Mozilla Downshifting Development of Thunderbird E-Mail Client 378
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla will be announcing next week that they will effectively be taking away resources from Thunderbird's development. Mozilla believes it's better for the developers behind the open-source e-mail client to work on other projects, i.e. Firefox OS. They claim they will not be outright stopping Thunderbird." You can also read the letter at pastebin.
Re:I can't wait! (Score:5, Informative)
Want the "Reload" button back where it used to be? Right-click, "Customize", drag the reload button where you want it, click "Done".
You're welcome.
Re:Other options? (Score:5, Informative)
I think the hilarious thing about the "bug" is that there is an operating system in this day and age that can't handle upper/lower case in filenames correctly. I'm spilting the blame 50/50 between Windows and Thunderbird.
Although this is a problem unique to Windows, it's not really a Windows bug. You can tell Windows to do the rename in those circumstances and it will. Thunderbird was the one that barfed.
What happened was that Thunderbird was written to ask if a file exists before doing the rename. Windows, ignoring the case said "Yep!" and so it refused to do the rename. This is expected behaviour. The fix is just to check if the names are the same if they're both lcase'd, and to skip the existence check if it's true, then tell Windows to do the rename.
This isn't really the sort of thing where a bug report would be sent to Microsoft.
Re:Don't be crazy (Score:5, Informative)
By removing Outlook Express, they did the world a favor. What a gigantic piece of crap that was. Getting double mails for no good reason? Remove and reinstall the offending account. Lost all your mail? Well, don't clear your recycle bin any time soon, or its probably gone forever. Just quit working altogether? That's normal for OE.
I worked for a small web hosting company during the time that OE was en vogue. Don't tell me about "lost functionality". That thing was and still is a huge piece of crap.
Did I mention it was a piece of crap?
It was a piece of crap.
Re:They might as well kick all the developers. (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know why this isn't built in, but you can install this extension in Chrome to see PDF and PPT docs in a sensible manner:
Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer (by Google)
Re:Good. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Tunderbirds are NO! (Score:5, Informative)
Well, they dropped it from the base release about a year ago but it is still there as a plugin.
Re:It had a great run (Score:5, Informative)
Please no. It is the only client that does what I need (including handling seven to ten separate email accounts, seamlessly). It's not perfect, but it's all I got.
Re:Mozilla "Foundation" is a corporation... (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed you are correct. The Mozilla Foundation is a corporation. Specifically, it's a 501(c)(3) public benefit corporation. As a 501(c)(3) public benefit corporation, our "profits" are measured in the amount of public good we create.
We invest resources for the benefit of the public. If we invest resources wisely, we maximize the amount of benefit we deliver to the public. If we invest unwisely, we fail to maximize the amount of benefit delivered to the public. It's our responsibility to always invest wisely so we can maximize the return for the public. Not doing so would be a failure to deliver on our mission -- our promise to the world.
Re:Good. (Score:4, Informative)
That's what IMAP is for.
Re:They might as well kick all the developers. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Probably won't hurt anything......for now (Score:5, Informative)
Why not use the web interface? Email is simple enough that in my experience there really isn't a lot that a native app can do that a good webmail interface can't.
There are several things.
#1 I like really advanced complex features like having multiple messages open simultaneously, the average web interface either doesn't support this or does it poorly.
#2 I already have half a dozen browser windows and tabs open if not more. I -like- my email windows have a different title bar, a different icon in the task bar, etc. Having everything open via the web browser makes making sense of my open windows more of a hassle. Plus if i quit the mail program, all the mail windows close. Nice.
#3 Hotkeys - yes some web interfaces have them, but its a mess.
#4 Attachment handling - web clients are getting better but it still sucks, and its far worse if your internet connection is ever less than perfect.
#5 Mass message handling... most web clients let you handle a page of email at a time.
#6 Folders - yeah yeah... gmail has tags and they aren't bad either, but like being able to expand and collapse folders within folders within folders.
On the subject of tags ...here's an interesting problem... migrate all your tagged mail from one gmail account to another one. This is painful as hell. I'm speaking as a Google Apps for Enterprises user here too... the paid version with phone support...
Only way to do is via IMAP,... which treats tags as folders. So if you've got someone with 5GB of email who is really got into tagging, and every message is tagged 3 or 4 different ways, IMAP sees it as 40GB of email. Now fortunately google and imap are smart enough to check message IDs and as each "tag" item is downloaded via imap as a folder, and then pushed into the new account folder where gmail converts it back to a tagged item it doesn't create duplicates of the message which is great. But it does still have to process them all as if they were separate messages.
Two small companies merged and two separate gmail accounts had to be consolidated...it took days. There was NO backend tool to do it "within the cloud", nope... every account had to be downloaded to a local workstation via IMAP and then pushed back up to the other account via imap... and every tagged item had to be evaluated separately for every tag on it...
Google provides a "legacy mail migration tool" to allow new clients to migrate data from your old email system to the new one via IMAP... and this is the same tool you need to use to move mailboxes between two different gmail hosted domains... or to move mail from one mailbox to another one in general (e.g. when an employee quits... although I think there postini stuff comes into play here too... I haven't gotten that deep into it...)
FF3.6 vs FF13 (Score:4, Informative)