Mozilla Thunderbird Reaches 1.0

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 is now available for download on Mozilla's FTP server." Here is the press release announcing the release. Virtual folders and RSS integration, coupled with the recent hype surrounding Firefox, might give this sucker some serious momentum.

Release Notes

[Tiberius_Fel]

Release notes are available here: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releas es/ [mozilla.org]

Icons

[ack154]

Mmm... since 1.0PR - new, pretty icons!

Re:Memory Footprint

[ack154]

Doesn't seem very slow to me, but I'm opening it on a 2.8ghz w/ 1gb ram. Do you have an older system? Any extensions/themes installed? Have you tried to recreate the profile?

Torrent

[youngerpants]

And as the servers take the same hammering they took when Firefox was released, heres a torrent crafted by my own fair hands

http://www.youngerpants.com/thunderbird.torrent [youngerpants.com]

Re:But will it let me backup my mail store?

[Bricklets]

I'd be happy if I could just specify where the data is stored like most apps (even Microsoft ones).

Use the Profile Manager to specify where you want your data stored. I've kept my mail in the My Documents folder since forever.

optimizing a mail client is pointless

[SuperBanana]

came across this win32 optimized version (depending on your processor).

[siiigh]. Considering much of what a mail client does is either disk or display, and not very repetitive, processor-specific optimizations will do little to no good. Even search functions are largely disk constrained if the mailbox is big enough that search time becomes an issue on any modern system.

If it was a Pi calculator, or a game (in which a miniscule difference in per-frame loop time makes a huge difference in frame rate) I could see the point, but this is just silly

Re:extensions

[Finuvir]

As long as the extensions need nothing more than a version number bump you can upgrade now. You'll have to add the line

user_pref('app.extensions.version','0.9');

to user.js in your profile directory. Make sure Thunderbird is closed when you add that line.

Re:Memory Footprint

[TheRealMindChild]

Launch the executable with the command line flag -turbo. This will cause the libraries it uses etc. to stay loaded (The same works for firefox). Youll see much better speed.

Nice, but still not enough to make me switch

[gbulmash]

Downloaded it, installed it, played with it, uninstalled it.

I use Pegasus Mail (pmail.com). For all the nice features in Thunderbird, it still seems to me that Pegasus has much more powerful filtering rules. And, at least for my uses, has more features aimed at people who maintain multiple e-mail addresses.

Pegasus is free, but not open source. I urge people to compare it to Thunderbird. I've used it since 1996 and have never found a mailer I like better.

- Greg

Re:Any other choice?

[rduke15]

Open Source other than Mozilla, all I can think of would be Pine.

The "Program for Internet News & Email [washington.edu]" from University of Washington. Version 4.58

If you need a multi platform program, this one seems to cover them all. Amiga, BeOS, VMS, you name it... It looks like it even runs on a plain text terminal, so I could probably set it up to handle my mail on my 486 Linux firewall. Or maybe on my coffee machine? I'll have to look whether there is a pre-compiled version for La Pavoni [lapavoni.com] (because the Pavoni's don't come with a compiler).

But even though I do like text terminals, shells and command lines, I don't think that is how I would like to manage my email. Not even to spare my eyes all the pictures and colors the HTML spam throws at them.

For me, I'm still staying with Eudora, and only occasionally use Thunderbird when I want to send an HTML mail, and it's a bit too complex for Eudora, but not enough to use Dreamweaver and put it on a web site. Eudora is neither open source nor even free (there is a "sponsored" version with ads), and does not run on Linux. However, on Windows (or Mac), it's still the best I know: plain text mail storage, separation of atachments, regular expression searches, and the most powerful filtering I have seen (on any arbitrary header and/or the body, including with regex'es, and with several "actions" happening sequentially with filtered mails)

Re:T-Bird is missing "Combine and Decode"

[Quarters]

How do you reach the flawed logical conclusion of "If T-Bird doesn't do combination then Usenet users will have to use Oulook Express"?

There's a whole class of applications called "newsgroup readers" that might be of some interest to you. I can easily name five freeware ones for Windows off the top of my head. I'll leave it as an excerise to the poster to see if he can find some on his own.

OE is a singuarly bad newsgroup program. Newsgroup functionality is the worst aspect of that program. Do yourself a favor and get a real tool for the job.

