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Mozilla The Internet Communications

Thunderbird 1.5 Arrives 399

Tech Support writes "Thunderbird 1.5 is here! It's ready to download, so get going. Finally, Firefox 1.5 has its counterpart. New features included automatic updates, anti-phishing protection, inline spellchecking, saved search folders, podcasting, RSS improvements, the ability to delete attachments from messages, and a whole lot more."
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Thunderbird 1.5 Arrives

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  • Ubuntu packages (Score:2, Interesting)

    by gsasha ( 550394 )
    Are there packages for (K)Ubuntu available for it somewhere?
    And while we are at it, are there [semi-]official Firefox 1.5 packages Ubuntu?
    • Thunderbird 1.5 has the potential to be in Backports eventually. Firefox will never be an official backport for Ubuntu 5.10. If you really want Firefox 1.5 in Ubuntu 5.10, there's an article on the Ubuntu wiki describing several ways to install it without hurting programs that depend on Firefox 1.0.x. I'm not aware of a .deb package for Ubuntu 5.10 to properly install Firefox 1.5 alongside the existing Firefox 1.0.x.

      You could also pick up Dapper early, which is what I've done, but I also have a 5G iPod and

    • Look at the following two links: http://wiki.ubuntu.com/ThunderbirdNewVersion [ubuntu.com] and http://wiki.ubuntu.com/FirefoxNewVersion [ubuntu.com].
      The page on Thunderbird still refers to 1.5rc1, but I think the same instructions apply (with the obvious changes).
  • ie the one the replying to the email from is located?

    Actually, I stopped using Thunderbird when I lost all my email in my last Windows backup/restore. Now I just use my Gmail from Firefox account. Does it have anything cool in it that means there's actually a point in using an email client any more, or do I just stick with my browser?
    • Why not use IMAP? IMO, it's the best of both worlds: Messages are stored on the server, so you can still get them (from anywhere) if your client stops working, and you get all of the nice features of Thunderbird.
      • by n00tz ( 926304 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @09:16AM (#14453719) Homepage
        If IMAP isn't available for your email: Thunderbird allows you to "leave the (POP) messages on the server", "don't delete (from server) until moved from inbox", and "fetch headers only" from server.

        I use "leave messages on server" and "Don't Delete" functions for portability as well as being able to access the same mailbox(es) from multiple computers(ie. pulling my personal mail to my work computer and leaving it available for home computer, or pulling my gmail account email to the email client and keeping it available on webmail too).

        I also backup my %root%/Documents and Settings/%username%/Application Data/Thunderbird folder to keep my email settings the same as they were pre-reformat if I'm doing a backup before I reinstall windows every ~3 months or so. You can do the same with Firefox, but I have run into some problems if I saved said profile folder from one version and tried to port it into a new version. The easy fix is to make sure you keep the installer from the last version of software, replace the profile folder, and upgrade with the newest installer.
      • by MemRaven ( 39601 ) <(moc.eilywkrik) (ta) (krik)> on Thursday January 12, 2006 @09:48AM (#14454022)
        The problem is that it's pretty easy to get a pretty massive web-mail account these days (free for GMail, very little cost for anybody else), but try getting an IMAP account with 2GB+ of mail space. I mean, seriously. If I could find one, I would gladly pay a reasonable amount of money for it, but I've never seen one that offers:
        • A reasonable (1GB+) amount of disk space.
        • IMAP and webmail access.
        I've seen various combinations (particularly a large amount of disk space with POP), but never a really good IMAP service. If someone knows of one please let me know!
        • I guess I just cheat, by running my own IMAP server ;-)

          Still, it's great to have, especially after my school's CompSci department's IMAP server got me hooked.

          I really like what I can do with Cyrus IMAP, though, especially with the sieve server-side filtering. Really nice to have my mail-filter rules independent of my mail client too.
        • by Heartz ( 562803 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @10:14AM (#14454283) Homepage
          Consider http://www.fastmail.fm [fastmail.fm]. I've been using them for a good few years now and they've been rock solid. The best part of the service is that they have a neutral forum hosted at the popular EmailDiscussions.com [emaildiscussions.com] forums. Here you can read genuine uncensored feedback about their service.

          Their largest account comes with 2GB's of space, IMAP/POP, Spam Assasin, Sieve, 250MB of file space and tonnes more other things. All for only 40bucks a year. They have other plans, so you can pick and choose what you need.

  • On autosave when there are embedded images in html mail?

     
  • There was one thing that Outlook 2003 got right and that was the tiling of the folder, inbox and message panes vertically. Has this got it? Or does this need an extension?
  • by aphoenix ( 877085 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @08:52AM (#14453493)
    That's a tasty feature. Why isn't there a "Spread Thunderbird" website? mmm... Spread...
  • by Adult film producer ( 866485 ) <van@i2pmail.org> on Thursday January 12, 2006 @08:52AM (#14453501)
    I hope they've fixed some of the more glaring bugs, such as when an email has lots and lots of attachments that fill up the window, making it next to impossible to read the content of the email (the attachment bucket at the bottom just grows and grows, with no way to shrink it.)

