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."

v0.2

[Not The Real Me]

I definitely want to install this version. The previous version crapped out so much I deleted it after 30 minutes.

Alright

[focitrixilous P]

With Microsoft confused as to the devlopment state of Outlook Express [slashdot.org], This could be a golden oppertunity for the open source community to gain a significant foothold, because Microsoft might finally be fixing their bugs. I know it sounds crazy, but why else would they push everything back so far?

Re:One feature I want...

[sweetooth]

Most people that are stuck using exchange are stuck using it because of shared folders, scheduling, and contacts. Not just the email portion of Exchange.

Wait! I Want This Feature!

[Anonymous Coward]

I use pegasus for windows to download my email headers from the pop3 server, then I can delete all but the ones I will then download. This way I get rid of spam quickly, without actually having to download a lot of K's.

Now, can this new client do that? If It can, I can use that, on Linux, and not have to boot up Windows (insecure).

I'll go download it and see for myself, but I hope it's not another Kmail (too much like Windows email client).

Re:One feature I want...

[afidel]

I haven't seen any other solution that works as well for colaboritive calendering. For instance you can tell Outlook to schedule an appointment and invite a bunch of people, if there is a time where everyone is available that day that is not the time you specified it will ask you if you want to reschedule to that time. It also works well when you want to intetgrate meeting room checkout, you just add the meeting rooms as participants and they automatically accept and mark themselves as busy for that time period. If so setup you can easily see when a meeting room is open. It also scales to any size organization which most other systems do not.

Re:Speed

[aardvarkjoe]

Off to install Thunderbird 0.2 on the machines of all the extended family... boo free tech support. :(

I've got to say: if you're installing alpha software on your family's machines, you're just begging to do free tech support.

Re:Why?

[Jaysyn]

There might be a plugin that does just that, hell they already have card games plugins, how hard could a launch bar be?

Jaysyn

Re:Something I've been wondering

[istewart]

There should be a standalone Composer, IMO. X-Chat Aqua satisfies my IRC needs under OS X, but Composer is a freely available and easy-to-use WYSIWYG HTML editor that has been my primary work environment in the past for my personal websites.

There's probably going to be a number of people who believe "WYSIWYG sux" and quite a few more who think that Composer is irrelevant in the face of far more expensive commercial packages, but I just want something that I can use to make non-mission-critical personal webpages. I can do this now with regular Moz, but I'd rather not download a 15MB alpha every few weeks over my 56k, or load a web browser, email client, and IRC client into memory along with my editor of choice.

Re:One feature I want...

[rsborg]

. And a lot of people use it because it is still the best one-stop-shopping product for email, shared folders, scheduling, contacts, tasks, etc.

[grain of salt]
Nope.... It's not like there are lots [lotus.com] of competetive [matadordesign.com] groupware [novell.com] products and services [officeclip.com] out there... Just that for some crazy reason, people still choose Microsoft, who are proven leaders in designing secure, easy to use products.
[/grain of salt]

Why always new profile?

[jhdsl]

I think it is a pain to always have to create a new profile. When switching from Mozilla 1.0 to 1.4, a bug I submitted was "solved" by saying "create a new profile". I counted how much work that was, I filled in over 20 text fields and clicked about 30 boxes before I was back to normal. And still I lost all my collected adresses, saved passwords and local adressbook.

The "create new profile" is Mozillas equivalent to "format C: and reinstall everyting". More work should go to handle profiles so they are backwards compatible. It is really annoying.

Stop the forks already...

[tyagiUK]

I would be the first to say that the core Mozilla engine has come on in leaps and bounds over the past few years. Yes, the project has had ups and downs, but has eventually delivered a fantastic browser engine. However, as an end user, I don't have the time|inclination to sift through several variants of a browser (some of which seem identical to a non-clued-up end user). How about a single distribution package that just does a modular installation (or even use a custom network installer that just downloads the necessary components). The components for installation, including whatever GUI shell you would like, plug-in support etc, could all be selected from a simple checkbox GUI. The installer app could then just go an grab the components (or even the appropriate fork distribution as a first attempt) from the Mozilla site. This way, we just get Mozilla, not have to decide which of several variants are appropriate.

69 dollars worth of software

[gad_zuki!]

Okay, the connector is 69 dollars. [ximian.com] Not cheap and not exactly expensive. You're living in a Microsoft world but you like Linux, why not just buy it? At one time in my life I had a nice foreign car and I had to pay extra for parts, labor, etc. To me it was an opportunity cost worth paying for. I didn't want another Chevy so I paid a little extra. In the long run it made me a bit happier and it was nice owning something somewhat rare/different.

Just out of curioustiy: at what price-point will most people in your situation actually buy the dang thing? What if it was 29.99? How cheap are you?

Or better yet why doesn't Ximian offer a student discount?

It blows my mind that hard-core linux types will put 10 hours into figuring out some trivial problem but won't blow 70 dollars on a piece of software that will let them use Exchange.

"So Ted, what did you do today?"

"I wrote a script that gets my email from OWA 2000 and puts it in a comma deliminated file on one of my linux partitions. Then I wrote an app that will take this file and run a fake POP3 server for me to get the emails. Pretty good eh?"

"How much time did you spend on this, Ted?"

"I dunno, 3 or 4 hours."

"Dont you bill $50 an hour."

"Yep."

"Why dont you just buy the damn connector?"

*long pause*

"Cause Stallman says proprietary software is bad? Oh man, I need help."

Re:pfft @ gtk+

[kelnos]

i think you are misunderstanding something. XUL is not a GUI toolkit. it's just a cross platform interface definition language. XUL, as interpreted by mozilla's widget libraries, rely on the underlying OS to create widgets. on windows, they're the familiar windows widgets generated via the win32 api. on linux, there isn't an OS-specific widget library. well, you could say that Xlib/Xt/Xaw is somewhat of a widget library. but it's butt-ugly and a pain to work with. gtk is what mozilla uses to draw its widgets. there used to be the option of building mozilla using straight xlib, or using qt, but i believe that code is no longer being maintained.

as for using the same version of gtk - it's getting there. gtk2 support is not quite complete, tho it's quite useable. hopefully we'll start seeing gtk2 in default builds for all of the mozilla-based apps soon. (all performance arguments aside, i can't stand looking at gtk1.2 widgets after using gtk2.)

It's about personal value

[truthsearch]

It blows my mind that hard-core linux types will put 10 hours into figuring out some trivial problem but won't blow 70 dollars on a piece of software...

Hackers highly value their problem solving abilities. The satisfaction of finding a solution far outways the simplicity of buy it. It's just a matter of what's more valuable to a person, having a solution or building it.

Re:It's about personal value

[LWATCDR]

I guess the real issue is not why someone would choose to write it them self. I think we all know why. The complaint is why complain about how much a $69 piece of software costs? That is not that much more than a videogame or a nice dinner. It is about choice. If you want to write a program and give it away then more power to you. If you want to write and sell the a program then also more power to you. If you want to complain that someone else wants to get paid for a program they wrote then write it yourself but do not complain about it.