Not yet ready for prime time. I wish this had been a little more clear when I decided to try this program out. As it is, I'm sticking with it for one reason: I've read that it's a real challenge to get your information back into Outlook. I remember reading, when I installd Thunderbird, that its mail database was easily read by any email client or something along those lines.

1) I still can't believe they went through till this release with this annoying system of forcing a new set of folders for every email address you own. Furthurmore, this wouldn't be as annoying if you didn't have to choose to receive mail for every one of them. Why can't I have something that will check them all at once?

2) there doesn't seem to be a way to make the default screen anything other than the stupid welcome screen. Why can't I go straight to the inbox?

3) either there are some simple options missing, or they're hard to find. For instance, I'd love to be able to set the program so that when I reply to someone, the cursor is automatically placed at the top instead of the bottom.
*edit* I found the setting for this one. It's there, but I can still claim that it's annoying to have to set it for each account if I want a universal setting.

4) bugs. very annoying bugs. for instance, when I double click on a folder to expand it, it instead opens another instance of Thunderbird. I then found one of those extentions which supposedly fixes this problem, but it didn't do a thing.

5) the spam filter does not work. At the very most it is broken. I've marked countless messages as spam, and it never marks anything except, occasionally, email from a listserv which is in turn the only thing I've marked as NOT spam.

This is simply suprising to me. This project has been going on for a while, hasn't it? Sorry, but there are other projects out there, for what would seem to be more complicated programs, that work better than this one, or at least don't fall short in very basic ways.

What would I suggest? I'd suggest:
1- allow us to decide how to handle multiple email accounts
2- add some more basic interface options
3- don't do it yourself, Mozzila people - just incorporate something like Spambayes, which worked flawlessly when I used Outlook.

Sorry for the rant. I'm just a little peeved at the program right now. On the upside, I do really enjoy Firefox, and will never go back to IE.

I wasn't impressed with Thunderbird either. I'm sticking with Outlook/SpamBayes. I am a Firefox convert, though. I switched about a week ago and I'm hooked on the tabbed browsing and all the extensions.

I do miss PopupCop a bit. It's a better blocker then what is built-in Firefox (or the IE Google toolbar) and it's got some other features I like. Hmmmm.... maybe I'll learn how to write a Firefox extension.

Mine starts with my inbox open, so I can't help you with that. Junk Mail controls work great for me, only 5 out of the past 32 spam messages didn't get marked as spam. I have never had one false positive and I started using it sometime in January 04.

My settings
Click on Tools -> Junk Mail Controls
Select the account you want
Click on Adaptive Filter tap
Check the "Enable adaptive junk mail detection"
Click on Settings
----White Lists---
Check "Do not mark messages as junk mail if the sender is in my address book:"
Select "Personal Address Book"
----Handling----
Check "Move incomes messages determined to be junk mail to:"
Select " "Junk" folder on:" and select a mail box. Mine is the same for all addresses I check.
Check "When I manually mark messages as Junk:"
Select "Move them to the "Junk" folder
Check "When displaying HTML messages marked as junk, sanitize the HTML"
Repeat for each account you have setup. (Yes this part sucks)

Oh and make sure you mark all your good mail as not spam it really does help the filters.

That's pretty much how I have mine set up. I'm not saying "oh darn, it's giving me some false negatives and some false positives." No, I'm saying it simply does not work (I'm just getting mad at the program here, not at you ).

I think one problem may be that I have it set up to send even mail marked as junk to my inbox. I think this may have confused the program somehow. I only did this because I don't want false positives ending up in the sea of junk mail I have saved in the junk folder. Regardless, it's an option built into their system, so it at least shouldn't be the problem.

Basically, on any given time I check my email with Thunderbird, I don't have ANY mail being marked as junk. Up until a month ago, I'd frequently have mail from one of my yahoo groups marked as junk. However, I kept marking this as not junk, and it seems that this is the only thing the program has actally learned.

The way I see it, no matter what settings I have, seeing that I have a total of 9943 items in my junk folder, all marked as junk, I'd think it would mark some messages, false positives included. The fact that it doesn't mark ANY leaves me to assume that it is broken on my machine.

That said, I'm now going to look at it for the 50th time, and since I've brought it up on the empeg board, I will find the answer immediately.

Well, I just noticed that .8 was just released and added a Global Inbox.
"POP3 users can now combine all of their POP3 accounts into a single global inbox under local folders."

Something you might want to do is reset the junkmail training data on the "Adaptive Filter" tab. Then go into your junk mail folder and mark it all as junk again. I know one of the version upgrades the release notes said to do this since the filters had changed. So now I keep my junkmail so when they require this again I will have some junk mail to train the filters.

Thanks, just knowing that .8 was released is good. I'll go get that now.

the only thing that i wish that it would do is allow mail forwarding as a rule action
maybe 0.8 does this. i havent yet looked

Just an FWI, you shouldn't install the new version into the same dir you have the current version installed to unless you delete the dir first.

Before upgrading I always Zip the Program folder then delete it. I then zip the folder that stores the mail in c:\documents and settings\%user%\Application Data\

If everything works I can then delete the zip files.

I read up on the Mozilla support forums for experiences other folks have had upgrading. The general message I got was simply to uninstall the old version and install the new one. I tried that and it worked just fine.

