Thunderbird 1.0 is Mozilla’s next generation e-mail client rate it here. Thunderbird makes emailing safer, faster, and easier than ever before with the industry’s best implementations of features such as intelligent spam filters, saved search folders, builtin RSS support, privacy protection and much more. Elsewhere, Evolution 2.0.3 was released too (rate it here).
Thunderbird 1.0 Unleashed
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Upgrade was very smooth for me. New theme is an improvement. Seems very solid so far.
ThunderBird is great, but it still doesn’t seem as refined as Mozilla Mail, which comes with the Mozilla Suite.
Why did they release it only after 3-4 days of 1.0 RC release ? what was such a hurry to do it? It still has issues and I would like to see them resolved first. It takes a bit longer to load atleast than OUTLOOK on my machine
I absolutely agree. Thunderbird has still important issues. It is not of the same quality as Firefox is in its 1.0.
And I enjoy Thunderbird very mutch. My girlfriend will never allow me to swich her back to OE/IE in Thunderbird/Firefox place. I’ve used it too, but sice I’ve choosen to stick with a rather lame (when it comes to spec) laptop over my desktop computer, I had to find something as good as Thunderbird, but with a lot smaller memory footprint. Mutt was good, but it has some shortcomings (or I failed on .muttrc, who has 90k;-) and then I discovered Sylpheed-Claws. It’s a very good e-mail client, that can be compiled with GTK1.2 binding, and that makes him a) bad looking b) fast 🙂
Just my .02 PLN
I have a pop account that put all its mail into the Local Folders, and I have a few message filters setup, but I manually run them when I get new messages… I haven’t been able to find an option anywhere to automatically run them. I’ve been using Outlook 2003 at work, and the interface is very very nice, I wish the thunderbird guys had put more effort into the Vertical layout like in Outlook.
I agree with the earlier poster, that was a bit quick – I’ve only had the RC a few days. Was certainly nothing like Firefox, which dragged out like anything over PR, rc1, rc2…
Admittedly I haven’t noticed much change in the last few versions; the only thing I spotted from 0.9 to rc1 was the new theme. It’s certainly stable enough to be at 1.0; it compares very favourably to the first release of Outlook 🙂
Simon: Message filters should run automatically. Mine certainly do. I suppose they wouldn’t if you uncheck the box, but that’s about it…
Even if I actually use Evolution, for the fast Mail call up or RSS is Thunderbird 1a.
It stands also only in ‘battle’ with OutlookExpress, not with Outlook. Outlook is replaced perfectly through Evolution.
Thunderbird makes emailing safer, faster, and easier than ever before with the industry’s best implementations of features such as intelligent spam filters, saved search folders, builtin RSS support, privacy protection and much more.
What is this? Eugenia the shill?
Seriously, I use Thunderbird, but “ever before”? “industry’s best implementations”? Why can’t I have my IMAP mail automatically go to my single inbox? Why does its Eudora import suck so bad? Do filters on the single inbox work yet? (They very well may – haven’t checked in a while…) Can I sort by a text column (e.g. subject) and then press a letter to jump to the first one that starts with that letter? Can I remove filter rules other than the last one? Shall I go on?
I’m all about congratulations when it’s due, but let’s have some serious reflection and inspection rather than rampant incessant back-patting.
what i’m missing in ANY mozilla-like mail-client: the ability to hit just ONE button and have all my emails and adressbooks exported to ONE single file, which then can be imported elsewhere (or on the same machine in case you have to re-install the system).
no more coyping by hand, no more /profiles/dskjh2389.slt/bla
What will be the benefits of having Firefox and Thunderbird combo versus the Mozilla suite(sans Composer and Chatzilla)?
I’m the only person I know who has this problem (and I haven’t found much on google), but Thunderbird crashes at least a dozen times a day for me. 🙁 It makes me sad because I really like it, but when almost every new message window causes a crash, it’s really only borderline usable.
