Mozilla has released Thunderbird 3. You can read the release notes, or download the darn thing. “If you like Firefox’s tabbed browsing, you’re going to love tabbed email. Thunderbird 3’s tabbed email lets you load emails in separate tabs so you can quickly jump between them. Search results open in a new tab too. New tools like our timeline and filtering tools will help you pinpoint the email you’re looking for, whether it’s the one from yesterday, last month, or several years ago.”
nice!
…but page 2? no body cares about e-mail clients anymore? even cross-platform ones?
Apparently not.
I admit, I like my Gmail… you can set up an account and access it from anywhere, and its web interface is nice and clean. But when I recently installed the then-current 2x version of Thunderbird and realized I could use it with my web-based Gmail account in the “classic” fashion, I was quite pleasantly surprised. The best of both worlds! Not to mention, it’s not ISP-provided, so my e-mail address doesn’t change every damn time I switch ISPs.
Now, the only problem is… waiting for the next Ubuntu release or whatever it takes to package it. Sure, Mozilla probably provides a tar file or something to extract into your home directory, which is how I used Firefox 3 and 3.5 up until Ubuntu *finally* decided to support it officially… but it feels “cleaner” and more proper to use the official package management system. It’d rather not use tarred, generically pre-built binaries if I can help it.
Fedora 11 and Fedora 12 includes the latest pre-release and will update to the general release soon. XULRunner is a shared component by dozens of software packages and hence it isn’t really easy to shift to new major versions.
You could try the Mozilla PPA
https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mozilla-daily/+archive/ppa
I’m using the tarball as we speak. What’s the problem with it anyway? That’s basically how windows users deal with their software all the time, and I don’t see them complaining.
Oh no, there are some of us who do. For myself, I do especially care about the portable app version, which I’m using for many years now. That doesn’t mean I don’t have backups on gmail, at work and at home, but still, it’s nice to have all my mails from all accounts handy all the time, even without a connection (!).
How to install in ubuntu:
https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mozilla-daily/+archive/ppa
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/ubuntuzilla/index.php?title=M…
Yeah, this is a major release of the best email client for Linux.
Even the gmail users will need to use a real client at work to access that pesky exchange server. Thunderbird beats the competition hands down.
No. The motto of the best email client still reads:
“All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.” -me, circa 1995
Edited 2009-12-09 08:17 UTC
Did you try thunderbird 3 already? I’d argue mutt is not better than that.
The cool thing about mutt is that is makes you really ‘leet. It allows you to berate users of modern email clients, who send you html mail with pretty backgrounds, with a certain degree of authority. It’s the geek equivalent of being part of the old Aristocracy.
You should try it. A month or two of putzing with your .muttrc file and seeking out tips from other Mutt users should get you passably close to what TB and Evolution users get “out of the box”. 😉
Edited 2009-12-13 17:40 UTC
‘leet is not what it used to be. Back when I was at school, the ‘leet thing was to use Gnus (emacs usenet module) for email too. Elm, Mutt and (god forbid) Pine were the newbie choices.
I can sort of understand someone wanting to use Gnus (prolonged marriage to emacs infrastructure), but using mutt on this day and age seems somewhat masochistic (unless you have a crappy computer of course, or read your emails through shell account).
Totally subjective. How can it compete with KMail, for example?
Subjectively speaking, kmail was much slower and more crash-prone for me than thunderbird 2. Obviously I have no benchmarks to prove it.
As for thunderbird 3, it’s no comparison at all (though I haven’t tried the latest kmail builds…).
To each their own. I personally can’t stand Thunderbird, after having used KMail/Kontact for so long. Especially now that KMail/Kontact is available for Windows. Why anyone would use something (TB) so slow and blah is beyond me.
An impressive release. I was using it since the betas, and it seems to improve in almost every aspect. Specially regarding the mail search, IMAP handling, overall speed and UI.
One feature I like the most is the ‘show in conversation’, which opens the entire thread in a separate tab. If only it would be easier to reach.. hopefully an extension arrives soon to simplify it.
Tb3 is my preferred email client when I’m not on my Mac. I’ve been using it since the betas and have been very impressed. Nice to see it officially released so the distros can start packaging it.
i’ve found thunderbird to be slow and heavy in the past. has it lost any weight at all?
I also used to remember thunderbird as slow, but it was fast since thunderbird 2; possibly due to improvements in xul / firefox stack?
I’ve been using the “Shredder” nightly builds for a while now, sadly I’ve been finding it getting more and more sluggish since they introduced automatic indexing of messages (though having nearly 40k messages in my inbox might have something to do with that).
