6 ms·

Thunderbird 3 released

75 points by keyist 17y ago

keyist 17y ago
Vimperator fans will want to monitor the Muttator add-on page for updates: http://www.vimperator.org/muttator http://www.vimperator.org/muttator
- Daemmerung 17y ago
  vim : Muttator :: emacs : ? Don't I wish....
  - WalterGR 17y ago
    Attention downvoters: You are apparently not familiar with analogy syntax. Daemmerung is simply asking if there is a similar plugin, but using emacs syntax.
    - Daemmerung 17y ago
      Thanks, Walter. I've tried using XKeymacs (http://www.cam.hi-ho.ne.jp/oishi/indexen.html http://www.cam.hi-ho.ne.jp/oishi/indexen.html) to this end, but had problems with the previous Thunderbird. Perhaps I should try again with 3.0.
- teilo 17y ago
  Muttator nightlies run on 3.0, but I found them unusable.
dustingetz 17y ago
if its not better than gmail, i don't think anyone cares.
- elbenshira 17y ago
  I think there is a valid point hidden inside this flame-bait. GMail (and other web-based email clients) are making inroads against traditional desktop email clients. I used Thunderbird for a long time, but just found GMail's client much more intuitive and faster. The best part is that web apps are getting faster and faster as JS engines improve. This isn't the case for desktop clients, at least from my experience. Bloat always sneak up on you. Sure, this happens on web apps too (e.g. Google Wave), but it doesn't feel as bad because we're used to web apps being "slow" (only to get faster the next year). For desktop clients, once you're bloated then you pretty much stay that way. I loved Thunderbird and I was excited about Thunderbird 3, but really, I don't see a reason why I would want to leave GMail. Of course, I'm not using "enterprise" email for work or anything. But even enterprise email will be web-based eventually.
  - sid0 17y ago
    Interestingly, I find Gmail's client an absolute pain to work with. It's the best browser-based client, but that really isn't saying much.
ericb 17y ago
I just installed it. It looks substantially better due to a less cluttered interface, and search seems vastly improved. So far, I'm impressed.
- shelfoo 17y ago
  There do seem to be some questionable UI pieces. I don't like the look of the reply/reply all buttons. They're especially bad if using the 3 pane (veritical view with message pane). The tabs are pretty sweet though. I like having everything open in the same window vs a bunch of separate email windows.
RyanMcGreal 17y ago
> The new attachment reminder looks for the word attachment (and other words like file types) in the body of your message and reminds you to add an attachment before hitting send. I'm embarrassed to admit that this will help me considerably.
- est 17y ago
  I don't know if Thunderbird matches ICU languages e.g. Chinese with 附件
- bvi 17y ago
  Gmail has had this for quite a while now.
  - dhimes 17y ago
    So has tbird, actually.
billybob 17y ago
Just curious - what's the appeal of non-web-based email? I'm forced to use Outlook at work, but I can't imagine having to install something to get my personal mail, and having to back up my personal mail. Do people do this mostly because they're concerned about their data privacy, or because it's easier to work when you don't have internet access, or what?
- ericb 17y ago
  My wife's old yahoo account got hacked. Watching yahoo's nonexistent "customer service" "help" her convinced me there is a giant hidden danger to webmail--she essentially had no recourse, no way to reclaim the address, no way to recover old emails, no way to stop this person from getting new emails she might receive, and no way to stop them from impersonating her.
  - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
    For geeks (and perhaps geek's spouses) owning your own domain and only contracting out the email hosting to Google is probably the way to go here. If it all goes wrong then you control the domain and what happens to emails sent to it.
- y0ghur7_xxx 17y ago
  I use thunderbird because I have a lot of email accounts and I like to have them all in one central place. With thunderbird I can download all mail from gmail, yahoo, my isp mailbox and all other accounts on my local pc and manage them all from one place. That's the main reason. Then there is the fact that I can easily switch mail provider without loosing my mail.
  - blasdel 17y ago
    gmail can download your mail from other accounts and send outgoing mail through back through the right server. Have all your mail in one central place without being tied to a single box with a particular config. You can even use desktop clients on multiple computers via IMAP without any hassles.
dpcan 17y ago
I'm in heaven. I just performed the same search I spent 10 minutes on a couple days ago to see if the new search would have worked better under those circumstances, and I was able to narrow it down and find the missing message in under 2 minutes. Fantastic work Thunderbird Team!!!!
- mahmud 17y ago
  If you're seeing a lot of email traffic, you need to move the indexing to an actual external search engine and write your own 'search' plugin; both Lucene and Sphinx would rape native TB search in performance. And the index can be shared across a team as well, say, in a sales force.
est 17y ago
