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Mozilla The Internet

Mozilla Thunderbird 0.4 Released 344

Posted by michael from the sunday-morning-fun dept.
Random BedHead Ed writes "The latest release of Mozilla Thunderbird, the standalone Mozilla mail program, has been released and is available for download here. A quick scan of the release notes shows some new improvements and features, including a new look, bug fixes, and for Linux users the ability to click on a URL in an e-mail and have it actually launch in your default web browser (how novel). Download and enjoy..."
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Mozilla Thunderbird 0.4 Released More

Mozilla Thunderbird 0.4 Released

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  • Although it is in 0.4 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ErixTr ( 601648 ) <erixtr AT gmail DOT com> on Sunday December 07, 2003 @05:08AM (#7652656)
    Thunderbird is really very stable. I have been using it since 0.2a as my main e-mail software. (Including all the nightly builds.)

    I can't think how stable 1.0 will be. Just give it a try. You'll like it.
    • Although it is in 0.4, THunderbird is really vary stable

      It was already pretty stable even at 0.1. I mean all it was was a fork of the Main Mozilla mail-news code into a standalone program.

    • Re:Although it is in 0.4 (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Tarqwak ( 599548 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @05:40AM (#7652717)
      One thing that makes MTB kind of annoying for (to be) former Outlook Express users is bug 30057 - "Use one Local Mail tree for all POP3 accounts"

      Other than that it mops the floor with OE.

      • Re:Although it is in 0.4 (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Rysc ( 136391 ) <sorpigal@gmail.com> on Sunday December 07, 2003 @04:00PM (#7655090) Homepage Journal
        I completely agree. It makes no sense at all.

        Why build a SEPERATE set of trash/sent/draft/template/etc folders for every account? Why give me so many trees and so many inboxes? If I want to segregate mail by which account it's sent to, I'll use filters. That's what they're for.

        At the very least they should provide an option to merge all folders in all acounts into a single "virtual" tree, and then hide the accounts. A hack, sure, but at least it would get the job done.

        • Re:Although it is in 0.4 (Score:4, Insightful)

          by gullevek ( 174152 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @08:05PM (#7656466) Homepage Journal
          oh no! please NO! Gosh, I hate it so much that you can't do that in Kmail or Evolution. I want SEPERATE mail boxes. You ask why? Because I read serval different mail accounts. Work, Private, Alternate. I don't want to get them mixed and I have no interested in some major sorting rules (which are impossible to do if you recive the same ML at home and work account [see Kmail for this sucker bug]). I hope Thunderbird keeps there seperate accounts for each box.

          and btw, if you want all in one tree, why don't you set up a basic rule -> all mail income on pop account 1 move to folder inbox in local acount. furthermore you can set for each account that the sent/draf/etc folder are in "x" mailbox.

    • Re:Although it is in 0.4 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jridley ( 9305 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @08:24AM (#7652958)
      I've tried 0.2 and most recently 0.3. I gave both of them about a week. Both times I went back to using Forte Agent. 0.2 was just not stable for me. 0.3 was stable, never crashed or lost stuff. My big problem is that after a few days of usage, it just started getting horribly slow. Also there are some usability problems that I start out thinking I can live with, but they eventually bug me too much:

      - "thread" view is sorted wrong. They group by thread then sort ALPHABETICALLY. Sorry, group then sort BY TIME, at least optionally. Otherwise I've got recent threads at the top, ancient threads at the bottom, and thousands of emails between them. Browsing becomes nearly impossible; recent threads become needles in a haystack.

      - No "backspace" when reading emails: both Agent and Thunderbird (and others) allow spacebar and "N"ext message to quickly browse through messages, Agent has a "backspace" key that remembers which messages you've read and backs you up through them. When you're in thread view of a mailing list that generates 100+ emails a day and you have 6 month's archives in the folder, once you leave a message you have almost no hope of finding it again without this feature.

      - the spam filter is hopeless. I tagged well over 1000 spams, and it still was getting about 50% false negatives, and even worse, about 20% false positives. I'd pick up 50 emails, have 20 spams in there, it wouldn't ID 10 of the spams, and it would throw 5+ legitimate emails into the spam filter. POPfile got to be almost perfect far before this. Yes, I could use POPfile with Thunderbird, but I was hoping the feature would actually work.

