Thunderbird looks forward [LWN.net]

The Thunderbird mail client developers have recently posted a Thunderbird 2 page describing the changes they anticipate for the next major release. According to the roadmap, this release is expected in the "late Fall 2006" (presumably northern hemisphere) time frame. The task list is ambitious, but perhaps not sufficiently so.

One of the planned changes is to introduce multiple views of the folder pane - the list of mail accounts and folders which appears on the left of the window. Thunderbird users with vast numbers of folders would evidently like to be able to filter the display in various ways to make the list easier to work with. So there will be options to display "favorite" folders, the most recently used folders, or those with unread messages.

Current Thunderbird implements "labels" for messages; the user can mark a message as being "important," "work," "personal," "todo," or "later." There is no facility for adding new labels, so those which might be useful to your editor ("muchmuchlater") are not available. For 2.0, the developers have realized that (1) any self-respecting application must allow users to apply tags to objects, and (2) labels are really just a form of tags. So labels will be "rebranded" as tags, and users will be able to create their own tags. The association of colors with tags will be possible, preserving the color-coding capability that Thunderbird has now.

Another new feature is called "improved phishing support," which, one assumes, is not exactly what the developers intend to implement. Plans include integrating the Firefox2 safe browsing extension and making use of both local and network blacklists. There are also (unspecified) plans for improving the internal bayesian filter for spam filtering.

Then, there's the animated new mail alerts and a tooltip-like popup which can provide a summary of new messages in a folder without actually opening that folder. Your editor must confess to being unconvinced that inflicting even more little popup windows on the desktop will truly improve the overall experience.

There are a few other things which might be nice to have on this list. Your editor has been using Thunderbird with a (non-LWN) account for a while now, on the notion that there must be something to these graphical mail clients which makes them worth using. Based on this experience, he has a few suggestions for features he would like to see implemented ahead of animated alerts:

The ability to configure the printing of messages - or, at a minimum, a realization that, most of the time, there is little value in using half a page of paper for every single header, causing even short messages to be split between two pages.
Some flexibility in the on-screen header display would be nice as well. Why should it be necessary have all headers displayed just to see who a message was sent to?
A provision for feeding a message to a shell command.
Replace the confusing "Junk/Not junk" toggle with a non-modal interface.
In your editor's experience, the internal bayesian filter is not as effective as it should be. Rather than try to improve it, why not fill out Thunderbird's fledgling support for integration with external filters? Being able to easily train SpamAssassin, say, from Thunderbird would be a great thing.
Make it possible to send plain text (such as a patch) without having to go through strange rituals to keep it from being reformatted.
Cause Thunderbird to not send HTML mail by default.
Somewhere along the way, a bit of attention to reducing Thunderbird's memory footprint would not be entirely misplaced.

Thunderbird is a nice mail client in a number of ways, and its developers look like they plan to make it nicer yet. Your editor supports this work, but hopes that attention to some basic usability issues will not suffer as new features are added to this application. In many ways, graphical mail clients are still slower, more awkward, and less powerful than the text-oriented clients they ostensibly replace. Sooner or later, it would be nice to close that gap.

to post comments

Thunderbird looks forward

Posted Apr 6, 2006 4:18 UTC (Thu) by kfiles (subscriber, #11628) [Link] (9 responses)

The whole HTML vs. plaintext thing in Thunderbird is my greatest gripe with the program. I generally want to send *and* compose only in plaintext. To do so, I have to set all sorts of preferences, including some inaccessible from the GUI.

However, once in a while, I need to send out an HTML mail (for long lines that can't be wrapped, or tables from a SQL query). To do so (as far as I've ever discovered), I have to change my account settings to compose in HTML, then for that message change the Options->Format to HTML to override my Plaintext Domains for sending the message.

I'm not sure I follow our Editor's specific header viewing complaint. I generally view messages with View->Headers->Normal, and expand the visible headers. This gives me Subject, From, Date, To and CC headers. That's not to say that I don't also wish to be able to customize the headers available in Normal mode.

As for Labels, one can only hope that they realize that any "label" or "tag" is only useful if you can *search* on it. I really wanted to like Labels, but found that the only way to find particular labels was to Sort By them. Why in the world is Thunderbird limited to searching only on message headers -- no date range, label, has-attachments, marked-as-junk, etc. for you!

--kirby

Thunderbird looks forward

Posted Apr 6, 2006 6:03 UTC (Thu) by Mithrandir (guest, #3031) [Link] (1 responses)

I've been going through the same thing to send the odd HTML message, but clicking on the "strange rituals" link in the article allowed me to glean this piece of information:

To compose an email in HTML when you normally use plain text, shift-click the "write" (compose new mail) button.

w00t!

Um, as for tags, wouldn't it be nice to be able to add a "due by" date to an email, rather than just "todo"? Just an idea.

Thunderbird looks forward

Posted Apr 6, 2006 7:11 UTC (Thu) by illtyd (guest, #2124) [Link]

Thankyou Mithrandir!

Where was this useful information hidden in the docs!

