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Editorial Review of Thunderbird 3 Beta 2

Description of Thunderbird 3 Beta 2

Thunderbird 3 Beta 2 is now available for download. This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality of the new features and platform changes that will be included in Thunderbird 3.

The archive feature is straightforwardly borrowed from GMail's archive feature, which we think is great. The idea is that figuring out exactly which folder each message should be filed is a process that can take a lot of time and effort--something that wasn't a real problem in the early days of email, but which becomes a real time sink with thousands of messages. With a good enough search engine, it's easier for many users to simply “archive” the message (doesn’t really matter where), get it out of the way, and then rely on the search capability to find the message again.

In this beta, we're half-way there. The archive feature is there if you want it, but you can also use the standard “file in a folder” method. Thanks to work we did before beta2, the archiving is fast, putting messages in per-month folders at the click of a buttton or a keystroke. The new fast global search hasn’t landed yet, but even our “old” cross-folder search mechanism has gotten a lot better.

The second feature worth highlighting is also not fully deployed, but already useful. The Activity Manager was born out of a recognition that Thunderbird 2 is pretty bad at telling you what it's doing. It says a lot of things, it says them fairly loudly, but they’re rarely the things you want to know. We're building infrastructure that will let the various bits of Thunderbird be much more helpful in describing what’s going on (through a log of notable events), what went wrong (non-intrusive but notable alerts), and how it’s progressing at long-running tasks (with more context than just a single progress bar). Teaching software that wasn’t designed with a notification mechanism or philosophy in mind how to be polite and informative is a slow and arduous task, but we’re making good progress. In Thunderbird 3b2, there’s an Activity Manager window, which for now will just report on message moves, copies and deletes, and IMAP auto-syncing. Now that the framework is in place, we should be able to have a lot more informative messages when you need them, and reduce the number of dialog boxes (especially the ones you can’t do anything about!).

Note: This link takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

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• Reviewed by: emmat81

  06-28-2009

  Duration of ownership: 18 Months

  Strengths: Free client.

  Weaknesses: No search capabilities, no conversation view, not cohesive experience.

  Overall Evaluation: Thunderbird worked ok as my basic email client. I recently switched over to Postbox, which has been out for about a year from the original developers of TB. Postbox has search and conversation view, and overall usability is just a lot better. Highly recommended: www.postbox-inc.com

• Reviewed by: Northlite

  03-17-2009

  Duration of ownership: 1 Months

  Strengths: Handles IMAP better then Windows Mail etc ever has. Have been using Thunderbird for years now and am generally happy with it over Outlook Express, Outlook, Windows Mail (live).

  Weaknesses: Sometimes fails to put sent items in IMAP online folder and has to be canceled, not big deal for me though.

  Overall Evaluation: Unless they make it so I can customize the 1 1/2" header pane in version 3 I probably won't be upgrading, on my 19" wide screen its' fine but on my laptop it leaves me with empty space wasted. I work with a remote person sending me graphics for a web page, Thunderbird handles this the best for me to save and use.

• Reviewed by: neospyce

  05-16-2007

  Duration of ownership: 3 Months

  Strengths: Simple and great for those who don't need clients as heavy as Outlook.

  Weaknesses: Not aware of any.

  Overall Evaluation: This is a great client, especially if you are a Vista convert and are completely revolted my Windows Mail. Do you miss Outlook Express? If so, then this is definitely what you want, but just remember that you will have to find your way around to configure it and that is quite simple.

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