      - using it in large binaries groups is completely hopeless, especially on a good server with long retention. I went into a group that had about 300,000 messages on the server, and it just about coughed up a lung. It took it forever to do anything once that was loaded. Also it doesn't even appear to combine all parts of a multipart post into one display item; without this feature, you actually have to LOOK at all 300,000 items; this is ridiculous, other newsreaders have had this important feature for years.

      There are other problems, but I've already forgotten them (I switched back to Agent two days ago).

      Yeah, I could fix some of these if I wanted, and I did look in to that, but setting up the build environment is fairly involved, and I couldn't fix all of them without spending significant time learning the guts of the system.

      I *want* Thunderbird to work, I just can't live with it yet. And I'm afraid some of the things that bug me about it might be fairly hard to fix.
      • Not sure what operating system you use, but give poco mail [pocomail.com] a try. It's been my mail program for ages now on my windows box, and it's damn near perfect. Have a look here [pocomail.com] for a list of some of the features available. And with pocoscript there almost nothing you can't persude pocomail to do.
      • The thread view is sorted by thread and then time, at least in 0.4, and I think it always has been....
        Also, since the spam filter is Bayesian, it's going to not work properly if you get lots of messages that aren't spam but have spammy titles. I don't know if that's your case or not.
        Regarding the other things, I have no idea. ;)

  • Exchange Support? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FrankConners ( 639830 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @05:16AM (#7652668)
    Just curious..... does anybody think there is a possibility that Thunderbird will support Exchange Mail/Lotus Notes. Unfortunately we both use Domino and Exchange Servers at Deutsche Bank :(

    • Re:Exchange Support? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Mozilla itself (haven't tried thunderbird yet) plays nicely with Exchange. Use IMAP to read the mail, set the SMTP outbound to be the exchange server and pull in the address book using LDAP.All available through the normal settings dialogs.

      Its faster than using outlook to search through emails but there is the downside of missing meetings because the calendar isn't supported.

    • Re:Exchange Support? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Gnavpot ( 708731 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @05:27AM (#7652694)
      Thunderbird can use IMAP. I do it at home.

      Even though IMAP is not Exchange's native language, i have seen some Exchange servers running an additional IMAP service. So you may be lucky.

      But doesn't Deutsche Banke have an opinion regarding employees installing unapproved software on the company's computers? I would certainly hope so, even if it means that you can't use a proper mail client.

      • Re:Exchange Support? (Score:5, Informative)

        by gad_zuki! ( 70830 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @07:41AM (#7652885)
        >Even though IMAP is not Exchange's native language

        Mail severs don't really have native languages. Exchange supports protocols just like any other mail server. POP3, IMAP, and MAPI.

        I use tbird with Exchange and have no problems with IMAP nor with IMAP over SSL (which Exchange supports too). I just generated a non-authorized SSL cert and off I went.

        A couple problems/issues:

        Tbird does not support NTLM authentication, so if you're using IMAP or POP your password will be sent as plain-text unless you use SSL.

        Microsoft really half-asses IMAP. If I open my contact folder and open a contact, I get a blank email. Same with notes. It doesn't seem like it would be much trouble to just deliver the ascii format of those contacts and notes in the body of the email.

        That said, the changes in .4 are much welcomed and tb has been my prefered email client for a few months now.

        I would still like to see something other than "Catching up with Microsoft" in the future. How about integrating with gpg and having an easy to use GUI to encrypt messages. Currently, you have to get gpg, install enigmail, and pray. A built-in encryption module could really help push encryption onto the masses.

        Or even an installer for win32. (there's an unofficial installer btw)

        • Re:Exchange Support? (Score:4, Interesting)

          by ocelotbob ( 173602 ) <ocelot.ocelotbob@org> on Sunday December 07, 2003 @07:53AM (#7652903) Homepage
          Or even an installer for win32. (there's an unofficial installer btw)

          I'm willing to wager that it's already in progress. The last few nightlies of Thunderbird (which has gotten a lot faster and even more awesome in the past few weeks) have been built with a windows installer, so I imagine that focus will be shifted to Firebird soon enough. IIRC, one of the things in the firebird/thunderbird/sunbird project was to streamline the installer as well, just give the crew a release or two to polish it up.

        • Re:Exchange Support? (Score:3, Interesting)

          by pe1chl ( 90186 )
          Opening a contact would have to be implemented using LDAP, not IMAP.
          Mozilla does that OK.
          A "clever conversion of contact to mail" may be attractive at first, but how would you want to send mail, search, etc.