I’m using XP SP2. Anyone have any advice (other than installing another operating system)?
I do hope IMAP support will be better, altough I tend to doubt about it. IMAP support has just been plain broken until now. Will check this evening…
Integrate the exchange-connector (for Evolution) and I’ll be sold on Thunderbird. I know it’s a very niche thing, but it’s something I absolutely must have in my email client. I’m thankful for the unbeatable ease of evolution and exchange-connector, but options are always good.
If I’m not mistaken, the exchange-connector has also gone open-source. If this is indeed the case, what is the hold-up?
I have not used it myself. But I installed it for my girl frind and she seems to like it a lot. It looks nice. Is there any kind of spam filther in it?
I’ve used it with imap since the very early versions, and never had a problem. How exactly is imap completly broken ?
I just installed it and it looks OK. I had followed the latest builds and have never encountered any problem except the occasional crash. Hope 1.0 is stable enough to switch over my collegues as well.
Although I am trying to switch to Linux for the last 3-4 years, somehow I end up using windows (mostly due to Visio 2003 and PP 2003)… (I know crossover, but it just does not feel right).
But, I think Evolution is a great e-mail client and I dunno when/where I read it but I remember that Evo would be ported to Windows. Does anyone have any clue about it? Or is it my mind playing games with me?
Cheers
I used to use Pocomail for email, I liked the spam filtering because it gave me the ability to manually edit a junkfilter.txt file to add/remove points based on terms.
eg.
“viagra” = +10
“remove” = +5
“!!” = +2
“Jim” = -10
I don’t like the lack of control over the spam filter. Aside from maybe a better default theme I don’t see what TB offers that Pocomail does not.
Hi,
everytime it loads the html email ( from Borland for example ), it crash. Sometimes it can crash for three times per day. I will migrate to Evolution. No doubt.
1.0 at last. I just installed the 1.0 RC the other day. That was quick…
I have problems with character encoding with Mozilla Mail and Tb.
They ignore the encoding given in the mail header though this option is not set.
The auto-detection seems not to work, in Tb I can’t even find it in the menu.
It is stable and does not crashes for me atleast most times. I have had crashes but they have been few 🙂 Thing that Thunderbird lacks is startup time. It takes too much time to start atleast on my machine(Firefox also takes large amount of time to start Mozilla SVG starts much faster than Firefox 🙁
)
I hope Mozilla foundation will focus on stability and speed now that these products have reached 1.0 release. I also think that there should be much more flexible way of transferring profiles, bookmarks etc from Firefox/Thunderbird to other places. Also I normally use .Zip files of these and do not install them(On WinXP as it there is so much crap). Hence they have been nothing but pleasant experience for me atleast except for speed.
I can’t figure out what i’m really doing with Thunderbird, seems that all features are mixed together.
I can’t see a clear simple scheme of the overall thing in my mind.
It is not clear how/when works filters for example: can i do the same thing as with “MagicMail” (filter & delete spam when they are still on the pop server) ?
I didn’t try to make a filter because is seems difficult.
Is “junk” the same as “spam” ?
If this program is for programmers or emails professionals, perhaps it is ok, but for end-users, they should still call it beta-version, and try to make it friendly.
I now have a few of my co-workers using Thunderbird. The 1.0 timing couldn’t be better for me. I work at a university, classes are done and it’s getting near Christmas. People actually have time for upgrades.
For what it’s worth, I moved these people over when they were having problems with Outlook Express/Outlook. Every one of them loves it. Personally, I use Thunderbird on every platform I deal with regularly. I’ve been using it since about 0.5. I think I can count how many times it has crashed on one hand. Honestly, I don’t know why Thunderbird doesn’t get more press. It’s a great app.
I am trying to download it with Firefox with DAP plugin & DAP says to me that password required any idea?
I am on dialup so I would prefer to use DAP
got it people.
