Submitted by Thunderbird 2 is now available for download on Windows, Mac and Linux in over 35 languages. It offers easy ways to manage and organize your email with message tags, advanced folder views, message history navigation, find as you type, and improved new mail alert notifications. Thunderbird 2 also includes a refreshed user interface and support for Microsoft Vista.
Mozilla Thunderbird 2 Released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I haven’t downloaded it at home yet for Windows, but on OS X at work, it looks VERY slick.
Blends into the entire OS, looks almost native (I’m not sure if it is or not).
Performance is much better than the previous one too.
Another great release and huge thank you to the Mozilla team.
IMHO, Thunderbird used to lag behind Firefox in the looks department, but TB 2.0 looks better than Fx 2.0. I think the new version looks gorgeous on all three platforms, but definitely moreso on Mac OS X.
AFAIK, Thunderbird and Firefox don’t use native Cocoa widgets yet–that’s slated for 3.0, but they’ve done a good job of making XUL look native in 2.0.
yes it looks amzing good,
here is a screenshot:
http://img340.imageshack.us/my.php?image=thunderbirdeu8.png
but there is no dock integration! Douh!
Edited 2007-04-19 13:30
… newsreader – there are only three predefined headerlines to use with filtering mechanism – as they were in 1.5.x and no way to add custom ones.
And no, I can’t create a extension myself.
I remember a few years ago when I read news in Thunderbird (it was just split out of Mozilla a few weeks before). It wouldn’t store my preferences to have an extended view sorted by date. Each time I launched Thunderbird I had to manually go to the “View” menu to display the list of news by date and extended.
Things have changed, and now I read the news in Google Groups. Since then I don’t pay anymore for my Usenet account.
Anyway, regarding Thunderbird 2, where are the screenshots???!
are you sure?
i could swear that my tb 2.0 have a “new tag” option in the drop down menu that shows up when i hit the tag button in the gui. there i can define the name and color of the new tag…
edit:
oops, forgot that you where talking about it used as a news reader…
Edited 2007-04-19 19:19
My email client of choice. 🙂 Works beautifully I especially like its learning bayesian spam filters and the endless number of useful extensions to extend the core functionality.
Also I like the fact that I can easily copy a Thunderbird profile including all my mail from a windows box to a linux or mac and it will pick up the email without hassles.
Though it would be sacrilegious, I wish I could integrate Thunderbirds bayesian filtering into Outlook, man that spam detection in Outlook SUCKS.
Thunderbird + FireFox = Bloat.
Why run two lots of apps which use basically cp’s of the same libraries, and consume excess amounts of RAM, when you could just use Seamonkey and save a few hundred meg.
Thunderbird seems slower than the Seamonkey’s Mail & News by a considerable margin.
It’s called choice. That’s what some people may choose to do for their own reasons.
The answer to your question is that users don’t care about library usage, and they don’t measure RAM usage. They also don’t know what Seamonkey is, if you’re interested.
Thunderbird and Firefox both work well, and that is what users care about.
The answer to your question is that users don’t care about library usage, and they don’t measure RAM usage. They also don’t know what Seamonkey is, if you’re interested.
I know what Seamonkey is and it is great! I use it since I have an older system with limited RAM and using Seamonkey saves me RAM instead of using separate applications for Mail and Browser. Without the ease of adding extensions, Seamonkey and Firefox are really the same browser. Firefox looks more contemporary but if you throw a good skin on Seamonkey it can look decent. Here’s an extension and skin that will make it more Firefox-like: http://markbokil.org/index.php?section=tech&content=c_linuxmonkeyme…
Edited 2007-04-19 14:47
I use Opera for web browsing and Thunderbird for e-mail and RSS. I love Opera, but I never liked M2, drives me up a wall. Mozilla seperated the browser from the mail client for weirdos like me.
Most average users use webmail and couldn’t care less about ChatZilla and Composer, so SeaMonkey would be feature bloat for them.
When you look at it that way, SeaMonkey actually consumes more RAM than running Firefox and Thunderbird alone; SeaMonkey loads its whole self into memory, regardless of what component you’re using at the moment.
