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Mozilla Thunderbird 0.2

Release Notes

Mozilla Thunderbird is a redesign of the integrated Mozilla App-Suite mail component. Our goal is to leverage much of the existing functionality of that product to produce a stand-alone mail application that is simple and extensible. The Mozilla Thunderbird Project website has more information.

The focus of this second milestone release is to improve on the stability, performance, and polish of the promising 0.1 release. While there is much more work yet to do, the developers are excited about recent progress and are anxious to share their latest efforts with the community. Enjoy!

Owing to the maturity of the foundational code of the app-suite, Mozilla Thunderbird is very usable; however, the status of this release is pre-alpha, and as such, is assumed to have defects. To help find the defects, the developers happily receive user feedback (via comments in the Mozilla Thunderbird forums kindly hosted by MozillaZine, or via bugs filed in Bugzilla.) Please carefully read these release notes before filing any bugs in Bugzilla.

This document covers the following topics for the Mozilla Thunderbird 0.2 milestone release:

What's New
Downloading, Installing and Uninstalling
Known Issues
User Support and Feedback

What's New

The following list of progress highlights is summarized from a more complete change log. Here are some of the highlights:
  • Footprint and Performance

    Since 0.1, we have made excellent strides in reducing code footprint and improving performance. The download file size for Windows has been reduced by 1.5MB and is substantially faster than 0.1.

  • Improved Default Theme

    Arvid Axelsson continues to improve the crisp, fresh, and attractive theme based on Qute, his amazing theme for Mozilla Firebird. Updates include new icons for the options dialog, and improvements to the icons for both the mail and compose toolbars.  Also added are new taskbar icons for Windows and dock icons for Mac OS X.

  • Improved Spell Checker

    The spell checker now ignores quoted text when composing a reply (HTMLand plain text), and also ignores any URL inside the message body.

  • Redesigned Options Dialog

    The 'Options' dialog got theme updates (see above), a streamlined 'Advanced' panel, and a new 'Attachments' panel for managing behavior when opening mail attachments.

  • Improved customization

    The Compose window toolbar now supports a 'Quote' button. The Mail window toolbar now supports a 'Previous' button.

  • Improved Stability

    This release is based on the Mozilla App-Suite 1.5 beta branch.

Downloading, Installing and Uninstalling

You must delete your old Mozilla Thunderbird directory (NOT the profile directory) rather than just overwriting the files there. Not doing so WILL result in problems and you should not file any bugs on Mozilla Thunderbird unless you've first done a clean install. Thunderbird 0.2 uses the same profile as Thunderbird 0.1. You will not lose any of your mail settings when upgrading to this release.

Volunteers have provided Mozilla Thunderbird binaries for Windows, Linux (GTK2), and Mac OS X. We hope to soon have mozilla.org directly provide these and non-GTK2 Linux binaries.

Windows: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/releases/0.2/thunderbird-0.2-win32.zip

Linux with GTK2 and XFT: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/releases/0.2/thunderbird-0.2-i686-pc-linux-gtk2-gnu.tar.bz2

Mac OS X: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/releases/0.2/thunderbird-0.2-macosx.dmg.gz

Contributed builds (These are unofficial builds and may be configured differently than the mozilla.org builds.)

Localized builds Contributed by the volunteers of the MLP:

Once you have downloaded the binary, use Winzip or gzip to unzip Mozilla Thunderbird to an empty directory then run thunderbird.exe. Thunderbird will create its own profile and will not interfere with your Mozilla App-Suite (Seamonkey) profile.

To uninstall Mozilla Thunderbird, simply delete the Mozilla Thunderbird directory. This will leave your profile in place for use by future Mozilla Thunderbird installs. If you wish to remove your Mozilla Thunderbird profile delete the Thunderbird folder from your Windows Application Data directory or remove the .thunderbird dir from your Linux home directory.

Known Issues

This list covers some of the known problems with Mozilla Thunderbird 0.2. Please read this before reporting any new bugs, and watch it regularly (we'll update it as new bugs are found in the release). Because this is only our second milestone release, we realize we have a lot of work to do ahead of us! At the same time we are very excited about Thunderbird and want to share with you our current level of progress.

  • The default theme is not complete yet. We are still using a lot of Mozilla classic theme icons. Arvid is working on the artwork and you will continue to see it improve going forward.
  • Unix users: our integration with the operating system has not been implemented yet. Clicking on HTTP URLs in mail messages fails to launch your default Linux browser. We hope to address this in the next release. We recognize how important this is for our unix users and apologize in advance.
  • To add a non-English dictionary, read the installation instructions.
  • OSX users: if you close all open Thunderbird windows you will get a very strange menu bar filled with Seamonkey looking menu items, most of which don't do anything. We still need to implement this 'hidden window' in Thunderbird. Hopefully we'll have this by the third milestone.
  • OSX users: We don't have a 'Windows' menu item in the menu bar which allows you to toggle through the open application windows yet. We hope to have this in the near future too.
  • Turning on junk mail adaptive filter detection is a per account preference (Tools / Junk Mail Controls / Adaptive Filters). However the UI makes it look like it is a global setting. To turn it on for several accounts, click on the Settings tab, change the account menu list to the right account then go back to the Adaptive Filter panel and make the decision to enable or disable automatic junk detection.
  • The progress-meter in the mail 3-pane does not become visible when performing operations. It stays hidden all the time.
  • We do not currently migrate your Mozilla profile to Thunderbird. If you just want to try Thunderbird out, use a new profile and enter in your mail account information. You can migrate your Mozilla profile by hand, although we do not recommend it.
  • If you configure a POP account to not download message bodies over a certain size we later fail to download the rest of the message body when you click on the download rest of message link.
  • If you want to make Mozilla Thunderbird your default mail client on Windows, we recommend going through Tools / Options General instead of going through the operating system. We fail to register a key with the OS when you go through Windows' Internet Options.
  • The Mark All Read keyboard short cut does not work on Linux.

User Support and Feedback

First-time users can get started quickly with the excellent Introduction to Mozilla Thunderbird.  Discuss general issues, provide feedback, and get peer user support in the Mozilla Thunderbird forums hosted by MozillaZine.  For FAQs, Tips & Tricks and other customization help, be sure to check out the Mozilla Thunderbird Help site.

Previous versions of the Release notes: 0.1