Thunderbird 1.0 RC1 Released

KingDaveRa writes "Mozilla.org has quietly released Thunderbird 1.0 RC1. 1.0 RC1 includes lots of bug fixes and improvements for features like saved search folders, the RSS reader, mail migration, and message grouping. The default themes have both been updated with new and improved artwork as well."

Multiple identities/accounts

[Nadsat]

Problem with Thunderbird is that I never liked the way it handled multiple-acounts. And could not import multiple identities from Outlook very well. Hopefully this is resolved. Looking forward to Thunderbird dropping presents all over the place from the sky.

Re:Im surprised

[Dancin_Santa]

It's only great if you deal with English-only mail. Just about any other language introduces some pretty serious problems that prevent the widespread adoption of this outside of the US and Canada.

The biggest issues is the inability of the mail reader to adequately auto-detect foreign character sets, so you end up with a huge jumble of garbage instead of the expected text.

Re:Popularity

[FlipmodePlaya]

I'm thinking lack of usage. Especially during the aKadamy, KMail seems to have sapped up all the available attention. KDE's whole PIM suite is evolving so rapidly, it's obviously being doted upon by the geek community.

Outside of that afformentioned community, it seems Outlook/Express is absolutely dominant. Personally, I like Opera's M2.

Re:Popularity

[skids]

The geek fanbase for thunderbird is smaller, so it gets less free publicity.

You can't really live without a graphical web browser (well, at least without impairing access to a lot of stuff), but the same isn't true of email. There are a number af very good text-mode mail readers, and most people I know prefer something like PINE, and really dread the day when you can't live without a graphical email reader.

So far we've done a fair job of beating back the perpetually looming encroachment of non-plain-text email. (There's even an ASCII ribbon campaign :-)

Re:Popularity

[Umbral Blot]

Well it defnintely has competition form Outlook, and of course many other free third party clients. The difference is that, unlike FIrefox, Thunderbird does not incoperate many more features than outlook. Also it has few extensions and themes, which could make up for its lack of brilliance. I can give people planty of reason for people to switch from ie to Firefox, but from outlook to Thunderbird I can only pester people about security. And I have no way at all of "converting" users of other mail programs, like Eudora.

Re:Popularity

[TheBurningDog]

I suggest thunderbird to my friends because of the ease that PGP integrates into it with the enigmail [mozdev.org] plugin.

Not many webmail sites offer good PGP support.

Re:Popularity

[ral315]

The difference is, while there are numerous e-mail programs out there that threaten Outlook's market share, Firefox is the only browser that is a true threat to IE.

Re:Popularity

[AstroDrabb]

Outlook has so many more features then thunderbird. Since I dont use outlook I will give my mom's answer when she looked at thunderbird for her office. Can I use it to schedule the presentation rooms?

Why would you compare MS Outlook, a groupware application, to an email application? A better comparison would be MS Outlook Express to Thunderbird. MS Outlook Express cannot schedule the presentation rooms either. Thunderbird is far better then OE and has far better default security.

For office type groupware, MS Outlook is currently the best product out there. But for a typical _home_ user email program, Thunderbird is very good and much better then MS Outlook Express IMO.

Re:Why Mail and News?

[znark]

I don't understand why people want a browser that has a POP and NEWS client built in? If I want to use POP I use my POP client (not outhouse). If I want to use NNTP I use a NEWS client.

E-mail and news (and offline dial-up BBS messaging of the old days) are all sides of the same coin, communication-wise:

• You have paragraphs of text.
• You have quoting.
• You have signatures.
• You need to have a message editor.
• You usually have a need to archive important messages into folders of your own choosing.
• Most often you would like to keep a record of what you have yourself written.
• You need some search facilities.
• There must be a way to see a list of new messages, and an option to thread them into coherent discussions.

A well-written news message is the same as a well-written e-mail message. The line between the two further blurs when you subscribe to mailing lists. Why use (and learn) two different interfaces and programs for handling what is essentially the same form of communication?

-- znark

Re:Thunderbird is missing something

[Nimey]

What T-bird is missing vs Firefox is a monopolized market. There are a lot more email clients out there than web browsers, and I doubt that Outhouse Excess's marketshare is quite as high as IE's.

Re:Thunderbird is missing something

[aardwolf204]

its not non-obvious, its where all your other settings go. \document and settings\local settings\application data\microsoft\outlook

Now read this post again and pay attention to the path. not an ms fan boy, i just dont think its that hard. oh, and ever hear of the xp files and settings transfer wizzard? its under accessories, system tools, great for when upgrading hdd or pc.

Re:Handling in Linux?

[bob beta]

What about us FVWM2 and Tab Window Manager (twm) (it's kinda nice, actually, and is 'built into' the base X11 distribution, i.e. it;s there by default on NetBSD, without having to add a single thing)?

Re:Popularity

[Albanach]

You make a very fair point - Thunderbird is a sound replacement for anyone usine OE at home.

However, the Moz suite - either as one application, Mozilla, or as a pick and choose set of Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird will, eventually pose a serious threat to Outlook's dominance on the corporate desktop.

One thing that I do wonder about though is syncing with other programs, especially mobile phones. Is there any pressure being put on Symbian etc to make their phones sync contacts with an LDAP server, email with thunderbird, calendar with iCal etc? Even when folk can book the meeting room, the next big problem will be all the other corporate stuff that intigrates with Outlook won't work with the Moz suite unless pressure starts getting applied now.

Re:Popularity

[LnxRocks]

Thunderbird's usefulness to me is cross platform e-mail. Since the linux and and windows versions use the same mail store format, just setup the store in a mutually accesible spot to all OS software and it works.

