[Macworld]

Post your comments for Review: Thunderbird 2 e-mail software here

[folklore]

I don't use Thunderbird on OS X, but I do use it in Windows. One of the things I really like about Thunderbird is that it can be installed on a flash drive. Combined with IMAP, that means I never have to use webmail even when I'm using a lab computer.

[jpmm]

I may be wrong here, but I thought that Eudora (which was released to open source) was going to be somehow be incorporated into part of Thunderbird (building them together, or something). Just wondered, since Eudora is kind of "frozen in time" right now (yeah, I use Eudora on my PC). :-)

[Jeter2Fan93]

jpmm said:

I may be wrong here, but I thought that Eudora (which was released to open source) was going to be somehow be incorporated into part of Thunderbird (building them together, or something). Just wondered, since Eudora is kind of "frozen in time" right now (yeah, I use Eudora on my PC). :-)

Indeed. http://wiki.mozilla.org/Penelope

[jamus]

Two TBird extensions that I have found very handy are:
"Display Mail User Agent" to show what app the sender used to make their email.
"Display Quota" to keep clients in the know when it comes to filling up their IMAP quota (we all can't be Googles with near unlimited mail storage).

[DahlBryn]

Hmmm... Wasn't the Thunderbird II originally an optical device that replaced the ribbon-based ink cartridge in your Apple ImageWriter printer (a 9-pin dot matrix unit) to turn it into a 128 grayscale scanner (back when your Mac was a 512K unit) ? I believe the software was written by the same guy(s) the wrote the "Finder" Andy Herzfield and Bill Atkinsen.
Memory may be foggy it was '85/'86 after all, but it was something like that.

[alansky]

One thing about Apple Mail that isn't often mentioned is that it is very robust. I remember seeing Steve Jobs demo the Jaguar version of Apple Mail several years ago with over 30,000 messages in the Inbox.

[SJMacGuy]

Nope, that was ThunderScan. I was doing Lisa => Macintosh XL screen upgrades at an Apple dealer in the Pacific NW when this came out. It created quite a buzz, as I recall.

[DahlBryn]

Re: ThunderScan...
Ah-hah, you're right. Knew it was something with a ...bird in it.
I thought I was the only person still around who knew about the Mac XL.
Had a Lisa with a 20MB "Profile" hard drive (that's right, 20MB, not 20GB).
Loved the fully integrated "office" software known as 7/7. It was at least 10 years ahead of its time. The 512k Lisa cost me 6.5k, the 20MB Profile cost 1.3k and 7/7 was $750. That was a lot of coin back then for a two floppy disk unit. Converted the thing to a Mac XL with one 400k 3.5" disk.
You could take the whole thing apart with a quarter. Beautiful case design and had one of the best and clearest screens of any computer for years.
I know I'm off topic, but ahhh, the warm fuzzies. Mac XL and ThunderScan...
The ImageWriter ribbon replacement scanner device (ThunderScan) really worked well too.

[JakeT]

alansky said:

One thing about Apple Mail that isn't often mentioned is that it is very robust. I remember seeing Steve Jobs demo the Jaguar version of Apple Mail several years ago with over 30,000 messages in the Inbox.

Thunderbird can handle a lot of messages as well. Back when I was using it, I found that Apple Mail spent a lot of time updating the smart folders, even when nothing had changed.

[kimbarator]

I'm fairly new to Thunderbird, but I like it so far.
On occasion I like to delay the sending of an email until a particular date and time. Adding the "Send Later Extension" [SL8TR] to Thunderbird works pretty well for that.
See http://unsignedbyte.com/?page_id=4
(I have no connection to these products.)

[Sharon]

I was unable to get Thunderbird 2 to install the "Display Mail User Agent" in Addons. Any advise? Thanks.

[jpp_zoso]

"When tags are properly and fully implemented, as they are in Thunderbird, they provide a way of organizing messages that is more flexible than the use of folders because it's multidimensional"
thunderbird imap tags in the mac version do not sync or hold in the windoze version, which is annoying as heck for those of us that need to live in two platforms. i'd like to blame the settings or configuration of the corporate imap mail server, but the windoze version syncs and holds tags just fine across multiple workstations. every mac client always displays the default tag colors and text label for any message which was not tagged by the most current session.

"Once mail is downloaded to your computer, Thunderbird makes it easy to search through it; it's also possible to save searches as specialfolders that are very similar to Apple Mail's smart mailboxes."

the best email client i've used for searching is opera's m2, hands down. no competition. local or remote, it's all the same to m2. and m2's filter feature simply kicks too much ass. when is another vendoir going to release a database email application like m2? no more filing, no more duplicating multi-topic messages, no more wasting time organizing and navigating complex directory trees...m2 doesn't care where the message is located, it finds 'em all, and lets you get at 'em all in 6-7 different ways.

"Thunderbird 2.0.0.13 has a very strong feature set..."

2.0.0.12 is the most current version posted on mozilla's web site...is this a typo, or is 2.0.0.13's release imminent?

[dammarin]

One unexpected benefit of Thunderbird being multi-platform is mail-and-settings folder compatibility. Ever since I gave up on Eudora those many years ago and started using an early version of Thunderbird, I have moved my mail from Windows, through many distributions of Linux to my current Mac and have never had to do any sort of export/import operation. I just copy the entire Thunderbird folder (the one with the settings and mail, not the app install dir) to the appropriate location on the new system, change its name so it conforms to the system's naming scheme (.thunderbird in Linux), possibly reset file permissions to myself and I'm done.

The whole procedure takes maybe 30 seconds (excluding the time required to copy GBs of data from one drive to another) and I have the exact same Thunderbird I had on the other system, including window layout, spam filtering rules, etc.

jpp_zoso said:

"When tags are properly and fully implemented, as they are in Thunderbird, they provide a way of organizing messages that is more flexible than the use of folders because it's multidimensional"

thunderbird imap tags in the mac version do not sync or hold in the windoze version, which is annoying as heck for those of us that need to live in two platforms. i'd like to blame the settings or configuration of the corporate imap mail server, but the windoze version syncs and holds tags just fine across multiple workstations. every mac client always displays the default tag colors and text label for any message which was not tagged by the most current session.

2.0.0.12 is the most current version posted on mozilla's web site...is this a typo, or is 2.0.0.13's release imminent?

Maybe it would be worth filing a bug report with the guys at Mozilla?