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]

Still no call-out to a browser?

[devphil]

Coincidentally, I decided to switch to firefox+thunderbird (or, failing that, firefox+mozillamail) just last night. And they seem nice and all, but it's infuriatingly stupid that

• clicking on a mailto link in firefox doesn't bring up thunderbird, or anything else
• clicking on links in thunderbird -- whether in a message, or in a thunderbird dialog bix -- doesn't bring up a browser

I understand and appreciate that, unlike Windows, there's no standard *nix API for these sorts of things. But it looks like

Re:Still no call-out to a browser?

[Derek Pomery]

Sounds like you'd really be happier with the complete suite.
That way your irc:// links will work, your mailto: links...

For someone who depends on all the pieces with complete integration, what's wrong with just using the suite?
(yes, I know someone will spout some B.S. about bloat. They use the Gecko base people! Odds are Mozilla will use *less* memory since the libraries are more likely to be shared while you just might have different Thunderbird/Firebird versions.

Re:Still no call-out to a browser?

[devphil]

Um, no. It's not BS.

I don't know what Gecko is. I don't care. I shouldn't have to.

What I do know is that Mozilla takes 10+ seconds to start up on my Linux box, and has fewer extensions and whatnot that I can find. For some of our debug-mode product builds, I have to quit Mozilla to free up enough swap space.

Firefox loads in a blink, and never needs to go away.

I'm not asking for complete integration. I know that there's going to be some duplication, e.g., now I have to enter my master password

Re:Still no call-out to a browser?

[{X-Frog}]

Well for me it works.

I'm using gnome, so to do that all I needed to do was to go in Application --> Desktop Preferences --> Advanced --> Preferred Applications
And there, I set my default browser and my default mail client!

Re:Still no call-out to a browser?

[drinkypoo]

If it makes you feel any better, thunderbird on my windows xp system won't launch firefox, which IS set as my default browser. I have to copy and paste links.

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

Re:Release Notes

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget next year we get to hear that Thunderbird 1.0 is one year old! It's the damn birthday stories that annoy me.

Re:Release Notes

[Sivar]

Reaching 1.0 is a big deal, because certain PHBs will not allow the installation of "beta" products.

I agree it is kind of irritating when every dot release of every major OSS project is announced though.

Re:Release Notes

[Eil]

Seriously, I don't get how exactly this stuff is news. It's getting tiresome already. I wouldn't mind if it was once a year or something "Thunderbird 2.0 is now out", but it's every week or so and its brutal (Thunderbird 1.0.1b is out!).

Well, you could always do what the rest of us do when we come across a story on the Slashdot home page that doesn't really interest us:

Scroll down a few lines and proceed to the next one.

Give it a shot, you'll be amazed how well it works.

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]

Why ADD a calendar??

[Savet Hegar]

Why does everyone think an e-mail program needs a calendar?

An e-mail program doesn't need a calendar any more than a web browser does. Nor does it need one any more than a file sharing program does.

If you want a calendar program, get a calendar program.

Re:Why ADD a calendar??

[COMON$]

Usually when you are corresponding to people it is nice to have their contact information integrated into the program that manages your appointments. A calendar is a simple program that can easily be integrated into any organizational program. Also FTP and Web have little to do with appointments. Whereas most of the appointments I make a day come from e-mails. Really nice to be able to tie that calendar entry into the thread that preempted the meeting I need to go to. I think the real question is why wou

Re:Why ADD a calendar??

[shellbeach]

For some people, work /= meetings.

work = work / meetings ???

Thus the amount of work you do is inversely proportional to the number of meetings you have ... OK, I'll agree with that!

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:Why ADD a calendar??

[chowells]

> Why does everyone think an e-mail program needs a calendar?

Because people with slightly more sophisticated scheduling needs than yours find it useful, for example, to easily be able to e-mail deatails of appointments and so on to other people. The integration between an email client and calendar can help to facilitate this.

Re:Why ADD a calendar??

[Savet Hegar]

I implemented a web based calender running on php and mysql for my entire office. My employees can check and update their calendar from anywhere.

You're right. My schedule isn't sophisticated enough to need someone else to build additional bloat into my e-mail program.

Re:Why ADD a calendar??

[gad_zuki!]

So now they have to run the "bloat" web browser to get to another server to do something they should be doing with the email app that contains all their contacts.