    I also notice that when having "Full Headers" viewable, it's impossible to read the content of the email.
    • by Derek Pomery ( 2028 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @09:26AM (#14453806)
      Trivial to fix with a custom userChrome.css stylesheet.
      I don't have Thunderbird, but I had problem with expanded headers so I simply did the following: /* if full headers are enabled, trigger a scrollbar after ten lines */
      #msgHeaderView
      {
      max-height: 10em;
      overflow: auto;
      } /* keep the enigmail box from creating a scrollbar - annoying */
      #expandedEnigmailBox
      {
      max-width: 80em;
      }

      I don't know if the DOM Inspector is available for Thunderbird, but every time I want to
      tweak the suite a little, I actually edit it. No harder than editing a web page.
      • by frankie ( 91710 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @10:38AM (#14454502) Journal
        Trivial to fix with a custom userChrome.css

        No, apparently it's not. CSS patches have been tried, and for some reason it doesn't work right for the attachment pane. See the following bugs for details (copy link to a new tab, slashdot referrer is blocked):

        • bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=223340
        • bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=242531

        If you can find a css tweak that works, please submit a patch.

    • Message filtering is still archaic.

      Someone had some fun playing with XUL and changed the interface, but the core message filtering is still an All or Any situation.
  • Several versions ago, I tried to import all of my mail from Outlook (8 years worth, not ready to abandon my mail archive yet), and Thunderbird did a horrible job of it, preventing me from switching mail platforms.
    I'll give it another shot with this version, as I would love to be able to get away from Outlook once and for all.
  • Upgrade (Score:3, Funny)

    by Doggan ( 945328 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @08:56AM (#14453535) Homepage
    That's a 1.5-1.07 => .43/1.07 => .401*100 => 40.1% upgrade!
  • Threading (Score:3, Interesting)

    by aussie_a ( 778472 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @08:58AM (#14453551) Journal
    I've found Gmail's threading to be much more superior over Thunderbird's (despite Gmail's simplicity in threading, or perhaps because of it). Has thunderbird improved in this regard?
  • In Portage already? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Metasquares ( 555685 ) <<slashdot> <at> <metasquared.com>> on Thursday January 12, 2006 @09:01AM (#14453584) Homepage
    Wow, mozilla-thunderbird-1.5 is already in Portage. The binary isn't yet, though.
  • by CTho9305 ( 264265 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @09:01AM (#14453585) Homepage
    If you like an integrated suite, be sure to give SeaMonkey [mozilla.org] a try. It's got pretty much the same features as Thunderbird 1.5, but also includes a browser and more.
  • Can you filter cross posts in usenet? I ask because the functionality is there in mozilla, it just hasn't been exposed in the UI.

    Mozilla also has a bug that if you filter on one author it takes out the entire thread instead of just that author and replies to him/her.

    Does Thunderbird go beyond that bug?
  • by timbck2 ( 233967 ) <<moc.liamg> <ta> <2kcbmit>> on Thursday January 12, 2006 @09:10AM (#14453656) Homepage
    Can anyone say "feature creep"?

  • I guess I'm stuck with web mail and OLK. Sad but true.
    Until I can print an address book with more than 3-4 contacts per page with something else that OLK, I'm stuck.

  • Does it have.... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Zedrick ( 764028 )
    the option to use pure text? That is, no HTML what so ever. Not in the text, not when qouting, not ever? I've read a million howtos about this (for previous versions, on Win and Linux), but haven't been able to totally disable HTML - afaik it's not possible. Somebody please correct me.
  • no changes since RC2 (Score:5, Informative)

    by AndyST ( 910890 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @09:22AM (#14453765)
    If you had 1.5rc2 installed: Scott MacGregor wrote [mozillazine.org] that the 1.5 release has no changes since rc2. So you won't need to update unless you really want that build date (like me)
  • No need to download if you have 1.5 RC2 installed already, there have been no changes.
  • The Mailer I want (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Thursday January 12, 2006 @09:25AM (#14453803)
    Thunderbird is ok. Really ok. It multi-plattform, uses mbox, has some cool automation/filtering and is relatively easy to set up and recover on all plattforms.
    Yet it still looks like a software that's aping last decades Outlook/Netscape Mail crappyness.
    What I whish for is this:

    Three-Divided is the 5uXX0rz!!1!1!!11ONE!
    Default non-three-divided screen. Three-devided is pointless. It sucks. It really does. Nobody really needs it and it definitely is bad as a default setting. If at all it should be optional. This is one thing that elitistware called Mutt actually really does right. I'd like Thunderbird with tabbed fullscreen folder, mails, read and edit views. With easy switching up and down the herachy with Ctrl.-Arrow or something. It can't be that hard, no?