    • Re:Exchange Support? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Bob9113 ( 14996 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @05:46AM (#7652730) Homepage
      I use Thunderbird at the office against an Exchange server. It doesn't interface with Exchange calendaring (at least AFAIK), but the mail works great. Set it up as a IMAP client. You can get the settings from your Outlook install.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @05:52AM (#7652738)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • "With extensions, people get the features they want, and people who don't want them can rest easy. Works well for the birds."

        Birds are coding extensions for Mozilla now?

        Those cunning oiseaux!

        Hitchcock was right- lock all your doors and windows, and hope they don't have blasters.

        graspee

    • Re:Exchange Support? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Spoing ( 152917 )
      I doubt you'll see native Exchange support, though you might want to check to see if POP & SMPT are used for your mail servers.

      NOTE: Personally, I've been told where I am that there was no POP and SMPT access...even after repeated requests. The admin even went as far as to say it was corporate policy not to support POP or SMPT. They lied. Just plug the server settings in and see what happens. If that fails, try another similar address.

  • firebird speed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sewagemaster ( 466124 ) <sewagemasterNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Sunday December 07, 2003 @05:18AM (#7652675) Homepage
    from the mozilla/ firebird website, it says that firebird's developed and targetted mostly for windows - although it's cross platform obviously - but unfortunately it seems that the application's speed/ responsive under linux is quite slower than on windows... quite noticable...

    could this be X's fault?

    • Re:firebird speed (Score:5, Informative)

      by jsebrech ( 525647 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @06:54AM (#7652832)
      Firebird simply doesn't have as much linux developers. That's the thing with open source, you can't assign work to your developers. It's one thing saying "firebird needs to be optimised for linux/X", and a whole other thing to actually do it.

      What I can tell you though, is that despite firebird being slower on linux than on windows, it's not noticeably slower (for me anyway). And in addition, it is a fast browser, even on linux. On windows it even whoops IE's ass in various benchmarks. A lot of people have misconceptions about firebird's rendering speed because they're used to IE's render-as-soon-as-data-arrives model of updating the screen, which starts sooner, but ends later. If you want that in firebird, type about:config and set nglayout.initialpaint.delay to 0. One more thing: I have a pII/233 that I run firebird on. It runs at a usable clip, even on such a low-end system.

      And obviously, whenever a graphical application is slow, it is X's fault ... NOT.

      • Re:firebird speed (Score:5, Insightful)

        by FooBarWidget ( 556006 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @09:59AM (#7653201)
        "That's the thing with open source, you can't assign work to your developers."

        Actually you can - hire some developers.
        Open source is just a development model. Open source doesn't automatically mean everybody has to be a volunteer. You can still hire as many professionals as you want.
    • I've noticed this about mozilla as well. Not so much the rendering speed as the speed of the interface eg. the "feel" of clicking a button. After having used it under Linux I just passed it off as Mozilla being slow but when I started using it under Windows (same versions) it seemed to be much less sluggish. This is with no themes applied as well.

      Anyone know why?

      • Re:firebird speed (Score:3, Informative)

        by ocelotbob ( 173602 )
        Sounds like a scheduling/latency issue. Try renicing X to run at -5, or upgrade to a test version of kernel 2.6, where a lot of the latency/sluggish feel of X in general will be mitigated, if not disappear completely.

    • Re:firebird speed (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Apage43 ( 708800 )
      I'm running on a windows comp and a linux comp... And the linux comp seems to run firebird MUCH faster.

  • Bayesian SPAM filter (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 07, 2003 @05:18AM (#7652677)
    I've used Thunderbird 0.3 and now 0.4, but the same thing surprises me: Thunderbird's bayesian spam filter is not nearly as good as POPFile's (which I used before).

    For example a particular spam mail, which is always identical, never gets marked as spam, no matter how much I train the spam filter.

    I'd guess the "success ratio" of Thunderbird's SPAM filter is about 80%-90% - with POPFile I got about 98%-99% success ratio.

    Am I doing something wrong? Has anyone has similar experiences? I'd really like to use Thunderbird's spam filter instead of another program, as the "training" is integrated to the mail reading application (much easier just to click "Junk" icon, than to switch application and search for that same mail and then handle with it)

    • Re:Bayesian SPAM filter (Score:5, Informative)

      by OverlordQ ( 264228 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @05:35AM (#7652706) Journal
      1) Might ask for help in a Better Place [mozillazine.org]
      2) Apples and Oranges, POPFile isn't a spam filter, it's an email classification system.
      • Sounds to me like the Orange is a better Apple!