Yeah, there are other solutions, but the lack of calendaring in TB is keeping it from hitting a Firefox-like lovefest. It may not be an issue for you, but it is for others.

Integrated groupware/calendar is whats needed to compete with Outlook. Period. Not everyone is a savvy php programmer with servers and an organization to control.

Re:Why won't they add a calendar?

[T-Ranger]

The buzz word is not "email client" but "personal information manager". Of course, these are two different things. The later requires the former, but not the other way around.

Just as Firefox is a lean, mean, browsing machine, Thunderbird should be a lean, mean, email reading machine. If you want a calendar, then get something else.

Icons

[ack154]

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

Re:Icons

[gclef]

Actually, one of the things I'd love to see in Thunderbird, but may take a while, is tabbed accounts similar to the tabbed browsing for Mozilla. In other words, each email account would appear in Thunderbird as a tab. (You could put a little email icon in the tab if that account has new mail.)

That would (I think) clear up some valuable window real-estate for those of us with multiple email accounts.

Redirect (was Re:Icons

[frisket]

Tabbed accounts would be cool. I'm downloading it as I write, so I haven't seen it yet, but The One Thing missing last time was a Redirect feature (like Evolution's Redirect, or Elm's "B" button) which lets me forward mail to the right person without making it look like I sent it -- it preserves the original From and Sender and Reply-To so that the recipient can work as if the mail was originally sent to them.

This is utterly essential for anyone working in support, as you constantly get mail which needs to

Memory Footprint

[TrollBridge]

Maybe it's just my own perception, but Thunderbird seems to be a bit bulky, judging by how long it takes to open. Am I totally out of my league here, or is Thunderbird a little chunky?

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?

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.

Re:Memory Footprint

[sparkhead]

Seems a little large here as well. On Windows I've been running Foxmail since forever, and it does everything mail related very well in much less memory.

The RSS/newsgroup functionality of Thunderbird is great, but the memory footprint is huge.

Re:Memory Footprint

[at2000]

Agree. When I was running it on PIII 700 + 128MB RAM, it is really a lot slower than Outlook Express. But on P4 1.4G + 256MB RAM it rocks! Even better on faster machines.

Re:Memory Footprint

[ConceptJunkie]

It is a little sluggish, however, it's still an order of magnitude (literally) faster than Outlook when both have a large message store.

Outlook was taking 30 seconds or more to open a folder, which was one of the reasons I dropped it for Thunderbird several months ago.

Ironically, Outlook Express never had this kind of problem.

Re:Memory Footprint

[Paleomacus]

It's that 'Express' in the title. It makes things go faster!

Re:Memory Footprint

[ConceptJunkie]

It also doesn't lose data once your store gets to about a gig or gig-and-a-half in size, so I guess "Express" also means "doesn't suck".

(Frickin' two minute thingy completely infuriates me. Hey, Slashbots, some of us can think fast enough to write more than once good comment every two minutes. I suggest one minute (and 15 seconds for writing a comment, because quick witty responses don't always take 20 seconds. I'm really sick of "Slow down, cowboy." Wake up, CowboyNeal, et al, I'm not the usual mouth-

Re:Memory Footprint

[soulsteal]

You mention Outlook, so I assume you had all your mail stored in PST files on the hard drive. Outlook has trouble with PST files thaty get to around 1.5 GB or so. At that size, PST access gets sluggish. There's a hard-coded limit somewhere around 2 GB that, once you reach it, will corrupt your data.

This can be avoided by making multiple PST files.

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.

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:Memory Footprint

[rindeee]

Thunderbird? Chunky? Thunderchunky(Props to late 80's prep-rappers "DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince).

Re:Memory Footprint

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's chunky, but being able to run the newest Thunderbird is worth the cost of you upgrading to a 486.

Re:Memory Footprint

[Chris_Jefferson]

Just FYI, I've just installed 1.0. It does here (512MB, 1.2Ghz) seem noticably nippier than 0.9, both in terms of opening folders and starting up.

Any other choice?

[at2000]

If I don't want Outlook Express, Mozilla Mail&News and Mozilla Thunderbird, what else *Open Source* e-mail clients can I choose in Windows?

Re:Any other choice?

[oexeo]

> what else *Open Source* e-mail clients can I choose in Windows?

Pirated Outlook.

Re:Any other choice?

[oexeo]

The parent listed Outlook Express in context to "open source" I took him to mean "free" as opposed to the actual definition of "open source."

