Talk:Mozilla Thunderbird
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| This article is part of WikiProject Free Software, an effort to create, expand, organize, and improve free software-related articles. | |
| Start | rated as Start-Class on the assessment scale |
| High | rated as High-importance on the assessment scale |
 |
Mozilla Thunderbird has had a peer review by Wikipedia editors which is now archived. It may contain ideas you can use to improve this article. |
Please see the discussion at talk:Thunderbird_(disambiguation). - UtherSRG 20:20, 10 Jan 2004 (UTC)
[edit] MACOS
"As for Firefox, the Mac OS X version is poorly integrated and generally considered inferior to other ports."
What is this ? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.42.79.229 (talk • contribs) 21:43, June 24, 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Polish?
Is a special Polish edition of Thunderbird at work? Did I oversleep or what?--217.237.151.169 12:14, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)
- Of course there's a Polish edition! As of the time of writing, it, and all other translations, can be found here (the filename is thunderbird-0.2-win32-plPL-SEAinstaller.exe.) --Ardonik.talk()* 14:26, Sep 21, 2004 (UTC)
- Hmm. That's not right; it's a link to a really old version. The latest internationalized versions are supposed to be here, but the URL on that page to localized versions is broken. The default installer seems to be for English only. Maybe someone else can help out? --Ardonik.talk()* 14:42, Sep 21, 2004 (UTC)
I think the Anon misunderstood "Polish work" (to improve 1.0) as "a work in the Polish language" [1]. --Menchi 02:54, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)
[edit] Themes and Extensions
Some thoughts. First, I don't think these should be grouped together- they are not similar, and extensions shouldn't be in the interface section. Second, they are non-standard terms which I think should be commented on to be skins and plugins, or something along those lines. Juan Ponderas 05:56, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Copying from firefox page?
It seems someone copied part of this page straight from the Firefox page. I found several instances where the word 'firefox' was used instead of thunderbird in the Cross-platform support section and the word browser was used instead of client in the Internationalization and localization section. I fixed the problems, but I'm not sure weather its ok for these sections to be identical to the Firefox page, so I thought I'd leave the matter in the hands of some more experienced users to handle. --Canageek 20:52, Jun 12, 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Complaints
A common complaint I have heard (and have myself) is lack of an integrated calendar. Can that be added or do I need a documented source first? Oberiko 04:43, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
- I say add, then if people don't like it, it'll get deleted. I mean, no one has answered since January... Additionally, there are extensions for calendar support and Mozilla does have a separate calendar. You may be aware of this though. Dawhitfield 02:52, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
- Yup. Lightning was announced after I made the orginal post, so I think that basically puts the issue to rest. Oberiko 17:20, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Criticisms
Just a simple observation, but where it says that Thunderbird has been criticized for not having the ability to automatically save attachments to a folder, that's probably because it would become a huge security risk, with worms and virus's being able to easily infect users. -Astroman 03:49, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
- Tacking onto the criticism of not having this ability, it mentions that there is an extension to perform this functionality, could someone add a link to said extension ? Signpostmarv 20:00, July 8th 2006 (GMT)
"Some important features are also missing from Thunderbird, such as default templates for new mails and replies, which are present in most other email clients." Thunderbird 2 now has "message templates", so I believe this example should be removed. If there other features missing, they can be added as examples, otherwise I believe the item should be removed. --Patrickdepinguin 14:41, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
[edit] not criticisms, feature requests
isn't this whole list pretty pointless? it's just a feature request list. should this be left to bugzilla, and not wikipedia? most of these aren't really criticisms. criticism would be more like "TB does X, but this adversely affects Y users, and the designers have refused to change it" or similar. feature requests are no9t criticisms. --60.242.222.210 00:12, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
Add to this the recent edit by Mojo-chan. You can use templates in ThunderBird for Windows and Linux. Perhaps Mojo-chan is just unfamiliar with the use of the software or (s)he is using an older version, or a Mac version. If this is not an error please provide a source or explain here why what was posted is correct.--71.202.46.143 08:02, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
As far as the third criticism is concerned (protecting emails from outsiders), it's one of the most basic features imaginable for a mailing client so it certainly deserves mentioning here. And although designers have not plainly refused to fix it, they've actually failed to do so in the last seven and a half years (since it was reported at the end of 1999), which is pretty long time even as compared to the notoriously sloppy Microsoft. Adam78 22:42, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
Granted that's a long time, but I suspect partly this is a misplacing of a lack of os features onto an application, namely functional file and folder permissions. See discussions of how pidgin makes no effort to secure stored passwords beyond trusting that the os has functional file permissions in place and attempting to use them.