Seamonkey actually uses less memory than Firefox. At least in my experience that has been the case.
Also, you can choose to install or not install Seamonkey’s components. If you don’t need ChatZilla, don’t install it, same goes for the rest of them. Everyone always gives Seamonkey a bad rap which it doesn’t deserve.
It’s not a “bloated” browser.
Simple… I don’t use Thunderbird (not by choice; my university’s IMAP server is extremely flaky and Evolution handles it better than T-bird or Kmail). My RAM usage is probably even higher than what it would be if I used T-bird and Firefox, but I get the functionality I need. That’s the beauty of open source: you get to choose the tools that work best for you, not what works best for some guy in Redmond.
I thought that the Linux version used the same libraries for both Firefox and Thunderbird. The libraries are shared across the two apps since they use the same libs anyway. In windows it might be different due to the nature of how software is installed on the platform. The same applies to OSX. In Linux most common libraries are usually shared across the applications that use it and I heard that the Mozilla Suite does this because they are all using the same engine. Am I wrong?
Am I wrong?
Yes you are. On linux Firefox and Thunderbird use separate libraries. The mozilla developers refer to it as XUL Runner. Believe it or not but each mozilla application currently doesn’t share these resources but has a copy of them. Is it inefficient? yep. Eventually the two applications will use one XUL Runner engine but they have been separate for quite some time. Having separate runtime engines for the two applications makes it easier for the developers though since they don’t have to worry about version problems with XUL Runner. The downside is that running multiple copies of XUL Runner eats RAM since you have copies of what essentially should be a shared resource.
Edited 2007-04-19 15:01
On linux Firefox and Thunderbird use separate libraries
Well, assuming they use compatible version it is more a matter of how they are packaged.
If the distribution packagers move the common parts of a shared sub-package, they will use the same resources
Well, assuming they use compatible version it is more a matter of how they are packaged.
Nope. They don’t currently use the same compatible version. It is not just how they are packaged. Believe it or not but the Gecko library, XUL Runtime, is not completely separated from the application level in Firefox and Thunderbird so this is not currently possible. Changes will need to be made to both the applications and the XUL Runtime to make this possible. There are plans and some prototypes but nothing solid yet for a public release.
They are still working on fixing that.
I believe in the next version both firefox and thunderbird will run on XUL Runner. Which will allow them to share a lot of resources.
Because when I develop XUL code, I sometimes crash Firefox. I don’t want to take both down at once or risk data loss in email.
How’s that?
Because when I develop XUL code, I sometimes crash Firefox. I don’t want to take both down at once or risk data loss in email.
That is one drawback with using a shared XUL runtime. If the runtime fails all the applications will terminate. Ideally if you didn’t care about RAM XUL Runner would have the option to run each application which a separate instance of the runtime. I think this is actually a planned option. I tend to be kind of skeptical about software releases. Until I actually see thunderbird and firefox running on XUL Runner it is just vaporware.
I wonder if the RSS reader is any better than 1.5.x. I had to go to Google Reader, because even though I loved using the search and the integrated e-mail client and sorting (and now tagging) features, I found that Google Reader was simply a better behaved client. I guess I can always do an OPML export/import and find out.
Yes, the RSS/ATOM reader is improved in terms of usability (a better subscription UI) and compatibility with feeds that are not correctly formed.
I use FastMail.fm, as I suspect many of the OS News type might. (Or you might use one of the excellent competing services that let you set flags on IMAP messages…) I was wondering if Thunderbird 2.0’s new tag functionality works by setting custom flags on the IMAP server.
I used to set custom flags like “$Label1”, “$Label2”, etc. with a custom Sieve script. Then the corresponding label would show up in Thunderbird (“1 Important”, or “2 Work”)
Thunderbird previously only paid attention to 5 custom flags… I’m guessing that power hasn’t translated to -gasp- infinite custom labels, set by the server, and readable by the client -gasp-
There would be nothing quite like having your tags show up on other computers when you log in with the new Thunderbird 2.0! (Well, I guess there’s always a web client, like GMail… heh.)
you get ‘Date’ when you should get ‘Received’ or ‘Sent’ date options. There is a reason that every other email program on earth shows incoming mail as ‘Received’ and sent mail as ‘Sent’. Freaking wake up TB developers everyone out there that I tell about TB just comes back at me with the same problem. No one wants to view their incoming mail by Sent date and that ‘order received’ stuff is complete crap and they know it. They are just too lazy to parse out some damn mail headers. freaking amateurs.