I have one problem with the new version, and I'm beginning to think this is a concious effort on the part of the programmers: why can I never move things in my toolbars? It's the same in IE. They like to put their advanced search boxes flush to the right of the screen, and it simply gets on my nerves. .7 had it aligned to the left, which looked much better and was so much easier to use. It's just plain un-ergonomic. GRR.

*edit*
View the attachment. That's what I'm talking about.

I have been running Thunderbird since about v0.3 and it is generally good but has taken a while to get itself together.

I tried the spam filtering and found it useless. I marked messages for weeks without anything happening and then it suddenly started dumping *everything*. I now have SBL+XBL on the mail server and get a couple of spam messages a day so I don't really need run anything client side any more.

Before 0.8 I used to combine my POP3 folders by setting a rule that said "if the subject isn't 'flibble' move the message to Local Inbox".

Gareth

Well, I turned on my machine this evening, and I wasn't able to connect to the internet. I double-checked everything, and it all appeared normal.

Who knows, it might not be Mozilla's fault, but all I know is that most of the settings on Firefox had been reset (homepage, security dialog boxes, etc), and when I finally did connect to the internet (without actually changing anything), I was taken to Mozilla's site with a message that the preview build of Firefox has been released. This is good news, but I hope it's not what caused me so much frustration for a couple hours.

Responses are based on MozMail, but might help you out:

Quote:
1) I still can't believe they went through till this release with this annoying system of forcing a new set of folders for every email address you own.

Also annoying. Switching back and forth between Mac Mail and the PC just makes this painfully obvious.

Quote:
Why can't I have something that will check them all at once?

Yes. Infuriating. In Moz, there is a pulldown on Get Msgs that lets you choose Get All, but that should be the default, not the exception. If you setup your accounts as autodownload, obviously this isn't as big of a deal, but i definitely obsessive-compulsively want to check them all again.

Quote:
2) there doesn't seem to be a way to make the default screen anything other than the stupid welcome screen. Why can't I go straight to the inbox?

In Mozilla: Edit=>Preferences=>Mail & Newsgroupss=>There's a checkbox labelled "When mail starts show the Start Page in the message area" that can be turned off. Not sure if this is the same for Thunderbird.

Quote:
I'd love to be able to set the program so that when I reply to someone, the cursor is automatically placed at the top instead of the bottom.

YES! Why this isn't the default -- no idea .. So this is in a really weird place in Moz -- it's a per-account setting. So Edit=>Mail & Newsgroup Account Settings=>under each account=>Composition & Addressing=>pulldown menu with "start my reply above the quote"

Quote:
when I double click on a folder to expand it, it instead opens another instance of Thunderbird.

Yeah there are a lot of these annoying things ... For instance, File=>Exit on MozMail exits all browsers. Yeah, thanks Mozilla, because that's certainly what I intended. I don't care that it's a single process, that's a dork attribute -- they're clearly separate contexts to an enduser.

Quote:
the spam filter does not work

I actually just started using this and it's been OK for me so far, but it's too soon to tell.

Fortunately, most of my peeves with the program have been solved, and some of them were actually there, I just didn't see them. Here are some of the conclusions of my griping points:

Quote:
1) I still can't believe they went through till this release with this annoying system of forcing a new set of folders for every email address you own.

Obviously, this has been solved in the latest release. Now that it's possible to combine them, Thunderbird definitely holds an advantage here over Outlook, since you have the option to set up a group of folders for whichever accounts you like. That's what I like in general: the option.

In regards to the second part of that complaint, that I couldn't check all the addresses at once, I did find out I was wrong about that. For some reason I never noticed the little arrow to the right of the "Get Mail" button. Still, as you say, "Get All" should be the default.

Quote:
2) there doesn't seem to be a way to make the default screen anything other than the stupid welcome screen. Why can't I go straight to the inbox?

I believe I was wrong about this, but I could have sworn that it varied where it put me at the program start. Oh well.

Quote:
I'd love to be able to set the program so that when I reply to someone, the cursor is automatically placed at the top instead of the bottom.

Again, it just took a while to find the option. It's there somewhere, and I set all my accounts to the placement I prefer.

Quote:
when I double click on a folder to expand it, it instead opens another instance of Thunderbird.

This one is still an annoyance. It was there in the last version, it's still there in the new one.

Quote:
the spam filter does not work

I had the filter enabled for two days to test it out. Despite the upgrade to an entirely new version of the program, the filter is behaving the exact same bizarre way it did before. Oh well.

So all in all, Thunderbird will eventually do well, I think. I just think it isn't the potential MS opponent that Firefox is.

I think "not ready for primetime" might be true. I installed it for a friend, and he keeps having problems, like
1) installing mime handlers seems to be hard.
2) the process of importing an address book from netscape 4 was messy but not Thunderbird's fault. Now he claims thunderbird is shedding addressbook entries.
and i think i might have the answer to 3, but:
3) he wants the cursor at the top, not bottom of replies with quoting, so he can intersperse comments.

in all i'd almost tell him to switch back to ns4 for mail :-\

Yeah, #3's easy. Tools->Account Settings->Composition and Addressing->start my reply above the quote.

Actually, #3 is not so easy, at least if you have the global inbox enabled. I do, with three accounts all going to the Local Folders group. However, it appears that the placement of the cursor on replies is now somewhat random. Sometimes it's at the top, sometimes at the bottom. This is independant of the setting on whichever account the original email was sent to. It appears to have more to do, at least on my machine, with which folder the email was filtered to. Even then it seems to be random.