Mozilla Thunderbird 3 Released 272
Posted
by
kdawson
from the hot-bits dept.
from the hot-bits dept.
supersloshy writes Today Mozilla released Thunderbird 3.
Many new features are available, including Tabs and enhanced search features, a message archive for emails you don't want to delete but still want to keep, Firefox 3's improved Add-ons Manager, Personas support, and many other improvements. Download here."
Re:Tabs (Score:5, Informative)
It's had that for ages
To view emails as conversation threads, go to View, Sort By, and choose Threaded, (Unthreaded to stop showing threads.)
A big step up from TB 2 for linux (Score:5, Informative)
I've been using Thunderbird 3 in beta for the last few months on an ubuntu system. TB 3 doesn't look dramatically different than TB 2, but the performance difference is *enormous*. TB 2 would crash frequently, it would periodically use all resources while it did heaven knows what, and Gmail IMAP was a disaster.
TB 3 is responsive, hardly ever crashes (perhaps twice in 3 months), search is *way* improved, and it finally feels like first-rate software. My hat is off to the Thunderbird team.
Re:Tabs (Score:4, Informative)
yes, the only problem is that your replies do not show that way (unless it is a mailing list where you receive a copy of your own message). If there is some way to merge the Sent Folder with the threaded view using a search or some kind of virtual folder, please help us
Conversation view != threads (Score:5, Informative)
Every single time I see this discussion, someone pipes up to say "but thunderbird DOES do threads!".
That it does. And that has absolutely no bearing on the discussion at hand.
Conversation view as provided by gmail gives you a single page for each entire conversation AND it inserts your replies online as appropriate.
There's several other features that make conversation view work so well, but you'll have to actually try gmail to understand what we are talking about.
TB3 Upgrade Warning - You'll need your passwords (Score:1, Informative)
I just ran the upgrade, and the bad news is that TB 3 asked for my long-forgotten passwords when checking for mail. You know, the ones that TB 2 so helpfully remembered years ago when I first installed it.
It would have been nice to get some warning before running the upgrade. Fortunately, I use webmail for one account, so I knew its password, and guessed lucky on another.
The new version looks shiny, but who'll care if they can't get their fricking mail?
Hopefully improved. (Score:5, Informative)
One of the early releases I downloaded had the amusing "feature" of downloading every message in the background - not just headers, full messages, with attachments. According to the bug report, this was intentional, so that your folders would be accessible without being connected to the network, but it never seemed to know where to stop. It was *constantly* and repeatedly downloading messages, and ate 40 some-odd gigs before I noticed it and went back to 2.
--riney
Re:Tabs (Score:5, Informative)
Threaded view is not conversation view.
Message Archive. (Score:2, Informative)
a message archive for emails you don’t want to delete but still want to keep
To be more specific, the message archive is for emails that you want to get rid of, but don't exactly want to delete. Like if you're in a mailing list and want to clean out your inbox, but you don't want to delete all of (or at least some of) your messages in that mailing list. It's basically just another way of organizing things. Sorry if I didn't make any sense before :\.
Re:Tabs (Score:2, Informative)
Great (Score:3, Informative)
Re:vCard support yet? (Score:2, Informative)
Not sure, but More Functions For Address Book [nic-nac-project.org] fixed that for me on TB 2.
Re:Great (Score:2, Informative)
I had the same problem when installing the RC version. This add-on [mozilla.org] turns out to be very helpful while they don't manage to update lightning.
The problem I have now is with the update feature. Having installed RC2, do I need to download de full version? It doesn't seem to be able to update itself.
Re:Great (Score:5, Informative)
You should try one of these:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/nightly/latest-comm-1.9.1/ [mozilla.org]
I've found Lightning betas to be solid and have been using them for several months (I use GCalDaemon to sync with Google Calendar). I'd back up first just to be safe.
Re:Tabs (Score:5, Informative)
Go to Options > Advanced, and click the Config Editor button.
Type hide in the Filter box to find the mail.tabs.autoHide preference.
Double-click on mail.tabs.autoHide to toggle the preference.
Cheers!
Re:Great (Score:3, Informative)
You should try one of these:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/nightly/latest-comm-1.9.1/ [mozilla.org]
I've found Lightning betas to be solid and have been using them for several months (I use GCalDaemon to sync with Google Calendar). I'd back up first just to be safe.
Mod parent up. The Lightning calendar plugin team has been craking out bug fixes and is well on its way to releasing.
How Thunderbird has gotten this far without integrated calendaring (not just via plugin) I have no idea.
Checking all folders for new mail with TB IMAP (Score:3, Informative)
Did you try setting mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new to true?