Sorry, I should have said "Graphical"

[at2000]

Sorry, I should have said "Graphical" e-mail clients in parent. Thank you for your suggestions and it really confirms my belief: we really have no choice, except text-based and much less well-known ones. But we do have some choices for browser, though most of them are still Gecko-based.

printing contacts suck: I'll wait

[denis-The-menace]

Until I can print 15 or so contacts per sheet, I can't use it.

It's also a pain to enter phone numbers. If you type 555 5551234 and it keeps it like that. It doesn't reformat to [phone].

Until this is fixed, I wait. (BTW: there are no Contact Extensions for it...)

Re:Contact groups

[Jokkey]

Yes, just open the Address BOok and click "New List."

Re:But will it let me backup my mail store?

[Flooded77]

If you're paranoid (like me), just get Mozbackup [jasnapaka.com]. It will make a backup file of your Thunderbird/Firefox/Mozilla profiles (and mail). I've had no problem with it.

Re:Memory Footprint

[maskedbishounen]

Takes about four seconds to open for me, under Linux, with .2 gigs less than you. And we're high end, believe it or not. God forbid you have an old Pentium box around and you're looking for a mail client.

No extensions/themes, at all. I'll admit I haven't re-created my profile since .6, but really. And people look at me as though I'm a freak when I tell them I like text-only clients.

Portable Thunderbird 1.0 available already

[fatwreckfan]

Portable Thunderbird 1.0 is available already at . Now that's speedy :) I finally have a use for my old 32MB usb key! [johnhaller.com]

Re:Someone help me out

[dolphinling]

The Mozilla Suite is a combined browser/mail/news/chat/addressbook. Firefox is just a browser. Thunderbird is just mail/news/addressbook. They all use the same rendering engine, and share much of their other code, but have different front ends.

Re:CCK please

[indicavia]

Hi! I don't know anything about this kind of stuff, but is this [dbltree.com] what you're looking for?
It says "Automated deployment of Firefox with extensions, themes, and pre-configuration"

God bless! :)

Re:extensions

[the unbeliever]

It doesn't exist by default. Use ChromEdit to edit your user files and it will create one in the proper place.

Why won't they add a calendar?

[DrShasta]

I've been trying to use Thunderbird for a couple weeks and if I switch back its because thunderbird doesn't have a calendar. I still have to open outlook and leave it open if I want to be reminded about meetings and appointments.

Re:Why won't they add a calendar?

[bhtooefr]

Sunbird is the calendar you're looking for. Also, there's an XPI (IIRC) that's been around for quite a while that will plug into Mozilla, Firebird, or Thunderbird (Sunbird is actually a fork of this XPI to a standalone program). It's called Mozilla Calendar. Both are available at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/ [mozilla.org]

Re:Someone help me out

[Wordsmith]

Ok, let's break this down.

First (well, not really FIRST, but anyway) there was Netscape. It included the browser, mail program, html composer and whateevr other goodness in a big monolithic application. Each major function had its own UI, but they were all parts of the same program.

Then, the Netscape team opened up much of its code, and Mozilla was born (I could be wrong; Mozilla might always have eben a codename for Netscape source, even before the OSS release). Like Netscape, Mozilla was a web browser, mail program, html composer, and more. It developed slowly over time.

Eventually, the old Netscape line (4.7ish) was replaced by a rebranded and slightly enhanced Mozilla, with the Netscape name. Netscape 6.x was based on pre-1.0 versions of Mozilla. Netscape 7.x was based on post-1.0 versions. These days, AOL owns Netscape, and Netscape remains involved with Mozilla project development to some extent.

Somewhere aroudn the same time, the Mozilla project worked on forking off certain components of Mozilla into more modular components. Firefox (then called Phoenix) was created to be a standalone Web browser with a smaller memory footprint than the overall Mozilla suite had ever been. Thunderbird was the standalone mail application.

Over time, both firefox and thunderbird got features entirely independent to those versions -- ones that don't exist in the larger Mozilla suite.

At the moment, both the larger Mozilla suite and the Thunderbird/Firefox standalone applications are being actively developed. Eventually, according to most thinking, the larger Mozilla will be phased out and replaced by the standalones.

