{"id":6,"date":"2005-04-26T11:38:39","date_gmt":"2005-04-26T01:38:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thunderguy.com\/plusplus\/20050414\/thunderbird"},"modified":"2006-01-02T10:45:37","modified_gmt":"2006-01-02T00:45:37","slug":"mozilla-thunderbird-email","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/2005\/04\/26\/mozilla-thunderbird-email\/","title":{"rendered":"Mozilla Thunderbird email"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Everybody loves Mozilla Firefox, the open-source web browser <em>du jour<\/em>. But there&#8217;s nowhere near as much attention being paid to its sister application, Thunderbird, an email and news client and RSS reader. I use Thunderbird for all my email: it has a lot of excellent features, but somehow doesn&#8217;t have quite the same <em>mojo<\/em> as Firefox. Here are some of the things I love, and some other things, about this fine program.<\/p>\n<p>The best things about Thunderbird:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Excellent spam filtering<\/strong> &#8212; it uses a Bayesian spam filter to detect junk mail. It works pretty well for me, though I use it in combination with SpamAssassin on the server. SpamAssassin stops about 90% of my spam on the server, then Thunderbird gets most of the rest.<\/li>\n<li><strong>POP3, IMAP and RSS support<\/strong> &#8212; though I haven&#8217;t used the RSS features.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Extensions<\/strong> &#8212; Thunderbird uses a plug-in extension architecture like Firefox, so you can download extra functions, tweaks and UI hacks.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The thing that would really get me excited about using it is the killer feature it doesn&#8217;t have: <em>tagging<\/em> (another concept <em>du jour<\/em>). Thunderbird expects you to manually organise your email into a fixed hierarchy by filing it into named folders: it physically moves the email into files and folders on your hard disk. This filing isn&#8217;t very useful. When I&#8217;m trying to find old email, I always end up searching my entire mailbox because I can&#8217;t remember where I would have filed things. For example, my friend sent me an email about his experiences with his new camera: did I file it under &#8220;Friends&#8221; or &#8220;Tech&#8221;?<\/p>\n<p>Rather than imposing a single hierarchy, it would be much better not to file things at all: just index all text in all email, and allow users to tag emails with relevant keywords. Then you can find email simply by searching. The focus would be on full indexing and fast searching with a minimum of user effort.<\/p>\n<p>This idea has been around for a while. The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.opera.com\/products\/desktop\/m2\/\">M2 Mail client <\/a> built into Opera has done this for years, and more recently GMail brought search-focused email to the wider world. The Opera system is excellent: it looks like a traditional folder structure, but underneath it&#8217;s a tagging system. I&#8217;d love to see Thunderbird use this.<\/p>\n<p>Thunderbird does have a a search-based classification feature called Search Folders, but it&#8217;s slightly clunky to set up and doesn&#8217;t allow any extra tagging, which is needed to make it useful.<\/p>\n<p>Also, like every program, Thunderbird has bugs, including one that bites me often. In an attempt to publicise it and get it fixed, I mention it here: <a href=\"https:\/\/bugzilla.mozilla.org\/show_bug.cgi?id=277352\">Bug 277352 &#8211; After sending the e-mail, the systems &#8216;hangs&#8217; on &#8216;copy to send folder&#8230;&#8217;<\/a>. I&#8217;m digging in the code myself to try to fix it, but it will take me some time to isolate it, and I don&#8217;t really have that much time.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I still use Thunderbird every day. It&#8217;s not as essential as Firefox, but I like it a lot.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mozilla.org\/products\/thunderbird\/\" title=\"Get Thunderbird - Reclaim Your Inbox\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/sfx-images.mozilla.org\/affiliates\/thunderbird\/thunderbird_large.png\" width=\"178\" height=\"60\" border=\"0\" alt=\"Get Thunderbird\"><\/a> <\/p>\n<pre><script type=\"text\/javascript\"><!--\r\ngoogle_ad_client = \"pub-1713593930017144\";\r\ngoogle_ad_width = 180;\r\ngoogle_ad_height = 60;\r\ngoogle_ad_format = \"180x60_as_rimg\";\r\ngoogle_cpa_choice = \"CAAQ56j8zwEaCHvU9tBAqJJaKMu293M\";\r\n\/\/--><\/script>\r\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\" src=\"http:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/show_ads.js\">\r\n<\/script>\r\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Everybody loves Mozilla Firefox, the open-source web browser du jour. But there&#8217;s nowhere near as much attention being paid to its sister application, Thunderbird, an email and news client and RSS reader. I use Thunderbird for all my email: it has a lot of excellent features, but somehow doesn&#8217;t have quite the same mojo as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-6","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-tools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/semicolon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}