I’ve been looking forward to the release of Mozilla Thunderbird 3 for a while. It’s always exciting to see what changes a major release will bring and i hadn’t followed its development partly because i wanted to be surprised. And surprised i was.
I’m sure you’ll see allot of these kinds of posts in the near future. It’s inevitable when major changes are made to software that many users are going to gripe and, this time, i’m one of them. Sometimes it’s due to stubbornness – unwilling to adapt to a new way of doing things. Sometimes the software developers just went nuts and actually borked a good piece of software. In this case it’s a bit of both…
New Account Wizard
The new method of adding accounts makes the process very easy for many, but may be a bit frustrating for those that know how a particular account needs to be configured and don’t want it done automatically. For instance, in my case, Thunderbird 3 wants to use IMAP as a default for most of my accounts, despite the fact i don’t. I want POP/POP3. So when you add an account that you want to manually configure, Thunderbird will try to configure it for you anyway by connecting to and probing the mail server which you then have to stop. If you make the mistake of clicking the “Manual Setup” button thinking that you can change the protocol, you’re in for a surprise. Instead, after stopping Thunderbird from probing the server, you have to click the small “Edit” button which, to me, wasn’t obvious at first. If Thunderbird tries to set up your account using IMAP, which it will by default, and you don’t manually edit it before you finish creating it by using the “Edit” button, and not the “Manual Setup” button, it will then create the IMAP folders which you can’t rid of via the GUI.
Tabs… needed for ???
As wonderful as tabs are in many applications, especially your browser, i have absolutely no use for tabs in my email client which i find to be a waste of screen real estate. Worse, Thunderbird 3 does not offer an option via the config UI to disable them and, instead, leaves you manually editing prefs.js to set “mail.tabs.autoHide” to “true”. Dumb.
Smart Folders… not
If you don’t like the way folders are displayed by default, it’s easy to choose another layout either from the “View” menu or by using the 2 tiny buttons to the right of where it says “Smart Folders”. Personally i prefer “All Folders” because it takes up less room which leaves me wondering what’s so “smart” about taking up more room.
Action Buttons… de-actionized
Instead of the single default toolbar with your “Get Mail”, “Reply”, Write”, etc. buttons, Mozilla decided to break it up by removing some buttons from the main toolbar and adding some very out of place looking buttons at the top of the Message Pane. Better yet, there’s no option to configure them, at least not for now (may be introduced in 3.1). If you don’t like the new layout, create the “chrome” directory, if need be, in your profile folder (Thunderbird\Profiles\[random_string].default\chrome) and either add this to your existing userChrome.css or create one:
.msgHeaderView-button {
display: none !important;
}
Then customize the main toolbar and add back the missing buttons.
Global Search and Indexer… how about NO search indexer!
Thunderbird 3 provides an enhanced method of searching all your emails using a database that is created and enabled by default from ‘tools >options > advanced > general’ with a setting labeled “Enable Global Search and Indexer”. With this enabled a database is created in the root of your profile folder that could be very large. It may also take a long time to index all your emails if you have allot (thousands). The upshot is that using the “Global Search” input area on the toolbar will look through all your emails and create a pretty printed list of results. The downside is, in addition to having all your emails using disk space, you now also have another database of all your emails using disk space. If you disable the Global Search Indexer the database will be deleted and the Global Search input area on the toolbar will become about useless. To search the old way, picking the folders you want to search, or all of them, you’ll have to use the “Find” item from the ‘Edit > Find’ menu.
Missing Columns… i need an extension to do WHAT ???
The wizards at Mozilla decided to remove some message head columns from Thunderbird 3 for whatever reason. If you want them back you need the extension Extra Folder Columns.
You…
By default, any of your own identities in the message fields From, To or CC is replaced with “You”. Change this from ‘Tools > Options > Advanced > Reading and Display’ and de-select “Show only display name for people in my address book”.
Disk Cache… um, you’re not my browser
Thunderbird 3 now creates a disk cache directory (50 MB in my case) to store images and whatever other junk i don’t want to store. With tabs, a disk cache, cookies and the ability to brows the www with an extension, one wonders if the the Thunderbird developers have forgotten what the difference is between an email client and a web browser. I don’t display HTML email, i don’t send HTML email (that’s a no-no) and i sure don’t want to store images and style sheets and whatever else locally. To disable this, go to ‘Tools > Options > Advanced > Network & Disk Space’ and set it to “0″.
Cookies… yuck!
Thunderbird also stores cookies by default. To disable this, go to ‘Tools > Options > Security > Web Content’ and disable it.
General Thunderbird Tweaks…
In prefs.js…
If you don’t want to display HTML email, set “mailnews.display.html_as” to one of the following:
0 (default): Display the HTML normally
1: Convert it to text and then back again
2: Display the HTML source
3: Sanitize the HTML
For more information, see here and here.
To disable Java set “security.enable_java” to “false”.
For extra security, research the DOM options in prefs.js. Also check ‘Tools > Add-Ons > Plugins’ to make sure that you want any plugins there to actually load.
The Final Say…
I think Thunderbird 3 is going to go over well and, overall, i find it to be OK though it was a disappointment at first. The 3.1 release should offer a few more options and, hopefully, fix some of the bugs which i haven’t mentioned here. If you haven’t upgraded yet, you may want to hold off until 3.1 because, in my opinion, i’m not seeing any major new features with the 3 release that make an upgrade worth while.