Agreed

[bogie]

Contrary to what many people say its no competition for Outlook. Outlook Express, sure. But its really lacking in features for business and expecially corporate users. No built-in mature calendar, no real full featured palm syncing. How useful is syncing ONLY your address book? I'm not talking about a full blown Exchange client here, but there are certain basics people expect. Unfortunately judging by the response over the last few years those types of features and turning Thunderbird into something that competes with Outlook proper is not something the dev(s) is interested in.

I hope Thunderbird fans don't think I'm just bashing it. I suggest and install Thunderbird for any OE users I encounter. OE is just not safe to use. I'm just kinda let down because its hasn't turned out the way I had envisioned it.

Oh and as the other person pointed out, on Linux Evolution is very nice. Perhaps one day it will be availabe for Windows.

Thunderbird adoption

[pugugly]

As a helpdesk techie, I think Thunderbird is going to have a rougher ride than Firefox.

The problem strangely enough, is that Outlook Express was so much worse than Internet Explorer. IE isn't a great browser, but for most people until this last set of security flaws (Infection via Jpg? Yeah, that's tied too bloody close), it's "Good Enuff" - they could work around it. the only other browsers out their had fanbases, but weren't so head and shoulders above to be worth dealing with. I never cared for netscape, didn't like the packaging of mozilla, and didn't wan't to pay for opera - So I tweaked IE's security and stayed with the one that was "Good Enuff".

So when Firefox came to maturity just as the last set of flaws finally did things even my ultra paranoid security settings (Never had an adware get through) couldn't compensate for, people were primed to leave en masse. And it's great - I can tweak it, it's portable, and it does stand head and shoulders over IE.

Outlook express on the other hand never was "Good Enuff", for anything besides simple Email. It's really only used by people that have never bothered to try anything else. Pine and Elm have more capabilities. Everybody else moved, and has gotten to using something else that *is* good enough, and doesn't have the security holes IE had to jolt them. I have fifty+ filters I'd have to port from Eudora, others use Pegasus, or elm, webmail, or whatever.

So the people who wanted to move, have. The people who haven't moved yet aren't just waiting on Thunderbird the way I was waiting for a browser I *liked*.

So it's not going to hit OE as hard as Firefox hit IE.

Re:Popularity

[I_Love_Pocky!]

Even if you don't use it for email, the RSS viewer is really slick. I just tried it out on my own feed: http://tfp.rajohnston.com/rdf.php [rajohnston.com], and it worked seamlessly. There are probably other viewers out there that do a good job, but this one is the best I have found so far.

Re:Popularity

[rsidd]

Wow, and I'm still using the GNU ``mail`` command.

You mean the BSD mail command?

rpm -qif /bin/mail
Name : mailx...
License: BSD ...
Packager : Red Hat, Inc.

Not everything in the world is GNU...

Re:Popularity

[icedevil]

True, not everything is GNU.

However there is a GPLed version of this, which reminds me ... not every distro in the world is Red Hat.

Seconded

[RedBear]

That signature issue in particular is a good indicator, I think, of the general reason why Thunderbird (and Mozilla Mail before it) never really "spread like wildfire". I'm not sure what somebody was thinking. I mean, come on. You have to create some kind of text file outside of Mozilla with Notepad or something, save it somewhere (no default location), and then go in to the preferences and browse to the location of that text file that you somehow figured out how to create. And you can only have that one text file, so only one signature unless you go through that process again. And it's either there or it isn't.

The whole process is totally nonsensical to your average user. Other email clients will just let you choose a signature to insert from a list. That's the kind of thing people like. Thunderbird and Mozilla Mail have just been kind of rough in spots until now. Built in mail filtering not withstanding, it just hasn't had anything special to pull people away from Eudora, OE, Pegasus or Opera Mail.

And yes, we are talking about the average Windows user here, the 95% of the population that this software is supposedly being marketed to. In that world there are a lot of users who do not know how to create a simple plain text file with Notepad.

On Mac OS X the case for TB is pretty hopeless. Apple Mail integrates with the rest of the OS like clockwork and is a hell of a lot prettier. I'm actually kind of surprised to see Thunderbird getting to 1.0 so fast. In my opinion it still needs a lot of usability enhancements and beautifying to really compete with other email clients the way Firefox can compete on level ground with all the other browsers. Maybe a miracle has happened since 0.9, but I doubt it.

Of course I'll still be forcing my users to use it anyway, since it's a hell of a lot better than OE on Windows.

Re:Popularity

[Swaffs]

I think much moreso than text-mode mail readers is that many people use only webmail. I know a lot of people who don't realize they can get an email address through their ISP, but have hotmail addresses because that's what they know. Also, many use gmail or their ISP's webmail option since its so portable.

How many of them are useful features?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

It's true that Outlook can do much more than Thunderbird, and as someone else already pointed out, Outlook Express would be a fairer alternative to compare against.

Still, I prefer Thunderbird even to Outlook, for a simple reason: I don't need those extra features. All I want is a mail client that can:

• read mail effectively (including avoiding HTML bugs, not filtering out genuine .exes, etc.)
• provide a simple and effective address book
• provide decent mail processing rules
• back up and restore mail without losing data

without zillions of stability and security issues. I switched to Thunderbird after a system failure (caused by an official MS update, in fact) took out my MS-based mail system.

I doubt I'm the only one in the world who really doesn't care about scheduling meetings and booking rooms using Outlook. I'd rather just have a simple, effective tool that helps me do my job. Trying to schedule meetings using Outlook is far less efficient than simply e-mailing, picking up the phone or (shock!) walking around and talking to people, IME.

Re:Popularity

[phrostypoison]

Using Gmail thru POP + Message Grouping + some toolbar tweaks... Is pretty much Gmail without labels, archives, but with folders. Of course you can use the Gmail Atom feed as well, even both... You know, RSS feed items shouldn't be considered 'mail'.