I beg to differ. Nobody with a sane mind could possibly want to sort incoming mails according to received date. That would completely screw the order of mails. Imagine using TB for a mailing list and have the mails show up in a completely random order due to “ordering by received date”. I want my incoming mails to be ordered according to the date they were sent. Only that solution will order mails in the correct order. Using “received date” will jumble the mails around in random order making it difficult (read: impossible) to follow a mailing list.
I also fully agree with you.
calling them amateurs is also not a very good thing <tm>.
I am wondering though if the AM/PM vs 24 hrs format is easy now or not. We’ll see.
sgi.
Imagine using TB for a mailing list and have the mails show up in a completely random order due to “ordering by received date”.
Well, the main sorting on mailinglists will be done by threading (references) anyway, so it would probably only affect ordering of postings with the same parent.
In this case however, sorting by receive date might make sense, since the ordering will stay fixed when new messages arrive, i.e. postings with the same parent will be added as the last child of the parent’s “tree” and any previously received posting will stay at the position it is at.
True to the extent threaded view works properly. Broken mailers tend to ruin this.
Edited 2007-04-19 16:58
True to the extent threaded view works properly. Broken mailers tend to ruin this.
True, but thus broken postings will end up on a wrong level (often even top level) and thus be outside the range of properly sent postings.
So they basically get their own “mailer too broken for mailinglists” section in the thread and there IMHO the same reasoning (stable ordering) applies as well.
“you get ‘Date’ when you should get ‘Received’ or ‘Sent’ date options.”
When is it received? When it was stored in your mailbox on the server? When you downloaded it?
Sorting by “received” is rather pointless.
“There is a reason that every other email program on earth shows incoming mail as ‘Received’ and sent mail as ‘Sent’. ”
Really? Every other? Only one I know of is Outlook/Outlook Express and Express can’t even do it “right”.
With Thunderbird + the Lightning Calendaring extension, Thunderbird will let me accept meeting invitations from an exchange server and put them in my calendar.
Very cool, try it out:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/
Also, check out the Google Calendar Provider extension… you can manage your GCal account from Lightning now, works like a charm. Still missing some features (alarms, recurring events), but those are being worked on.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/4631
“Also, check out the Google Calendar Provider extension… you can manage your GCal account from Lightning now, works like a charm. Still missing some features (alarms, recurring events), but those are being worked on. ”
Nice! Hope they manage to implement all the functionality soon B)
Version 2 still has the same problem the first version had on OS X. If you start the program it sits there at ~0 percent CPU usage, but as soon as one email arrives CPU usage jumps up to ~5 percent or so and remains there until the program quits.
Go Thunderbird, never come back, not because its great (well, it is), but because there is no easy way to export your mail again!
Trying to move to Outlook a year later, was HELL. I tried several solutions, several extensions, nothing worked. I had to set up my own imap-server to move it!?
Cant find anything about enhanced export, until that, i wont touch it. Shame, because its great!
See for yourself: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Export_mail_into_Outlook_(Express)_or_Apple_Mail
Edited 2007-04-19 08:49
Any decent mail client has the responsibility to adequately *import* mail from various formats. That way, nobody has to worry about exporting.
You should complain about Outlook, not Thunderbird…
Go Thunderbird, never come back, not because its great (well, it is), but because there is no easy way to export your mail again!
Is using IMAP not an option?
I think that you should be able to export. There is one file in UNIX mbox format per mail folder. I can’t tell you the name of the file, because I don’t use Thunderbird/Seamonkey at this time. ‘mbox’ format is the one that contains many plain text messages in a single file. You should be able to find them in you home directory uner .mozilla or .thunderbird directories.
I think most mail clients should be able to import mbox. If not then those clients are the ones missing important features.
