According to the Thunderbird project roadmap (version 1.20), Thunderbird 1.0 is due middle of this month. But with all the hoopla surrounding the Firefox 1.0 release, you’d never have known. I found out simply by dumb luck, not because I was pointed there or because Mozilla.org had announced it anywhere. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder if Thunderbird is always going to be Firefox’s forgotten little brother. I hope not, because Thunderbird rocks just as much as Firefox. I really hope that once Firefox is out the door, serious attention will be paid to marketing Thunderbird as well.
thunderbird? what’s that?
According to the Thunderbird project roadmap (version 1.20), Thunderbird 1.0 is due middle of this month. But with all the hoopla surrounding the Firefox 1.0 release, you’d never have known. I found out simply by dumb luck, not because I was pointed there or because Mozilla.org had announced it anywhere. Sometimes I can’t help but … Continue reading “thunderbird? what’s that?”
Well, I’m sure it will rock as much Firefox, and I use it, but it still need some key features, notably inline spell-checking and a template manager. Inline spell-checking, hopefully, can get in before 1.0, but I don’t know.
I had to get away from Agent because of their continued refusal to put in HTML email reading. It’s a darn good newsreader, but well…it’s behind the times email wise. Outlook was out of the question for the same reason I abhor IE. A friend had hooked me on Firefox, but I’d never really looked into anything else made by Moz. Then I found Thunderbird and I’ve never looked back.
Yeah it seems as if Tb always gets the 2nd stage, I’ve been using since the old Minotaur days and I’m happy to see this project grow and evolve…even if it is in the shadow of it’s bigger “brother”. I did see Thunderbird on a free cd that came with some PC mag at a store yesterday though, that was neat.
Even if all Firefox users use Thunderbird, it will be a helper application as compared with Firefox. Its just because there is more that you can do with a browser than with an email client. Of course, a handful of people already use an email client as much as a browser (e.g. newsreading, multiple email accounts, and now rss..), but the percentage is not huge.
I agree that more marketing is needed for Thunderbird. There are a huge percentage of people using OE which is as bad a software as IE is when compared to Ffx. I myself have recently converted 5 people recently from OE to Tbd!!
Wishlist: “Purge button”, “Theme’s compatible with corresponding Firefox themes”(ala Mozilla), “rss comment support” 😉
I agree: Thunderbird deserves more. And I had my parents and girlfriend successfully migrated from OE without problems or regrets. TB could be used as a “trojan horse” to show the quality of mozilla-branded products.
The main thing I’d need to switch to Thunderbird is an easy way to strip attachments from messages before I archive/save them.
One of the most overlooked parts of TB is the address book.
Ever try to move a card? It will only copy them.
Ever try to make a email list? You’re limited to 12 entries in the list.
Ever try to copy a list from one address book to another? The target book will get an empty card with the same name as the list, but with no other information.
I knew about the first one from personal usage of TB, but found the others in bugzilla and confirmed they’re still there on TB 0.9.
Also here[1] is a thread on slashdot of someone else who has had trouble switching people from Outlook to TB. The issues described look valid to me. The problem is that the address book has not seen much improvement in the past few years. The address book is TB’s weak point where it is the strong point of our major competitor (Outlook).
Please respond via email since I only came here because of the link from Planet Mozilla, Thanks.
[1]
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=128454&threshold=5&commentsort=0&tid=154&mode=nested&cid=10723935
Not just Thunderbird, but Sunbird/Calendar, Camino and all the other little goodies now hidden away in the mozilla.org site.