I agree. The paragraph "It is not possible to protect emails from other (unauthorized) users of the computer" is hardly a fair criticism of the application. It might be a valid criticism of the operating system or the user, but not of Thunderbird. Brunnian 08:37, 14 July 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Message loss due to compacting folders?
I've spent many hours contributing to Thunderbird (not to mention using it and supporting it) and I have never seen this bug:
"Compacting folders can lead to the loss of messages in the folder you are viewing at the time"
Thus, I'm removing it from the list of "Possible deficencies". Perhaps someone can cite a source (like a bug in Bugzilla). I have seen folders that incorrectly display the count of messages and compacting folders fixes this problem. Perhaps the person who added this line was confused by that? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 66.92.53.49 (talk • contribs) 18:41, October 17, 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Is it proprietary software?
See discussion at Talk:SeaMonkey#Is it proprietary software?. -- mms 15:34, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
- You can obtain/install officially branded products which don't have Talkback & are therefore completely free/open source. Trackback is widely considered to be an extension & not the core product. This is really free/open source software. --Karnesky 20:16, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Windows XP
Why don't we have it running under windows xp? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 64.131.55.36 (talk • contribs) 02:02, January 19, 2007 (UTC)
If you're talking about the screenshot, I'm in two minds myself: on one hand, XP is a far more common operating system, and Thunderbird is most likely to be run on it - so there is the "Encyclopaedia Accessibility" issue. Then, on the other, Thunderbird and Wikipedia both reflect open-source, non-proprietary values, and so perhaps it's more appropriate to have it under Linux. What do others think? - Certainly there would be no harm in including a screen shot of it running under other OSs as secondary pictures, but which is most appropriate for the primary picture? --Christopher 19:41, 13 March 2007 (UTC)
- When the user interface is essentially the same (with only the window decorations significantly different), I see little reason to include screenshots from multiple OSs, and whether Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X are used doesn't matter. Thunderbird falls under this category. Now, when there are significant differences (think Mac IE 5 versus Windows IE), then multiple screenshots is appropriate. -- Hawaiian717 23:38, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Web Links
Someone has put a weblink in titled "Easy Tutorial to configure Thunderbird." It is obviously translated from some non-English language. I take issue with the use of the word "easy" when the language goes like this: "Thunderbird is a client of electronic mail of novel characteristics that turn it one more an option than attractive than it´s not possible to be let evaluate."
Surely someone's got a better weblink out there somewhere, yes?
Molasseskat 19:11, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Eudora vs. Thunderbird attachments
"Most e-mail programs use MIME to attach files to e-mails. MIME converts the file to a format compatible with Internet transmission (i.e. "encodes" it) and attaches it to text of the message, creating one large e-mail. Then the whole e-mail, including the attachment, is sent together.
Thunderbird stores the whole e-mail together, including the attachment, in MIME format in the mailbox files in your profile folder. It does not un-encode and store the attachment outside the mailbox file unless you save or detach it as described above. By contrast, the Eudora e-mail program automatically un-encodes and detaches the attachment when you receive the e-mail; it always stores attachments as separate files."
"If a large number of messages are being stored in the mailboxes and mail folders being imported, the process can take extraordinarily long. This is because Eudora 6.2 stores messages differently than Thunderbird 1.5. For one, Eudora 6.2 mailboxes are text files containing the text from all the messages being stored in the mailbox. Thunderbird 1.5, however, stores messages in a binary format. Also, Eudora 6.2 separates attachments from the message text, storing attachments in a designated folder. Thunderbird 1.5, on the other hand, stores the message text and attachments together in its binary format. This means that Thunderbird’s import tool needs to go through every message, put together any attachments with the messages they were sent with, and then compile all of the messages into a binary file that Thunderbird can then read."
