The second beta of Thunderbird, Mozilla's free, open source email client, has been released. David Ascher has the details on his blog:

The most striking part of the release is the sheer volume of bug fixes. It’s not sexy work, it’s often the hardest work, but it’s very important. This list (of bug fixes and feature work, but mostly bug fixes) is impressive.

Of the features that have landed, I want to talk about two that many users could easily ignore: archiving, and the activity manager.

You can download the beta now for Windows, Mac OS X or Linux directly from AusGamers. Bear in mind it's a beta though.

Why should you care about Thunderbird in this day and age of web-based email? Well, if you're a Hotmail user you probably won't care, because you're boned regardless of what happens, but if you're a Gmail user and were stung by the outage the other day, you could have at least had access to your previous email if you'd been running Thunderbird. Gmail supports IMAP access (a type of interface for email), so if you're running Thunderbird, you can download all your Gmail contents to always have a local copy available - helping you stay in control of your data.

tah might suss it out seeing I use thunderbird so heavily

I suppose this'll probably sound like a stupid question (but being the idiot I am I'll ask it anyway) has Thunderbird's RSS support increased at all? I had a brief look at the beta (and by brief I meant I wrestled with its RSS capability for around two hours) and had difficulty finding any of the common features you'd find in something like Feedghost. For example, clicking on a folder doesn't show you the news items from any RSS feeds inside subfolders (which Thunderbird 2 liked setting up) and there appears to be no way to display additional columns relating to subject, category, feed of origin (only author, which is arbitrary), etc.

I ask because I'm looking to replace Feedghost since when it crashes it's quite effective (i.e. it attempts to destroy all record you ever used it) and has a few other annoying but commonly encountered bugs that the developers won't fix. I just haven't found anything of comparable quality yet and unless I'm missing something (quite plausible) I haven't noticed any improvements to Thunderbird's handling :/ I guess it's not a high priority?

Bahamut, you could maybe try this extension? http://forumzilla.mozdev.org/

Haven't used it myself as tbird's standard rss is sufficient for my current purposes but sounds like it might be what you're after.

EDIT: nevermind, just read it's not being updated for tbird 3

last edited by Dan at 21:55:16 27/Feb/09

I'm sick of thunderbird, every time MS changes something hotmail support stops working. I'm switching to Windows Live Mail instead but I hate the address book in WLM, does anyone here use a 3rd party (not built into email client) address book program and if so, which one and how good is it?

Thanks for the heads up on that extension Dan, but it looks like it's only duplicating built-in functionality (the ability to redirect multiple feeds into the same folder) where you have problems with determining from which feed the story originated since it only shows "Author". It's a bit of a toss-up how that works out; Ausgamers is configured to list Ausgamers as the author but other places like Joystiq list the name of the person that wrote the article, which isn't very helpful when it's mixed with others.

Guess I'll accept that Thunderbird's just going to be a webmail backup program and try to find another RSS reader with a good interface design =) (which, incidentally, is quite challenging).

Guess I'll accept that Thunderbird's just going to be a webmail backup program and try to find another RSS reader with a good interface design =) (which, incidentally, is quite challenging).

Google Reader is still my favourite, and with Gears you can take it offline anyway

Is there a beta download for Thunderbird 3 apart from the nightly builds?

Bahamut: oh i get ya. I don't even know if they exist so i can't offer any actual recommendations, but for that purpose maybe you could try finding a web based feed-readers that lets you construct a new feed with your own structured results.

Sounds like something completely possible and useful so surely something like that exists right? Can Feed Zero do that trog? :P

Let the user add a bunch of feeds, sort and filter them to their liking then output a new feed for use in an external program so they don't have to keep logging into the website all the time?

Does anyone know how Thunderbird compares to Windows Live Mail? I've been using Live Mail for about a year now and enjoy how basic it is while still giving me everything I need from a personal email client. Does Thunderbird actually bring anything cool that would be a reason to switch? Or are they all pretty much just the same...

^^ If you use hotmail I'd avoid thunderbird, as I said in my post every time MS changes something thunderbird's hotmail support breaks and you've got to wait for the plugin author to fix it. If you use it with gmail then it's not so bad.

Windows Live Mail isn't hotmail, it's the stupid and confusing name they give to what used to be outlook express.

what's new in v3

all i can see are a bunch of bug fixes

I like the Gmail interface much more than any mail client.

That, and email isn't important enough to me for me to be running a separate program for it. Having said that though, we all have to use Outlook at work now, and after using Thunderbird, Outlook is an incredibly painful, slow, bloating piece of s***.

After using thunderbird in an office environment I miss outlook so much ...

Windows Live Mail isn't hotmail, it's the stupid and confusing name they give to what used to be outlook express.

Actually at the moment Windows Mail is the confusing name they give to what used to be outlook express and Windows Live Mail is an even more confusing name they give to a slightly better version of the same thing that's available to download.

Confusingly enough at the moment, but also a really big deal for something Microsoft, I'm pretty sure there will be no mail client packaged with Windows 7 and Windows Live Mail will be what you will have to download if you want a Microsoft mail client with your Windows 7.

After using thunderbird in an office environment I miss outlook so much ...

I hear that, Microsoft Office Outlook just s***s all over other mail clients for email-heavy business needs.

Yeah it does, for support, user friendliness nothing comes close. As well as the fact its got really good calendaring, intuitive stationary and email push for various mobile devices.

I'd like to implement Tb onto my network..

but I have no idea about computers


none what so f***ing ever.


what makes it better than the MS Office offering?

Windows Live Mail isn't hotmail, it's the stupid and confusing name they give to what used to be outlook express.

I'm aware of that but if you're using an @hotmail.com email then for some reason (at least on mine anyway) thunderbird + webmail is now broken since the 2nd to last windows live/messenger/mail/whatever update and can no longer check my hotmail accounts. The author of webmail tries to fix it with every release that MS does that breaks it which I swear they do on purpose to make people swap to WLM or OE, but I've installed the latest version of webmail and hotmail support is still broken. Windows Live Mail can check my hotmail accounts and my gmail accounts so I've switched over to it instead. I guess MS wins this round but at least I'm not using IE. Yet.

Thunderbird still works with my gmail accounts though but stuffed if I'm gonna use 2 email clients.

what version was thunderbird about 12 months ago? cos f*** it sucked.

Who on earth still uses hotmail. If you have gmail accounts why on earth don't you just set hotmail to forward everything to one of your gmails then just use thunderbird's imap support.

The fact that Windows Live Hotmail uses HTTP with Windows Live Mail natively instead of POP/IMAP is a huge benefit to me as it allows me to check my email through the proxy at uni with no trouble at all. That and I was lucky enough to get exactly the address I wanted when they started making @live.com.au available, not to mention I think that @live.com.au looks a lot more professional than either @hotmail.com or @gmail.com do.

say hi to Dave Hogarth for me..


he sucks at teh FPS