I haven’t tried the 3.0 release yet, though.
I love it ! Particularily the new better search function.
I really need to considering switching back to Thunderbird after a ~18-month period with KMail. Thunderbird’s spam filtering is the best I’ve ever used. KMail always misses the spam and mis-identifies proper messages as spam, and it doesn’t handle the junk mail properly anyways.
I’m using bogofilter with KMail without any troubles, though Gmail takes care of most spam for me.
Superb release.
I have been using Thunderbird 3 since alpha 3 and it’s great. Very much improved over Thunderbird 2. Too bad it too so long to come out, I think it was a year behind. Also isn’t this the first release since Mozilla made Mozilla Messaging?
looks great. now to just figure out how to import my filters from tb2
Beautiful release! Kudos to Mozilla folk once again!
Been using v3 since Beta1 and it’s a lot faster in handling my huge inboxes, more solid and more feature rich than v2.
Don’t know if it can be compared to mutt, but it’s probably the best graphical client one can get ATM.
I’ve only installed it today (didn’t feel like trusting 10 years of mail to beta software), and I’m really happy with 2 features:
– the lovely search functionality (oh how I missed this in Thunderbird 2 – especially the timeline)
– the ‘show in conversation’ option
Next, I’m going to investigate how the ‘archive’ function works.
Great release!
While there are certainly some nice improvements over the 2.x versions, there are still some fairly basic bugs and issues that have been around since the 2.x days. I just installed the 3.0 release and ran through my list of TB annoyances, most are still present.
– highlight (say) 20 messages in the drafts folder & hit enter, only 8 will open no matter how many you select.
– to attach a file, you have do drag-drop it on the head section of a compose window. Drag a file onto the body of a message, and (instead of attaching it) TB inserts a *link* to the file – an absolute link that will only work on the sender’s computer. Why would anyone want to do that?
– the “View > All Headers” option is useless in many cases, since you can’t just select & copy all of the headers. It took me a while to realize that the view source option is the only way to view the raw message.
– I love the ability to partially download a message (very handy for dialup), but downloading the rest of the message is still hit-or-miss (highlight a different message and TB will stop downloading the rest of the previous message)
– so far as I can tell, the option to auto-save drafts doesn’t actually kick in until you type something in the reply/forward/compose window
– and my biggest gripe: when you restart TB after a crash, it doesn’t restore anything you had open before (unlike Firefox), which is REALLY aggravating if you had a large number of reply/compose windows open before the crash (and even if had them all saved as drafts, there’s the annoyance of having to re-open them 8 at a time).
That said, two of my longstanding gripes were fixed – TB finally has a built-in signature editor, and it now parses URLs as links in plain-text EMails (’bout time).
this is true
That is probably a feature. Just imagine you selected a 100 messages and accidentally hit enter!
Given the amount of EMail I have, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that I would do something like that intentionally. I suspect TB would become unresponsive for a minute or two while it opened all of the messages – but I’d prefer that to opening 100 messages eight at a time.
I would expect a friendly “Are you sure?” dialog if I exceed the reasonableness threshhold.
“You seem to be doing something crazy, like opening 100 messages at once. We think this is nuts and are giving you a chance to cancel this action. If you choose to continue we really will try and open 100 windows, but we have no idea if your computer can take that.
Continue?
[I understand, do it anyway] [No! Cancel!]”
I’ve used thunderbird for years and years, and thunderbird 3 is not higher quality than thunderbird 2, and in some ways it is lower quality. And I don’t see a significant new feature other than the better search.
Unfortunately, judging from the pace they’re moving, they have some more years and years to go before they significantly improve it
I was using Thunderbird 2 with some disconfort, in the long past I used Outlook Express and for one thing the UI was better. After migrating to Linux, Evolution was a huge beast with so many options and UI problems. Finally Thunderbird 3 is easy on my eye… the UI has been greatly improved and the new features shine. Thanks Mozilla for learning your lesson – we need more applications like this. And let Songbird and new-Firefox come!
I use Thunderbird on several computers.
[The profile’s files reside on a microSD card inside my 3G USB stick which is also the way all my computers and their XP/Ubuntu OS’s connect to the internet. This is handy].
The problem is:
1) I’m wondering where Thunderbird 3 is going to store its index. My notebook has been indexing for over 4 hours..and not I see it’s on its way around again, indexing the same unused mailboxes. The hard drive LED is off, so I’m hoping the indexing is being written to the USB micro SD.
2)Maybe TBird3 is not for people like me. Is it portable?
Steve