      • Re:Bayesian SPAM filter (Score:4, Funny)

        by mikecron ( 686696 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @07:26AM (#7652864)
        Apples and Oranges-A Comparison [inno-vet.com]

      • Re:Bayesian SPAM filter - Empty "hello" emails (Score:4, Interesting)

        by zr-rifle ( 677585 ) <`moc.rdez' `ta' `rdez'> on Sunday December 07, 2003 @07:52AM (#7652901) Homepage
        It's been 4 or 5 months since I've started to receive empty html emails with the topic reading only "hello" or "hi". No text, links or anything in the main body.

        My guess is that these email are sent by spammers targetting users who use bayesian spam filters, since marking such emails as Junk, thus training the filter, might actually mess things up.

        I haven't actually looked at the bayesian algorithms, so I'm not sure about this.
        • The way I understand it, all that would do is teach your Bayesian classifier that HTML tags are slightly junkish: they show up in some junk messges and (presumably) some good ones, but HTML on its own = junk.

          So if you get an HTML email from a friend, the presence of (e.g.) your name and theirs should outweigh the "junkness" of the HTML, and it won't be marked as junk. But if you get HTML spam then the presence of words like "click here" should keep the balance on the "junk" side.

          Bayesian sorting really is

        • I handle those mails one step before the Bayesian filtering kicks in. I use POPMonitor [popmonitor.com] on Mac OS X to delete a lot of spam on the server with a few simple non-Bayesian filters, before downloading it and letting Eudora's (Bayesian) Junk Mail filter handle the rest. One of the rules I have in POPMonitor is: Delete if Subject is "hi". Mail from a trusted sender whose subject is "hi" would still get through, but in practice this never happens. Most of these "pretend it's personal mail" tricks from spammers don'

      • Apples and apples--Mozilla uses the same algorithm as POPFile, and if you really wanted you could use Mozilla's junk mail controls to sort email into two categories instead of just sorting out the junk.
    • I have had a similar lack of success getting the Bayesian filters in Thunderbird to "learn" my spam.

      I have found mixed results with other users: Slashdot recently linked [slashdot.org] [slashdot.org] Shuttleworth's Software Development Bounties [markshuttleworth.com] [markshuttleworth.com] where he says "Bayesian filtering of junk mail has worked really well for me in Mozilla." This is, of course, after a long time of training. Binary Bonsai [binarybonsai.com] has similar things to say.

      At least, as eWeek concludes [mozillazine.org], it's better than Outlook 2003. I switched

    • OTOH, Thunderbird's spam filter is *so* much better than the one Eudora 6. I don't know what Eudora uses, but it constantly marks messages from mailing lists as junk, even though I have filters specifically set up to move list messages into folders for each list. WIth Eudora, I have to correct it every time I get mail. With Thunderbird and similar filters, a mail list message gets marked as junk maybe once a week.

      One interface problem with Thunderbird though is the way it treats messages it decides as j
    • Vote for bug 23114 [mozilla.org]. If it's fixed, clicking the X-POPFile-Link header will open up a browser window with the relevant message options shown.

  • Thunderbird is the right answer (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pirhana ( 577758 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @05:24AM (#7652691)
    I think going after reverse engineering the Outlook MAPI is a terrible and never-ending task. As microsoft keep changing things to ensure incompatibility with Free softwares, its pointless to chase outlook. An alternative cross platform mail client like Thunderbird makes a lot of sense in this background.

  • palm address book sync (Score:5, Informative)

    by jark ( 115136 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @05:33AM (#7652701) Homepage
    Thunderbird 0.4 finally adds an optional extension to sync the Thunderbird address book with your PalmOS based handheld. Grab it from here [mozilla.org].
    • Sigh, for Windows only. Expansion of the .xpi shows:

      CondMgr.dll
      HSAPI.dll
      install.js
      mozABConduit.dll
      palmsync.dll
      PalmSyncInstall.exe
      PalmSyncProxy.dll
      palmSync.xpt

      That obviously won't work on OSX, FreeBSD and Linux systems. I've been working on the SDK for pilot-link [pilot-link.org], but it isn't quite ready yet... that doesn't mean it can't be used to develop a cross-platform conduit to do this, however, or even a Java-based one (Yes, we support that too!).