Mozilla, Firefox, and Thunderbird all use the Gecko rendering engine developed for Mozilla. Incidentally, so does compuserve's own browser (i think), and certain platform-sepcific browsers such as ephipheny and galeon.

The next version of Netscape, incidentally, will be a rebranded and enhanced version of Firefox, according to recent reports.

Hope that clears things up.

Important Thunderbird bug still needs a fix

[rfarma5]

I have been using Thunderbird since probably the 0.3 release and I find myself recommending it all the time, but there is still one bug which has not yet been fixed which seems crucial to the interface.

Basically the issue is that a lot of emails have incorrect date/timestamps in the header and if you order your messages by Date it sorts it by the Date Sent in the header rather than say the Date Recieved to your email server. The temporary fix (for me at least) is to order message by "order recieved" but this can create a huge mess when moving messages between folders because the moved message now has a newer "recieved" datestamp. Without using this method, all of the spam and junk emails show up throughout my inbox because the dates/times in the headers are inaccurate.

It has been reported here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21603 3 I am just assuming the developers don't know/realize why this interface issue is such a problem, but I am really hoping that someone will address it soon!

Hopefully I did a good enough job describing the problem. If you've seen it or struggled with it, you should recognize my description. Finally, I want to graciously thank everyone on the mozilla team for putting out such quality programs that I actually _can_ recommend even to people who think that IE _is_ the internet, and I am not trying to discredit the hours put in by the dev's!

Pine isn't open source

[Noksagt]

Open Source other than Mozilla, all I can think of would be Pine.

I use Pine. I love it as an IMAP client (and of the cross-platform email clients, it is, with Mulberry (which I also use), still one of the top two IMAP clients out there). But it isn't open source. PC-Pine (the native port to win32) is a completely closed source product. It is available gratis (which is more than I can say for Mulberry), but without source. Furthermore, the Pine license for the *nix code is restrictive enough that many consider it "not Free:" You aren't allowed to release binaries of your own.

This being said, there aren't many open source email clients available natively on win32. However, many do work with cygwin. The *nix version of Pine (which, as above, might not be "open enough"), mutt, kmail, gnus, sylpheed and others work fine.

Re:Standards vs. usability

[drinkypoo]

However, many users don't follow Microsoft's standard here, nor do they want to. I couldn't care less where Microsoft wants to store my data, and I'm never going to use roaming profiles yada yada on my home PC.

I do, however, want all of my essential data to be stored on my RAIDed, routinely backed-up hard drive. I don't want it in a Windows-standardised yet strangely still hidden directory, which lives five levels deep on my (not backed-up) OS drive.

It's not the Thunderbird team's fault that you are incapable of using windows properly. You can use either the user manager to set your profile path, or you can edit the registry key ProfileImagePath. Either way you can change your profile directory from C:\Documents and Settings\profile (hardly five levels deep) to something else. Unfortunately, while mozilla chooses your application settings directory based on your profile path, the profile's prefs.js will have to be manipulated to reflect the new absolute path to your data because prefs files do not reference environment variables.

Microsoft provides a way to move your profile to another location. It is somewhat esoteric, but you chose to use windows, and should not be blaming the mozilla team for your inadequacies, or its.

With that said, it certainly would be nice to get a tool to move user profiles, especially unregistered ones. It is something I deal with at work on a regular basis.

Re:Any other choice?

[Etyenne]

More power to you if you like Eudora. I don't. We did a very large scale mail server installation (85K accounts) in an organisation that used to have Eudora as the standard MUA. A lot of users of Eudora 5 in the wild. Like everything, bug happen and get corrected so I should not judge the actual quality of a software by it's older releases, but some of them are just too good to pass.

For example, we had to disable STARTTLS IMAP extension because an older release of Eudora was sending STARTSSL. Yes, you read that correctly : STARTSSL. Can you believe that ? That such an obvious bug got passed QA and release astound me. The guy who wrote the STARTTLS support obviously never even bothered to *test* his code.

Another huge source of fuck-up related to Eudora was the habit it had of sending raw 8 bits character in header. In case you don't know, that's a pretty big violation of RFC822. This is particularly thorny as there is no way to tell which charset was used, so automated conversion was not really possible. Did they fixed this one at last ?

