LWN: Comments on "A look at Thunderbird 3"

A look at Thunderbird 3

X-Nc — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 22:33:48 +0000

I had the same problem. Due to circumstances beyond my control I have had to spend the last year or so under MS Windows. While T-Bird is not my favourite email client, it is better than most of the other options on WinXX. When I tried to upgrade to v3 the wizard did everything it could to make sure it didn't work. Finally I removed T-Bird and installed one of its many clones (Synovel Spicebird). Thankfully the new year brought with it a new system so I'm back to using Linux and Evolution.

Far too kind

foom — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 21:42:48 +0000

>cyrus server searching is extremely efficiant

That's good to hear. I also noticed Squat for Dovecot. I've actually been thinking of switching to Dovecot (from Courier) for a while now. I guess if I ever do I'll try that plugin.

So, I guess it is possible to run a mail server with indexed full-text search in it using readily available software. I do wonder what percentage of actual users have their mail on a server so configured, though. Squat's page makes it sound rather resource intensive, and it is only in an optional plugin.

>searching on the client across all folders, 15 min
>searching on the server, 4 seconds

That just shows that whatever client you're using is rather crap, and also failed to make an index.

Far too kind

dlang — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 11:24:33 +0000

they are also working on implementing fuzzy search to allow ranked results for search-engine like use.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-morg-fuzzy-search-01

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dlang — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 11:22:27 +0000

with a cyrus server searching is extremely efficiant (and with a decent server it can be significantly faster than on a slow laptop drive)

I was just recently testing this comparing two mail clients, one that used the server-side search and one that pulled everything to the client and searched there.

This was on a large complex account (80+ folders containing >60K messages)

searching on the client across all folders, 15 min
searching on the server, 4 seconds

there are a lot of BAD IMAP implementations out there, courier-imap is one of them. it talks the IMAP protocol to the client, but is very inefficient on the server.

A look at Thunderbird 3

njs — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 02:15:33 +0000

AFAIK the de facto standard is this:
http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html

Far too kind

baldridgeec — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 01:46:24 +0000

Actually, a little googling suggests they're considering the implementation of multi-mailbox search already: http://www.ietf.org/old/2009/proceedings/09mar/minutes/mo...

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baldridgeec — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 01:18:02 +0000

My fault - you were actually using the term "mailbox" correctly! I work with Windows guys who never refer to them as anything but "folders" and it rubs off. I was assuming multiple servers/accounts in my previous reply.

Ok, fair enough. Maybe there should be an MSELECT extension that specifies on which mailboxes the following commands should be run...

Ugh, then you have a modal response set, as responses run after an MSELECT will need to include a mailbox name as well as whatever ordinary response they give.

Maybe better to define a MULTISEARCH extension that returns "mailbox/message#"... results. Should we talk to the LEMONADE guys? :)

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foom — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 00:45:55 +0000

> IMAP not handling multiple mailboxes seems like sort of a misplaced complaint.

The client can certainly work around it, yes. But it's a pain in the ass design. For example, if you want to wait for new mail to appear in multiple mailboxes, you have to make a bunch of connections to the same server, one per mailbox, just so that each one can sit idle, watching for new mail in the one single mailbox. And some clients try to do this. Others give up push notification, and poll for new mail periodically.

Back to the problem with SEARCH: To implement multi-mailbox search, you need to invoke the SELECT command and the SEARCH command once per mailbox. (remember: this is all on a single server!) With my 44 mailboxes, that'd requires 44 SELECT/SEARCH commands. You could parallelize it by using multiple connections, but that's still a bunch of extra work. I find it unlikely that you'll be able to make that competitive in speed with a single search on your mail client's fulltext index.

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quotemstr — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 00:21:52 +0000

cyrus-imapd has a good indexing implementation called 'squat'. It's far better than a linear search.

Once again: difference of opinion

zlynx — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 00:18:16 +0000

IMAP is a protocol. It isn't up to you to define how it should be used. It makes an excellent alternative to POP when email is accessed by many different computers.

The way that *I* use IMAP it may as well be POP, if POP was optimized to keep many gigabytes of email available.

Also, the way that I use IMAP, the "server" is an older 1 GHz CPU with 256 MB RAM and a single 5,400 RPM hard disk. All of the machines that I read my email with are far more capable and perform searches much much faster locally.

I find the features of Thunderbird 3 and Evolution to be very useful to me in this situation. These programs and the IMAP protocol work very well for what *I* use it for.

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dskoll — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:54:12 +0000

TB3's indexer was a vicious, unpleasant surprise. IMO, it should be off by default, not on by default. Or at the very least, it should be off if you're upgrading from TB2. Leaving it on for new TB3 installations is vicious and unpleasant, but at least it's not a surprising change in behaviour.

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baldridgeec — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:53:05 +0000

Speed is an issue, true - Courier-IMAP should do indexing and store the results in a database. Using this sort of method I can't see why server-end search wouldn't be almost as fast as local search.

But IMAP not handling multiple mailboxes seems like sort of a misplaced complaint. IMAP is the protocol - the client should be handling connections to multiple servers in a seamless fashion if that's what is desired.