      This brings us much closer though.

  • Question... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by John Seminal ( 698722 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @05:34AM (#7652705) Journal
    I have never used Mozialla to read email. I am wondering, does it have anything that will not allow the img src tag in email to work? In other words, can it open just the text without allowing any requests to be sent out? I know many spammers validate email addresses by sending spam with a small image, and when you request that image, they know they have a real email account. All you have to do is make the mistake of opening one wrong email. Then they start sending you 10 times the amount of spam. I think it would be benificial if there was an email program which has a setting so that no requests are sent. I guess what I am asking is this possible or does it already exsist?

    • Re:Question... (Score:5, Informative)

      by karevoll ( 630350 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @05:44AM (#7652727) Homepage
      In "Tools"->"Options"->"Advanced" you will find a checkbox for "Block loading of remote images in mail messages" :-) This option has been present for a long time (at least as long as I've known about Thunderbird) :-)
      • This option is also available in Mozilla.

        bug: it breaks the loading of images in the mail startup page.

        • Re:Question... (Score:3, Informative)

          by aredubya74 ( 266988 )
          There's no handy preferences/tools menu option to set this in Mozilla, but it's still pretty easy to enable in Windows (tested on Win2K, Moz 1.4.1):

          - Browse to the URL "about:config" (no quotes, of course)
          - Under the filter entry at the top of the page, enter "mailnews.message_display.d". This will give you a single config entry, "mailnews.message_display.disable_remote_image"
          - Double click this config entry, and change the value from false to true
          - Close and restart Mozilla, open an email that previously

          • Re:Question... (Score:4, Informative)

            by DeadMeat (TM) ( 233768 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @11:44AM (#7653679) Homepage
            Actually, it is accessible from the GUI: hit Edit/Preferences, go to Privacy & Security/Images, and check "Do not load remote images...".

            That said, one of my (few) complaints with the monolithic Mozilla suite is that the Preferences dialog buries useful stuff like that where you might not expect it. Thankfully, that's one of the things that's been revamped in Firebird/Thunderbird.

  • I was lazy and used Outlook Express for email, plus an old Hotmail account hanging around. After working with Firebird betas for awhile I gave Thunderbird a try and have used it ever since, even tapping into my Hotmail with the free and excellent Hotmail Popper [boolean.ca]. Unfortunately only for Windows, but still and excellent companion to Thunderbird. (Also works with any POP email client) And thankfully once Hotpop downloads the msgs the TBird spam filter goes into effect.

    Jonah Hex

  • Emacs Keybindings? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Bob9113 ( 14996 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @06:00AM (#7652755) Homepage
    Does anyone know if or when Thunderbird will support either an Emacs mode or configurable bindings without editing the source code? I seem to recall somewhere in some Mozilla manifesto that Emacs bindings were supposed to take precedence. Thunderbird has a fine set of keybindings, but it's nothing like Emacs.

    Yeah, here it is [mozilla.org]:

    When these two bindings conflict (as in ctrl-A or ctrl-H), the emacs binding wins.

    Not that I'm saying they should necessarily make this the default, but the above implies they recognize how large the Emacs userbase is; it would be nice to at least be able to configure it myself without having to recompile.

  • The one "feature" that holds me back (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MikShapi ( 681808 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @06:04AM (#7652758) Journal
    ...me and half the world that is.

    The CALENDAR.

    I use outlook everywhere because I need the calendar.
    If they could provide a simple calendar program, like the Good'Ol palm desktop, they'd open the door for quite a lot of people.
    I don't mean a large-scale office multi-user integrated calendar solution like MS Exchange.
    Sure, you could get to that later on, build it on top of MySQL or something, I mean something simple I can use at home for myself. Something that people with non-corporate needs can use to organize their life (These people _do_ exist you know. One or two of them.)

    Of course you'd be fighting an uphill battle to set some form of open standard for calendar/mail/addressbook syncing. An API for handhelds/smartphones to use (as opposed to "Does it sync with Outlook?"), Microsoft would be clobbering you on the head every step of the way - Windows Mobile 200X will not support you out of the box, Outlook will continue shipping with PDA's, ActiveSync will work flawlessly with Outlook and they'd be paying non-MS mobile vendors (like palm) to support Outlook-syncing in their (even non-MS) OS and not support alternative sync standards.

