Thunderbird 0.7 Released

aeinome writes "Right on the heels of the release of Firefox 0.9 comes the official release of Thunderbird 0.7. Updates are similar to Firefox's, with new extension and theme managers and slight increases in speed. Be sure to read the release notes for the complete list of new features, and then download it from the Thunderbird homepage."

Thunderbird Rocks.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been using Thunderbird for quite sometime now. It is EXCELLENT. The spam filter works well after you train it.

Great

[$calar]

This is great for my parents' computer because they are still using Windows. But I really like Evolution better on the Linux side of things. Thunderbird is very good overall and I recommend it to all existing users of Outlook and Outlook Express. Get out now while you can!

Re:Difference between Firefox and Thunderbird?

[gnatman64]

Firefox is a webrowser, and Thunderbird is an email client.

Re:Pardon the Ignorance...

[jark]

Firefox [mozilla.org] is a standalone browser whereas Thunderbird [mozilla.org] is a standalone email/news client.

Re:vs. Opera

[Punboy]

Opera, AFAIK, is not open-source. Firefox and Thunderbird are. Firefox and Thunderbird IMO are more stable and have more/easier to use features. Also, they look better. And in some cases are faster than Opera. Go try them out, they won't bite :-p

NOT A Release Candidate!

[jark]

The correct thread by mscott, pointing out the 0.7 release is right here [mozillazine.org]. This is not a release candidate but an actual point release.

Re:Warning: Release Candidate status still...

[Jack Comics]

Totally incorrect. While the Release Candidate was released on Monday, which is what you linked to, the new 0.7 is the official release two days later as no major problems were found with the Release Candidate. For more information, see here [mozillazine.org].

Re:Mozilla

[neverkevin]

From the FireFox FAQ:

What's happening with the Firefox development?

Firefox will be used as the default browser in Mozilla. The current Mozilla suite will be replaced by stand-alone applications.

Link [texturizer.net]

Speed?

[skinfitz]

*slight* increase in speed? I saw that Firefox allegedly had a "3% increase" - Bollocks! - it's CRAP LOADS faster than the old version! If TBird has a similar speed increase I'm looking forward to it.

Not happy.

[Wig]

I wasnt overly happy with Thunderbird 0.7. I downloaded, installed, and found out that it doesn't seem to want to work for me. This is interesting, considering Last night I tried to get Thunderbird 0.6 and the .tar.gz was corrupted, it only showed the "components" folder (which is hardly enough to send mail.). So, I think I'll just stick to KMail and hope Thunderbird 0.8 is better.

Re:vs. Opera

[Arial Sharon, 10pt.]

One releases binaries for FreeBSD, the other doesn't.

Re:Still Room for Improvement

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you want to send html email in the first place? It's bad etiquette.

Actually...

[Ender Ryan]

Actually, at my (admittedly small) company, we have already standardized on Mozilla Thunderbird for email. There _are_ some bugs, but they are easier to live with than the shortcomings of other, lesser email software.

We even use it on the Macs, which came with... Mail.app? iMail.app? whatever... We use it on the Macs, because it just does IMAP better. It still amazes me how poorly most email clients handle IMAP.

Thunderbird also supports TLS for all mail communications, which is very nice to have out of the box support for in free software.

YMMV.

Re:Still Room for Improvement

[psylent]

"In fact, I still can't seem to switch between HTML and plaintext email composition without changing my overall composition preferences, which is buried at least four or five clicks away from the composition window."

Doesn't [shift]-Write work for you?

Re:Web browser overload!!

[AnonymousCowheart]

Three? There's WAY more browsers than that! Check this out:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ [mozilla.org]

Warning to Mac OS X users

[gwoodrow]

So, it could just be that I'm a moron, but I thought I'd share anyway.

Virtually every program I use in Mac OS X Panther allows me to overwrite an old program with the newer version without screwing up any of the settings. Thunderbird, however, screwed up big time. It copied perfectly, and opened smoothly, but it did NOT keep any of my settings. I'm having to go through and reconfigure all my email accounts and settings from scratch. I like thunderbird, but this little feature is a big enough pain in the ass that I may have to stick with Mail just so I don't have to worry about wasting time with this again. Proceed with caution, Mac users.