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foom — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:39:18 +0000

"IMAP has a perfectly good search feature"...yeah right.

The protocol has a reasonable search command, but have you actually tried using full-text search on any IMAP servers? I don't know of any for which it takes a reasonable amount of time to execute. Opening every single message in turn and looking for the text is not a useful implementation of fulltext search.

Furthermore, IMAP is a utterly useless at multiple-mailbox handling. Most every command, including search, operates on a single mailbox at a time. Of course, the user often wants to do a search across all mailboxes (and be notified of new mail in all mailboxes, but that's another discussion...)

Once the servers people use ACTUALLY have a perfectly good search feature, then, maybe, clients will start using it instead of their own local index.

A look at Thunderbird 3

nix — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:38:28 +0000

A lot of MUAs also populate References:. In-Reply-To: is really rather
antiquated and limiting in comparison (only one ID).

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Baylink — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 20:58:53 +0000

Well, I disagree with this.

I think that anyone who creates an IMAP mail client that has to *suck all the mail down locally* to do *anything* with it is working on the wrong program.

If that functionality is for some reason *not* already available in IMAP servers, that is where it needs to be put. Anyone who thinks otherwise would seem to rather desperately misunderstand the architecture of IMAP mail.

A look at Thunderbird 3

Baylink — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 20:56:37 +0000

Yes, there's a standard. It's called Message-ID and In-Reply-To.

I call your attention to RFC 2822. :-)

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baldridgeec — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 20:51:41 +0000

I don't understand this at ALL.

The email client should not locally index anything from an IMAP server. IMAP has a perfectly good search feature built into the protocol. Evolution does the same thing (I'm not even going to discuss Outlook's problems). Is there any email client that gets this right?

Turning off global indexing

dskoll — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 15:26:50 +0000

Possibly... I never played with TB3 long enough to go 5 levels down. However, the form-submission bug is a killer for me.

A look at Thunderbird 3

james — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 13:11:29 +0000

I don't want all my mail in one folder (Work / Personal) and didn't find an easy way to set this.

This sounds like "Smart Folders". Does View menu -> Folders -> All work any better for you?

Turning off global indexing

james — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 13:09:19 +0000

Does Edit menu -> Preferences -> Advanced -> General -> untick "Enable Global Search and Indexer" do what you want?

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zlynx — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 07:36:14 +0000

The indexing is a feature for other people. It's one of those feature/bugs depending on your opinion of how things should work and what the rest of your software environment is.

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dskoll — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 22:26:42 +0000

This review was far too kind. IMO, Thunderbird 3 is a brown-bag release with major bugs. In fact, until you can disable the magical indexing of every piece of email, TB3 is unusable for me. It will sit for hours indexing my IMAP mail, storing the indexes on an NFS server that happens to be the same machine as the IMAP server. Great. Then there's also this bug which brings TB3 functionality "up" [sic] to the level of M$ Outlook.

A look at Thunderbird 3

smoogen — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 21:32:48 +0000

I didn't know there was a standard. Pretty much every app seems to do threading its own way. Is there a freedesktop or similar published standard?

A look at Thunderbird 3

evgeny — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:33:57 +0000

Yes, it's not intuitive. But my comment was only to correct the statement that thunderbird cannot deal with the mbox format - which is how I interpreted your text. Sorry if I read it wrongly.

PS. My guess why thunderbird doesn't use ~/mail by default for local folders is that historically there have been several mail folder formats and not all of them it recognizes. However, mbox specifically is o.k.

A look at Thunderbird 3

jzb — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:12:51 +0000

I didn't run into any of the issues you describe, but it sounds like you have a fairly non-standard email setup. You should definitely file some bugs with the Moz folks. I'm sure they'd like to know about the problems you encountered.

A look at Thunderbird 3

jzb — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:11:24 +0000

Sound advice for users who know where to find those. Not such a usable feature for users who aren't familiar with the directory structure where Thunderbird stores its mail and the way it works "behind the scenes." So, yes, it's possible, but not in an intuitive manner.

A look at Thunderbird 3

garthy — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:07:19 +0000

I spent about half an hour fighting the accont wizard before giving up and going back to 2.0.

If you want to use an email address that doesn't match you username then thunderbird changes the email behind your back.

It kept trying to append a domain to an IP address I was typing clearing the field.

I don't want all my mail in one folder (Work / Personal) and didn't find an easy way to set this.

It's wouldn't accept the SSL cert permantly for the session.

It made a simple thing very hard. I know the account details I want to configure but when it kept changing them without telling me it made me quite angry!

A look at Thunderbird 3

bferrell — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 13:10:42 +0000

So far there is no working lightning. Some of us are unhappy and waiting

A look at Thunderbird 3

evgeny — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 08:38:58 +0000

> One would expect that Thunderbird would be able to grab mail from, say, an mbox file

It has no problem reading mbox folders. Just put/link them to the "Local" account directory. I always define the later to be ~/mail so I can access my local folders either from thunderbird or pine.

A look at Thunderbird 3

thedevil — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 05:18:13 +0000

Top-notch? How about standard compliant threading?