    And yet, if such an API did come to exist, the Open Source community would complement the software support that the PalmOS/Windows Mobile/Symbian/Linux handhelds/smartphones will lack to sync to the desktop, not to mention the desktop software itself.

    In my view, FireBird seems like the mother of all places to start pushing such an API.

    Bit until that happens, I'll stick with Outlook.

    • Re:The one "feature" that holds me back (Score:5, Interesting)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @06:15AM (#7652779) Journal
      I use outlook everywhere because I need the calendar.

      How about this one [mozilla.org]? It uses the open iCalendar (RFC-2445) format used in Apple's iCal, and can share and subscribe to calendars using WebDAV (RFC 2518). I don't personally use it any more (I use iCal), but I am able to read calendars published by users of it, and publish calendars readable by it (ah, the joys of open standards). I have never used Outlook, so I don't know if this will provide all of the features you need. Oh, and last time I looked (0.4 versions ago) it was unable to sync with my mobile phone's calendar (one of the reasons I switched to iCal).

      • Re:The one "feature" that holds me back (Score:4, Informative)

        by IGnatius T Foobar ( 4328 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @09:45AM (#7653166) Homepage Journal
        Mozilla Calendar really needs to be folded directly into the Thunderbird system. People want a calendar in their email client, and that's that. The sooner this is done, the sooner Thunderbird can start kicking Outlook's butt.

        The place where Mozilla Calendar is a bit weak right now is its server support. Sure, you can publish and subscribe using WebDAV, but that's not the same thing as having a true server-side calendar. And you still can't send and receive meeting invitations, or check other users' free/busy times.

        Fortunately, there is a group at Penn State working on fixing this. [psu.edu] They're writing a new calendar API that can be used to hook into arbitrary servers. That means that modules will be able to be written for any back end, such as Citadel, [citadel.org] Sun calendar server, [sun.com] Kolab, [kroupware.org] or whatever else appears out there in the future.
        • Nooo... what Mozilla Calendar needs is to become another standalone Mozilla application, just like Firebird and Thunderbird. And guess what, that's what project Sunbird is all about.

          Now, before you say "I want them integrated!", keep in mind, it is expected that these standalone components (Firebird, Thunderbird, Sunbird) will also operate as extensions. So, as I understand it, you should be able to load Sunbird into Thunderbird as an extension.

    • Re:The one "feature" that holds me back (Score:5, Informative)

      by jark ( 115136 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @06:18AM (#7652782) Homepage
      This [laposte.net] was being worked on as an extension to Thunderbird. It uses the Mozilla Calendar [mozilla.org] as the basis for adding a calendar in to Thunderbird.

      ...unfortunately November 19 was the last time the site was updated and it is not even workable on 0.4.
    • How about just getting the damn 'mark all as read' hotkey going in Linux.. it's been broken since 0.2... Even in the full version of Mozilla it's b0rked... It iritates me to no end having to navigate the menus just to mark an IMAP folder as read.

      Maybe even a right-click -> Mark all as read would do...
    • I'll put in a partial vote for wcal [neosystem.com]. It's a calendar server that runs its own http daemon. It's got a few annoyances, but I never managed the transition to the Mozilla calendar extension. The specific reason for that was that at the time there wasn't a way to make a secure connection without resorting to some kind of tunnel, such as running VNC/tightVNC through an ssh tunnel.

  • Local Folders... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 07, 2003 @06:12AM (#7652774)
    I have been solely using Mozilla Mail for about 5 years and it has been excellent. However, I have never used or found a use for "Local Folders". In fact, they just get in the damn way. I wish I could delete them!!! What are they for???

    • Re:Local Folders... (Score:2, Informative)

      by iantri ( 687643 )
      I don't use Mozilla Mail so I don't know for sure, but I think this may have something to do with IMAP -- normally with IMAP all your mail is stored on the server (so the e-mail client usually shows your remote folder tree as a tree under the name of the server).

      I would assume this is a place to store things locally.

  • Still no S/MIME! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by headqtrs ( 467875 )
    And Mozilla istelf has S/MIME for ages
  • For anyone still running glibc 2.2.5, try the French language release. It still works. Open with "thunderbird -UILocale en-US -contentLocale en-US" and it will start with English. You can download the French release at contrib-localized and it will go up in a few days. You can also find the old 0.3 release in contrib-localized.

