A new Thunderbird
A red space ship - to replace a green transport craft.
Thunderbirds are (see icon)
Thunderbird 3 is nearly ready to leave the nest. Mozilla Messaging on Wednesday conjured up the first release candidate for version 3.0 of their popular open source email and news client. What's that mean to you, the reader who doesn't like plunking fledgling code on their system? Only that portentous feeling that the final …
Option to display message as plain text (which I always activate) allowing me to concentrate on the content (i.e stripping flashy formatting), especially when it is what we call "gray-list spam" and the possibility to view the message in its source (raw) form including all headers and HTML tags etc. without opening the message, extremely useful in avoiding dangerous spam. Add as a bonus, a good Bayesian spam filter and you can survive with its modest graphical user interface.
If I still have the first two options in the new version I'll just stay with TB for another decade.
Never really liked the direction that browser-vendors have taken email clients, essentially web browsers that understand SMTP/POP/IMAP.
With that built-in browser engine, 3rd-party plugins, script support in email and so on, I hope you're all ready for a new wave of trojans that infect via email client vulnerabilities. And Microsoft isn't the bad guy this time.
while I was freelancing and trying to live the open source life I used thunderbird for a while. it's a nice mail reader but the lack of calendar / task management (and ability to integrate with Exchange) means that it's only half a solution for me.
If it offered a way to seamlessly integrate into an Exchange environment (I use a hosted Exchange service for the family) or even integrate Google email and calendar or Live mail/calendar in one coherent interface (and deal with meeting requests etc) I'd probably look at it again...
That said I've been using the Office 2010 beta for a short while now and it's like the Vista -> Win7 switch... they've improved virtually everything... so Thunderbird etc will need to add useful functionality to really appeal (besides the cost and the open source posse)
Did you never see the strangely-named Sunbird? It's a local calendar/tasks application (similar to Mac's iCal) that was in early development - and also had a Thunderbird plugin called Lightning.
I've not heard anything of Sunbird for ages so it may not have got any further than an alpha.
And not just for the easy view-source and spam filtering.
The beta has been the standard client in both Fedora 11 and Fedora 12 so it's had a fair bit of testing. I was getting a bit blasé about mail clients — they generally do the job but there's nothing especially exciting about them. Having use TB3 for a while now though I'm really quite impressed.
The big things like the local index for "search everywhere" and the smart folders are good, but so are the little things like reminding you that you haven't actually attached that CV to the message.
It's well worth sticking with.
The last beta was buggy as hell - constantly crashed. However, the searching IS fantastic and tabbed email is just one of those "doh! How come nobody thought of that before" moment. I just hope the RC is as stable as they are making out. Oh, and PLEASE get lightening working for this ASAP.
I've only ever used TB for news reading. Its kill-filing facilities were underwhelming in scope and appallingly implemented. To top it off, it regularly forgot things, such as which dictionary it was meant to be using and the list of subscribed newsgroups.
As a result I binned it in favour of Pan.
Having just looked at the v3 features list and found NO/NADA/NOTHING has been done to improve news handling, its going to stay in that bin. Forever.