Some people like attachments stored with the mail msg, like Thunderbird does. But Eudora users, who want their attachments separate, like they have been used to for years, face a difficult conversion to Thunderbird. Penelope was supposed to be the answer, but seems to not actually be moving forward. So, Eudora users are still stuck, with no real options.
See also: [2] "Avoid this attachment GOTCHA! You may lose changes you make to attachments unless you read this!" -69.87.200.164 15:54, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Screenshot
Could someone please upload a new version of the screenshot with Thunderbird 2 and Gentoo Linux, preferably looking and tagged like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mozilla_Firefox_2.0.0.2.png -KingpinE7 00:49, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Does the old Thunderbird logo really need to be in an encyclopedia? To my knowledge, that logo was only used before Thunderbird 1.0 came out (in versions 0.1 to 0.9). 71.113.250.73 01:58, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Penelope/Eudora
On November 22, 2006 the first alpha version of the Penelope XPInstall extension was made available on Bugzilla.[1] Version 0.1a19 was released April 26, 2007 (831 KB) for Thunderbird 2.0b2 – 3.0a1. [3]
The Qualcomm Penelope developers announced on 07-19-2007, "We currently have, in house, our first actual Beta build (called Eudora 8.0.0b1). We'll probably get this posted in the next few weeks." This open-source, Thunderbird-based version has been under development since 2006, but will not be a true replacement for the current Eudora (ie., one that has similar features/capabilities) until 2008 at the earliest. [4] -69.87.204.57 20:11, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Press Release?
Not to be overly critical but this line: "Just as Firefox aims to redefine the web browser, Thunderbird is a refinement of the mail and news interface." sounds a lot like it was ripped right out of a press release. I'm all for GNU and Mozilla, however in wikipedia, I think it sounds a little PRish. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mikelj (talk • contribs) 18:23, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Market adoption
I've removed the following section, since it contains only anecdotic data. If anyone comes up with better more solid figures, please feel free to re-add.
==Market adoption== {{Importance-sect}} <!--This section could do with some actual percentage market share figures, as opposed to anecdotes. Anyone?--> As of April 2005, the [[Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences]] was making a [http://www.fas.harvard.edu/computing/thunderbird/ customized version] of Mozilla Thunderbird available to students and faculty. According to an article posted on [[May 9]], [[2005]], [[New York University]]'s [[Stern School of Business]] had also [http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=163100275 started] using the open source e-mail client. Starting 2005 fall, the Networking Services and Information Technology department of [[University of Chicago]] will [http://blog.ebrahim.org/archives/2005/06/02/uchicago_to_distribute_firefox_and_thund.php include both Firefox and Thunderbird in its connectivity package] for all incoming students. More recently, [[Saint Louis University]]'s College of Arts & Science has adopted Thunderbird as its e-mail client of choice. Also, the University of Leeds School of Computing uses Thunderbird as its main mail client for new students, as does New Zealand's [[University of Canterbury]].
-- Ddxc (talk) 20:59, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Fair use rationale for Image:Thunderbird-logo-64x64.png
Image:Thunderbird-logo-64x64.png is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.
Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to insure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.
If there is other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page. Note that any fair use images lacking such an explanation can be deleted one week after being tagged, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.
BetacommandBot (talk) 02:13, 12 February 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Screenshot again
Could someone with access to a free linux build post a screenshot please? Screenshots of software running on non-free operating systems are discouraged as they nullify any free-use compatibility the image has. You can see Talk:Mozilla Firefox for an extensive discussion of this and its result.--Oni Ookami AlfadorTalk|@ 06:08, 12 February 2008 (UTC)
[edit] No Outlook mention at all?
Shouldn't this article mention Microsoft Outlook in some way? Either to give an example of another program that Thunderbird is or aims to be comparable to or better than, or it should be mentioned when discussing Thunderbird's import/export features or general compatibility. I've never used either program, so I'm not a good candidate for commenting on them, but I hope someone else can. --Gronky (talk) 11:12, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