Threaded messaging

[brunes69]

Anyone who uses email frequently cannot live without threaded messaging once exposed to it. This and this alone will keep me off of webmail forever (sure, you *could* thread in webmail, but it would either result in many trips back / forth to the server to expand / collapse the threads, or it would need fancy JS and DHTML magic which I have never seen in a webmail app.).

I access my email solely through IMAP, and while I *do* occasionally use my webmail access while away from the desk, it is far from my first choice.

Other things client side email can give you
- Better spam filtering than webmail, since you can run your own and fine tune it
- Don't have to worry about your email account suddenly being terminated due to the whim of a company
- Privacy issues
- Infinite GB per email account (in theory)
- Better integration with your desktop calendar and addressbook
- Ability to easily sync with your PDA / Cell phone
- Ability to click "mailto:" in your web browser and have it work
etc...

Re:Not from me....

[Masami Eiri]

Delete your old install first, then install it. Or install to another folder. That should make it work.

Re:Warning to Mac OS X users

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually they decided to change the default location of account files. Breifly, you need to find ../Thunderbird/profiles.ini. Open it and either change the path to point to your old files (Profiles/defult/XXX.slt something like that), or copy the files in xxxx.slt into the new Thunderbird directory.

Head over to the Thunderbird Support forum on www.mozillazine.org for a better explanation.

Re:Speed?

[CeleronXL]

The 3% speed incrase was just the result of one speed fix. There were also many other speed fixes/optimizations that took place, even though they only reported on one.

Re:Multiple email addresses per identity yet?

[Mustang Matt]

Just a heads up... I installed it and it looks like they've worked this out quite well.

It's behavior in this regard is different that Outlook Express but not in a bad way. I'm still getting used to it, but I think I can make the switch!

Re:Linux URL handling.

[lucifer_666]

To open external links from any third party app in a new tab in Firefox, rather than a new window, try Single Window by Aaron Spuler [txstate.edu], a Firefox extention which I only found and installed yesterday.

It has two tick boxes, one for enabling single window mode for all links, and another to enable opening external links in new tabs. I've got the first one off and the second one on. Works great!

Caution with themes!

[Trillan]

I don't know if it is a general problem or not, but when I've tried to download Thunderbird themes Firefox has attempted to use them, instead of passing them to Thunderbird.

Not passing them to Thunderbird isn't that big a deal, really. Trying to use them in Firefox is. Installing a Thunderbird theme into Firefox will cause all of Firefox's controls to disappear.

A little caution is in order.

It's not.

[justinarthur]

Actually, running Mozilla is faster than running both Firefox and Thunderbird at the same time, because the mail/news and navigator components of Mozilla use the same instance of the Gecko Rendering Engine without wasting system resources. There is NO reason that I can possibly think of for switching from Mozilla [SeaMonkey] to Firefox+Thunderbird until Firefox+Thunderbird can utilize the same instance of the GRE. Moreover, if you want standalone, you can always select the specific components you want installed during the graphical installation or during compile.

Re:Actually...

[jdreed1024]

We even use it on the Macs, which came with... Mail.app? iMail.app? whatever... We use it on the Macs, because it just does IMAP better. It still amazes me how poorly most email clients handle IMAP.

You're kidding, right? At least for 0.5 and 0.6, Thunderbird had serious IMAP/SSL bugs, where it would just hang for no apparent reason. The release notes acknowledge this bug, even. This caused a problem not just with delays in INBOX operations, but also manifested itself as a problmem with sending. If you chose to save sent mail on the server, and clicked Send, and it sent the mail, and then hung trying to write it to the server, it would respond with "mail was not sent" when it clearly was, it just hadn't copied it. Even the old Netscape 4.x was able to say "Sending the mail was successful, but copying it to your Sent folder failed". I never understand why Mozilla/Thunderbird couldn't do that.

I haven't compared against 0.7 yet, but last I checked Mail.app was an exceptionally good IMAP client, and even pine was better than Thunderbird at IMAP/SSL.

