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Mozilla Technology

Beta For Thunderbird 5.0 Released 75

Posted by Soulskill from the new-and-improved,-now-with-larger-numbers dept.
scdeimos writes "Mozilla has announced the release of Thunderbird 5.0b1, the first in their new rapid release cycles. According to the Thunderbird Beta FAQ, Thunderbird 4 was skipped, as the program's version is now tied to the underlying Gecko engine."
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Beta For Thunderbird 5.0 Released More

Beta For Thunderbird 5.0 Released

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  • Let us know when it's released.

  • they went toally crazy this quartal

  • gmail (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I used Thunderbird for years, but I recently switched to using gmail exclusively. I can send and receive from my old accounts, and... I don't have to be at my PC to check my email.

    I feel kind of guilty switching after using Thunderbird for so long, but its just more convenient.

    • Re:gmail (Score:5, Interesting)

      by j-pimp ( 177072 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [1891yppiz]> on Friday June 03, 2011 @09:12AM (#36330794) Homepage Journal
      I use gmail exclusively for sending and receiving mail. However, I keep thunderbird running the the background to backup my mail. I use thunderbird as opposed to something like fetchmail because when I am offline I can revert to thunderbird as a client, and I backup my calendar and contacts with it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        I actually prefer Thunderbird's editor and three column display, but poor integration with gmail made me switch to using gmail only. It is supposed to sync up with IMAP but in reality it doesn't work very well.

    • And what happens if the cloud storage glitches/crashes and you lose years of emails (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/27/gmail-reset-emails-deleted_n_828863.html)? Yes, it was fixed this time and more contingencies are now in place, but the risk is still there.

      You can still use Thunderbird (or any other mail client) to store an off-line copy of your email via POP3/IMAP.

      • I just have to say, "And nothing of importance was lost". Seriously most people don't care that much about having every single email they've ever sent or received archived for history. Do you record every telephone call? Every conversation? Do you keep IM chat logs? This is the equivalient of what most people use email for. I won't worry that much if all my email disappeared tomorrow. I mean, it's nice and all that the email is there to look at, and I don't actually delete any email, since gmail off

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by alt236_ftw ( 2007300 )

          As you said, it depends what you use you email for.

          The fact that *you* don't use your email for anything important, does not mean that *I* don't.

          In my emails accounts (not only GMail) I have contracts, project proposals, contact details, collaborative discussions for projects, things I have emailed to myself as a backup, copyright notices for things I own and have released, etc.
          Not to mention professional discussions, announcements and proposals. And more personal emails as well.

          As organisations move to the

          • Mod parent up insightful +1

            My email is important to me (and to some others) and I want it 100% under my control. I want its security, backup, etc. to be done exactly the way I want it done and I want to be able to access it (all of it) when I'm offline. Although these requirements may not be necessary for many people I don't think that stops them from being reasonable requirements.

            Unfortunately I'm loving TBird less and less as the years go by, but that's a different story.

        • And what happens when you suddenly need that email from a few years back that you didn't think you'd need? Seriously, unless you're doing a lot of email, chances are that the volume is small enough to keep backed up. Having something like Thunderbird chugging away in the background or some other program backing things up means that if somebody fat fingers your data that you've at least got some backup somewhere that covers it.

        • I've discovered certain advantages to having an extended archive (5+ years). Everyone I've had extended communications with gets their own folder in the archive and I use it as a profile and note store. That information usually isn't necessary but sometimes it's a real lifesaver.

          Once, I was involved in a lawsuit where someone was convinced I had agreed to a four-year contract and wanted to sue me for about a million dollars for breaching it; going back three years, I was able to prove that he had sent a c

          • I just archive by year now. The annual folders generally only have 3-6k messages and it's not hard to narrow things down by year.

            Plus it makes it easier to archive infrequently instead of having to stay constantly on top of it. Procrastinate for a few months and it's still only a 1 or 2 step operation to sweep all the old email into the proper folder.

            I get lazier as the search tools get better. I would go by decade, but even Thunderbird has issues once you get up into the tens of thousands of message
    • I access my gmail through Thunderbird using IMAP. If I need to access gmail from another computer, I can use gmail's web interface.

      • IMAP?
        does anyone know if this work with Mozilla SeaMonkey too?

        • Given that IMAP was first RFC'd back in 1986 and has been around for as long as POP3 (more or less), there's no reason why Seamonkey would not have IMAP support. And if it does, no reason that it should not work with GMail.

