The first version of the Mozilla Foundation’s Thunderbird was a serviceable e-mail client; the latest version may be a great one. At first, Thunderbird Version 1.0 made a good impression. On a longer acquaintance, however, problems such as poor search functionality and memory leaks tarnished its reputation. Now, with Thunderbird 1.5 Release Candidate Two in hand, the program stands poised to regain its good name and far, far more.
I think the main problem Thunderbird faces is a lack of innovative alternate clients with which to compete and a basically uncompetetive market.
Cross-platform Mail apps are a rare breed – most home users use OE or Mail.app depending on platform, business users are largely split between Lotus and Outlook
While there are many mail apps for OSS operating systems (Kmail, Evolution), few run on Windows. Evolution is in a slow process of porting but due to the degree to which the underlying GNOME desktop needs to be ported in order to support it, I suspect it will be a large and initially very buggy application.
I really think the best way for Thunderbird to develop is in a situation where it has serious competition from another OSS app on the Win32 platform.. but I don’t see that happening soon.
Good post.
FWIW: I dual boot linux/windows, and I found thunderbird to be a good choice.
I keep a seperate fat32 partition which I use for data that can be read by either linux or windows. By keeping my mailboxes in that partition, I could access the same mailboxes, with the same email client, from either the linux side or windows side. Everything had the same look and feel.
Same as I do.
You might want to take a look at captive-ntfs or even better:
Take a look at this one: http://www.fs-driver.org/index.html
ext2fs (and ext3fs, mounted as ext2fs) driver for Windows
Much better than FAT32.
Check TheBat! from RitLabs. Although it is not free, and only runs on windows, it has a much beffer functionality and is more mature than Thunderbird. Several times I considered switching from TheBat to the Thunderbird, but it still lacks important functionality, and although it is free, I prefer to pay 20$ and get a client which just works.
And how does the TheBat! work on OSX? Oh, it doesn’t. Well one of the benefits of Thunderbird is its x-platform nature.
I’m using Thunderbird 1.0.7 and eagerly waiting for Thunderbird 1.5.
I agree there aren’t that many email apps for Windows that are open source which can compete with Thunderbird.
On the other hand, there’s Pegasus, which is freeware but (sadly) not yet open source. It has been around for over a decade and the author even provides a freeware MTA (email server). What is truly sad is that he’s apparently being sent hate-mail from opensource zealots for 3 years according to http://www.pmail.com/sundry/pmlinux.htm
The reason I use Thunderbird is because there’s a good chance I’ll be using Linux or FreeBSD on a desktop next year (on servers I only use Debian and on desktops I only use Windows 2000 right now).
Anyway, I really like open source–not just GPL but also Artistic,BSD,MIT,Public Domain, and others. But sending hate-mail to an author who’s been giving away a useful freeware program is really stupid and reflects very poorly on the open source community.
I really think the best way for Thunderbird to develop is in a situation where it has serious competition from another OSS app on the Win32 platform.. but I don’t see that happening soon.
With KDE moving to QT4, kmail should become available on Win32 in the not-too-distant future.
I’m still waiting for the Lightning Project to show
something useful. The lack of calendar functionality
really starts to push me to Outlook, which I try to
avoid if I can. The biggest problem is that there’s
really no other open source alternatives out there.
(on the windows platform.) Tb really needs more
developers and resources so they can accelerate its
development.
Tb 1.5 sure is decent, with the addition of smtp server
management and software update. But the UI seems to be
a bit less responsive than before. At the end, I would
like to see the calendar functionality, and soon.
Why do people want their calendars inside their MUA, just because many others make that mistake, it’s no reason to expect this from the rest of the devs.
If you are looking for a calendar, look at Sunbird.
I _really_ don’t know, how an Outlook user can complain about the TB GUI being sluggish, while Outlook regularly refuses to be responsive when some imap or pop actions are processed.
Outlook, and I’m talking about 2003 is such a terrible piece of junk, compared to the not so great at all TBird, which still has alot of problems.
Just because you don’t like having a calendar in your email client doesn’t mean no one else does either.