Re:Thunderbird Rocks.

[WhiteBandit]

Doh. I just noticed the release notes mention something about "minor changes to the junk mail system"

Re:Threaded messaging

[christopherfinke]

I've written a webmail client that does threading, as well as thread arcing [ibm.com]. Check it out. [sf.net]

Charamel for both!

[ShadeARG]

Charamel [members.shaw.ca] is pretty nice. It's a dual theme for both Firefox and Thunderbird. I've been using it for the last couple of days, and it supports the new extensions for Firefox 0.9 and Thunderbird 0.7. It's definately worth checking out!

How do you get the profile manager??

[RobertLTux]

# Other New Features... New user interface for viewing vCards. New Profile Manager which also supports running from a USB device..... -- Okay folks for a new feature it seems to be very well hidden (and the profile seems to have full paths in it) hints or ideas?? the firefox version works quite well

Link it up...

[DA_MAN_DA_MYTH]

And here's that link! [mozillazine.org]

Yeah I almost flipped a lid that I lost my mail and didn't bother to back up Thunderbird. Then I realized I'm an idiot, and the application doesn't store my user info.

Re:Why is this better then Mozilla?

[JazzXP]

Don't know about Thunderbird, but Firefox has customisable toolbars, which is something the is severely lacking in Mozilla. Also, as I'm a web developer, I'm opening and closing web browsers quite frequently (to make sure Java is totally out of memory), and I find the startup time on Firefox is quite a bit faster than Mozilla (it's almost as fast as opening IE which is pretty good as IE is intergrated into the system, thus always partially running).

Re:Is there a tutorial on transitioning from Outlo

[christowang]

Open up Thunderbird and go to File and Import.

You can select Outlook, and import your contacts and all of your email over with no problems.

Re:toolbar icons, headers

[Trillan]

Is it possible to reduce the size of the toolbar icons, and remove the text under the icons?

Sure. Right click on an empty spot in the tool bar and choose Customize. Or, if you prefer, click View->Toolbars->Customize.

Is it possible to toggle full headers view on/off as you can in eg. PINE or mutt?

Haven't used PINE or mutt, but it sounds like you want View->Headers->All or View->Headers->Normal.

Re:Thunderbird Rocks.

[adamfranco]

Check out this forum post [mozillazine.org]. I had this problem on OS X, but it involved renaming a settin in the "profile.ini" file to use the old xxxxxxx.slt location instead of the new one named "default".

Hope that helps.

Re:Evolution can display deleted messages

[TheDancer]

Evolution does... View->Hide Deleted Messages. Make sure it's unchecked. Evolution 1.4.6

I haven't used Thunderbird so I can't comment

Re:Still Room for Improvement

[Sunspire]

It's done on a per server basis. Open up Tools->Account Settings, look under "Compositioning & Addressing" and uncheck "Compose messages in HTML format".

Note that if you don't use any of the HTML controls, even if you're in HTML editing mode, Thunderbird is smart enough to send the message as regular plain text.

Re:Thunderbird Rocks.

[TDRighteo]

Doesn't EnigMail [mozdev.org] handle GPG encryption/decryption and signing?

Or have I been using vaporware for the last year?

Re:No probs with Tbird, but as for Firefox 0.9...

[juhaz]

I'm sort of nervous about where Tbird keeps the attachments, if I export the mail / import into another app if Tbird proj goes TU, will I still have everything.

Thunderbird keeps mails as they come - attachments are included inline instead of stripped and saved separately.

And the whole thing is saved in "mbox" format which is so common and simple (basically just message after message in plain text file) that everything should be able to read or import it.

I really want to like Thunderbird

[PeteDotNu]

...apart from the fact that its presence on my hard drive makes my computer freeze and reset sporadically. It could be just coincidence, but I did a total reinstall of Windows two weeks ago, and everything was running fine until I reinstalled Thunderbird two nights ago. Now it's back to it's usual ways. Surely it must be a coincidence? Does Thunderbird alter any highly important system files when you install it?