The Mozilla foundation has released a new release candidate of Thunderbird 1.0 closely following the stable Firefox 1.0 release. A final version is expected within this month.
Mozilla Foundation releases Thunderbird 1.0 Release candidate
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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There are too many bugs left in thunderbird for a 1.0 release. For example, if X crashes, thunderbird doesn’t release the lock on the current open profile, so you need to delete the lock file manually before you can get back into your profile.
I am an avid firefox/thunderbird user, and I think that they are both best-of-breed at this point in time. However, firefox is a more mature project than thunderbird will be a year from now. Features are still being added left and right (virtual folders, RSS feeds, multiple identities, etc.), so how could it be considered stable?
I bet there will be quite a few rc releases before 1.0 final.
I am also afraid it’s not completely ready for 1.0. Although I am using TB on a daily basis, there remain some quirks that need to be polished. Apart from that, great product (running RC1 now).
I agree. I have three problems with Thunderbird:
1. It crashes when it tries to get my gmail-POP. Gmail does not allow me to get my pop mail for some reason (I filed a bug report with google, they don’t have a clue what’s up yet), and their POP server returns some weird stuff sometimes, and that crashes Thunderbird (that’s on linux).
2. It completely destroyed my email archives when I tried to migrate to it from Outlook express. I have 2 GB of data in there, and it didn’t seem to be able to handle such a big conversion. I had emails being placed on wrong subfolders, I had emails never converted, I had mangled text and all sorts of stuff (that’s on XP).
3. Thunderbird leaves too much space from the beginning of the window to the mail subfolder list (“inbox, sent items” etc). I want to use the outlook-layout where all three panes are vertically aligned, and this space takes a lot of screen estate for no good reason (linux).
Other than that, it’s not too bad, but it certainly needs some more clean up.
I agree. It seems to me that the developers are trying to put the 1.0 as soon as possible (due to the fact that Firefox 1.0 is already available) without paying too much attention to quality. There is plenty of serious bugs in bugzilla that have been hardly touched by developers and the UI designe is in places not finished. Some examples (most from recent nightly builds, not from RC – but I guess that most of these are still there) – inability to preview information (size etc.) about attachments, very buggy composition module (famous “sticky spacebar” problem), no date received field, buggy message forwarding, problems with mimetypes (attachments icons etc.) etc., etc. Uffff… It has great potential, but in its current state it rather deserves something like 0.5 and not 1.0RC
I’ve been using it as my sole email program since 0.7.3 and while I don’t do anything very advanced with it, it functions perfectly as far as I can tell and has much more useful junk filters and such than Outlook did even after several stable releases. That said, it does change noticeable each time I update, so I see your point.
Honestly, what does everyone expect from a 1.0 release? To me that says “first release”, and you don’t expect it to be perfect. Yeah, you expect most of the bugs gone, but it seems if most of you had your way there’d be about three pieces of software in the world that had ever made it to 1.0.
I think it should be noted that Outlook has been around for what, four, five versions and nine years now? Thunderbird’s already much better than it (unless you happen to use Exchange or whatever) and to me that deserves 1.0. There are still plenty of numbers to go for them to keep working on it.
Using Tbird 0.9x for tbird and it works GREAT!!!
Okay, to be honest – Outlook Express for me is still the best client. On the other front I’ve stopped using Internet Explorer since Firefox (Phoenix then) 0.2 was released, but I can’t stop using OE because I could not find the features anywhere else (even in the Outlook).
I’m using it not only for mails, but for newsgroups, and I’m able to actually search the bodies of the messages. Last time I’ve tried that with Thunderbird, it was not available (only the subject line).
It might be distorted view of what an mail/news groups app should look like, but I wanted one composite one – e.g. not two separate programs.
Let’s give it a try and see
BTW: There are some .XPI files here:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/1.0rc/w…
deflenus.xpi 01-Dec-2004 15:58 6k Mozilla extension
langenus.xpi 01-Dec-2004 15:58 236k Mozilla extension
mail.xpi 01-Dec-2004 15:58 6.4M Mozilla extension
newsblog.xpi 01-Dec-2004 15:58 34k Mozilla extension
offline.xpi 01-Dec-2004 15:58 6k Mozilla extension
talkback.xpi 01-Dec-2004 15:58 311k Mozilla extension
xpcom.xpi 01-Dec-2004 15:58 597k Mozilla extension
Are those important? When they say Mozilla extension, I’m not sure what they mean.. Are they extensions for Firebird only, for Thunderbird or both of them?!?
