
Thunderbird Ups the Email Ante - linuxmag
http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7529
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thorax
Random cautionary anecdote about Thunderbird tabs:

My cat stood on my keyboard and opened an email hundreds of times. This made
hundreds of new tabs that would re-open every time I started Thunderbird. As
far as I could tell, Thunderbird has no function (yet?) to "Close All Tabs" or
"Close All Tabs but this one" and so I just gave up after a while and manually
closed them all myself by clicking the [X] one at a time.

If I had known how many there actually were (no real way to tell) I would have
written a UI automation script (or extension) to close them all, but instead I
spent a good 15 minutes closing the same email again and again. To make
matters worse it was actually a very depressing email to boot.

~~~
bk
Holding ctrl-w should close the tabs very quickly, if Thunderbird has the same
shortcuts as Firefox.

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thorax
Excellent! Thanks for the tip. It scared Thunderbird into pegging the CPU
until I killed it, but it worked great.

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davidascher
That's a really funny cautionary tale. I filed it at
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=517489> so we can think about
ways to avoid or mitigate...

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davidascher
FYI, that bug has now been closed, and "Close other tabs" will be in TB3 final
(and nightlies before that).

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mitchellh
The only reason I can't stand switching out of gmail's web based reader is
because I can't stand NOT having conversation-style emails.

Does anyone know if TB3 supports this? If not, does any other email client?

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RyanMcGreal
I'm not on gmail, so I don't know if this is the same as conversation-style,
but Thunderbird has provided the ability to view emails in a threaded view for
years. Apparently you can also configure Tbird to maintain this threaded view
when sorting by date, subject, from, to, etc.:

[http://lifehacker.com/264317/maintain-threaded-view-in-
thund...](http://lifehacker.com/264317/maintain-threaded-view-in-thunderbird)

~~~
alexgartrell
Tbird's threaded view is nowhere near as intelligent as Google's threaded
view. When an email client arbitrarily adds a "Re:" is messes it up.
Conversation-style view is more or less useless when split up among multiple
conversations.

Or at least this was my experience this summer.

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decode
_When an email client arbitrarily adds a "Re:" it messes it up._

I'm pretty sure Thunderbird uses the Message-ID and In-Reply-To headers to
create the threads, not the subjects. But some people don't always use the
Reply function, or Reply to an old email when they want to start a new
conversation. Maybe Gmail has some logic to get around these limitations.

~~~
davidascher
In Thunderbird 3, we use a combination of the two models, as some mail
providers (Yahoo! for example, IIRC) strip away the right headers. Thunderbird
3's threading is way better than Thunderbird 2's.

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bcl
I've been running the Beta for months now on OSX, ever since Thunderbird2
started crashing and locking up on me. I've had zero problems with it.

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endtime
This is pretty cool - I used Thunderbird for a very long time and tried the
beta out briefly.

Don't count out Outlook 2010 though...it has some pretty solid improvements
too. I can't stand the conversation threading in Outlook 2007 or Thunderbird
2, but the way Outlook 2010 does it is pretty comfortable for me.

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wslh
Thunderbird is a shame and it was left behind by Mozilla, just try to fill a
bug and they will tell you it's a feature... may be in 100 years it will add a
pair of features.

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raptorex
I agree, I have been using it for years at my company and it consistently
performs very poorly when you have a large mailbox (and it's unusable if you
try to have it save messages for offline use). filters randomly miss messages,
only to work when you run them manually, opening an email sometimes just hangs
forever, it feels sluggish all the time...

I don't like the interface either, you can't tell when it's doing something
CPU-intensive in the background like compacting unless you notice that it says
something in the status bar, and the status bar changes when you do something,
leaving you wondering what the hell it's doing.

I installed the new beta a few hours ago and it seems just as bad, just now it
was sitting in the background and it made my brand new macbook slow to a crawl
for some reason. so I tried telling it to do the new archive feature on my
inbox, and it gave me a folder for the years 2005-2009 with an extra folder
for 2000 with nothing in it, and the 2005 folder ended up with a bunch of
messages from 2005-2009. awesome. it's still hanging for long periods of time
just trying to open single messages. I'd say it's my fault for using a beta
but the release isn't really any better.

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raptorex
ah, and it just crashed when I tried to delete a bunch of messages. it was
trying to index them, using 60% of my cpu, despite the setting telling it to
automatically delete them because they were more than 30 days old. which has
been set for a long time, leaving me wondering why they are still on the
server in the first place. I'm not sure I would recommend Thunderbird for
professional use. I haven't seen it lose messages or corrupt my mailbox, but
it sure is flaky for me.

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rebron
yeah, it'd be a simpler menu than Firefox, maybe Close Other Tab, Open in New
Window, Close All Tabs. No need for reload, new tab, or bookmarks.