Looks like it tries to download every email in Gmail and index it locally. God. My maillist subscription just made my HDD explode. Didn't IMAP provide some sort of search function already?
- fjabre 17y ago
  IMAP does provide a search function but it's substantially slower than downloading and indexing your emails locally..
  - jgranby 17y ago
    I quite like the iPhone's compromise: it stores and indexes the most recent 50 or so messages, and when searching provides a "Continue search on server" button. Thunderbird (or others) could have a larger store of recent messages, but this would avoid downloading thousands of mailing list emails.
- pqs 17y ago
  You can easily configure how many months of email you want TB to download for you. Go to Account Settings.
Luc 17y ago
This seems like a good time to mention my favourite add-on, Nostalgy (update for 3.0): http://alain.frisch.fr/soft_mozilla.html http://alain.frisch.fr/soft_mozilla.html . It makes keyboard control easy. From the description: 'Save time and get back the productivity you were used to with mutt/pine/eudora!'.
- pqs 17y ago
  Nostalgy is a very good extension. But since I can archive mail in TB3 using the key A, then I think that nostalgy is not that necessary, which means that TB3 is much better than TB2 :-)
vito 17y ago
Just tried it here, I normally use Mail.app. First impressions were "oh, this isn't so bad," but then I started using it. It feels very janky, the interface is a bit disfunctional (going to File > New Folder gave absolutely no visual feedback as to where it put it, and if you have the filters window open and make a new folder you have to close and reopen the filters window for it to notice the new folder). The one thing I saw that I liked was the "Reply to Mailing list" button, but that just didn't work, at all. The To: recipient was the person who wrote the email, not the list. Also, I couldn't figure out how to open a new tab. E for Effort I suppose, but it's seeming less and less relevant, and if major releases are this buggy I can see why.
- sounddust 17y ago
  I downloaded it and tried it, and unfortunately it has the same two problems that I hate about version 2: 1) There is no option to say "reply using the same 'from' address that the mail was sent to." This means that you either have to set up an "identity" for every possible e-mail address you use, or you have to reveal your "main" identity to anyone who sends you an e-mail (and possibly confuse them in the process). 2) If you get new mail and read it on your iPhone or any other computer while thunderbird is open, then the status icon/indicator will get permanently stuck in "new mail" mode and you have to restart the app to get it to disappear. On the plus side, the search is excellent.
  - julianz 17y ago
    > There is no option to say "reply using the same 'from' address that the mail was sent to." Huh? I've used Thunderbird 2 (on Windows) forever and I rely on this feature all the time, with multiple IMAP accounts and multiple email addresses for each of the accounts. It just works perfectly.
    - phildawes 17y ago
      I suspect you might be mistaken. Do you just mean you've configured multiple email addresses into thunderbird and get to pick which one to use, or have you really found out how to do "reply using the same 'from' address that the mail was sent to." in thunderbird? (I use a different email address for each webapp I sign up to but obviously don't want to have to add each one to thunderbird, so this feature would be awesome)
rbanffy 17y ago
It's the orange space rocket, one that launches from under a pool, right?
- chaosmachine 17y ago
  If you look closely at the launch page (top left), they've actually snuck in a look-alike rocket.
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    I could't find it... Is's too good a reference to let it pass.
mahmud 17y ago
Thunderbird, Firefox and Emacs. Seriously, the three pieces of software my life would be meaningless without. Greasemonkey and Lisp are the crack cocaine of software, that is, if crack allowed you to realize an innate higher potential in yourself. I have never scripted it myself, but I have paid someone else to do it and my thunderbird add-ons account for at least 20% of my income. If you're doing a lot of marketing and lead generation, you owe it to yourself to tame this beast to your advantage. Specially for one-person shops, you can bypass the whole CRM shenanigans with a well kept TB strategy. Good luck!
- bvi 17y ago
  Could you elaborate?
moo 17y ago
Lightning calendar add-on is not compatible.
- dhimes 17y ago
  whoa- thanks for this. I was literally seconds away from making a big mistake...
- teilo 17y ago
  The nightly for the 1.0 branch is compatible, and fairly stable. I have been using it for months with TBird 3 pre-releases, and am using it in 3.0 right now.
83457 17y ago
I've been using the CuteBird theme for a couple years which mimics the Apple mail client design. Now that I have upgraded to TB3 the theme is no longer compatible and the default theme, even with the improvements, just looks bad.
sgbrix 17y ago
Using Firefox 3.5.5 no fixes yet 12/11 for TB & Lightning. What a doozy! Remember satellite to mars, feet & meters? Here is one right on earth.
cmwoulfe 17y ago
Ver 3 - Used for a few days, buggy, want to go back to version 2 for the time being and upgrade later. Can't find ver 2. Any suggestions. The Woof Man