>To me that says “first release”, and you don’t expect it to be perfect.
Sorry, but it doesn’t say the same to me. As a first generation “stable” release, yes, it won’t have all the *features* in it. BUT, I DO expect it to have ironed out ALL IMPORTANT bugs and crashes.
The fact that it’s 1.0, let it only mean that it’s not fully featured (as an example, to not support binary newsgroup attachments, or to not have AI to learn about junk mail etc), but I *do* expect it to be mighty stable for the features it decided to include.
>> I’m using it not only for mails, but for newsgroups, and
>> I’m able to actually search the bodies of the messages.
>> Last time I’ve tried that with Thunderbird, it was not
>> available (only the subject line).
Both of those features have been with Thunderbird as long as I’ve known it…
Thunderbird can search message bodies. Just click the little magnifying glass and pick “Find in Message”.
Before it hits 1.0, hopefully they’ll improve the branding and appearance consistency, for instance:
– the next and previous message (forward and back) buttons are different from Firefox 1.0
– in the Windows XP start menu when registered as the default web and mail clients, FF is described as “Firefox” yet TB is described as “Mozilla Thunderbird”
– the icons settings used in the main tool bar are not used in the compose mail window, address book window, etc (for instance, small/large icons, text labels/no text)
There is inbuilt support for using the user’s Windows address book live rather than importing it, which I think would be very useful, as there are many client applications using the Windows address book, not just Outlook Express, yet there is still no visible menu to enable this (indeed I forget how to do it in user.js/prefs.js).
There are also problems when rendering Unicode (UTF-8) fonts on both Windows and Linux (the font size is not respected for UTF-8 text and is different from ISO-8859-1 etc.), but it doesn’t seem like this will be fixed by 1.0 either. 🙁
@Roguelazer
As recently as 0.8 or 0.9, I don’t think it was possible to search in a newsgroup for message containing specified body text. Sure there is finding within the current message, but that’s not the same! 🙂
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/1.0rc/w…..
Are those important? When they say Mozilla extension, I’m not sure what they mean.. Are they extensions for Firebird only, for Thunderbird or both of them?!?
OMG!! So confusing!!! How to figure it out?!?!?! Oh wait. You can just look at the URL…riiiighhht.
Better search capabilities appeared in 0.8. They were improved again in the 0.9 series. As others have said, you can search message bodies easily.
As for the XPI files, these are extensions. Since they are in the Thunderbird directory and they specify Windows, you can add them if you want too. They are not needed for the program to run.
You probably should just use this URL:
http://tinyurl.com/7xwa5
I think the developers need to work on making Thuderbird look more like Firefox. Compare the options window in Thunderbird to Firefox for example. Why can’t it look more like that?
More bugs… I changed the font for Sans-Serif on TBird-RC1 on my Mac, and it keeps reverting ALL fonts to “american typewriter” font. Bleh…
i just wish it coud use the same themes as Firefox. I’d like the two of them to match visually and have an open for it to do it automatically… that or just get a Noia Extreme theme for Thunderbird.
stop filing useless bug reports in the comments section of your website
Bug reports should go into bugzilla.mozilla.org. This is a release candidate version explicitly meant for testing and reporting bugs so that a stable final version can be released
> Thunderbird leaves too much space from the beginning of the window to the mail subfolder list.
Well, click “Tools” on the menu, then “Options”, then change pane arrangement in “Window Configuration”. Wasn’t that obvious?
By the way, I also hate folder list’s waste of space. But others may differ, and as long as I can configure it, I don’t care much.
Thunderbird needs a way to automated responses (i.e. out of office, vacation, etc). Other than that, I like it.
–Dr. SuSE
> Well, click “Tools” on the menu, then “Options”, then change pane arrangement in “Window Configuration”. Wasn’t that obvious?
You misunderstood. I HAVE the outlook layout on Thunderbird. But this specific layout craves for more horizontal spacing, and the current situation in the folder listing takes too much uneeded space. That was my complaint, not where to find the layout preference panel.
Please use the original subject when replying btw.
Tb is the best.. the only feature i miss from Outlook Express is the ability to copy an attached message to a mail folder. AttachmentTools.xpi is a messy workaround. it should be possible to just open an attached email and then [Message > Move] it to any folder.
Anyone has screenshots of new thunderbird? Question to all migrated people – is it worth moving from 0.9 to 1 RC? or should i wait for 1.0 version? Inbox data is critical for me, so has anyone faced any problems in moving from 0.9 to RC 1?
