The Surgery

I just upgraded my email client from Thunderbird version 1.5.0.12 to 2.0.0.4.

At the time of writing this post, the new version had only been released for a couple of weeks. You can’t get this version by clicking “Help / Check for updates“, but you can download it directly from the Get Thunderbird website.

To the average user, there are a few subtle but very welcome improvements.

What is Thunderbird? Thunderbird is a free, open-source email client for Windows, Linux desktops and Max OS-X. The installer is only about 11MB and it’s easy to setup, migrate mail and address books from other applications like Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, and in my opinion has the best Junk Mail handling of any client-side email application.

The “Why I use Thunderbird” Diatribe. For many years I was a Microsoft Outlook user… Corporate/Workgroup mode at work, POP3 mode at home. I booked meetings, published journal entries, used the TAPI dialler in Microsoft Contacts and collaborated with the best of ‘em.

I was also employed for many years as a developer to write client-side and server-side applications for Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange, which may have clouded my judgement somewhat.

My love affair with Microsoft Outlook came to end after I saw Mozilla’s Thunderbird being used by a colleague. It’s simple, lightweight, costs nothing and does most of the things you need on a home email application. I was an overnight convert.

But there were some things I sorely missed in Outlook. We all have individual things we like, and particular ways we work with computer applications. I’m pleased to say that some of the features that I, personally, have been missing are now being included in Thunderbird.

So what’s new? This isn’t an exhaustive list of what’s new in Thunderbird 2. It’s a list of features I’ve noticed, that I’ve thought “Cool!”, “About time!” or “Hey that’s useful!”

• Privacy Protection / Remote Images. Thunderbird has always blocked remote images in HTML email, requiring you to manually click a “Load images” button if you trust the message sender. There’s a new link in version 2 at the top of the email form which says “Click here to always load remote images from… (trusted sender’s details)”. This is a great innovation and saves time when you receive regualr emails, from a newslist for example, which contain images. Clicking this link creates a new Address Book entry for the sender of the email, if one doesn’t already exist.

• File in Recent Folders. This is one of those features I lamented the loss of, moving from Outlook to Thunderbird. After reading an email, I always file it in a folder (unless I just click delete). In older versions of Thunderbird, you had to drill-down into the folder structure using the “File selected message” button, i.e. there wasn’t a “recent folders” list when you clicked this button. Now there is a “Recent Folders” option when you click “File selected messge”… a huge time-saver and good addition to the application.

• Move back one message / forward one message. Again, in Outlook the “Next item / Previous item” buttons were invaluable on the email form for quicly scanning your emails. In earlier versions of Thunderbird there were “Previous Unread / Next unread” buttons, but if you had “read” items in your Inbox these buttons were unavailable. The guys and girls at Mozilla have added “Go back / go forward” buttons to the email form, which make message navigation a bit more flexible.

I’ll post more new features as I stumble across them. In the meantime, have a look at the Thunderbird 2 Release Notes for a more extensive list of improvements.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 2:17 pm and is filed under Internet, Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.