For example, I managed to export to Sylpheed, which is MH format, by choosing to import mentioned mbox type folders.
It takes space away from OS related posts
Thunderbird is kinda like an OS. It can run programs – Extensions!
I just upgraded from 1.5.something to 2.0
Looks nice, and it seems the RSS problem is fixed.
(sometimes it stopped updating a feed)
I see they addeed Gmail to email account types. I was using Gmail though POP3 for a long time already so that doesn’t add anyting to me, I keep using the normal POP3 support.
But one thing I would like to see in ThunderBird is HTTP-mail support. Since I am using Mr. PostMan to get my mail on HTTP-mail accounts, but I can’t get Mr.PostMan to work with my school’s *shiver* Outlook2003 WebMail
I really appreciate the efforts of the Thunderbird team to bring out this latest release, and the new features are a great improvement.
But there is still one basic feature which is lacking and i find it extremely dissapointing that it is not implimented. I should add, this is also the case for almost all email clients out there. The feature i refer to is – no importer for .mbox!!
I mean, it is the default standard, the grandaddy of all email formats and yet there is no easy way to import mbox folders. People coming from MACOSX 10.1.x – 10.3.9 who are migrating from Mail.app to Thunderbird will have a difficult time importing their mail. I mean they go around in circles an import into Eudora and then back into Thunderbird, but why should they? Also anyone coming from Linux who uses Evolution, same issue. So what is the bloody difficulty here? Is it too mcuh to ask for them to write an importer for .mbox? Comeone people, we are suffering here…
Thunderbird uses mbox format as it’s native format, you don’t have to import anything, just drag and drop into Thunderbird’s profile your mbox files from your current mail application and remove the file extension (.mbx), nothing more.
Yes, I’ve done this many times – slurping Yahoo Groups using a perl script (yahoo2mbox) and then ‘importing’ using the method you describe – works flawlessly.
“The feature i refer to is – no importer for .mbox!!”
As far as I know, mbox and MH are the two main representation formats for mail; while an mbox file represents a mail folder and holds the messages concatenated as file segments, MH uses a singe file for each message and directory subtrees for the mail folders. The system mail collector (e. g. /var/mail/$USER) is in mbox format, too. For example, tools like fetchmail read the messages from a POP3 server and place it into the user’s mailbox (/var/mail/$USER) where any (!) program can get the mail from. So it’s possible to use different mail clients upon one and the same database (granted that the format is equivalent, e. g. sylpheed-claws + pine).
“I mean, it is the default standard, the grandaddy of all email formats and yet there is no easy way to import mbox folders.”
You can use mbox2mdir to convert mbox into qmail compatible Maildir, if this is a compatible type, I’m not sure. You can break up mboxes by yourself (with help of a processing script, of course). There are tools like mboxgrep, too.
“Is it too mcuh to ask for them to write an importer for .mbox? Comeone people, we are suffering here…”
It’s always nice if standards are supported, at least at converter level. I hope there will be a usable solution.
While there is no default importer for .mbox folders, there has been an extension written for thunderbird (at least version 1.5x) called mboximport: https://nic-nac-project.de/~kaosmos/mboximport-en.html
which lets you either import single .mbox files or import a whole directory tree. It does give your folders odd default names, for exmaple calling an old “inbox” folder inbox2314 or something, but will import the emails without a hitch.
I dread the words:
That same line was applied to Firefox when 2.0 was released. In October… and 1.5.* users are still waiting for the upgrade package. I expect we’ll still be waiting for a Thunderbird update come Christmas. It might be unimportant to most users posting here, but for dialup users it’s a bit of a pain to have to download the whole release when they could be getting a much smaller delta package if MozCorp would just use the delivery-system they spent so much effort developing.
Rant over… to those complaining about lack of export options, here’s a trick I learned when trying to export/re-import my mail in Outlook Express a few years ago, which had the same problem. The solution was to select all messages (or all in a particlular folder) and forward all as attachments in a message which you save as a draft. You can then drag+drop the draft onto the desktop as a single .eml file, which (if memory serves) you can then import into OE or TBird. Open the draft, and drag/drop the attached mails to the folder they belong in.
