Mozilla Thunderbird 2 takes flight

Mozilla on Thursday launched Thunderbird 2, the latest version of its free, open-source e-mail client featuring message tagging and customization.

Thunderbird 2, with its enhanced features, is intended to ease the organization of e-mail via message tags, advanced folder viewing, and speedier inbox and message searching.

Under its message tagging feature, users can assign single or multiple custom tags to their e-mail, such as "from mom" or "weekend projects." Users would also be able to assign default tags, as well.

"In Thunderbird 2, we incorporated the proven benefits of tagging to e-mail," Scott MacGregor, Mozilla's lead engineer for Thunderbird, said in a statement. "Tagging initially gained popularity on blogs, photo and link-sharing sites as an intuitive way to organize online information."

Thunderbird 2's customization features are designed to allow users to create their own message template, or use any hundreds of free add-ons to change the appearance and functionality of their e-mail client.

Thunderbird 2 also includes a backward-forward function to browse messages, and allows users to save e-mail searches in folders for reuse.

[stercor]

Thunderbird & gmail

Can Thunderbird 2.0 be used with gmail.com?

[The_Doc1010]

It should work

I have not installed it yet, but it should not have a problem. You should be able to access Gmail via POP through Thunderbird like any other client.

[jdano]

Gmail in Thunderbird

Yes. It's very easy to setup Thunderbird for use with Gmail.

First you have to enable POP in your Gmail account settings.

When you create a new account in Thunderbird it will ask you what type of account you want to create. Select Gmail from the list, then input your name and address on the next screen. The first time you check mail it will ask you for your password. And that's it.

[Orion Blastar]

Use the Webmail extension

Webmail can be found here and install Webmail and the GMail extensions and you should be able to access GMail from Thunderbird.

[loony75]

And Google Calendar Too

Thunderbird works beautifully with gMail, which is great. The best feature I've found is the Lightning add-on that integrates Mozilla's calendar app (Sunbird) with Thunderbird, giving you a built-in calendar right along with your e-mail (think Outlook).

And since we're talking about Google, with the Lightning add-on you can get two-way communication with your gCalendar (which means you can create events in Thunderbird that are also added to your Google Calendar).

More and more useful every day...

[shantanu77]

No match for Outlook Express

I have 'tried' to use thunderbird many times. Each time I import my outlook express mail, it become dead slow.
I dont think it still is capable of handling large number of mails.
I really think the new updates should be related to handling large amount of mail in the place of providing fancy stuffs.

[lynxss]

Hah, I think the same thing about Outlook

I often say the same thing about Outlook. We use a IMAP mail server and for a long time Outlook support for this was just horrible. Besides taking 3 or 4 times more steps to initially set up, deleting mail didnt work right, managing folders didnt work right. Various other features would just randomly quit working.

As the only sys admin in a midsized company its been a major annoyance always having to fix peoples outlook problems every couple of weeks or so vs the 85ish % of the company that are engineers and all use Thunderbird and never had a single problem, ever.

Granted, Outlook support for the IMAP protocol is much improved lately, but its only just now at the point where Thunderbird, Kmail, and Evolution clients were 2 1/2 years ago.

[zeroplane]

And you were using what mail server?

Me thinks you were using exchange weren't you.

Perhaps you should look at why the mail server was so slow.

[axw]

No such problems with IMAP server

The postings by shantanu77 and cameronjpu are unfortunately too incomplete to locate or reproduce their problem. Are you using POP or IMAP protocols, to which type of server do you connect over which type of line, are you talking about 1000 existing e-mails in your inbox or 1000 new ones, etc. I'm connecting over 1.5Mbps DSL (to name the slowest connection) to Linux-based IMAP4 and ESMTP servers with encryption in either direction. My inbox is frequently in the thousands (>100MB), never experienced the problems described in the postings here with either Thunderbird 1.x/2.x or SeaMonkey 1.x versions. Thus, you may want to check your settings or switch to a different server. As for the junk mail, a good mail server will filter those out before they end up in your inbox and put them into some other folder instead, thus making it easier to find your way through all the spam.

[dburr13]

Longtime T-bird user

I've been using Thunderbird for a couple of years and i like it alot...I hadn't thought to add Gmail to it..but now i have and it really was easy to set up.