I added url manually in DAP & got it to download
Spam filter a little easier to use in Mozilla email client. Thunderbird filters look a bit more advanced, but I don’t need/use them. Firefox should have option setting for what to do when you click a mailto: link (Linux version still reports “unsupported URL type”); this would make TB more accessible.
I love firefox’s rss, “open tab in new window” opens links in background, and a proper home button on main toolbar. But I still seem to use mozilla more often simply because of it’s included chat, email, and html editor; although it seems a tad slower than Firefox. I wonder if Mozilla would by now have been the browser/email client to be putting a big dent in IE’s market had it received more hype over the past while…
– when new mail arrives directly to a subfolder (I use procmail), I don’t get notified, nor does Thunderbird notice it until I click on he folder
– when browsing to a folder I didn’t use in a long time (eg archived mail), I typically don’t get to see my mails, because of no good synchronisation or somehting like that. It just stays “connecting to server…”
I’m using Thunderbird on Windows. On Linux I used Evolution with the same server/account and no such problems whatsoever.
Serge right mouse click on the subfolder that you want notificatom for and there is a check box that you need to check. Offhand I don’t remember what the text says and I don’t have thunderbird installed here (forced to use Outlook) but the instructions are pretty understandable.
I’ll put it on my mac ASAP.. but it’ll be a year before there’s a debian package.
Simon,
Have you checked that your filters are actually enabled?
on http://ftp.mozilla.org, latest release is rc1. am i missing something here?
> but it’ll be a year before there’s a debian package.
I don’t know, 0.9 is already in unstable and I’d bet that Linspire (Debian-baseed) will have a 1.0 .deb in no time.
I have an old hotmail account which i still use, it would be nice if they added httpmail support to thunderbird. On linux i prefer evolution.
* Can’t specify the folder to which deleted items are moved to. If it’s something other than Trash, you have to go manually editing some config file (which I never go to work).
* No way to specify move operations should also automatically expunge. This means if a message gets moved to your Spam folder, other mail clients will still show it where it arrived. Same for just moving messages around. Or if you allow it to move messages to your Trash folder on delete.
* Frequently fails to remove “Opening folder…” message.
* Cannot have unique configurations for viewing each folder (ie show different things, flags on folder x, recipients on folder y). At least sorting is unique per folder.
* Speaking of sorting, the default is oldest messages first. Yes, oldest messages first. Genius.
That said, it has a really cool feature called identities that very few other mail clients have.
No problem hear using Tbird – got sick of the lousy features in Outlook Express (don’t think I should have to pay for Outlook 2k3). I want a simple email client and Mozilla has provided one. Kudos!
Still crashes as soon as i try to read my imap mailbox.
Well, I find it quite unuseable to have to put up notification for every single mail folder. Makes me think to older Outlook versions where you had to enable every folder for offline sync.
Mozbackup backups all the addressbook and all the emails to one file and you can import it into a new install of Thunderbird.
Anybody know the easiest way to import messages from Thunderbird to Mozilla Mail?
MozBackup is only Win32 …. 🙁 Are here another alternative for a Mozilla linux user ?
I installed it over my 0.9 just to check if it does what think it would… Goddamn! Just as I suspected. It didn’t clean out the 0.9 version from the registry (Uninstall info). Now I have 0.9 and 1.0 on my Add/Remove Programs. I can easily clean this out from the registry but this is ANNOYING… same as Firefox there.
Anyway, re 1.0, I immediately noticed speed increase overall.
It’s only a 1.0 release, so there’s bound to be little buglets with the overall operation of the program.
I wonder if the people having IMAP issues have reported their findings to the proper channels for have them fixed ?
Personally, while Mozilla is great (and actually started the whole Moz-family of internet apps) having TBird and Firefox available for disparate operating-systems is the killer aspect for me. I run eCS at home and WinXP at work and it’s cool to be able to use the same apps on both.
Gregory L. Marx
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