    Encryption. All variants. Out of the box.
    Zero-hassle, zero compile this, semi-maybe-works-if-your-lucky pseudo wannabe plugin encryption. As in: Start Mailer, Klick "Encryption", Klick "Make Key" and get rolling. It can't that hard, or? KMail and Thunderbird have be practically lying about this to the community for years. Both say they support encrytion. Fact is, they don't. Enigmail is compiling agains a moving target and rarely hits - i couldn't get it to run once - and KMail encryption, despite their bold marketing claims on the projects website, is Vaporware. Pure and utter.

    (Note to KMail: If I have to compile at least 2 different frameworks, including downloading some rare, bizar Aegypten library kit and, on top of that, fiddle with some arcane pseudo-plugin architecture in order to get a "KMail Encryption Plugin" running, then KMail does not offer a Plugin. A plugin is just that: You Plug it in and it just works. Bottom line: Please quit lying to your users. It pisses them off. qed)

    If only a mailer would offer these features, one could actually presume that E-Mail clients have arived in the 21st century. Until then all mailers suck. One way or the other.
    • "Nobody really needs it and it definitely is bad as a default setting."

      Except I do. In my case, and I'd suspect a number of folk at the uni I work for, it allows me to see my inbox contents, an open email, and all the umpteen bboards I subscribe at the same college telling me which ones have new messages in them. Unless I'm misunderstanding what you meant...
    • Thunderbird has S/MIME support built in, no plugins needed. So does Apple Mail, so you can communicate with Mac users.

      http://kb.mozillazine.org/Installing_an_SMIME_cert ificate [mozillazine.org]

      I use it. It works. Mailing lists tend to fsck up signatures, though.
    • Why is three-divided so bad according to you? Just curious. I like it a lot personally. I have a lot of folders (more then hundred) due to various mailing lists I'm subscribed too. So this is all very conveniant that I can easily switch between those folders.

      Greetings,
  • by Vo0k ( 760020 )
    I just downloaded and installed it. I need it to read/extract content of orders from customers - they come to a different mailbox I don't have access to, and I get them as .eml files.
    Starts ok. Loads .eml files okay. But if I want to start it by doubleclicking an .eml file, it shows "d is not a registered protocol". Huh?
  • by twelvemonkeys ( 689012 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @09:32AM (#14453859)
    I've been using 1.5 since RC1, and as much as I was looking forward to having this feature, I've had disabled inline spellchecking because it's not quite ready for prime time.

    Try replying to a large email (100K+) -- Thunderbird will choke and your CPU usage will go through the roof, as Thunderbird inexplicably tries to spellcheck words you've not written in the previous email history. I've had Thunderbird choke for over 10 minutes on certain emails before I finally had to kill the process.

    Hoping they fixed this one for 1.5-final.

    • TB has never really scaled... it slows down as your inbox gets larger for example - now takes over 3 minutes to open one of my work inboxes (10,000+ messages).

      Plus there's being unable to reply before it's downloaded the attachments to the message (you just get a blank email instead of the original text quoted).

      Funnily enough the best for large stuff seems to be Outlook Express. Only that's basically unusable because it doesn't do quoting correctly and you have to manually edit the message (trying doing th
      • TB has never really scaled... it slows down as your inbox gets larger for example - now takes over 3 minutes to open one of my work inboxes (10,000+ messages).

        I think that would be fairly true of any email app with that many messages. Maybe it's time to archive a little? One quick and dirty way to do it is to zip your mail folder, store it someplace else, then delete the first 9000 (or so) messages. If you need 'em that bad, it won't take long to restore them. (Having said all that, some sort of arch

  • Since this release equals RC2 I think some of you might encounter this problem I had (and the solution took a while to find). On Linux (SuSE 9.2, in my case), using the archive, the first time I started the shell-script "thunderbird", an error occured and the whole thing crashed. The error message includes the line "Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server" (Gurus might know what this means, I didn't.). The solution is to open a shell and navigate to you thunderbird directory, execute "xhost +", then "
  • What about compatibility with my existing Outlook .pst files. I have just about every email saved from ~1999 in my main .pst. It is pretty large these days. Now, I understand that Thunderbird does provide import tools, but I'm always afraid of something getting lost in the translation. Not to mention, it might take a while to import from a 1GB .pst file. It would be a heck of a lot easier if Thunderbird could just connect directly to my .pst file, but I don't see any mention of the concern in the Thund
  • Great, now if only they could actually put some work into improving the Mozilla Address Book...
  • is good Bayesian filtering of spam.
    I really miss the SpamBayes [sourceforge.net] plugin that I used in Outlook. And the standalone server option doesn't work nearly as well for me.

