Thunderbird Ups the Email Ante | Hacker News Reader

Thunderbird Ups the Email Ante

linux-mag.com

41 pointslinuxmag21 comments

Random cautionary anecdote about Thunderbird tabs:

My cat stood on my keyboard and opened an email hundreds of times. This made hundreds of new tabs that would re-open every time I started Thunderbird. As far as I could tell, Thunderbird has no function (yet?) to "Close All Tabs" or "Close All Tabs but this one" and so I just gave up after a while and manually closed them all myself by clicking the [X] one at a time.

If I had known how many there actually were (no real way to tell) I would have written a UI automation script (or extension) to close them all, but instead I spent a good 15 minutes closing the same email again and again. To make matters worse it was actually a very depressing email to boot.

Holding ctrl-w should close the tabs very quickly, if Thunderbird has the same shortcuts as Firefox.

Excellent! Thanks for the tip. It scared Thunderbird into pegging the CPU until I killed it, but it worked great.

I did nearly the same thing once and dragged 2000 files to the dock by mistake. Had to be removed one at a time back then.

That's a really funny cautionary tale. I filed it at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=517489 so we can think about ways to avoid or mitigate...

FYI, that bug has now been closed, and "Close other tabs" will be in TB3 final (and nightlies before that).

The only reason I can't stand switching out of gmail's web based reader is because I can't stand NOT having conversation-style emails.

Does anyone know if TB3 supports this? If not, does any other email client?

I'm not on gmail, so I don't know if this is the same as conversation-style, but Thunderbird has provided the ability to view emails in a threaded view for years. Apparently you can also configure Tbird to maintain this threaded view when sorting by date, subject, from, to, etc.:

http://lifehacker.com/264317/maintain-threaded-view-in-thund...

Tbird's threaded view is nowhere near as intelligent as Google's threaded view. When an email client arbitrarily adds a "Re:" is messes it up. Conversation-style view is more or less useless when split up among multiple conversations.

Or at least this was my experience this summer.

When an email client arbitrarily adds a "Re:" it messes it up.

I'm pretty sure Thunderbird uses the Message-ID and In-Reply-To headers to create the threads, not the subjects. But some people don't always use the Reply function, or Reply to an old email when they want to start a new conversation. Maybe Gmail has some logic to get around these limitations.

In Thunderbird 3, we use a combination of the two models, as some mail providers (Yahoo! for example, IIRC) strip away the right headers. Thunderbird 3's threading is way better than Thunderbird 2's.

TB3 doesn't support conversations out of the box, but I'm thinking about doing an add-on to experiment with that. With our new global database, it should be possible to do something interesting.

If you don't mind paying for it, Postbox (http://www.postbox-inc.com/) does support this feature. That said, I find it quite annoying.

I know this sounds crazy, but the only non-Gmail chat client I like is the one that comes with Opera. It's every feature of Gmail except conversations--which, annoying, is the one that I also badly wish I had.

I think TB3 has a way to do this. However, its still pretty rudimentary. For example, if Im in threaded view and the thread is closed, I can click on the first email of the thread and it shows me the conversation-style message. However, it seems like each conversation has a limit and so after a certain legth of the message, it shows ... if you have too many messages in the thread then you just end up with PersonA ... PersonB ...

Useless.. but hopefully something that will be customizable before 3.0 is released.

Sup (http://sup.rubyforge.org/).

I've been running the Beta for months now on OSX, ever since Thunderbird2 started crashing and locking up on me. I've had zero problems with it.

This is pretty cool - I used Thunderbird for a very long time and tried the beta out briefly.

Don't count out Outlook 2010 though...it has some pretty solid improvements too. I can't stand the conversation threading in Outlook 2007 or Thunderbird 2, but the way Outlook 2010 does it is pretty comfortable for me.

Thunderbird is a shame and it was left behind by Mozilla, just try to fill a bug and they will tell you it's a feature... may be in 100 years it will add a pair of features.

I agree, I have been using it for years at my company and it consistently performs very poorly when you have a large mailbox (and it's unusable if you try to have it save messages for offline use). filters randomly miss messages, only to work when you run them manually, opening an email sometimes just hangs forever, it feels sluggish all the time...

I don't like the interface either, you can't tell when it's doing something CPU-intensive in the background like compacting unless you notice that it says something in the status bar, and the status bar changes when you do something, leaving you wondering what the hell it's doing.

I installed the new beta a few hours ago and it seems just as bad, just now it was sitting in the background and it made my brand new macbook slow to a crawl for some reason. so I tried telling it to do the new archive feature on my inbox, and it gave me a folder for the years 2005-2009 with an extra folder for 2000 with nothing in it, and the 2005 folder ended up with a bunch of messages from 2005-2009. awesome. it's still hanging for long periods of time just trying to open single messages. I'd say it's my fault for using a beta but the release isn't really any better.

ah, and it just crashed when I tried to delete a bunch of messages. it was trying to index them, using 60% of my cpu, despite the setting telling it to automatically delete them because they were more than 30 days old. which has been set for a long time, leaving me wondering why they are still on the server in the first place. I'm not sure I would recommend Thunderbird for professional use. I haven't seen it lose messages or corrupt my mailbox, but it sure is flaky for me.

yeah, it'd be a simpler menu than Firefox, maybe Close Other Tab, Open in New Window, Close All Tabs. No need for reload, new tab, or bookmarks.

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