          Unless GMail is doing some sort of non-standard IMAP. (There's been some talk on the Thunderbird users support group this week of Yahoo! doing non-standard IMAP things, so it's possible.)

    • I can send and receive from my old accounts, and... I don't have to be at my PC to check my email.

      That's got nothing to do with Thunderbird, really. Gmail is user agent and service provider combined; Thunderbird is just a user agent. As long as you know your provider details, you can access your email from any computer with telnet if you have to. I generally have a smart phone with me anywhere I go these days, so if I'm not near my computer, it's just as useful for retrieving email as thunderbird.

      Plus, as I run my own mailserver, I keep control of my own mail, instead of trusting and hoping Google will

  • I hope the guy who said Chrome is good because of higher version numbers is listening! Thunderbird jumped from 3.1 to 5.0 in under a year, oh boy!

    (Just downloaded it, looks the same, updates are minor. Not that that's a bad thing, never had much to complain about with Thunderbird, though I didn't like what they did with the search functionality and stuff in 3.0)

    • There are lots of changes under the hood. Thunderbird Conversations [1] was almost useless on Tbird 2.x, 3.0 and 3.1. For about a year now the extension has been developed with the next generation Tbird in mind (I think that it was called 3.4 internally, until yesterday). You are going to like Conversations!

      [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/gmail-conversation-view/ [mozilla.org]

    • They follow the successful model of the Apollo MP3 player, which died back in 2007 after reaching version... 37zz :)
      Basically those guys added +1 to the version number regardless of what they would update.
      I am looking forward to seeing versions like 2e^14 or 1e18 :)

    • ye looking at the release notes I can't see any reason for me to upgrade.

  • Finally. Maybe now I won't have to cut off the auto-detect because it doesn't allow me to enter POP manually.

    • Amen brother. If only I had the mod points.

    • Agreed (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Since 3.0 the account setup wizard has been absolutely maddening for me. Thunderbird developers, listen up: THE SETUP NEEDS AN OPTION TO BYPASS THE WIZARD.

      Let's repeat that: THE SETUP NEEDS AN OPTION TO BYPASS THE WIZARD.

      This option should be available BEFORE the wizard starts spinning out of control, not during, not after, but BEFORE.

      I have complained about this at least 5 times to the developers only to fall upon deaf ears. But the absurd setup procedure isn't the only problem here: the account folder is

      • Most likely the few and mediocre developers left on this sorry project with clamorous, long-standing bugs, unresponsive GUI and substandard code that has been riding on the reputation of Firefox since version 1 won't hear you.

        I have coded a number of small C++ programs, in the ballpark of 30,000 lines that run here and there in my office and somewhere else. My experience is that what is written on the source happens exactly, precisely in the executable. Not a single time in 13 years I have seen an unexplain

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by murdocj ( 543661 )

      God yes!!!

      I suffered with Thunderbird for a couple of years and then when I built a new computer just gave up on it and switched to whatever replaced Outlook Express (Windows Live Mail or something like that). Yes, I know, evil empire and all that, but it just worked, instead of having to try to outguess whatever the Thunderbird auto-configure was trying to do.

  • It seems like this release doesn't really bring anything the user will want bad enough to upgrade. I like the new speedier release schedule because it always seemed like we never got new versions, but I'd also like to see more than just minor bug fixes rolled into a major release.

    On a personal soapbox: We've been promised for a while now that sqllite would replace mork for address books. Has it? Being able to synchronize address books between mutt and thunderbird (or an iphone or android contact list) w

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Tridus ( 79566 )

      I was thinking the same thing. This is version numbers run amok. We're going from 3 to 5 and getting "rapid releases" like browsers, only there's nothing being changed. Maybe Thunderbird 6 will feature more rounded corners or something?

      There's no substance here. If they were adding integrated calendar support THAT would be a feature worth upgrading for.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by JigJag ( 2046772 )
        I know you want it integrated, but you may want to try installing the Lightning extension to Thunderbird. It allows calendering and it's good enough that I can do everything I used to do with Outlook in my corporate job (send/receive meeting requests, check attendant availability, etc). The one thing I can't do is reply with the voting buttons. JigJag
        • I used it for a while, but I kept getting "the action could not be performed" errors randomly until I repeated the SAME function 3 or 4 times. The main reasons I wanted it was so I could have my upcoming events visible from my inbox and a local backup. But the sidebar for events keeps shrinking to zero and local storage for the calendar NEVER works (and YES I enabled it!).

