Mozilla dons grass skirt with near-ready Thunderbird 3.1 release

The next version of Mozilla's open source email client hit a second release candidate milestone yesterday. Thunderbird 3.1's latest RC is now available for Windows, Mac and Linux machines. Mozilla said the next version of its mail client, codenamed Lanikai, comes loaded with faster search results and a quick filter toolbar, a …

[Hi Wreck]

Maildir

Just use IMAP to access your mailboxes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sharing Data

Please tell me it can read/write contacts to LDAP so there is at least a glimmer of hope that we can move away from Outlook/Exchange?

Why they spend so much effort doing stuff that loads of other clients do already I have no idea.

:-(

[Hi Wreck]

LDAP

You can read LDAP already. Writing LDAP appears to be a can of worms.

Setting LDAP access within thunderbird is not terribly obvious though. Go to the address book, then click on "FILE"->new->LDAP address book and away you go.

[Bucky 2]

People Eat Worms All The Time

Sorry, but that explanation has grown tiresome over the last 9 years.

Evolution managed to get R/W LDAP working some 5 years ago, and last I checked, it was an open source project, too.

[beardman]

ldap

Yes, it can read contacts from LDAP. Write? I guess - no.

[Anonymous Coward]

Writing a new email opens a new window...

why not a new tab?

[John Hoar]

Can't be worse than 3.0

I hope that it has an expert option for creating account setups; we were using HTTPS for our IMAP server and 3.0 simply would not do let me set that up easily - it kept driving me into the wizard-for-dummies which was utterly utterly inadequate.

Also; stop trying to index my 17Gb mailbox every 2 minutes you cretinous program.

[Woodnag]

This is why I'm stil on 2.0.0.24

Nothing on 3.0 was useful to me, the indexing was a complete pain, so I reverted...

[Anonymous Coward]

hope it's a bit faster

the last version takes aboiut 2 minutes to start up

[Anonymous Coward]

Two Minutes to Start

Under Windows, yes.

Under Linux... no.

I still wonder about all this effort on the initial setup (finding out your configuration, popular mail providers, blah blah) because that is something that we do only ONCE. True, it should not be difficult, and certainly it should not be a technical nightmare for the uninitiated, but it remains a one-off procedure.

My big want: I want to be able to be able to sync --- so I can take my USB stick, with Thunderbird Portable, away on holiday (I don't do business any longer) and merge my emails back to my desktop when I get home. Isn't that a fairly obvious requirement?

(Of course... If anyone can tell me that it does all ready, it will be well worth the blushes)

Oh... and I want to be able to see my mail as threads, sent and received, like Lotus Notes did ten years ago.

AND... I think that 3.0 was a great improvement!

[JC 2]

Hoping for Global Inbox

My main grip with current thunderbird versions is it appears you can't have both POP and IMAP accounts and have them dump all incoming email into a global inbox. Instead it insists on creating separate inboxes.

[Erp Erpington]

Sure you can.

Above the list of accounts/folders, there's two arrows. Click them until you're in the Smart Folders mode. There's your global inbox.

[JC 2]

@ Sure you can

Erp, I'm well aware of that Smart Folders feature and no that does not fix it for me, it still insisted on having two inboxes so long as I had both a POP and IMAP account... I'm not a noob at Thunderbird. Switching the IMAP account to POP immediately fixed the problem.