75 points by keyist 17y ago

Vimperator fans will want to monitor the Muttator add-on page for updates: http://www.vimperator.org/muttator http://www.vimperator.org/muttator

Daemmerung 17y ago
vim : Muttator :: emacs : ? Don't I wish....
- WalterGR 17y ago
  Attention downvoters: You are apparently not familiar with analogy syntax. Daemmerung is simply asking if there is a similar plugin, but using emacs syntax.
  - Daemmerung 17y ago
    Thanks, Walter. I've tried using XKeymacs (http://www.cam.hi-ho.ne.jp/oishi/indexen.html http://www.cam.hi-ho.ne.jp/oishi/indexen.html) to this end, but had problems with the previous Thunderbird. Perhaps I should try again with 3.0.
teilo 17y ago
Muttator nightlies run on 3.0, but I found them unusable.

dustingetz 17y ago

if its not better than gmail, i don't think anyone cares.

elbenshira 17y ago
I think there is a valid point hidden inside this flame-bait. GMail (and other web-based email clients) are making inroads against traditional desktop email clients. I used Thunderbird for a long time, but just found GMail's client much more intuitive and faster. The best part is that web apps are getting faster and faster as JS engines improve. This isn't the case for desktop clients, at least from my experience. Bloat always sneak up on you. Sure, this happens on web apps too (e.g. Google Wave), but it doesn't feel as bad because we're used to web apps being "slow" (only to get faster the next year). For desktop clients, once you're bloated then you pretty much stay that way. I loved Thunderbird and I was excited about Thunderbird 3, but really, I don't see a reason why I would want to leave GMail. Of course, I'm not using "enterprise" email for work or anything. But even enterprise email will be web-based eventually.
- sid0 17y ago
  Interestingly, I find Gmail's client an absolute pain to work with. It's the best browser-based client, but that really isn't saying much.

ericb 17y ago

I just installed it. It looks substantially better due to a less cluttered interface, and search seems vastly improved. So far, I'm impressed.

shelfoo 17y ago
There do seem to be some questionable UI pieces. I don't like the look of the reply/reply all buttons. They're especially bad if using the 3 pane (veritical view with message pane). The tabs are pretty sweet though. I like having everything open in the same window vs a bunch of separate email windows.

RyanMcGreal 17y ago

> The new attachment reminder looks for the word attachment (and other words like file types) in the body of your message and reminds you to add an attachment before hitting send. I'm embarrassed to admit that this will help me considerably.

est 17y ago
I don't know if Thunderbird matches ICU languages e.g. Chinese with 附件
bvi 17y ago
Gmail has had this for quite a while now.
- dhimes 17y ago
  So has tbird, actually.

billybob 17y ago

Just curious - what's the appeal of non-web-based email? I'm forced to use Outlook at work, but I can't imagine having to install something to get my personal mail, and having to back up my personal mail. Do people do this mostly because they're concerned about their data privacy, or because it's easier to work when you don't have internet access, or what?

ericb 17y ago
My wife's old yahoo account got hacked. Watching yahoo's nonexistent "customer service" "help" her convinced me there is a giant hidden danger to webmail--she essentially had no recourse, no way to reclaim the address, no way to recover old emails, no way to stop this person from getting new emails she might receive, and no way to stop them from impersonating her.
- ZeroGravitas 17y ago
  For geeks (and perhaps geek's spouses) owning your own domain and only contracting out the email hosting to Google is probably the way to go here. If it all goes wrong then you control the domain and what happens to emails sent to it.
y0ghur7_xxx 17y ago
I use thunderbird because I have a lot of email accounts and I like to have them all in one central place. With thunderbird I can download all mail from gmail, yahoo, my isp mailbox and all other accounts on my local pc and manage them all from one place. That's the main reason. Then there is the fact that I can easily switch mail provider without loosing my mail.
- blasdel 17y ago
  gmail can download your mail from other accounts and send outgoing mail through back through the right server. Have all your mail in one central place without being tied to a single box with a particular config. You can even use desktop clients on multiple computers via IMAP without any hassles.

dpcan 17y ago

I'm in heaven. I just performed the same search I spent 10 minutes on a couple days ago to see if the new search would have worked better under those circumstances, and I was able to narrow it down and find the missing message in under 2 minutes. Fantastic work Thunderbird Team!!!!

mahmud 17y ago
If you're seeing a lot of email traffic, you need to move the indexing to an actual external search engine and write your own 'search' plugin; both Lucene and Sphinx would rape native TB search in performance. And the index can be shared across a team as well, say, in a sales force.

est 17y ago

Looks like it tries to download every email in Gmail and index it locally. God. My maillist subscription just made my HDD explode. Didn't IMAP provide some sort of search function already?

fjabre 17y ago
IMAP does provide a search function but it's substantially slower than downloading and indexing your emails locally..
- jgranby 17y ago
  I quite like the iPhone's compromise: it stores and indexes the most recent 50 or so messages, and when searching provides a "Continue search on server" button. Thunderbird (or others) could have a larger store of recent messages, but this would avoid downloading thousands of mailing list emails.
pqs 17y ago
You can easily configure how many months of email you want TB to download for you. Go to Account Settings.

