Thunderbird goes 2.0

2007-05-07T00:00:00-04:00

I know I'm a couple weeks late posting this, but the fine folks at Mozilla finally released Thunderbird 2.0. Now, I've wasted a lot of your time here in the past waffling between mail clients... but I've been using thunderbird consistently since the 2.0 betas and I think it might finally stick. Here's why (for me):

Favorite folders: this feature allows you to mark certain folders (email folders, RSS feeds or saved searches) as "favorites" and you can limit the left-hand pane to view only those folders. For me, since I use procmail heavily to sort mailing list traffic, etc. this is a great feature for seeing my most "important" folders.
UI updates: like Firefox 2.0, Thunderbird got some subtle yet very pleasant UI updates - check them out for yourself. I also like the sound of this hack to make tags look prettier.
Tags: like the old "labels" messages can now have optionally multiple tags. I know after I read GTD I'm going to love this one even more.

Also, while not a core feature, I'm very pleased with the new Growl add-on for new message notification (I had been using YAMB before which wasn't optimal.

Still on my wishlist: sender pictures (preferably from LDAP userpicture or mac address book integration) and better offline detection for OS X. Otherwise, I love it.

loving thunderbird

2005-11-09T00:00:00-05:00

with the 1.5 release of thunderbird upon us (currently 1.5rc1), coupled with my foray back into linux on the desktop, i've been giving it another go. looks like most of my issues from my previous post have been addressed: specifically on-the-fly spellchecking and being able to create saved searches for flagged messages (big win!).

so, i'm currently using thunderbird full time on all my machines - complete with LDAP for my addressbook, and i'm liking it a lot. the multiple identity support in *one* account is great (since I have all my various mail forwarded to one place) - it means I can have a per-identity .signature (which since I maintain those in CVS - means they're uniform across machines). but, of course, it wouldn't be a blog post if i didn't complain about *something*. So here it is, my 2 big thunderbird feature requests:

LDAP entry editing. If my dn has write access, I want to be able to edit LDAP addressbook entries from thunderbird. Please :)
sender faces support. i have really grown to love this part of mail.app. Having people's pictures show with the headers in a mail message is a hugely effective visual cue (way to go apple!). i've got the MessageFaces extension installed which helps for people that actually send X-Face headers (which more or less nobody actually does)... and you can specify a local directory for images. but here's what i *really* want: search my LDAP directory for jpegPhoto entries that match and use those. that would rule.

mostly though, i'm pretty happy, especially after putting the following in my user.js file:

user_pref("mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new", true);
user_pref("mailnews.show_send_progress", false);
user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_type", 2);

The other big tip i have for those of you as addicted to growl as I am is to grab the YAMB extension which allows you to use growlnotify for new messages.

Anyone else have some good thunderbird tips?

walkah

Thunderbird goes 2.0

loving thunderbird