  • .torrents are available (Score:3, Informative)

    by ksheka ( 189669 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @08:14AM (#7652936)
    Unofficially at http://www.metashops.co.uk/mozilla/

  • what's still WRONG with TB (Score:5, Interesting)

    by professorhojo ( 686761 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @08:14AM (#7652937)
    as a current outlook expresser who desperately wants to change, i'll cast my vote for a centralized inbox option.. i operate about 10 different email servers and thunderbird by default gives me 10 different inboxes with 10 sets of local folders.

    that's just ridiculous.

    there desperately needs to a centralized inbox layout option like in outlook/oex. without that, i'm staying where i am.

    prof.h.
  • I'm still puzzled as to why there's no multi-column sorting in Thunderbird. I want to dump Outlook Express, but I really rely on being able to sort my mail, first by whether it's been flagged, and second by the date it arrived. Every time a new Thunderbird release arrives, I dutifully download it, attempt to do a multi-column sort (so that flagged messages are first followed by all other email in order from newest to oldest), and then get bummed out because the feature isn't there.

    Habit is a strange thing

  • I want to switch...really I do... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by embo ( 133713 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @08:36AM (#7652981)
    But I NEED to be able to switch between HTML and plain text emails on the fly, between either one, with plain text as my default.

    Currently, if you have plain text as your default, there is no way that I'm aware of to switch to HTML for a single email except by going in and modifying the profile of that user to send as HTML. I need to be able to do this on the fly, with a single button or menu item, not because I want to, but because several of my customers use HTML, and I want to be able to click "New Mail", and choose how I'm sending it. Same for Replies, same for Forwards.

    Honestly, my Outlook 2000 does this pretty much how I want it (I could use an improvement or two in the quoting ability of replies, but that's neither here nor there). When Thunderbird does this the way I need it done, I will be the first one to switch permanently.

    Until then, I use it pretty much only with the --addressbook flag...Thunderbird has a great addressbook, in my opinion.

  • What's the point of using Thunder- and Firebird? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ANicknameSimilarToMi ( 730518 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @08:49AM (#7653013)
    What's the point of using Thunderbird and Firebird if you want a mail application *and* a browser? I always thought these projects were originally created to derive slim standalone applications from Mozilla with a smaller footprint. But memory usage seems no longer be a key issue.

    For example, if I open Mail/News and a Navigator window, Mozilla allocates 25,800 KB memory. If I open Thunderbird and Firebird, they use 18,972 KB and 15,888 KB which is together 34,860 KB and much more. (OS: WinXP)

    Personally, I don't expect this will change significantly (more than a few MB) till version 1.0 as developers are biased towards their own machines, for which memory is often a non issue (who can blame them). This is very pity, because it hinders many people (with old hardware) to use Firebird and Thunderbird as their standard browser and mail application.
    • I think you have hit the nail on the head. I adore Mozilla/firebird/T-bird and i've been selling them to others like a brimstone preacher but I really do wish they would work on the memory footprint. They induce serious HD groaning and thrashing on anything under 128M of RAM.

      Thats my only real complaint. Can we shrink the memory usage?

      Ok, I do have one more gripe, specifically with thunderbird but I think its MY problem as nobody else reports it. I can't get links from thunderbird (ANY part of thunderb
    • It's nice not to have your e-mail client crash when the browser does. Or to have to quit the mail reader when you want to quit the browser.

      That said, I still am using the suite.

    • Re:What's the point of using Thunder- and Firebird (Score:5, Informative)

      by *SECADM ( 223955 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @11:00AM (#7653444)
      Once GRE [mozilla.org] comes out, this problem will hopefully be solved because any application based on Gecko/XUL/XPCOM will be sharing a single instance of GRE installed on the machine.
    • The answer is simple.

      The old mozilla that you know is going to be discontinued soon enough. Firebird and Thunderbird will be replacing it.

      While mozilla is still being developed there is not too good of a reason to use FB/TB. You will not save much in terms of memory or gain much in terms of performance. That's okay though.

      The purpose of this split is so people who _don't_ want both can have just one. These people will see a significant reduction in memory usage and gain in performance.

  • One word... (Score:3, Funny)

    by wampus ( 1932 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @09:23AM (#7653104)
    Thundercougarfalconbird
  • How closely integrated will they (optionally) be?

    One of the features of Mozilla that I have used thousands of times is "Open link in new tab" from an e-mail message.

