Totally off-topic... but highly useful. The wait is over. It's here.

[microchip.livejournal.com]

Firefox 1.0 is complete. I suggest getting it from the European servers, as the US ones are heavily overloaded, with Mozilla.org itself struggling under the massive amounts of traffic.


Firefox 1.0 (Windows) / All releases


The companion, Thunderbird, is currently at 0.9
Thunderbird 0.9 (Windows) / All platforms

Enjoy.

(Excuse the massive cross-post, just getting the word out. Feel free to copy/paste this info, and spread it around.)

Comments

[red-frog.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't mind hearing this myself. Except that I stopped with an earlier version of Eudora that I prefer, this describes my situation exactly.

[microchip.livejournal.com]

*nods* Makes sense.

Well, I'll summarise, as I have to vanish shortly, but I'll do a proper writeup soon.

I have to admit Eudora has been a long-time favorite of my own too. But Thunderbird has a lot going for it.

It's thread views are pretty nifty, but I'm assuming you can do the same with Eudora. (It's been a while.)

The built-in RSS/ATOM feed system is extremely good. I'm using it to aggregate my LJ communities, among other things.

One of the biggest things going for it - speed. It's fast. Very fast.

The bayesian junk mail filtering is most excellent too. Mine has been trained for several months, but it catches 99% of spam, and I've maybe seen 1 false positive ever, aside from the initial training (for a week or so).

It's extremely good for cross-platform. For Windows users, this isn't a major issue, but it is for everyone who's NOT using windows.

It's simple. Extremely easy for the normal end-user to adapt to.

It's excellent for searching messages, with it's handy search bar, and good overall message search facilities.

It's very skinnable, if you like to customize the way it looks, and highly extendible. Personally, I'm currently trying to write a webmail->thunderbird plugin. THAT will be nice. It's also got a built-in update checker.

Excellent multiple account support - either by aggregating the mail from several accounts, or keeping them completely seperate (as I personally do with the IMAP connections). Also very good at filtering mail via subject / address / any custom header field.

Excellent at moving mail between accounts, including IMAP.

I haven't had it crash yet either, since 0.8.

Oh, and it's free, and open source, of course. (Minor points to the normal user.)

I'm sure I'll come up with more, but I've got to vanish for now! *chuckle*

[jacobine.livejournal.com]

I switched from Eudora to Thunderbird a little bit ago.

I don't know if I can sell it or not -- it still has a few gotchas in it that annoy me.

However, the latest versions (I have a later version, but don't recall if it's .9 or not now) have increased functionality with regard to looking and feeling like eudora. You can now store all your email in one location, like Eudora; I have mine checking 5 accounts. It's flexible and nice and it's a MUCH lighter footprint than Eudora.

It also downloads email much much faster than eudora. It frankly amazes me how quickly it does so.

The extensions can be very nifty, too. I like being able to make it as fat or as lean as I like.

However, the downsides:

1) there is an annoyance factor of being unable to filter multiple addresses concurrantly. The solution, I think, would be to download all email and then sort it rather than sorting while downloading as it currently does. From what I understand, that's the reason you get these annoying error messages sometimes. Interestingly, it generally only happens for me when I open it at the beginning of a session, because my primary address is generally full.

2) The spam filter needs work. It's supposedly trainable, but I have to mark a lot of spam as spam. Eudora had no such problems, and I'm not sure why this is the case at all.

3) Email is a bit harder and less obvious to move around than eudora, file-wise (as in, in an upgrade or move to a new computer.) I'm not sure if the bug that prevented you from changing where your local folders are stored has been fixed yet, as I haven't checked in on it recently.

All that said, I'm generally happy with it. For me, I did have to recreate my filters but I cleaned a lot of old ones out in the process too. My email imported flawlessly, although my old Eudora is still on the hard drive since I've been too lazy to sort through my old attachments. The speed in email downloading (used to be, I could walk the dog while waiting for it to download, now I can hardly get my shoes on) is what really sells it for me.

[microchip.livejournal.com]

The local folder bug was fixed I believe. I run it off a network personally.

[jacobine.livejournal.com]

Excellent. I'll probably be looking at upgrades in the next day or so, anyway. I want my email off my C drive and back onto my data partition!

[nephil.livejournal.com]

I tried to switch from Eudora to Thunderbird a few months ago, but all my HTML-formatted messages, when imported, showed only the HTML code...does anyone know if this has been fixed?

[microchip.livejournal.com]

Whilst I do agree, I've no idea what the score is with that and Eudora, as I've never imported from it.

[ashton-blaze.livejournal.com]

thanks for that!

[prozacnation.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I didn't know a new version of Thunderbird was out. :)

[110billion.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I had the same deal. I'd gotten the new Firefox, but had no idea that Thunderbird had gone to 0.9. It's come a long way since I first used it... Which would have been 0.5, I think.

[microchip.livejournal.com]

*nods* I thought a lot of people might be the same way, so I mentioned it at the same time. Glad it helped! :)

[110billion.livejournal.com]

You're a mindreader for us tech supporters! :D

[djomp.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the European links, couldn't get to the other site, much appreciated.

[microchip.livejournal.com]

No probs. I'd noticed it was a bit dead, so thought I'd spread the word.