Having the two systems tightly integrated allows for a complete business planner type system. Sure, it would be possible to do everything through a decoupled system, but it just feels unnatural at least to me.
A personal information manager (preferably with PDA synchronization
) is ideal for a business environment. The MUA is just a portion of that functionality.
You can use Mutt for your email and Vim for your calendar if you want, but I’m going to hold my breath for Lightning.
There are many people who want calendar function in their mail client. If it’s such a bad idea why would the Lightning project exists in the first place? May be you don’t want it, but a lot of other people do.
I said Tb’s GUI is “slower than before,” which obviously means v1.0.x. When did I compare its UI responsiveness with Outlook? Btw, I’m not exactly an Outlook user. Like I said I try to avoid it at all cost, because I simply think Tb is more secure and I also like its spam filter. But also like I said before, there’s really no other open source alternatives on the windows platform, so when I’m fed up with it (because I want the calendar) I’ll have *no choice* but to use Outlook.
Obviously if they ever port Evolution or Kmail (more like Kontact) to windows, I’ll happily use them instead of friggin’ Outlook.
and there’s many people who dont want the “all in one application” functionality à la Windows (kde+evolution). This approche is an interoperabilities killer.
When I bought a Mac, I was shock how interoperability in windows and linux was so not efficient to deal with calendar/contacts/todo, all because it is lock in one app.
as Thunderbird want all my contacts to be hidden to other apps in my system, mail.app is my mail client of choice.
and other addressbooks (like kaddressbook!) too, it is the only reason that keep me using mail.app (and kontact on linux)
Oh btw, Sunbird doesn’t cut it. It’s basically a separate calendar program that you can launch from Tb. It has no integration or whatsoever with Tb. Not to mention its development is at a glacial pace.
Can it read MS Outlook PST files???
No?
Then it is irrelevant.
Mutt all the way for me
Thunderbird can invoke Outlook’s MAPI interface and import from Outlook PST files that way – the only problem with this apprach is that you need outlook installed to use it
Even Outlook/Entourage for Mac can’t read PST files. It’s a very selective format.
Then it is irrelevant.
You’re irrelevant.
It’s a very selective format.
It’s also proprietary and closed, so anyone storing their email in it is making themselves dependent on MS.
If it integrated with the Apple Address Book I would probably use it.
I think that thunderbird is a simple and secure email client. And that makes it a good choice for people who just do email/newsgroups reading and need no extra funcionality. Evolution it more like Outlook… but has no windows version yet, so windows users that need an opensource substitute for Outlook will have to wait.
There is no RC2 on mozilla.org so what is the “news” about. RC1 has been around for quite a while.
It doesn’t matter if PST is propietary or not when it comes to move people away from MS Email clients, the first question I get asked when I propose to move away from MS Outlook, is:
How do we move our email out of PST files????
So until anyone provides a means to convert a PST to something else, Thunderbird or any other email won’t take the world any time soon.
Er, thunderbird can import PSTs. I don’t know about you but I managed to move three PSTs into network shared mail boxes and use the same mail folders for reading mail on my Windows, Mac & Linux machines.
…but not enough to switch me from Syphleed. It’s multi-platform too, folks.
It doesn’t matter if PST is propietary or not when it comes to move people away from MS Email clients, the first question I get asked when I propose to move away from MS Outlook, is:
What I meant is that people do not care if PST is propietary or not, they are not concern about open or closed, propietary or no propietary. They only care about their years of accumulated emails, if they can not access them, any other Email client is of no use to them. Whether if that’s because PST is propietary only matters to technical people.
Am I the only one who has problems with printing out e-mails in any Thunderbird version? HTML formatted get printed somehow streched vertically or rather limited horizontaly, and plain text ones also have some trouble with centering… Tested on several Windows 2000 boxes – all have this problem.
I don’t have this problem on XP with a HP PSC 1610.
However, the progress dialog when printing a several page document does not layout correctly. The Cancel button gets pushed way off the the right and only a little bit of it shows.
I am still waiting for an application (Linux, but even a non-Outlook Windows one would do) that will sync my email/Calendar/Todo list to my Windows based Axim. Anyone know of anything that will do this?