For as long as I can remember I've read on people's blogs (Tinymail's initial implementor's blog [pvanhoof.be], for example) that GMail's IMAP has always been poor and that this is the fault of the implementor (Google), not the client. Van Hoof recommends Dovecot and Cyrus for IMAP service instead [pvanhoof.be], but to be sure, people are probably more attracted to Google's gratis service and large mail quota even if it means allowing Google to index all of your mail.
Re:Tabs (Score:4, Informative)
A similar but not quite the same choice is available.
When viewing a message, click "other actions" then "show in conversation"
Your replies are threaded in when viewing a message this way, but it opens in a new tab.
Re:Checking all folders for new mail with TB IMAP (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, I dug around online for solutions and had this working in 2.0 reasonably well using mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new.
I posted this question on mozillazine a few weeks ago and got some more information, including the bugs listed in bugzilla which are still unresolved. I probably should have included those before.
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=1615305 [mozillazine.org]
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=496119 [mozilla.org]
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=528009 [mozilla.org]
Lightning (and Sunbird) status... (Score:5, Informative)
Lightning isn't ready yet, it's 1.0 release is lagging behind TB 3.0. You can use the current nightly builds and they should work with Thunderbird 3. They're marked as Lightning 1.0B1pre. You can grab a nightly here:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/download.html#nightly [mozilla.org]
They said they're basically at 1.0 Beta 1 Release Candidate status and hope to have the official 1.0 Beta 1 release out within a couple weeks, at least according to the Mozilla Calendar blog. Details are in the Mozilla Calendar Blog (currently offline):
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar/ [mozillazine.org]
We're going to stick with recommending Thunderbird 2.0 for a little bit on PortableApps.com because Lightning isn't ready, and it is (arguably) the most important Thunderbird extension. And recommending nightlies to regular users is a bad idea.
Re:Account Creator is a Pain (Score:3, Informative)
You can just click Manual as you go through it. I found the automatic mode worked well in the different servers I set it up with. And it checks IMAP before POP for them (as most folks should be using IMAP these days anyway).
Re:Tabs (Score:2, Informative)
Ok, does anyone know how to turn off the tabs bar, or at least hide it when there is only one tab, like firefox does?
In about:config, change mail.tabs.autoHide to true.
(Tools->Options...->Advanced->Config Editor...)
I personally wish you could disable tabs completely.
Re:TB3 Upgrade Warning - You'll need your password (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.smartcomputing.com/techsupport/detail.aspx?guid=&ErrorID=29874 [smartcomputing.com]
Will help.
The problem is that TB3 has Master Password clicked on by default. The bug is that if you didn't have a master password set (just keeps your pop passwords), then your stuffed.
Back up your emails, uninstall TB3, reinstall TB2, assign a master password, reinstall TB3.
Re:I don't get smart folders (Score:3, Informative)
I personally monitor about a dozen mailboxes at work (IMAP shared mailboxes, project specific mailboxes, sysadmin type mailboxes that are shared via IMAP)...
It took me about a month to finally get comfortable with "smart folders". It was there in TB v2, but wasn't as prominent. Once I rearranged my folder structure a bit in the individual accounts, I'm actually quite happy with Smart Folders. I'm happy with all the inboxes clumped together at the top of the window.
Although sometimes I'll click the little arrows at the top of the folder list (that point left/right and are really tiny and easy to miss) to switch to classic view. Or I'll switch to only looking at "favorite" folders.
The UI design choice of using those tiny arrows to switch folder views is a poor one. Or at least I should be able to right-click up there and change to a different view, which is what I tried a few times with no luck.
Re:New quick search sucks big time (Score:1, Informative)
Thunderbird 3 still has the search bar but results appear in a new tab. This tab does not show results as a list but in a fancy HTML based summary view. That's great if you were searching for a particular message but utterly useless for bulk operations. What if I want to drag and drop a few files around, or delete them or flag them as junk? Even as a summary view it is stupid since it only shows 10 results at a time with a More button at the bottom.
You missed an important point.
Just click on "Open as list" (in the Search tab) and it will display *all* the results in a new tab! Here you can perform whatever operation you want on them.
Re:Doesn't work. (Score:3, Informative)
What has been working for me (no guarantees about the future!) is to use this exact path (for win32):
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/nightly/latest-comm-1.9.1/win32-xpi/ [mozilla.org]
Note the "latest-comm-1.9.1". If I use nightly/win32-xpi/ instead --- that's what seem like it *should* work --- the extension doesn't work. Go figure. All of this may change, I am not sure what the differences are in the different locations.
I know that this works because I just installed the release version of 3.0 and Lightning on my wife's laptop.
I am disappointed that the Lightning folks have made it so hard to find an extension that works with 3.0. This seems *very* important.