Thunderbird 1.0 Release Candidate 1 Is Now Available!

Discussion about official Mozilla Thunderbird builds
Locked
mscott
Posts: 2516
Joined: April 2nd, 2003, 4:10 pm
Location: Thunderbird Research Center, CA
Contact:

Post by mscott »

I don't believe we rushed anything. We met all of our intended goals which we set for ourselves almost a year ago. We had milestones which delievered on each of these goals when we finished them. I'm absolutely thrilled and excited about the release next week! Woo hoo!
Thunderbirds are Go!
Virtuose TK
Posts: 1720
Joined: March 1st, 2004, 11:16 pm
Contact:

Post by Virtuose TK »

So next week,ok.

mscott wrote:The Thunderbird Community Rocks!


This is true.
Windows XP
Firefox 1.0.1/Nightly
matt me
Posts: 189
Joined: January 21st, 2004, 10:57 am

Post by matt me »

Rushed? From the Release Candidate, Thunderbird 1.0 is set to rock.

Probably been mentioned and fixed already, but on random startups my account folders appear collapsed.
User avatar
heffeque
Posts: 13
Joined: December 4th, 2004, 11:39 am
Location: Salamanca, Spain, Europe.
Contact:

Post by heffeque »

that happens to me too
(.-=Kiwi=-.)
My menu: (.-=Heffeque=-.)
Visit: Bucleinfinito Reloaded
Daniel.Pfeiffer
Posts: 2
Joined: December 5th, 2004, 12:02 pm

Woes and praise

Post by Daniel.Pfeiffer »

Well, so the update to SuSE 9.2 dropped sylpheed-claws. Now where? With the raves Mozilla is getting, Thunderbird was an obvious candidate. The Bayes filter made this especially appealing! But after having decided to give the brand new release candidate a try, the woes started:

It can't handle one of the most standard mailbox formats: MH. Sure, go back to sylpheed and export it — but how, if sylpheed is gone, and not reinstalling it from source is the push for something new? For many a casual user this would have been the end of the adventure. Luckily I found BishBash's mh2mbox, which after a bit of twiddling, converted my folders minus subfolders one by one.

It talks about threading, but it didn't thread. Until much later, I found I have to turn it on per folder, of all places in the sort-by menu. To me sorting was only what I get when clicking on the column headers, so it's a menu I don't look at. Grouping would seem to be a different topic, especially if there is a threads menu!

I like maximized windows, and Thunderbird remembers this. But for every window it draws, it starts out as maybe 800x600 of desktop background, with the stripes to the right and the bottom of it grey. Then it builds up all the content in that smaller rectangle, before deleting it and redrawing it full size. Very distracting and annoying, and certainly a waste of CPU time. The same goes for the font menu, which is quite long on my box, and thus is noticably sluggish. Ever heard of caching?

I have toolboxes like Gimp's, or Emacs' speedbar and the mail-folder-view as shaded (rolled up to only the title bar) windows, always a layer above the app. With sawfish's auto-unshade on mouse-over this is very nice! Alas I haven't found that I can detach Thunderbird's folder view.

There are no themes yet, which isn't too bad, since the default is ok. There are five extensions, of which launchy sounds interesting, since I want Web URLs opened in Opera. Alas the server looks badly broken. Yesterday I could go to the download page, which didn't offer a download, instead stopping dead in the middle of a <a href= tag. Today it's the overview page, which ends in <span class, before even offering me the launchy download link.

I don't write in english so much, so I tried to translate user_pref "mailnews.reply_header_authorwrote", as shown on the Editing Configuration Files page, but to no avail. Actually, even user_pref("mailnews.reply_header_type", 2); in user.js doesn't do anything. When typing this at the javascript console it complains: user_pref is not defined :-(

Then there are a few things I've always liked/wanted:

I don't want a static sent folder. Instead I want replies automatically, and new messages after confirmation, to be stored in the current folder. Sylpheed was nice about showing -->addressee, instead of sender, in that column for mails/news sent by me.

The date column could be made a bit fancier: Showing only time for today's mail is nice. Show the week day and time for the last six days, and no year for the last six months. These are the ones that are most likely to be bold, so shorter strings also allow a narrower date column.