Multisync never worked for me, and the interface is too intrusive anyway.
i use it not because its the bets client – but i want to be sure my data is preserved through generations of software clients … something tha i couldn’t easily ensue with even Evolution
What I meant is that people do not care if PST is propietary or not, they are not concern about open or closed, propietary or no propietary.
They should be though.
They only care about their years of accumulated emails, if they can not access them, any other Email client is of no use to them.
Classic vendor lock-in. Microsoft cementing its monopoly.
Sadly there’s nothing much mozilla.org can do about that except provide an open alternative to eventually apply pressure on MS to open up its format, like OpenOffice and OpenDocument are doing with Word.
Not much point in reverse-engineering and chasing after MS’s closed format, because it would probably always leave them slightly short of being fully compatible.
Meanwhile, the MAPI interface does provide a way to import Outlook folders into Thunderbird.
Classic vendor lock-in. Microsoft cementing its monopoly.
followed by:
Meanwhile, the MAPI interface does provide a way to import Outlook folders into Thunderbird.
That’s some amazing doublethink. You’re locked in – to being able to export/import data easily to other systems!
🙂
Stop thinking about the client. There are a million email apps out there that kick ass/suck ass in their own way (I’m using Outlook 12 beta currently and find it to be a tremendous improvement over OL2003; that being said, nothing beats 2003 OWA). The important thing is the backend – take those thousands of developers working on pet email clients, and focus them on creating a backend that competes with Exchange and integrates into an environment as seamlessly. Then you can get some actual market penetration.
The only thing that I miss from Thunderbird is the possibility to add a contact to a LDAP server.
The program for most mail use is fine.
* Plugins are useful
* Free!
I hope they put a decent status bar
Cross-platform Mail apps are a rare breed
True, but there are some very capable ones out there. A big problem are the overhype of Thunderbird, lot of it generated because it’s family ties to Mozilla/Firefox. One good example of a competing OSS mail/PIM application, available for Win32, Linux and Mac, are Aethera.
http://www.thekompany.com/projects/aethera/overview.php3
I had been using Thunderbird as my main email client at home since it was back in beta 0.4. It worked great with my IMAP Hushmail account and I really really loved the built-in spam filtering.
I used ACT! 6.0 as my contact manager and calendar and that seemed to work good enough for the past 2 years or so. BUT… I’m moving back to Outlook 2003.
Personally, open source vs. closed source, licensing, etc. don’t mean a damn thing to me. All I really care about it what works the easiest and what’s the most powerful tool. After searching far and wide to find the best email client & contact/calendar mangager, and I’ve probably tried them all (on Windows anyway). I landed back on Outlook 2003 with the Business Contact Manager add-on for the following reasons:
1) Calendar, contacts, task management & email all in one program. Gives me one file to back up. I can quickly keep track of what emails I send to what people and assign tasks to it. But mostly I just like it better to have it all in one program.
2) Looks. Totally subjective, but I really like the look & feel of Outlook 2003. Thuderbird wasn’t bad, but ACT! 6.0 sure was.
3) PDA sync functionality. Just works better with Outlook than it does with ACT. I never did figure out if there was a way to sync anything T-bird.
4) Stability. Maybe 3 or 4 times I’ve had profile files in T-bird get currupted. I could pretty easily restore my settings from backups, but it was still a silly problem. On my dad’s computer, this would happen at least once a month and I’d have to deal with it for him. That REALLY started to get old after a while. Seems like it would always fail right when I was too busy to go over there and fix it.
It must be spotlight searchable…otherwise I ain’t using it.
As the “anonymous” who made the post “standing in an empty field” – I’d just like to say thanks. I’d never encountered Aethera before
Opera (faster than firefox, includes email)
Pick your platform: Windows / Solaris / QNX / OS/2 / MacOS / Linux / FreeBSD / BeOS
http://www.opera.com/download/index.dml?custom=yes
Thunderbird would let me:
– delete atachments (i hear thats coming)
– edit any messsage in place (whether sent or receive by me)
– schedule automatic compacts of folders
(actually the default should be to compact all folder nightly)