Re:Any other choice?

[dolphinling]

Well does Win2k come with an email client? :-P

Re:Any other choice?

[Jugalator]

Hmm, what specific features are you looking for in your mail client, exactly?

Re:Any other choice?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://sylpheed-claws.sourceforge.net/win32/ [sourceforge.net]

Re:Any other choice?

[colinleroy]

Incidentally, Sylpheed-Claws win32 maintainer has just returned after a long period of inactivity (or rather, real-life activity), and has released the win32 version of sylpheed-claws 0.9.13 just yesterday, a few hours after the regular 0.9.13 version.

Are you simply too lazy?

[aug24]

I googled [google.com] and found this [sourceforge.net] in thirty secords...

J.

Re:Are you simply too lazy?

[jxs2151]

Following this logic, in about three years there will be no discussion of anything on the Internet since the answer to every question will be to Google for it.

This will work for a while until we reach the point where new knowledge cannot be "Googled" because the prospect for new content for Google has been sabatouged by people who reply with "Google for it" to every question.

Get it?

Re:Any other choice?

[Finuvir]

If I don't want Outlook Express, Mozilla Mail&News and Mozilla Thunderbird, what else *Open Source* e-mail clients can I choose in Windows?

Telnet

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)

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 c

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, yo

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.

Re:Any other choice?

[MoThugz]

Why must you restrict it to Open Source ones?

If it's a matter of $$$, there are lots of good freeware email clients out there.

If you're really someone who does things "in the spirit of libre software", you wouldn't be using Windows in the first place.

So there are tons of them... check out freshmeat.net or nonags.com to see some.

Re:Any other choice?

[value_added]

Mutt.

No, really. It sucks less than all the others.

Really.

Re:Any other choice?

[ceeam]

Any reason you insist on Open _Source_? Are you going to hack on it / compile your own version? Or are you just expecting others to do it? If so - why would that matter to you whether it's Open Source or just free as in beer? I just ask because I kinda believe / am interested in "cheap software model". I mean - > $100 is outrageous for an OS that includes basically nothing and sold in close to billion numbers. OTOH - $10 would be a fair price and still may give developers some incentive to work on it (no

Re:Any other choice?

[Nimey]

Grab the Cygwin installer and have it install mutt.

But will it let me backup my mail store?

[ConceptJunkie]

Or do I have to wander the maze of twisty little directories in Microsoft's "Documents and Settings" directory to find where it stores mail.

Remember, it's in "Application Data" and not "Local Settings\Application Data", and also please note all these directories for hidden for some stupid reason.

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

Don't get me wrong, I love using Thunderbird and switched from Outlook shortly after I realized how deeply flawe

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

[Finuvir]

You've always been able to specify mail directory locations. I don't have a copy of Thunderbird here right now (my home directory in college is barely enough for Firefox) but I believe the option is in Account Settings (seperate for each account, though I presume there's an option for the new global inbox too).

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.

Using Profile Manager to move store location

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Do you still have to create a dummy set-up in the default place before you can do this? In previous versions, it seemed to be necessary, and then you created a new profile with the data store wherever you wanted it, but it was always counter-intuitive for users and a pain for those of us hackers who wanted to shift things around until we worked out what it was doing There must be an easier way...

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

[MobyDisk]

That's like complaining that a Linux application stores user data in the user's home directory and system-level data in /etc. That's the standard, it's how all applications are supposed to work. FireFox follows Microsoft's standards to the letter, thus allowing multiple users to have separate FireFox profiles, and allowing non-administrators to run the software. (Woe is me! If only most off-the-shelf applications adhered to that standard) And yes, you can override those settings if you want.

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

[ConceptJunkie]

FireFox follows Microsoft's standards to the letter

I realize that. So where are the "backup" and "restore" features? I use robocopy from the appropriate directory, but it would be nice if this were implemented in the app. When I reinstalled after replacing a harddrive, I had to find the data store, copy it, and after I reinstalled Thunderbird, copy that directory back in and pray it would actually work.

Fortunately it did, but this is not user-friendly by any definition.

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: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.

MOOX optimized versions?

[zippity8]

Has anyone tried these? I was googling for a torrent and came across this win32 optimized version (depending on your processor).

MOOX optimized versions [www.moox.ws]
NOTE: This is a third party / unofficial build.

Re:MOOX optimized versions?