Luc 17y ago

This seems like a good time to mention my favourite add-on, Nostalgy (update for 3.0): http://alain.frisch.fr/soft_mozilla.html http://alain.frisch.fr/soft_mozilla.html . It makes keyboard control easy. From the description: 'Save time and get back the productivity you were used to with mutt/pine/eudora!'.

pqs 17y ago
Nostalgy is a very good extension. But since I can archive mail in TB3 using the key A, then I think that nostalgy is not that necessary, which means that TB3 is much better than TB2 :-)

vito 17y ago

Just tried it here, I normally use Mail.app. First impressions were "oh, this isn't so bad," but then I started using it. It feels very janky, the interface is a bit disfunctional (going to File > New Folder gave absolutely no visual feedback as to where it put it, and if you have the filters window open and make a new folder you have to close and reopen the filters window for it to notice the new folder). The one thing I saw that I liked was the "Reply to Mailing list" button, but that just didn't work, at all. The To: recipient was the person who wrote the email, not the list. Also, I couldn't figure out how to open a new tab. E for Effort I suppose, but it's seeming less and less relevant, and if major releases are this buggy I can see why.

sounddust 17y ago
I downloaded it and tried it, and unfortunately it has the same two problems that I hate about version 2: 1) There is no option to say "reply using the same 'from' address that the mail was sent to." This means that you either have to set up an "identity" for every possible e-mail address you use, or you have to reveal your "main" identity to anyone who sends you an e-mail (and possibly confuse them in the process). 2) If you get new mail and read it on your iPhone or any other computer while thunderbird is open, then the status icon/indicator will get permanently stuck in "new mail" mode and you have to restart the app to get it to disappear. On the plus side, the search is excellent.
- julianz 17y ago
  > There is no option to say "reply using the same 'from' address that the mail was sent to." Huh? I've used Thunderbird 2 (on Windows) forever and I rely on this feature all the time, with multiple IMAP accounts and multiple email addresses for each of the accounts. It just works perfectly.
  - phildawes 17y ago
    I suspect you might be mistaken. Do you just mean you've configured multiple email addresses into thunderbird and get to pick which one to use, or have you really found out how to do "reply using the same 'from' address that the mail was sent to." in thunderbird? (I use a different email address for each webapp I sign up to but obviously don't want to have to add each one to thunderbird, so this feature would be awesome)

rbanffy 17y ago

It's the orange space rocket, one that launches from under a pool, right?

chaosmachine 17y ago
If you look closely at the launch page (top left), they've actually snuck in a look-alike rocket.
- rbanffy 17y ago
  I could't find it... Is's too good a reference to let it pass.

mahmud 17y ago

Thunderbird, Firefox and Emacs. Seriously, the three pieces of software my life would be meaningless without. Greasemonkey and Lisp are the crack cocaine of software, that is, if crack allowed you to realize an innate higher potential in yourself. I have never scripted it myself, but I have paid someone else to do it and my thunderbird add-ons account for at least 20% of my income. If you're doing a lot of marketing and lead generation, you owe it to yourself to tame this beast to your advantage. Specially for one-person shops, you can bypass the whole CRM shenanigans with a well kept TB strategy. Good luck!

bvi 17y ago
Could you elaborate?

moo 17y ago

Lightning calendar add-on is not compatible.

dhimes 17y ago
whoa- thanks for this. I was literally seconds away from making a big mistake...
teilo 17y ago
The nightly for the 1.0 branch is compatible, and fairly stable. I have been using it for months with TBird 3 pre-releases, and am using it in 3.0 right now.

83457 17y ago

I've been using the CuteBird theme for a couple years which mimics the Apple mail client design. Now that I have upgraded to TB3 the theme is no longer compatible and the default theme, even with the improvements, just looks bad.

sgbrix 17y ago

Using Firefox 3.5.5 no fixes yet 12/11 for TB & Lightning. What a doozy! Remember satellite to mars, feet & meters? Here is one right on earth.

cmwoulfe 17y ago

Ver 3 - Used for a few days, buggy, want to go back to version 2 for the time being and upgrade later. Can't find ver 2. Any suggestions. The Woof Man