| Mozilla betas Thunderbird 2.0 |
Dec. 14, 2006
 Analysis -- 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.
The layout on Thunderbird's revised displays is the same, but the overall look has been sharpened to give it a more professional feel
(Click to enlarge)
Bloggers, who have discovered the joy of using tags to keep track of their stories, will be pleased to find that they'll now be able to create and use their own tags for organizing their email. Messages can be assigned any number of tags. Tags can be combined with saved searches and mail views to make it easier to organize email.
With Thunderbird's new tagging system you can add your own tags for messages. In this case, the "Trash" tab, for yet another piece of spam
(Click to enlarge)
Folders have also been improved. With Thunderbird 2.0, you can also customize the folder pane to show favorite, unread, or recent folders. In addition, you can mouse over a folder with new messages and you'll see a summary of that folder's new messages.
When you're reading messages, you can also use the program's new session history navigation. With this, you can use back and forward buttons to walk your way through a message's thread history.
If you use saved search folders a lot, you'll also be glad to see that search results for saved search folders are now cached in each session. Thus, your folders should snap, rather than crawl, to attention when you use them.
The program also has improved filing tools. These will make it easier to move and copy recently opened folders and messages.
You can also use extensions to add custom columns to the message list pane, in addition to storing custom message data in the mail database. Thus, you will be able to mark and sort your messages by whatever criteria you see fit.
The extension system itself, is also being improved. Extensions now have better security and it's easier to localize extensions.
The overall look of Thunderbird's interface has also been changed. In my opinion, it's cleaner and sharper. Some of the changes are both a bit whimsical and practical. I, for one, certainly approve of using an image of a flame to designate spam.
You still must train Thunderbird's Bayesian spam filter, but once it knows what's what, it does an excellent job of zapping spam
(Click to enlarge)
Thunderbird is also smart enough now, in both Linux and Windows, to automatically switch to offline status when the network is disabled. As someone who'd been annoyed from time to time by Thunderbird refusing to respond because it's still trying to reach a mail server over a dead WiFi link, this is a welcome improvement.
The program's new mail notification alerts can also now be set to display such information as a new message's subject, sender, and message text.
Of course, at this stage of the game, Thunderbird 2.0 is still very much a beta. For example, I use LDAP (Lightweight Directory Assistance Protocol) to reach my master address list in an LDAP server. If I were to try to use that functionality over an SSL (secure socket layer) link, it wouldn't work. Mozilla promises to have this problem fixed in the next 2.0 beta release.
In addition, while playing with the new beta on my openSUSE 10.2 system, the program's busy wheel never stopped spinning. The program worked just fine -- it just always looked liked it was preoccupied with another task.
So, while this beta is not ready for day-to-day use, it does show a lot of promise for the future. If you want to see it for yourself, you can download a copy from the Mozilla Thunderbird site.
The beta will run even on minimal Linux systems. It only requires a 233MHz processor and 64MB of RAM. For the operating system, Thunderbird 2 only requires a Linux 2.2.14 kernel (or later), with the following library or package versions (or later): glibc 2.3.2, gtk+2.0, XFree86-3.3.6, fontconfig (also known as xft), and libstdc++5.
The program itself comes as a compressed archive. To install it, you simply extract its directories and files into the directory of your choice. After that, you run it by running the supplied Thunderbird shell program.
The program is also available for Windows and, as a Universal Binary, for both Mac Intel and PowerPC systems.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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