial FreeBSD builds can be found at:

http://home.arcor.de/t.hecker/freebsd/thunderbir d/

Hopefully, they will soon show up in the contrib directory of the official ftp also. //danne

Re:The release notes don't mention ...

[seaton carew]

Well, I'll be: there's an extension plugin that makes editing the prefs (slightly) easier:
http://texturizer.net/thunderbird/extensions.html# ChromEdit [texturizer.net]

Re:Memory Footprint?

[Jibber]

Hi,

Just started it up about 30 minutes ago, 3 IMAP accounts and one pop3 account. Loads and loads of messages in my INBOX's

Currently using 7,504k (just jumped up from 6,957k). Pretty good I'd say considering FireBird is taking 36Megs :)

Jib

Re:Memory Usage of TB + FB vs Mozilla 1.4

[BZ]

Thunderbird+Firebird will use more memory than the appsuite up until they are sharing a single GRE.

Groupware

[Laika]

For all of you bemoaing the lack of the "groupware" features of Outlook, perhaps you should check out this list. Here's you best answer for Linux in the groupware-space. If your needs aren't met by something on this list, you might as well cozy up to Outlook for the time being. Groupware List [svpal.org]