[DJ-Dodger]

Yep, I swear by them. The M2 build is significantly snappier on my Athlon XP at home and the M3 build is significanlty snappier on my P4 at work.

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:MOOX optimized versions?

[ConceptJunkie]

I'm sure any difference is completely unnoticeable, because like most apps, e-mail would be highly I/O bound.

Just how much horsepower could an e-mail app need?

CCK please

[lopingrhondo]

I'm still waiting for a Firefox/Thunderbird CCK that will let me customize them in a way that would make distribution worthwhile here at work. NS through 7.1 gave us the ability to make custom accounts and mail settings before install. Yes, we use Netscape as the default browser/mail suite here. We do exist!

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:CCK please

[dolphinling]

Ignore my comment above, I didn't read closely enough.

Have you tried editing the default profile? I do that with Firefox at school so I don't need to redo my settings for every computer.

extensions

[alatesystems]

I wish the moz foundation would implore the popular extension makers to update their version string. If I upgrade when it comes out, I'm screwed on all my extensions. If I wait, I'm going "when can i upgrade, when can i upgrade?"

I lose either way. This time I'm going to wait instead of upgrading from .9 for a while until the extensions are ready.

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: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.

Re:extensions

[dolphinling]

I think the new (as in still in beta, not being used yet) update.mozilla.org will have the ability to automatically update the version string (but don't quote me on that).

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:Torrent

[dolphinling]

They're not gonna take anywhere close to the same beating they got for Firefox. Firefox has a lot more hype than Thunderbird.

Re:Torrent

[youngerpants]

OK, OK,

I'm just a karma whore ;)

In Other News

[NardofDoom]

"Thunderbird Bad for Advertisers"

"My business has been cut ten fold by this communist software" say veteran spammer Ima A Shole. "I don't know how anyone expects to have free web sites if they don't let independent businessmen like me advertise porn and \/|@gr.r.r.a."

Huh?

[sammyo]

Shouldn't there be a name change at a full dot release?

Ba ding. :-) :-)

T-Bird is missing "Combine and Decode"

[way2slo]

I have been using T-Bird 0.8 for a while and am generally pleased. However, I still have to fire up Outlook Express once in a while to do one thing. Usenet Newsgroups. Why? T-Bird has no "Combine and Decode" feature.

Most Newsgroups require that a posted message be no larger than a certain size so to post large files, like mp3's, you must split them appart into several seperate posts. Without the Combine and Decode functionality you cannot put the pieces back together again.

Granted, Usenet Newsgorups have not gained as much popularity as the rest of the internet but it would still be nice to have. And until this feature is added to T-Bird, then Usenet users like myself will still be forced to use OE. Basically, why run two e-mail clients? It's not a good idea for the average user, so they are going to stick with OE.

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

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

"Find" is painful to use

[Sandor at the Zoo]

I read a number of mailing list digests, and Thunderbird's "Find" is sooooo painful to use. Here's the scenario: the digest has a list of Subjects from individual emails in the digest. I see one of interest.

I select the subject of interest. Instead of having a "enter selection for find" command, I have to copy and paste. Fine. However, if the Find dialog is already up, when I hit ctrl-F, the text in the Find dialog isn't selected; I have to select the text, then paste my subject into the box.

Then I click the Find button. It finds the text and shows it to me at the very bottom of the window. This is so annoying that it's nearly beyond belief. I have to scroll down a bunch to see any context whatsoever.

So, my request for two enhancements:

• When you hit ctrl-F, select the frickin' text in the Find dialog.
• When you scroll the message window to show found text, scroll the found area to the vertical center of the window, not the very bottom.

OK, so go ahead and flame me for a) not just fixing the application myself, and b) not trying to figure out how to file my own bugs.

In my own defense, a) I have a day job and a life at night, and b) I started to file some bugs and direction number 1 was "download Mozilla and see if the same bug appears there". I don't use Mozilla, have no interest in it, and don't feel like jumping through hoops to file bugs.

OK, call me cranky. :-)

Happy Holidays!

Looking to switch

[dfj225]

Recently my parents got an email in outlook express that will cause the program to lock up simply by clicking on the message (even with preview off). So, I'm looking to switch them to Thunderbird for a more stable and secure system. I would like to get their mail from OE into Thunderbird, but I think the mail database that OE creates might be corrupt. I'll give 1.0 a shot tonight and see how things fair.

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...)

Palm sync?

