Mozilla Thunderbird 3 Released 272
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."
This is great (Score:1, Interesting)
Too bad I switched to Postbox.
Tabs (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
99% of the time I read my mail in the reading pane instead of popping open a new window, so the tabs bar is just sitting there with only one tab showing.
Plus pressing the write button opens a new window instead of a tab anyway...
Re:A big step up from TB 2 for linux (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I blame the cold weather (Score:4, Interesting)
Does it matter all that much? (Score:5, Interesting)
I have been a Thunderbird user for as long as it's been around (and before it was "Thunderbird"), and I thought I would be one forever. Even once I started using Gmail for my personal email, I thought I'd need Thunderbird for my work stuff. But, you know, the university started offering hosted Gmail, and I decided to try it... and, months later, I don't miss T-bird at all.
Thing is, I was one of the hold-outs. While quite a few staff and faculty here are still on desktop email, almost all of our students have preferred web mail for quite a few years now - even when the only web-based option was that gosh-awful "Webpine" (Hey! Here's a great idea! Let's use our awful, counter-intuitive, ugly Pine command line program as a design template for a new web-based email client!). So I wonder for how much longer any desktop email programs will even be considered relevant.
Lightning.... (Score:5, Interesting)
That seems quite an important extension - any idea when (or if) it will be supported by TB3?
To me, it seems like an error of judgement to mainstream release a new version when key addons have not been satisfactorily updated. For the likes of Lightening, it isn't just eye-candy... and, for many, I suspect, breaking existing (addon) functionality will be unacceptable.
That said, I'm looking forward to 'conversation' view - and I've craved an improved address book for years... though what I saw when I last took a peek at the Beta wasn't much better than in TB2.
Re:Tabs (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Tabs (Score:4, Interesting)
Outlook 2010 has something pretty close to that, including reading in from multiple folders. It's not perfect, but it's miles ahead of what previous versions of Outlook and just about every other standalone client have (at least in Windows).
Re:Conversation view != threads (Score:3, Interesting)
All that does is make your inbox a mess.
This thread reminds me of the instant-message type SMS text view on Palm Treo phones. No other phone that I have found does it the same way.
I've been using Thunderbird 3 pre-release for quite a while now and even 3.0 doesn't do it quite right. But, it is what it is. It beats the pants off Thunderbird 2. Now if only enigmail worked on Windows as well as it does in Linux....
Re:Tabs (Score:4, Interesting)
Why the uber downloads (Score:3, Interesting)
(Note for those backwards people who still use POP: IMAP users normally download their message bodies on the fly.)
Sigh. Been using the beta for a couple of weeks, so I'm familiar with this download-everything behavior. This is not actually a new feature. What's changed is that it's enabled by default. Which is, I agree, pretty dumb.
Here's why they did this. This version has vastly improved searching (far and away, my favorite new feature) which doesn't work unless you have a local copy of the mailbox for indexing.
(I find this a godsend. In the past, I've turned on the local copy feature and then used Google desktop search. The problem here is that the user interface for GD sucks. Also, on one of my machines, I can't get GD to even look at the local mailbox file — no idea why.)
The way Firefox 3 does searching is Ultimately Kewl. (Won't try to describe it, go give it a try.) Naturally, they were proud of this feature and wanted everybody to try it. But just enabling such a potential bandwidth raper was dumb. Somebody should have designed a wizard or something so you could select the mailbox folders you wanted to index.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Tabs (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Account Creator is a Pain (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, it looks like a race-condition. There's some sort of background task that tries to verify that the settings will work, but it doesn't grey out the UI boxes while it does that.
It works well enough if:
- You prefer IMAP
- Your account domain matches up with the mail server domain
But I could regularly get it confused.
They're already working on 3.0.1. Figure out how to make it happen repeatedly, then submit a bug report.
New quick search sucks big time (Score:3, Interesting)
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. FFS, stop mimicking an AJAX web application - the results are RIGHT THERE on the disk and you can certainly show more than 10 results at a time.
The workaround is to create a saved search but that's even more hassle for something that could be achieved in seconds in v2.0. So much for progress. I suggest if Thunderbird 3.1 turns up, they put an option or two in to control this behaviour and remember what the user has chosen. There is even a "save search as virtual folder" option in the quick search menu suggesting someone was thinking of doing something like this, it just appears to be inexplicably greyed out.
Thunderbird 3 has potential but it really feels like a regression in several important respects. It also inexplicably lacks things I would have expected to be improved. For example, you still can't select an email, and right mouse and create a filter from it. This is something that Outlook has had for donkey's years.
Re:New quick search sucks big time (Score:3, Interesting)
Yea, who ever came up with that search "feature" seriously needs to be kicked in the head.
On the left hand side, when I see for example an email address similar to my search parameter my inclination is to click on that and expect on the right a complete list of of all similar email. Instead I get some limited half ass list, that might (might) be related to my search.
THE SEARCH SUCKS.