email

Thunderbird on life support

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Screenshot of Mozilla Thunderbird 13 on OS X

It is with a little sadness that Mozilla Thunderbird will no longer receive resources from the Mozilla Foundation. The decision has been made to focus on other products (mainly Firefox), and that there’s not much room for further innovation in desktop email clients – especially as many people now use webmail services exclusively.

I’ve been a long-time user of Thunderbird – right back to version 0.1 alpha (then called Minotaur) which I reviewed back in April 2003. It’s come on a long way since then, and is still my favourite email client on Windows – especially with the Lightning extension adding a calendar feature. A myriad of other extensions has also allowed me to customise it how I want.

That being said, in some ways it’s no longer meeting my needs. I use at work – officially we’re supposed to use Outlook but there are many people using Thunderbird instead, as its IMAP support is much better. This is fine for our email server which is Unix based, but if we ever move to a Microsoft solution then the lack of support for Exchange, even after all of these years, makes Thunderbird fall short.

I also no longer use Thunderbird at home; earlier this year, I moved to Sparrow which offers a much simpler and lighter experience. Thunderbird is great for an all-singing, all-dancing email client and great for the large volumes of mail that I get spanning different folders, but at home, I just want something basic that can stay in the background. It may have far fewer features but Sparrow suits my needs better. Thunderbird is still installed for the few times when I work from home, but I may now look into Apple’s own email client instead.

As I understand it, the next release of Thunderbird will be an ‘extended support release’, at which point it will receive fixes for major bugs and security issues, but no new features – at least, not from Mozilla themselves. It’ll still be hosted by Mozilla and, being open source, should ‘the community’ want to contribute patches to it then they will be welcome to. Postbox remains as a commercial fork of Thunderbird, although its £30 price tag is high.

It’s a shame to see Thunderbird fade into further obscurity but an understandable one. Many users just don’t need a desktop email client anymore, because they pick up their email on a mobile device or webmail. Outlook and Lotus Notes rule the corporate roost. That doesn’t leave much of a market for Thunderbird to serve.

GMail Invitation

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Update: (24th Jan 2006) I have no more invitations left. Thanks for your interest.

Hanni dropped me a GMail invitation earlier in the week, and although I haven’t really used my account, I now have an invitation of my own to hand out to someone. So, if you want one, be the first person to comment on this post. Make sure you include a real email address that I can actually contact you with, otherwise you won’t get one.

GMail is for real

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According to Reuters (and many other sources), GMail really isn’t an April Fools Joke. This year’s joke was the jobs on the moon prank, whereas GMail is a legitimate service that is soon to launch.

It does sound interesting, although I have to admit I was one of those who thought it was a joke, mostly because it was like no other email system I’ve heard of and the press release seemed somewhat suspect. So, seeing as it is legitimate, what do I think?

While I probably won’t use it myself (I already have, theoretically, 1GB of email storage), something like this is a very bold step for Google and could set an interesting precedent. It will certainly turn the heat up on Google’s rivals and re-invigorate the webmail market.

But next time I hope they don’t announce something like this on April Fool’s Day.

Why Thunderbird is better than OE

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You may have heard that despite reports earlier in the week, Microsoft will still develop Outlook Express after all. But unless Microsoft pull off something truly remarkable, I’m not going to switch back from my beloved Mozilla Thunderbird. And what’s more, I’ve given you a list of reasons why I’m not switching, in no particular order 🙂 .