At work we use Lotus Notes 5.0.8 with disabled POP/IMAP, which must be everybody's most hated app. The only thing I like about it is the To:/CC: column for when I'm in one of those fields. This is nicer than Thunderbird's recipient column. It should work for all my addresses, and also an alternative ML: for mailing-lists I say I subscribe to. Or maybe a configurable address to string/icon mapping mechanism.

Otherwise I just simply love it: auto replaced smileys, blockquoted citations, which can be further refined by CSS, colapsed threads which are underlined when they contain something new, fast restriction of view (though "recent mail" is too vague, compared to "last five days"), moving icons into the menubar... Despite the gripes, this is certainly my favourite app of the month :-)
h2-1
Posts: 33
Joined: May 31st, 2004, 6:54 pm

Post by h2-1 »

I agree, this is not a 1.0 release candidate. From what I read there is still the bug with the inbox getting wiped out with antivirus scanners, that bug by the way also was present with Antivir, I lost my whole inbox, that happened on version 0.8, haven't seen it since so was surprised to see that somehow the inbox getting deleted is not considered a show stopper???? Common guys, it's getting better, I've been using tbird for a few months now, but it's not a 1.0

the get mail button still doesn't work for global inbox on Windows 2000, still have to click down arrow and manually get mail from drop down list.

Good to hear that there is a bug track for the inbox deletion problem, but to whoever said this:
Honestly, I think that TB has reached the point that for myself and everyone else that I know (friends, family, etc, a lot of whom aren't tech-savvy) it's 100% useable, 100% of the time. For your average users who just want a mail client, it IS 1.0 quality.

you're llving in a fantasy world, how can I put this on my friend's computers, or my employer's, then one day explain to them why all 1000 messages they had in their inbox are gone? C'mon, get real. Fix that bug before all other bugs, you can't lose email. Period. There is no 1.0 release until that, and any other, bug that can make you lose email, are fixed. Cosmetic stuff, who cares, but core functionality, that must be a show stopper or the bad press could push back tbird progress radically.

Tbird is at very best around 0.7, I'd say closer to 0.6. 0.9 is when all primary functionality type bugs are fixed, just superficial stuff. Since 0.9 didn't qualify for that, it wasn't 0.9 as far as I'm concerned.

Keep up the good work, it's getting way better, but please don't shoot this project in the feet by jumping too fast to 1.0.

I've been waiting to switch some clients to this, but until those bugs are fixed I could never recommend tbird, much as I want to, I like it except for the bugs, waiting patiently for the real 1.0, what will that be now, 1.3?
sasquatch
Posts: 6022
Joined: November 25th, 2003, 8:56 am

Post by sasquatch »

I forgot about this email deletion problem. I lost an entire inbox due to the antivirus software.

This still isn't working right?
jeffbacon
Posts: 97
Joined: November 4th, 2002, 10:13 pm
Location: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Contact:

Post by jeffbacon »

mscott wrote:I don't believe we rushed anything. We met all of our intended goals which we set for ourselves almost a year ago. We had milestones which delievered on each of these goals when we finished them. I'm absolutely thrilled and excited about the release next week! Woo hoo!


I just think that a 1.0 release needs to go through some serious hammering for stability and bugs. If this is a 1.0RC, then there needs to be an appropriate period of testing (like, 4-6 weeks depending on results) and a number of outstanding bugs fixed. ie. there should be no known bugs that result in data loss in a 1.0 release.

Also, there was not enough time to test the new 0.9 features between the 0.9 and 1.0RC releases so they still may (and do) have some bugs. I like the Group by Sort feature, but it has bugs (like, I sort be date, newest at top but group-by-sort sorts the sections that way but the messages in each section [Today, Yesterday, etc.] are sorted in reverse order)
Jeff Bacon
User avatar
heffeque
Posts: 13
Joined: December 4th, 2004, 11:39 am
Location: Salamanca, Spain, Europe.
Contact:

Post by heffeque »