<quote>That same line was applied to Firefox when 2.0 was released. In October… and 1.5.* users are still waiting for the upgrade package. I expect we’ll still be waiting for a Thunderbird update come Christmas. It might be unimportant to most users posting here, but for dialup users it’s a bit of a pain to have to download the whole release when they could be getting a much smaller delta package if MozCorp would just use the delivery-system they spent so much effort developing. </quote>
The 1.5 Thunderbird and Firefox branches are still supported, the major updates will happen when the 1.5 version will become unsupported (next month for Firefox). Currently the AUS system is used every month for the stability and security patch for both Firefox and Thunderbird.
I keep a lot of old email, from several accounts. One thing that I really like about Outlook is the ability to archive old emails. BeOSMail is nice, cause I can just zip the mail directory. I use Thunderbird and it’s a great program, but still haven’t found a way to easily archive mail. What to do when your email box grows too large?
I hope it’s a feature that will be addressed sometime.
Did they finally fix the kde link bug? (not sure if it also exists in gnome, and other DM)
There are a few users who I’ve helped move over to Thunderbird and provide occasional support for. By far the most frequent questions/problems I get are related to signatures: non-technical users who can’t figure out the whole “you have to create a separate text file containing your signature, then associate it via TB’s settings” silliness. Or people who user local fileservers for document storage (including storing their TB sig files), and need to re-do the settings every time they lose connection to the fileserver (because in that case, TB can no longer find the sig file).
Would it really be that hard to add a simple built-in signature editor? I’m not programmer, but I would be surprised if it’s a more difficult task than implementing a Bayesian spam filter or built-in RSS reader. Even the original version of BeMail in BeOS – one of the most basic GUI mail clients I’ve ever used – contained that feature (and it didn’t even have support for multiple accounts or filtering).
You want a signature editor instead of a few documented tutorials on writing some html to build a custom signature?
Why would those two features be mutually-exclusive?
But to answer your question, what I would *like* is for Thunderbird not to lack simple, basic features that have been standard for over decade.
Just so long as they don’t take the same idiotic route as MS Outlook – who in their right mind ever thought that the “Use Word as Signature Editor” feautre was a good idea? Oh yay, Word formatting quirks – now available in your signature block!
Try this extension, it can even define multiple signatures.
http://www.achimonline.de/mozext/signatureswitch_download.php
Remember to remove the “.zip” after downloading, and before install the extension.
To use it , go to extension, click on Signature Switch > Option , and start defining your signature.
Hope it solves your problem.
That would be perfect if it were an issue with my own computer. Unfortunately, the place where the lack of built-in sig editor has been problematic is with less-technical users that I provide support for – most of them probably aren’t willing to pay me to come over to install an extension (and these are users who almost certainly couldn’t install/configure it without help).
I’ll definitely point people who ask in the future to that extension (thanks! I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, BTW). But it really is something that should be included with Thunderbird by default – even just bundling that extension would be an improvement.
I’m happy,
Important tagged messages at the top, sorted by date aftwards, threaded (although the hot key to collapse the threads does not seem to work as well as the expand hot key…ie goes one way only).
Nice!
Try:
http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=thunderbird%202&ie=UTF-8&oe…
lol.
It definetly looks better, i like the green and plastic look.
When I ran thunderbird 1.x, after 100 emails, it slowed down horribly, just like Outlook, and Outlook Express. Is that bug fixed in this new version?
I hope the new version integrates perfectly into Windows Vista. It needs to in order to compete with Windows Mail. It needs to support searchable mail, contacts although that could be provided through an extension. As of 1.5 and Vista RC2 it still could not even import messages from Mail and the new XML format contacts automatically.
I’d like to update thunderbird from 1.5 to 2.0, but I don’t know how. Do I have to uninstall 1.5 first or can I just download the 2.0 exe and install it? Will it import all my settings and mail automatically?
Thanks!
Mail – yes.
Extensions – yes, but some may be TB2.0-incompatible.
Settings – probably only those, which haven’t changed from 1.5 to 2.0.