  1. Themes – bored of the normal look? Change it. 10 themes are already available and it’s only at version 0.1
  2. Extensions – add on extra features without using shell hooks (like OEQuoteFix uses).
  3. Junk Mail filtering – considering OE is the world’s most popular mail client, I’m surprised this isn’t already in. But it isn’t. Thunderbird uses Bayesian filtering which is one of the best forms.
  4. Better message filtering – much more powerful than the rather basic filtering in OE, and easier to use too! Great for adding a filter to mark out mail that SpamAssasin thinks is spam, since you can specify custom header matching.
  5. Not full of security bugs – I can open an email infected with Klez and know that I won’t be automatically infected. And not a security patch in sight.
  6. HTML Sanitization – you can either view HTML messages in their full glory, or with things like images and CSS removed so that your address cannot be tracked as easily. You can even view them all as plain text.
  7. Sanitization for Junk Mail – if you like pretty messages but still want privacy, you can enable sanitization only for emails marked as junk.
  8. Cross platform – you probably could run OE in Wine on Linux, but this baby runs natively on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. And it’s already being ported to all manner of other OSes.
  9. Text Zooming – it’s been nearly a year since I used OE properly so I can’t remember if it does this, but if IE is anything to go by, even if it did it wouldn’t do it properly. You can make text larger or smaller in all emails, whether they use CSS or not. Great if your aunty sends everything in 64pt fonts.
  10. Automatic folder compression – those DBX files can get awfully big in OE, even if you delete all your mail. Thunderbird can compress them automatically, rather than waiting for you to do it yourself.
  11. Javascript Console – I’ll but good money that OE will never have this feature.
  12. Three-pane vertical layout – Outlook has this, but OE does not. But Thunderbird does 🙂
  13. Customisable start page – Yes, you can change it in OE but only by going into the registry or using X-Setup (a blatant plug because I wrote that plug-in myself 🙂 ). Thunderbird has it on the opening tab of the Options dialogue.
  14. On-screen alerts – You can have it pop up a message near the system tray when mail arrives. Handy that.
  15. Message labelling – Have important emails marked as red, or personal ones marked in green, although naturally you can change the colours easily. And you can set mail filters to do this automatically.
  16. Graphical emoticons – MSN Messenger has this, why doesn’t OE?
  17. Spellchecker – yes, OE has it but in some cases it’s buggy. And you can also change the language without buying a new OS.
  18. Doesn’t get hijacked – one of my ISPs decided to add an ‘Infobar’ to the bottom of OE once, taking of valuable screen real estate. And then there was the Hotmail advertising bar, and the ‘Outlook Express provided by…’. Yes, again X-Setup can fix those but how many users in the world have X-Setup? Probably about 0.1% or something.

I’ve probably missed many others, but that’s 18 features that I personally find useful that OE doesn’t have. Are you convinced yet? 😉

Added: meanwhile, there’s a guide for switching from OE to Thunderbird, complete with screenshots and very simple instructions. Check it out! 🙂

Only a minor feat

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Minotaur, the Mozilla-based stand-alone mail client, finally reached the stage where a public build could be released this week (which, by the way, can be downloaded from ftp.mozilla.org). It’s only at version 0.1a, and currently only available for Windows, but it’s a start.

Seeing as Mozilla Mail is my email weapon of choice, I thought I’d check it out. It weighs in at a hefty 12MB – the size of Mozilla itself – and as yet has no installer – you download a zip file, extract it to a folder and then run it, like you do with Phoenix (or whatever it’ll be called). It also uses your existing Mozilla profile, unlike Phoenix which keeps its data separate – this is a bad thing because it may mean that you not only mess up a minotaur installation, but your Mozilla one too.

I fortunately had Mozilla running at the time so I was asked to create a new profile (since Moz blocks access to the settings). After adding an email account, it was up and running. And then something dawned on me.

It looks exactly the same as Mozilla Mail. In fact, other than a slightly more streamlined Preferences dialog, I couldn’t find anything unique to it. What’s worse is that you’re stock with the ‘Classic’ theme, which I can’t stand – give me Orbit 3+1 any day. You can see how it looks in the screenshot. It did also seem a little slow at loading, and there was no splash screen to divert my attention…

Of course, it’s early days yet, and much work has been promised. Hopefully it will become as good as programs like Ximian Evolution or Outlook Express (or Lookout! Distress! as I’ve seen it referred to). Like Phoenix, its aim is to be cross-platform, so expect Linux and Mac OS X builds to arrive eventually (unless someone goes and creates Camino Mail or something), and I gather that some Phoenix features, like customisable toolbars, will make it into minotaur at some stage. Anyhow, I’ll give the developers the best of luck.

For a little linkage, try the minotaur Help site (from the people who brought you the excellent Phoenix Help) and reviews from bloggers Chris Gonyea and jorge. There’s also the Talkback discussion at MozillaZine, and it even has its own set of MozillaZine forums.

While we’re (sort of) on the subject of Phoenix, ‘duck’ seems to be the most popular name so far, with the least number of votes. However, the MozillaZine Forums seem to suggest that a name has already been chosen. Now, to update my Phallus Extensions…