I'd say you change the number scheme and start doing "1.0 RC0.1" and then "1.0 RC0.2" and so on that way you will have time to fix numerous bugs and make numerous releases between RC1 and the final 1.0. It is true that it has a lot of bugs, probably less than outlook ^^' but still, we need a bugfree 1.0 final to make it a suxes like firefox ;)
(.-=Kiwi=-.)
My menu: (.-=Heffeque=-.)
Visit: Bucleinfinito Reloaded
User avatar
Äkiidoll
Posts: 5473
Joined: August 16th, 2003, 2:03 pm
Location: USA
Contact:

Post by Äkiidoll »

A Help Contents would be great.
Help > Help Contents
A prisoner of Christ Jesus, by His stripes I was healed
User avatar
vertigo451
Posts: 281
Joined: August 17th, 2004, 7:48 am

Post by vertigo451 »

h2 wrote:I agree, this is not a 1.0 release candidate. From what I read there is still the bug with the inbox getting wiped out with antivirus scanners, that bug by the way also was present with Antivir, I lost my whole inbox, that happened on version 0.8, haven't seen it since so was surprised to see that somehow the inbox getting deleted is not considered a show stopper???? Common guys, it's getting better, I've been using tbird for a few months now, but it's not a 1.0


I still don't see how that is a thunderbird bug. Its a bug with the antivirus software. The format that Thunderbrd stores emails has been around for years and it is up to the antivirus corporations or the user to support the format.
jeffbacon
Posts: 97
Joined: November 4th, 2002, 10:13 pm
Location: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Contact:

Post by jeffbacon »

vertigo451 wrote:I still don't see how that is a thunderbird bug. Its a bug with the antivirus software. The format that Thunderbrd stores emails has been around for years and it is up to the antivirus corporations or the user to support the format.


Tell that to the users who lose all their email.
Jeff Bacon
User avatar
rodness
Posts: 149
Joined: July 19th, 2003, 9:28 am
Location: CA

Post by rodness »

Well, what would you propose that thunderbird do about it? Their mailbox format is *the standard*. Mozilla's big selling point is its standards compliance, do you really think that from a marketing perspective they can start shipping some proprietary format?

The problem is the antivirus software. If users lose email because of their antivirus software (NOT their mail client) then they should be using a better antivirus program.
And in my experience, if antivirus software stays up to date, it's never a problem because things get stripped BEFORE they make it to the inbox. So these users need to 1) use better AV software and 2) keep it up to date and 3) place the blame where blame is due. It's not a thunderbird problem, and shouldn't be fixed by thunderbird.

-rod
tniem
Posts: 609
Joined: March 20th, 2004, 12:16 pm
Location: Alexandria, VA

theme regression

Post by tniem »

First of all, I like the updated theme. Nice work!

The thing that I have noticed, however, is that it no longer has the light blue reply all look that previous version had. Instead 'reply all' just gives the same green 'reply' look that envelopes have. Would like to see that returned to past behavior so with a lot of the group emails I get, I know if I simply responded to the sender or I responded to everyone.
jeffbacon
Posts: 97
Joined: November 4th, 2002, 10:13 pm
Location: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Contact:

Post by jeffbacon »

rodness wrote:Well, what would you propose that thunderbird do about it? Their mailbox format is *the standard*. Mozilla's big selling point is its standards compliance, do you really think that from a marketing perspective they can start shipping some proprietary format?

The problem is the antivirus software. If users lose email because of their antivirus software (NOT their mail client) then they should be using a better antivirus program.
And in my experience, if antivirus software stays up to date, it's never a problem because things get stripped BEFORE they make it to the inbox. So these users need to 1) use better AV software and 2) keep it up to date and 3) place the blame where blame is due. It's not a thunderbird problem, and shouldn't be fixed by thunderbird.

-rod


ok, I don't even know the bug number of this bug. I'm just pointing it out as an example of an instance when Thunderbird's data is lost. I'm not championing this particular bug as the poster boy for data loss, but maybe it deserves to be investigated as to WHY the anti-virus software interacts with TB this way. Maybe there's a workaround or a set of steps the user can take to avoid this. Just because it's not our _fault_ doesn't mean it's not our _problem_.
Jeff Bacon
Locked