HTML vs text

Posted Apr 6, 2006 7:20 UTC (Thu) by kingdon (guest, #4526) [Link] (2 responses)

So the problems with HTML mail are probably obvious to most LWN readers (complicated to secure, too many variants of HTML, features which were designed for the web and don't belong in email, intrusive features like <BLINK> and animated images, etc).

But is plain text the right solution? I mean, sure it is for geeks like us, but what about people who want to have their paragraphs wrap (the #1 problem with plain text) and maybe even have a little bold or italics or other light formatting?

I got some email from someone (who I think is using a Mac) in text/enriched (RFC1896) format. Is it worth popularizing this? It might be a better solution than telling people to just go to plain text, but I don't know if it is *too* plain to interest anyone who isn't using plain text now.

HTML vs text

Posted Apr 6, 2006 9:28 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

what about people who want to have their paragraphs wrap

I might misunderstand you, but the following header
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed
doesn't solve this problem? The pine help mentions RFC3676 where this is specified.

Bye,NAR

HTML vs text

Posted Apr 18, 2006 12:47 UTC (Tue) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link]

Where's the problem with light formating? *bold* and /italic/, even
_underline_ works fine in a newsreader like knode. It's supposed to work
in mails, too. What's the difficulty to add a similar renderer to the
mail tool and set to a common standard for ASCII formatting?

* bullet point

- enumerate

> quote

Seems all to be too obvious.

label search

Posted Apr 6, 2006 22:02 UTC (Thu) by pdundas (guest, #15203) [Link]

You can sort of search on labels!

In Thunderbird 1.5, the "view" pull-down menu above the message list panel offers, besides "all" & "unread", each of the defined labels - so you can show only your messages tagged "important" or "later" or "personal".

the pain of "view headers"

Posted Apr 6, 2006 22:13 UTC (Thu) by pdundas (guest, #15203) [Link] (1 responses)

To my mind, the biggest problems with view headers are these:

When you show all headers, you can't scroll them out of the way. With 1200 vertical pixels it's not a problem, but with a 600x800 screen (I have old hardware too) it's truly painful. You can't even scroll down to see the lower headers! Even if there are unusually few headers, you're likely to be restricted to a line or two of the email, in a tiny scrolling area.

"Use 'view source' instead" is not really the answer to this problem!

This is aggravated by the next problem: If you're stuck in one-line email mode, as above, you can't change the view headers mode from full to normal and back without going to the view menu and navigating down through header options. There should be a right-click or a button for this (though the [+] shrink the headers is a help).

Overall it's not too bad a client though.

the pain of "view headers"

Posted Apr 8, 2006 1:52 UTC (Sat) by dirtyepic (guest, #30178) [Link]

there's an extension available called "header scroll extension". i bet you can guess what it does. ;)

i don't know why however, something as simple as adding a scroll bar when the headers scroll off the bottom of the window requires a third party add-on.

Thunderbird looks forward

Posted Apr 13, 2006 10:47 UTC (Thu) by kaig1969 (guest, #37135) [Link]

I installed the mhneny extension. It allows me to customize which headers are shown. Alas, I think that mheny and the header scroll extension do not seem to play ball with each other.

Thunderbird looks forward

Posted Apr 6, 2006 7:11 UTC (Thu) by marineam (guest, #28387) [Link]

I long ago gave up on inline patches in thunderbird. Luckily I don't have to send around patches very often and folks generally will tolerate an attachment over screwed up white pace, seems like a really good project for an extension. Most users won't care about patches, etc. but add on that adds a "Don't Mess With Me" option for an email and lets you inject an arbitrary file into a message would be very handy.

My biggest gripe with thunderbird is it can't scale well. Try keeing around a few months of the LKML in an IMAP folder. Lots of random freezes and an impressive memory footprint.

Thunderbird looks forward

Posted Apr 6, 2006 8:09 UTC (Thu) by eyal (subscriber, #949) [Link]

Another missing feature, that is not on the list, is the ability to edit messages. For many (most?) people the email/news client is an archive of information, and the inability to modify the information is a serious drawback.

There are many examples why this is very much needed: delete excessive quotes, correct spelling, add a comment, re-wrap messed text, provide a meaningful subject line, or just correct the encoding.

Moreover, there is no way even to edit my own message that's still in the Outbox, so I have to open a copy (ie. Edit as New), edit the message, save and finally delete the original. Very cumbersome.

There are popular proprietary email clients that for many years now allow editing any message. Hopefully Thunderbird developers will realize that this is a useful and very much needed functionality.

Feel free to vote for the RFEs I posted on Bugzilla:

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=254738
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=254739

EZ.

Thunderbird looks forward

Posted Apr 6, 2006 9:28 UTC (Thu) by ordonnateur (guest, #6652) [Link]

A folder view as in OSX Mail would be useful: a view of all inboxes, all junk, all sent, etc. and sub folders for each account. Makes it easy to see new mail and where from without any confusing resorting or selection of 'favourite' folders.

