“The Thunderbird email client doesn’t get half the attention that its big brother, the Firefox browser, gets, but the Mozilla Foundation has finally gotten around to lavishing some love on it, and the first beta of version 2 is now out. If you think there’s nothing more that can added to an email client – except for the fabled seek-out-and-destroy-spam option – prepare to be pleasantly surprised. The new Thunderbird comes with numerous new features.”
I want the possibility to create my contacts directly to a LDAP server. This feature is so overdue!
I saw somewhere that this was not going to happen, but I can’t exactly tell you where I read it. When I find it, I’ll post the link unless someone else can link to it.
I would be really interested in this too, if you can find the link. The Thunderbird address book with address auto-completion in the composition window is so well done, it’s just a pity that it’s not easier to use it for a shared contacts list.
This isn’t the way LDAP directories typically work. They are meant to be read only from the end user’s perspective.
I think you meant “[t]his isn’t the way LDAP directories are typically used.” Every DSA implementation I’m aware of can be configured to provide space for multiple public and private address books. With proper Access Controls in place, non-sensitive address books can be public and read-only and private address books can be visible only to their owners and the appropriate managerial users, for whom they may or may not be writable.
Given the value of address book information to most organizations it’s just silly to allow 3,647 different versions of that information to be squirreled away in as many users’ privately-owned data stores.
“””They are meant to be read only from the end user’s perspective.”””
There are meant to be *optimized* for reads.
However… in actual practice, they *are* read only from the users’ perspective.
IMO, this substantially attenuates LDAP’s usefulness.
One one level I find ‘tagging’ one of the most obnoxious memes to fall out of the festering chutney-chute of Web 2.0 (in many scenarios its application is just plain pointless), but I’m rather pleased to see it coming to Tbird as I’ve grown quite fond of it in Gmail.
Now, the question will be: do I sift through my existing mail archive, appropriately tagging a couple of years’ worth of messages, or just do them as and when I have occasion to access them in the future?
Looking to the future, will I even bother organising newly-received mail into folders any more? Or will I simply let a dirty big heap sit in my Inbox for all time and let the tags do the work of classification?
I shan’t sleep tonight for pondering that one.
While you can’t sleep, you might as well tag your messages
).
I’ll wait for the RCs to test it, but I look forward to the new features. I’ve grown to prefer tagging over filing, and smart folders (or whatever the generic name for them are) are a much needed feature.
Assumably, Eudora will be based on this release? I used Eudora for years and am interested to see what they do with/for Tbird
Finally! It needs to be able to import from Windows Vista’s Windows Mail and Contact store.
When will it integrate a calendar?
Check out this:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/index.html
or Sunbird….
both are beta, but it’s a start
Thanks for the link…Lightening is an excellent addition to Thunderbird, I was not aware of it.
Next step: each email is just another file / database entry and you view it through “saved” emails querry, just like pictures and music files.
For some reason, I sorta like that.
Using a database (SQLite?) would no doubt be a nice speed-enhancement. The only thing I don’t like about the idea is that corruption would knock over all your mails at once (same as mail clients that store all messages in one big ‘spool’ file). At least as things stand, I’d only lose one folder at a time.
Mails-as-files would be the ultimate mitigation against that, but query-times could be a bit painful. Also you might find some FS’ limits on number of files per directory become a hindrance with a really big archive.
merge the two ideas.
each individual mail is stored as a file, but the files are indexed by a database.
…welcome to BeOS
Do as usual. Save each mail as a file. A .EML-file is nothing but the raw pop3-mail saved as a file with the .EML-extension.
And the file can be indexed. Why such a solution isn’t implemented yet is obscure to me. Thunderbird can read EML-files so why not just save the mails as such, instead of using the errorprone mbox-format?
And the file can be indexed. Why such a solution isn’t implemented yet is obscure to me. Thunderbird can read EML-files so why not just save the mails as such, instead of using the errorprone mbox-format?
You can do that, and in fact some unix (server/client) software uses formats like that, but it’s several orders of magnitude slower to do it that way. Finding a file in the filesystem is a lot slower than finding the data you need in an already opened file.
I think ReiserFS is designed to change that, but I don’t know how much of a difference it makes.
It’s not that much slower if you have an indexing service
Finding a reference in a DB to a file is much faster than having to search through a lot of big slightly corrupted mbox’es
Wouldn’t a nice feature in email clients be to make a message rule saying if the attachment is an exe, pif, com, bat etc to just delete it, or move it somewhere.
I’ve always thought that it would be a great thing to have, yet none of the clients I’ve used do that.
Just installed it then, it’s looking very good, I never used to really like Thunderbird, but I’m definitely going to be changing this release.
“Wouldn’t a nice feature in email clients be to make a message rule saying if the attachment is an exe, pif, com, bat etc to just delete it, or move it somewhere.”
I suppose you could set up such a rule in Thunderbird – remember though that it is cross-platform. Those of us using operating systems other than Windows probably couldn’t care less if an e-mail contains a .pif file – it’s considerably less offensive than most other spam. Hence, not a feature I think should be in by default.
IMO Thunderbird is looking a bit like Outlook Express.
I always install it on my friends machines because i dont want them to use outlook. But to be honest it is not my kind of mail client.
I find it said but understanding they dont go more the pmail way…
is it just me, or would anyone else like to have the smtp settings in the account configuration, not separated?
I know its just a minor thing, but i hate to set up a new account and then figure for a few seconds why my mail isn’t getting sent…
For Account read POP3/IMAP account – you can set up many. Also, you can specify many SMTP servers. You can specify which SMTP server to use for which Account. You can specify a default SMTP server. Maybe you would be helped by specifying a working default SMTP server? I think your mail will then be sent after setting up a new Account. I think the way this is set up in Thunderbird works well.
Windows Vista’s Windows Mail does this, it stores messages as .eml files and keeps a database that sorts through them but of course you can’t write queries by hand.
…tagging looks cool. I purchased MailTags for Apple Mail… it has more features than tagging in Thunderbird, but I rarely use the extra features.
Maybe time to try Thunderbird again.
I’m still after a Email client that allows me to link one of my email addresses to a particular folder.
So when I’m in that folder (which may be a mailing list or Service like Paypal or eBay) then it will automatically choose the correct email address and signature I want to send the email in.
ATM, I have to remember which folder uses which email address.
Has anyone got an extension for this?
Gemini email client does this feature. But I hate its overly complex layout and it is buggy.
Wouldn’t it be nice if TB contained its own settings within a imap folder?
Then you could install it on a machine, connect to the server and it would use all its settings from the server.
No need for a large local user profile?