          If anyone knows of a linux compatible calendar program that can RELIABLY backup google calendar, PLEASE drop me a hint, I'm currently
      • Yeah, or at least always make sure there is a version of Lightning that will work with all new versions. That was a real treat having TBird get upgraded only to find there was no working Lightning for my version.

        And at one point they changed the way the profile directories were handled and it broke Beagle's ability to access TBird messages... I know Beagle is being forgotten but I really like the way it works and I really liked having all my email messages being included in searches of my system.

        While

  • International Rescue (Score:4, Funny)

    by rossdee ( 243626 ) on Friday June 03, 2011 @09:44AM (#36331172)

    Whatever happened to Thunderbird 4 ? I always wanted an email client that worked underwater...

  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=92165 [mozilla.org]

    I hope not... I wouldn't want to take away Wayne Lydecker's amusement before the bug's 10th Anniversary.

    ( The bug concerns renaming a folder from "Foo" to "foo" on a filesystem that does not differentiate between uppercase and lowercase, resulting in a "Foo already exists!" error, rather than the case change. )

    • If that's the worst sort of bug Thunderbird has, it sounds like a pretty damn good program.

      • There have been worse in the past - including loss of e-mail entirely - but nothing too recent.

        But your statement requires knowledge of what you're comparing it to, to correctly interpret it.

        Another bug, for example, is that at random it will simply stop displaying e-mails; either in the preview pane or when opened separately. A restart fixes this.

        Another one involves the RSS reader functionality. If you select message A, the headers for message A are shown, and the body of message A begins to load. Now

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by theCoder ( 23772 )

      ( The bug concerns renaming a folder from "Foo" to "foo" on a filesystem that does not differentiate between uppercase and lowercase, resulting in a "Foo already exists!" error, rather than the case change. )

      To be fair, you can hardly expect Thunderbird to fix a bug in the underlying filesystem, can you?

      In all seriousness, I'm not even sure how one would fix this bug. I can imagine that the code looks something like:

      if (stat(newName, &statBuf) == 0)
      {
      // error
      }
      else
      {
      if (rename(oldName, newName)

      • To be fair, you can hardly expect Thunderbird to fix a bug in the underlying filesystem, can you?

        Of course not - but it's not a bug (it's a shortcoming) and I do expect it to work with those shortcomings in a way to get around them.

        You wouldn't say that a large program that compresses down to 2MB total simply cannot be distributed on a 3.5" 'floppy' because one can't expect the archiver/distribution platform to fix the 'bug' that is the 1.44MB limit of the medium. You'd expect it to split up the archive, a

  • Chrome changes version number every month
    So Firefox now changes version number several times a year
    then Thunderbird skips a version number
    What's the next step, Gnome skips from version 4 to version 10 in one month?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      With all the complaints about Gnome I've been hearing, I think the next step is for Gnome version numbers to go backwards.

  • Oh dear. Thunderbird 3 was considerably worse than 2 (slower, uglier UI, they completely broke the search bar). How much worse is version 5 going to be than 3?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by chesky ( 1117831 )
      Version 4 was so terrible they never released it; version 5 has wrapped around again and become good.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I've used TB forever. Every once in a while it would bug me and I'd switch to something else, then find myself coming back to it. Even after moving to Google Apps - I stuck with TBird on my desktop. Feels more natural - I can't get used to GMails concept of tagging everything - I end up deleting sent mail all the time trashing a conversation (yeah I know PEBKAC). So I've generally stuck with TBird and though 3.x was a decent upgrade and has worked well with multiple IMAP accounts tied to it. I use GMail's w
  • As of today, I am looking for more Outlook-like abilities from TB, there is no built-in calendar, there is no to-do lists. I have to look for other solutions like Google, but I hate the corporation thinking of G. Hope the enhancements I am hoping for arrives with this new v. Already downloading it.

    • As of today, I am looking for more Outlook-like abilities from TB, there is no built-in calendar, there is no to-do lists. I have to look for other solutions like Google, but I hate the corporation thinking of G. Hope the enhancements I am hoping for arrives with this new v. Already downloading it.

      Use the Lightening add-on; they're suppose to provide it with TB at some point - or at least they were making a good try to do so with TB3. Pretty much does what you want. I've got a full Calendar - both off-line provided by TB+Lightening and on-line, synchronized calendars (iCal, CalDAV, etc.). There's also a task list.

  • I thought that was already in Earth orbit with John on board when I was a kid :-)

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