Thunderbird looks forward

Posted Apr 6, 2006 11:43 UTC (Thu) by sjlyall (guest, #4151) [Link] (1 responses)

One thing about thunderbird that I don't like is it's use of an "indexed mbox" format to store emails in. The total lack of tools to convert maildirs mailboxes to mbox format is a real pain for those with many maildirs worth of old email.

Why not just go with maildir format? It is 100 times easier for external tools and reduces locking problems etc.

I can't see the reason to stick with a unique variation of an out of date storage method.

Thunderbird looks forward

Posted Apr 7, 2006 14:02 UTC (Fri) by arafel (subscriber, #18557) [Link]

Almost every mail program worth the name can read mbox. A good reason in itself. I don't know that many external tools which work properly with maildir - I guess procmail probably can, but other than that...

If you want to convert maildir to mbox, mutt will do the job, and I can't believe it's the only program.

Submitting patches with Thunderbird

Posted Apr 6, 2006 12:57 UTC (Thu) by rmathew (subscriber, #20961) [Link]

These days I just attach patches as plain-text attachments after facing
problems with "format=flowed":

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/java-patches/2003-q2/msg00315.html

Thunderbird looks forward Before Popups

Posted Apr 6, 2006 13:04 UTC (Thu) by mikeraz (guest, #155) [Link]

So the editor would like to see Thunderbird catch up with features implemented in mail reads like Mutt and Pine before they add more eye candy.

So would I, so would I.

Especially header view configuration, plain text email composition, sending email to a shell command,

Thunderbird looks forward

Posted Apr 6, 2006 13:10 UTC (Thu) by Nelson (subscriber, #21712) [Link]

Anyone else having issues with the RSS reader and the files on disk getting corrupted? Seems like if thunderbird crashes, unfortunately this still happens from time to time, while updating rss feeds or within some delta of time since you added a new one, the whole lot of them get screwed up. The DS on disk is hosed when this happens. Either fix that or start embedded a real database.

Thunderbird looks forward

Posted Apr 6, 2006 13:21 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link]

> Why should it be necessary have all headers displayed just to see who a message was sent to?

There is a "+" mini button near the "Subject:" label...

Performance problems

Posted Apr 6, 2006 13:46 UTC (Thu) by mag (subscriber, #12697) [Link]

My major problem with thunderbird is that it is sooo slow.
In my opinion they screwed up the index <-> mbox thingy, they should have gone with a slimmer and simpler "handcrafted" index format that is fast.
The .msf files now are a joke, they take many megabytes per folder in my setup and feels very heavy handed.
I've done indexes like this before, and it's vital to select the minimum fields possible to be able to display the folder and as slim as possible to make it work fast.
It takes many seconds to open an folder with 100K mails on my dual core amd64 x2 with a fast sata disk, that's just bad.
I think long time netscape hacker Jamie Zawinski had an discussion about this years ago, but it fell to deaf ears.

I hope they'll do someting about this soon, or I'll be forced to swap mail app _again_ :/

Calendaring support - the missing link

Posted Apr 6, 2006 14:07 UTC (Thu) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link] (1 responses)

For many organizations, the critical missing need is support for CALENDARING in EMAIL on a cross-platform email client. There are a vast number of Outlook users who CANNOT switch because their organization is dependent on calendaring in email. Add that, and a lot of big users can switch to Thunderbird.

Calendaring support - the missing link

Posted Apr 6, 2006 16:22 UTC (Thu) by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048) [Link]

Like it or not, this is the problem that Evolution is supposed to solve...

Actually I use Evolution because it handles searches in largish folders (more than 5000 messages) snappily, and it integrates nicely in Gnome, but AFAIK the calendar integration was one of its major selling points.

Thunderbird looks forward

Posted Apr 7, 2006 1:17 UTC (Fri) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link]

Making the Address Book more friendly with regards to connecting to Microsoft Exchange's LDAP server would rock for me. Right now, it is a bit of a hack to get it working, and "working" means that I have to enter my password every time I query LDAP (yes, it doesn't remember my password even though I check the "Remember my password" box.) Other than that, Thunderbird works fairly well as an IMAP client to Exchange (which I have to use for work). It doesn't have all the bells and whistles that Outlook 2003 has (like creating server-side filters), but it has a relatively clean interface, and does its central tasks well.

Basic error handling

Posted Apr 13, 2006 11:44 UTC (Thu) by endecotp (guest, #36428) [Link]

What I'd like to see is some basic attention to the good programming practice of reporting errors, rather than throwing them away; Debain users may have encountered the mysterious "An error occurred while creating a message compose window. Please try again.". What this really means is "open("/usr/lib/thunderbird/components/myspell") = -1 ENOENT (No such file
or directory)"; if it reported that we'd all know to "apt-get install myspell", but without it, we're lost. "Trying again", needless to say, does not help.

There are other examples in the IMAP handling where meaningful error responses from the IMAP server are discarded and a generic error message is presented.

It may well be that these generic messages are more friendly to some users, but I, like most LWN readers I suspect, are looking for something else.