    Most people don't need this, but I want this, also: the ability to hit a button and send all selected messages, as individual inline messages and not one attachment, to an address or two I have previously specified. Why? Because I want to send all the spam I select to uce@ftc.gov and to Spamcop.
  • Do you think that's a good idea?
  • by enmane ( 805543 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @10:01AM (#14454150)
    So we'll have TBird, Firefox, and a Calendar all running off 3 instances of the same runtime engine - hey, that's SMART!

    why not have the runtime engine built into all three products but only install if it isn't already present? Ya know, save memory and work on improving 1 engine instead of 3. Oh yeah, that's too smart and already exists as Mozilla (which was canned)...err...SeaMonkey.

    This is being brought to you by the same category of boffins that duped you into believing that tearing apart the StarOffice Suite would IMPROVE system response when, in fact, it has slowed things down about tenfold while using up MORE memory.

    I don't doubt that they are good products on their own but how about using a runtime engine that is already present instead of loading a new one each time - PAY ATTENTION SUN AND OO.ORG.

    The regression of these 2 areas (i.e. Mozilla and openoffice) is so sad and considering that they are the 2 most used packages says something about the leaders of these software packages.

    For the life of me, I can't figure out:
    1) Why Sun dumped the integrated package and didn't make it opensource while opensourcing the split apps.
    2) Why the promise of increased speed hasn't been fulfilled?
    3) Why things would get 10x worse, in terms of speed, with OO?
    4) Why the FF and TB creaters aren't working on a common GRE? How many people DON'T use both at the same time?! I love the packages but after seeing the memory useage when using both and comparing to Mozilla, I quickly went back to the Mozilla Suite.

    Enough ranting for the day
    • by rklrkl ( 554527 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @10:48AM (#14454588) Homepage
      OK, so it's difficult to know how to Google for this one without knowing its name first, but it might be XULRunner [mozilla.org] that you're ranting about w.r.t. a single runtime engine to fire up apps like Firefox etc.

      I believe this is indeed the replacement name for what used to be known as "GRE" (Gecko Runtime Environment) and can be used for *any* XUL-based application, not just stuff coming out of the Moz development team. What's not clear to me yet is exactly when this will be complete enough to be used by Firefox etc. - maybe for 2.0, maybe not.

    • no, they don't (Score:4, Insightful)

      by penguin-collective ( 932038 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @12:36PM (#14455772)
      So we'll have TBird, Firefox, and a Calendar all running off 3 instances of the same runtime engine - hey, that's SMART!

      Yes, it is, because it means that they all can use different versions of the runtime engine.

      For the life of me, I can't figure out:

      Well, keep thinking about it, maybe eventually you will figure it out. It makes sense to me: Firefox, Thunderbird, and OOo get the job done with a memory footprint, speed, and release dates that I can live with. That's what counts.
  • 1. A Pocket PC version that syncs with Thunderbird.
    2. A calender function.
  • Disclaimer: I know it's open-source and free.

    Seems that 1.5 is 1.5RC2, which I've been using since it came out. So basically, they haven't fixed the tens of obvious and terrible IMAP bugs (like accounts failing to auto-check mail on startup; messages ending up permanently corrupt if you lose the connection while downloading them; etc ). Been waiting for 1.5 until I drop out of TB for IMAP. Anyone know of any *good* IMAP mail clients for Win32?
  • ****** broken (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MrBandersnatch ( 544818 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @10:51AM (#14454629)
    OK so silly me, feeling lucky today; thought Id install this over my old install since the version I was using (1.0.7) would open up and take 5 minutes to count the 150,000 unread messages that it *thinks * are in my inbox!

    Doh, of course now email doesnt work. No errors messages, no message boxes, NOTHING!

    Between this and FireFox 1.5 not displaying Flash, hogging massive amounts of memory, rendering some large pages a LOT more slowly than 1.0.x; crashing etc. etc; The Moz/FF have left me a lot less impressed than I once was...
  • by Honig the Apothecary ( 515163 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @10:54AM (#14454665)
    Uninstall your old versions of Thunderbird before running the installer for 1.5. I and a few other have had trouble when we let the installer for 1.5 just overwrite the older version. Backup your profiles, uninstall old version, install 1.5, and you should be good to go.
  • by Conanymous Award ( 597667 ) on Thursday January 12, 2006 @10:55AM (#14454681)
    I'm an avid user of Thunderbird, but unfortunately v1.5 still doesn't fix my pet peeve with the app: the enormo-attachment-list-you-can't-hide.

    Mailing list digests have the separate messages included as attachments, and on my 1024x768 screen resolution the attachment list, which Thunderbird finds obligatory to show, takes up a huge area.

    Dammit, how difficult can it be to put a little clickable arrow there so that I could minimize the attachment list??? Or have I missed an option somewhere?

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