[D'Arque Bishop]

First off, congrats to the Mozilla Thunderbird team; I switched to Thunderbird months ago and have been EXTREMELY happy with it, with one exception. Kudos on reaching 1.0.

Now, the exception I just mentioned happens to be Palm sync capabilities. I managed to get an extension downloaded and installed a version or two ago, but the data would only sync once (changes I made later to the Visor's address book wouldn't sync to Thunderbird), and I couldn't get the extension to install properly in later versions. I can't imagine that I'm the only one who wants to sync a PalmOS-based device to Thunderbird, or that I'm the only one who's had this problem. Checking Google has been little help, either...

Again, except for this one problem, Thunderbird works great for me. Is there any idea when I can expect this one annoyance to be fixed? (Or get some confirmation I'm the only one having this issue...)

Maybe I'll Switch

[Euphonious Coward]

If Evolution ends up depending on Mono, I might have to switch to Thunderbird someday. As it is, I have Vim as my editor, running via Evo's Bonobo support, which will probably be going away (maybe it already has in the current version).

I wonder how I'll get Vi editing in the brave new world of modern GUI mailers. Most likely I'll end up back on Mutt. Virtual folders are nice, though. E-mail clients still have a long way to go, for something we spend so much time using.

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]

RSS integration?

[Suppafly]

I never understood the idea of RSS integration into a mail client.. RSS is generally used to keep up with web data, so why wouldn't you have RSS built into the browser, not the mail client. RSS integration in a mail client is just bloat.

Re:RSS integration?

[Just Some Guy]

It really depends on your perception of RSS. If you think of it as a way to get mini web-pages, then it would make sense to view a feed in a browser. On the other hand, if you think of RSS as a customizable message delivery system or a read-only mailing list, then it makes sense to view a feed from the same client you use to view your other incoming messages.

Personally, see it as the latter. For me, it seems perfectly reasonable for RSS feeds to appear as folders in my mail client where I already use c

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.

Still missing much needed features..

[d_jedi]

like combine and decode (ie. multi-part messages),
yEnc encoding,
etc.

Still not feature complete

[anticypher]

1.0 means they have transitioned from alpha grade early release project to a first beta release.

Thunderbird is missing too many basic features to allow it to be rolled out to corporate users, or family members, or just about anyone not 100% geek. It still doesn't handle outgoing servers correctly. Filtering is difficult to use, can't deal with IMAP correctly, and sometimes just doesn't work at all.

The spam filtering still needs a lot of work, there needs to be an option to white list the entire set of local (and/or ldap) address books, not just a single one. When people keep separate address books for business and personal contacts, you then have to choose which book to whitelist. There's been a bug in bugzilla for quite a while now on that one.

LDAP incompatibilities, IMAP SSL handling, customisable UI, IPv6 support, the list goes on and on. I would have prefered if the dev team spent a few more months dealing with all the little problems that will keep this entirely out of business rollouts, and fixed the minor bugs which have lingered forever.

Maybe with the 1.0 early beta release, the current dev team will move on, and more capable Open Source volunteers will step up and finish the job. I, like many others, were driven away from the forums and bugzilla because of hostile attitudes and incessant bickering over extremely minor points. We tried to help, but some FLOSS projects aren't as deserving as others.

I haven't been able to convince anyone to switch over to 0.9 from outlook, or even Pine (so you know its got to suck). No major feature requests were addressed between 0.9 and 1.0, this is just a minor incremental release.

Yeah, call me cranky too!
the AC

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.

Re:Someone help me out

[Penguinoflight]

Mozilla is where the innovation is right now. 1.8alpha 5 is very stable, and its more evolved than either firefox or thunderbird. Runs faster too.

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: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,

Re:Someone help me out

[Single GNU Theory]

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).

Mozilla has, as far as I know, always been the codename for Netscape Navigator. Marc Andreessen worked on a web browser called NCSA Mosaic, and later, Netscape Navigator. Navigator was more powerful/featureful than Mosaic, so it was called Mozilla.

Re:Someone help me out

[Spectre]

I have a 4-digit UID ... and still use "pine" (and for that matter "mail") for e-mail. These new-fangled GUI e-mailers don't work so well when telnetted over a SSL link to the dial-up computer us old-timers keep in a closet at home ...

Re:Contact groups

[Jokkey]

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

Re:isn't the update available supposed to work?

[prandal]

Software update is broken in Thunderbird IIRC.