There are more I can't remember on the top of my head. Eudora have won the #1 spot in my list of broken MUA thanks to that, above Outlook and OE (who have some interesting way to fuck up too).

This is wrong.

[eMartin]

This feature is not included with Firefox or Thunderbird, as it is with full Mozilla.

There is an extension that adds it back to Firefox (Thunderbird evenetually), but there are some side effects.

Re:RSS integration?

[jacobito]

Consider the fact that many mail clients (Thunderbird included) integrate NNTP news reading already, which is very similar. RSS/Atom feeds, like NNTP newsgroups, are generally arranged topically (or by folder, or by web site...) and presented serially and chronologically; they lend themselves well to the interfaces typically used by mail clients, which, unlike web browsers, are designed not just for browsing data but for managing data. I personally don't think the web browser is a good client for consuming RSS/Atom feeds; the usage patterns of feeds and web pages are far too different. In fact, I never use Firefox's built-in RSS/Atom support.

Re:Still no call-out to a browser?

[ekimminau]

What OS are you running? Works like a champ for me on both Fedora Core 2 and WIn XP Pro SP2.

Re:Still not feature complete

[nicklott]

If you were using server-side filters you would know. It can't pick up new messages from any folders except the inbox. Amongst other minor problems, you also can't read a mail without having to download any attachments first.

I agree with the grandparent post, TB is a fine app, but the recent release schedule has been forced, to say the least, it needs more time to mature, and some of the bugs the grandparent mentioned desperately need to be fixed, preferably BEFORE new features are added.

Yes, but it's crap

[EvilStein]

See all of my previous rants about what a pile of shit Sunbird is.

Even this morning, trying to email a calendar request to another user results in the .ics file opening in their browser, not adding the event to the calendar.

That's a *basic feature* that keeps a LOT of people on Outlook. They WANT the clicky clicky "Let me calender you, Mr Coworker!" crap. It doesn't work in Sunbird.

The calendar just plain sucks. There's a HUGE OPPORTUNITY here to attract a LOT of small business/home office users (at least) but they're totally blowing it by pissing away time arguing about the default theme for the application.

Fix the damn calendar, and they will come. Please.

Re:Redirect (was Re:Icons

[SlackGirl]

Try the Mailredirect [mozdev.org] extension.

Re:Why ADD a calendar??

[sydsavage]

Personally, I like the way it works in KDE's Kontact application. It simply ties together the existing email, address book and calendar applications into an integrated framework. There are additional modules for things like RSS feeds and weather.

It has the advantage of being similar enough to outlook that most non-technical users are comfortable making the switch.

It's not perfect, but it looks like they are taking it in the right direction, and it is actively being improved.

Re:Here's why I prefer the Mozilla Suite

[WorldMaker]

If you are using Firefox 1.0 you can go to Tools > Options > Advanced... and underneath the "Tabbed Browsing" header you'll find a group box with radio buttons allowing you to default Firefox to opening new tabs in the last Firefox window. I was quite pleased at this new option.

Re:Still no call-out to a browser?

[adamfranco]

Here you go, some "HowTos" I made up:

To get Firefox to open the Thunderbird (or any other) email client when clicking on a "mailto" link, do the following steps:

1. Enter the address "about:config" in the Firefox address-bar. This will allow you to set new preferences.
2. Right-click somewhere on the window and select "New" --> "String".
3. In the window that pops up, enter:
network.protocol-handler.app.mailto
as the name of the preference.
4. Hit OK and then enter the path to your thunderbird executable in the next window. For me it is /usr/local/bin/thunderbird/thunderbird

To get Firefox to open when you click on links in Thunderbird, a similar process is followed.

Since thunderbird doesn't have an easy way to use about:config, you need to edit the preferences file with a text editor.

1. Close Thunderbird first as it will overwrite any configuration changes when it exits.
2. Open the Thunderbird "prefs.js" file located in you home directory, probably named something like: /home/afranco/.thunderbird/Profiles/jafwe232js.def ault/prefs.js
3. Add the following three lines to the prefs.js file:
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.http", "/usr/local/bin/firefox/firefox");
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.https", "/usr/local/bin/firefox/firefox");
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.ftp", "/usr/local/bin/firefox/firefox");

--Adam