Weekly Edition
Return to the Press page
| |||||||||||||
Five Power Tips for Thunderbird (Summersault Weblog)
Mark Stosberg was a demanding mutt user. Now he has some tips
for switching to Thunderbird. "As an internet professional, I
use e-mail constantly. Mutt, a popular e-mail client for command line geeks
had been wearing on me. I found Thunderbird 1.5 a capable replacement for
my needs, and have since cut the average size of my Inbox in half."
(Log in to post comments)
I wish I could switch to Thunderbird Posted Jul 21, 2006 21:39 UTC (Fri) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] Sorry to put it bluntly, but Thunderbird is of little use to a demanding Evolution user due to its inability to create search folders for mailing list posts on IMAP. There is a bug in the bugzilla. With all Evolution drawbacks, I'm yet to see a viable alternative capable of handling many mailing lists, especially those with non-standard headers (such as LKML).
I wish I could switch to Thunderbird Posted Jul 21, 2006 23:38 UTC (Fri) by gervin23 (guest, #13977) [Link] if you mean virtual folders, the version of thunderbird i'm running works perfectly with imap (v 1.5.0.4)
I wish I could switch to Thunderbird Posted Jul 27, 2006 2:25 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] Try creating a virtual folder for all messages that have "linux" (or just "n") in the List-Id field. It will always be empty. Virtual folders by subject are possible, but they are highly unreliable. A private reply to your mailing list post will end up in the list folder if the subject is preserved.If sorting messages by recipient, private replies will go to the list folders as long as the list address is among the recipients. You won't get your private copy in the Unmatched folder. If you try to work it around by making a virtual folder for all messages that don't have the "List-Id" field, you'll find that there is no way to do it. Don't get me wrong, Evolution has plenty of limitations of its own, but at least I can configure it to produce something acceptable for day-to-day work.
I wish I could switch to Thunderbird Posted Jul 22, 2006 1:51 UTC (Sat) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link] I used to prefer Evolution to Thunderbird too, but sadly Evolution doesnot support the POP3 servers of a couple of my e-mail accounts (it takes several minutes to check for new messages). Thunderbird, KMail or even Outlook Express work fine, though. I submitted a bug report to the Evolution team, but it was classified as a "not-a-bug" and they suggested changing my POP3 server - not an incredibly useful suggestion, as you can imagine. (When I say "my" POP3 server, I don't literally mean "mine" or "under my control" :-) The explanation offered was that my POP3 server does not support CAPA or UIDL, so there was no way to fix Evolution. Now, I am not an expert in POP3 protocols, but in the face of the overwhelming evidence of all other popular email clients working fine with my e-mail accounts, that explanation didn't convince me. Bottom line, I lost all confidence in Evolution and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, unless it is absolutely required.
I wish I could switch to Thunderbird Posted Jul 22, 2006 16:04 UTC (Sat) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link] > Now, I am not an expert in POP3 protocols, but in the face of the overwhelming evidence of all other popular email clients working fine with my e-mail accounts, that explanation didn't convince me.
The issue is not whether it works fast for you, but if it works at all for others. Without CAPA, it can't know if your server supports the "fast" POP commands. Thunderbird might just send the commands anyway, and if your server supports them, great. However, then the poor guy whose server doesn't support CAPA or the needed download commands cannot get his email at all.
Please think of the user Posted Jul 22, 2006 23:54 UTC (Sat) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link] That's pretty extreme. Users don't care about commandsets and other technical mumbo-jumbo nonsense. They want to READ AND WRITE EMAIL. If an email client can't do it, even though others can, it's a bug. Yes, there are buggy and obsolete POP3 servers, but users can almost never do anything about that... they just want to read/write their email. Any mail client needs to include a backoff approach so that it can deal with reality.
Please think of the user Posted Jul 25, 2006 6:10 UTC (Tue) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link] Please reread what I wrote. The user doesn't have to care about that, which is my whole point. If I had said "There should be a CAPA checkbox in the UI" then the user would have to care. Evo's approach is designed with the user in mind -- check for CAPA, if that fails, use the slow approach. That way everyone can send email.
Please think of the user Posted Jul 26, 2006 18:41 UTC (Wed) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link] Oh, come on, this is ridiculous. I cannot use Evolution because of this, so I don't see how it is in the user's best interest. I was forced to use any of the other e-mail clients, which work out of the box with my e-mail servers.