    As there is no standard interface (AFAIK) for tabbed browsing, I am a little worried that Thunderbird will not be able to do this for me, without specific integration with Firebird.

    So, for now, I'm still using Mozilla (even though Thunderbird and Firebird look so new and fresh!). But for how long will Mozilla be available?
    • If you get the Tabbrowser Extensions plugin for Firebird, you can configure it to be a single window application, with open in a tab as the default action. Then just use Thunderbird normally, click a link, and poof Firebird gets it in a new tab. And with Tbird 0.4 properly sending links to default browser in linux, it should work there too :)

      Disclaimer, I use this all the time and it works, but I'm running Win XP.

  • Fantastic, i havnt used windows for anything useful since thunderbird started to work :) I find that the releases are fairly quick too. I assume the release scheduel will coinside with firebird once they replace mozilla/seamonkey?? If thats the right name for the XPFE browser... forgets :)

    I'll download again, although i might have to wait for my woody install :( But the guy who takes care of those is pretty fast!

  • One question about Thunderbird 0.4 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ElGanzoLoco ( 642888 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @09:52AM (#7653181) Homepage
    One question about thunderbird 0.4, that I haven't been able to anwser by reading the release notes:
    Is the Outbox repaired?? I downloaded 0.3 a week ago, used it ever since, love it, except that it's seemingly impossible to put the outgoing mail in the Outbox or (Unsent mail), and sending it when I connect (yes I'm still on dialup). Yes, I DID install the "Offline" extension, it's crap:
    -no "send later" button (I have to use "ctrl-shift-enter"
    -when asked to "send later" it puts the email in the "unsent messages", which is fine. But why, when the messages are sent, do they get transfered to my account's "Outbox" folder instead of in the "Sent messages" folder?

    Is there any way to change that? I couldn't figure it out... I'm on dialup so there's no way I download the 0.4 version except if they have fixed the issue.

    Thanks!
  • or Linux users the ability to click on a URL in an e-mail and have it actually launch in your default web browser (how novel).

    For Linux users it's really novel comparing to what Windows users got:

    Windows users can copy and paste images (including screen shots) from the Windows clipboard into HTML mail compose.

    And it's just in December 2003! Wow! It took even less than a decade after Microsoft made it possible to their users! And it's only for Thunderbird on Windows platform, where, again, it's been al

  • System requirements posted for Linux are wrong (Score:4, Informative)

    by motorsabbath ( 243336 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @10:47AM (#7653399) Homepage
    The Thunderbird page states "Red Hat Linux 7.0 and higher", which is of course bullsh*t:

    ~/thunderbird > ./run-mozilla.sh thunderbird-bin
    thunderbird-bin: /lib/libpthread.so.0: version `GLIBC_2.3.2' not found (required by ./libnspr4.so)

    I wish they'd either build it against 2.3.1 or change the posted system requirements... One can find versions built for older GLIBCs if one want's to trawl the fora and newsgroups...

    Nice app, otherwise.
  • I installed Thunderbird after it was last mentioned on Slashdot. One thing I found is it is a great way to backup mail from Outlook Express. You just delete the Thunderbird data (read the help file) and the next time you start it, it asks you if you want to import mail. Just click the Import option for Outlook Express, and it takes all the mail in OE and imports it into a plain txt format that, if all else fails, you could use Notepad to read (unlike OE, which would take an act of Congress to read if for some reason the data files were separated from the OE program).

    As far as using Thunderbird full time, I would like to, but I actually have several years of e-mails stored in OE and when they are all imported into Thunderbird, it sure makes the old bird fly slow.

    Note I also use e-Backup from http://www.inachis.com/index.htm to backup and restore an OE mail database. It has worked great and it is pretty good at replicating an OE setup between different machines as well (e.g. backup your home machine and restore it at work).

    Yes, I am a microsoft basher and I'm wanting to move to Linux in the next year or so, but I will confess, outside of the virus thing, OE isn't as bad as some people make it out to be.

    Usurper_ii

    • One thing I forgot to mention when using Thunderbird to backup OE e-mail. If you use the method I mentioned above to import the mail, it will only import the mail from the default OE e-mail account. Since we have multiple users, you would actually have to change the default account for each account you wanted to import. One thing that would be very useful would be for Thunderbird to ask which identity it wanted to import!!!

      But still, it is free...so it is hard to complain too much.

      Usurper_ii

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