I seriously doubt Thunderbird will change the format of its mail folders. Remember, Thunderbird comes from Mozilla Mail, which comes from Netscape. I have not seen a format change since using Netscape in the mid 90s. The format used is fairly popular. It’s called mbox.
Since I’ve got over 300 mails in my imap inbox it have always crashed/stoped while starting it, tried a version a week ago or so (0.9) and same problem. The mailinterface and mutt works of course.
I’m using TBird 0.9 for a while (since it was released) and also I got more than 600 imap messages on server. It never crashed. Although it eats my RAM, I’m ok with it…
Fwiw, I just upgraded to it on my Gentoo box, and (like most Thunderbird upgrades) it didn’t work right, so I had to delete my $HOME/.thunderbird/default/????????.slt/compreg.dat file. Now it works fine. Me likey =P
I use TB0.9 on a daily basis for all my personal mail on A windows XP sp2 laptop. I can’t use OE because OE does not support the secure authentification that I configured on my slack + dovecot + postfix server.
It really rocks. Now I’ve installed TB 0.9 on a laptop for a new user (a normal user, not much computer knowledge) and she didn’t need any instruction.
I use many themes and extenstions. It really looks better dan OE. And I prefer things like “show all headers” over the “keep-user-stupid” interface of outlook 2003.
BUT… it crashes at random. In the middle of composing a message, boom! get some memory error or other strange stings happen, like messages that disappear. When I restart TB, I’ll get them back, but it is very annoying.
AND… why can’t I drag and drop a message to another program or to a file folder (filesystem directory)??? Why can’t I drag and drop multiple attachments at once to a file folder? I have to do it one by one.
Definitly no 1.0 on the horizon. But still a great app.
I have been using Thunderbird for 10 days now (v0.9) and I have no problem with it. It works well, both on Windows and Linux, with my folders shared betwenn the two OS, and using 2 POP servers.
My only complaints are:
– about the configuration which is a bit messy at the moment, but I suspect this will be organised better in 1.0 FCS.
– the icons on the main bar are not the same size as the icons on Firefox.
Other than that, I have adopted Thunderbird, and got rid of Outlook and Evolution. I prefer tools which are multiplatform.
Does anybody know if there is some kind of function ala “one click-purchase” to back-up your locally stored e-mail.
I am missing this function in TB.
On OS X there seems to be no way to change the font size of the list view. If you have to use Japanese the current size is far too small, it’s extremely hard to read.
Still no sign of a 1.0RC enigmail plugin. I’m getting worried.
Is it just me or does GMail and Firefox have serious problems working together?
I have an IMAP server (I run at home) with 2GB of messages over 5 years. It is easily 4000 messages. I don’t have any problems.
Maybe your profile is corrupt or something? Just double check things before saying stuff is cr**.
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Since I’ve got over 300 mails in my imap inbox it have always crashed/stoped while starting it, tried a version a week ago or so (0.9) and same problem. The mailinterface and mutt works of course.
Anonymous (IP: —.cm-upc.chello.se),
It’s you. It works fine on every firefox install I have tried it on.
Same here, it works great. I’m just using the win32 version here though.
—-
It’s you. It works fine on every firefox install I have tried it on.
Opera’s M2. Not only is it the fastest client I’ve seen for searching e-mail, but it’s also got the best grasp on virtual folders (and I haven’t seen anything better at dealing with multiple accounts, either). Plus it comes with Opera.
I found M2 to be extremely irritating. Having an email client embedded inside a browser does not work for me. Please note that it was done very differently in Mozilla which I don’t use either.
Opera is amazingly fast though.
The only problem i have with thunderbird is that it is a big, fat, slow program (version 0.9 on linux 2.4).. i takes noticeably longer to load than firefox, or even something like open office. I’d like to see some speed improvements for 1.0. Still my favorite e-mail client.
Since RSS was introduced into TBird, it has never worked for me (on the newest Mac OS 10.3.X). Same with 1.0rc1.
When I click on manage subscriptions, then add, then input, say, the osnews rss or the slashdot rss feed, TBird says “bla.org/foo.rss is not a valid RSS feed.”
Anyone having the same problem?
Anyone using TBird on Mac OS and knowing how to make RSS work?
I have been using thunderbird for awhile, i have 4 mail accounts 3 are pop one is imap and the imap store has over 6000 emails. i also have it pointing to a ldap driectory for contacts (which has thousands of contacts). and newsgroups and it works fine for me?
i think there on the right path….
-Nex6
I still use the old and good Mozilla Messenger on linux and I receive more than 500 emails (including spam) by day from many accounts withou any troubles for the last 2 years.