1) Evolution: Too slow to use. Impossible to configure to be fast.
I really can't fathom a scenario where 1) is better than 2) in any sense whatsoever.
The solution for Thunderbird and mailing lists: Gmane Posted Jul 22, 2006 22:18 UTC (Sat) by markjugg (guest, #25986) [Link] Although I didn't go into in the article, I do use Thunderbird to manage a number of technical mailing lists as well. For this I use the newsreader built into Thunderbird, along with Gmane. This works better than slrn in my opinion, which I also replaced in the switch.I encourage people to try newsreader+GMANE to manage mailling list traffic. I explain more in this posting. It was written in my slrn era, but the concept still apply. Mark Stosberg
I wish I didn't have to use Thunderbird Posted Jul 25, 2006 5:29 UTC (Tue) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link] I'm only using Thunderbird for one reason: DECENT TLS/SSL support, including client certificates. This means it's actually viable for business mail. With evoluton, the only reasonable option is an SSH tunnel ... and that's not exactly ideal.
It's also nice that Thunderbird doesn't crash every 15 minutes and uses (slightly) less than a gig of RAM ;-)
Nonetheless, I share your incredible frustration with its inability to use IMAP `SEARCH' to do server-side searches across multiple mailboxes. I use Cyrus IMAPd which can do this very quickly and efficiently, and can maintain a search index for older messages, so thunderbird's search is not so great.
I wish I didn't have to use Thunderbird Posted Jul 27, 2006 2:32 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] This script limits evolution to the measly half gig:#!/bin/sh ulimit -m 524288 exec /usr/bin/evolution "$@"This way, if evolution gets "sick", it dies quickly and gracefully without hogging all memory and swap. This may work with Thunderbird too.
Five Power Tips for Thunderbird (Summersault Weblog) Posted Jul 23, 2006 0:57 UTC (Sun) by hein.zelle (guest, #33324) [Link] I'll have to try the Nostalgia plugin, I've been using the quick file extension so far, which works but is not quite ideal when you immediately hit the right folder: you still need to select it from the list before hitting enter.
Although quick file makes thunderbird almost a usable Mutt replacement for me, I still have some remaining gripes:
I do very much appreciate the ability to view the folder list in tree-view mode, so once thunderbird matures a little further I may try switching again. For now I've returned to mutt, and I'm not unhappy with it so far.
Five Power Tips for Thunderbird (Summersault Weblog) Posted Jul 24, 2006 20:11 UTC (Mon) by ceswiedler (subscriber, #24638) [Link] I used to do a lot of filtering on sender or organization (work, organization, etc) but Gmail has proven to me that efficient searching beats pre-organization nearly all of the time. If you can search for all messages by a certain sender as quickly as you can open folder, why put them in the folder? Folders (or labels, as Gmail does it) can be useful for things that can't easily be searched on, but for me, I've ended up with exactly zero of them. The advantage for me is that I don't need to do any sorting of my own mail, and my ability to find stuff is pretty much the same.
I don't mean to say that everyone should use Gmail (local clients have their advantages) but I'd encourage you to look at a search-based organization method instead.
Thunderbird can work more like Gmail Posted Jul 25, 2006 15:01 UTC (Tue) by markjugg (guest, #25986) [Link] GmailUI is a Thunderbird extension that adds some Gmail-inspired interface improvements to Thunderbird. Notably, easy archiving with the "y" key, a more a powerful quick search, modeled after the quick-searching shortcuts that Gmail provides.
Thunderbird can work more like Gmail Posted Jul 31, 2006 5:47 UTC (Mon) by sitaram (subscriber, #5959) [Link] I often show a demonstration of GmailUI to people who might potentially switch to Thunderbird. Sometimes I even tell them (if I'm feeling really honest) that it's a separate extension :-)
Start with a busy folder with lots of messages. Type "/" (focus goes to the search field) then "f:whatever". Status bar say "141 matches found". As I keep typing " a:1" (mails with attachments), then " -some_common_word" and then " -one_more_common_word", and pausing after each term to look at the status bar, the matches found keep coming down until finally it hits "7 matches found". At this point a visual check finds me the email I want.
I haven't yet found another email client that can do this. In real time. On IMAP.
[Err, of course when I say "some_common_word" I'm only obfuscating my actual search terms for my privacy...]
|
|||||||||||||