Thunderbird, the Mozilla-based email program that designed as a sister project to Firefox, is currently at 1.0, & some reviews are coming in about the very successful program. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reviews it in eWeek in an article titled "Thunderbird: Not Quite Ready for Business". He likes it for personal use, but doesn't think it's ready for corporate use. That's honest, and quite reasonable. He also brings up several bugs. But he also really, really likes the program, & he explains why. Hmmmmm. If you're a Tbird user, read this article! Linux Times features a review titled " Product Reviews: Thunderbird 1.0". He talks a lot about how Tbird stores mail in the mbox format, which is actually something I don't like - I prefer the maildir format, since it lessens the likelihood that a corrupt mbox file will bork a gazillion messages. And btw - if you're not quite sure about Tbird, or you're a Mozilla junkie, then you might want to check out this quick 'n dirty overview of ...

There's a whole passel of books coming out now about Firefox & Thunderbird. Here are a few reviews (& interviews & discussions with the authors) of some of them (& no, mine isn't in there, because mine hasn't come out yet, but it's really really really close!) ...

Wow - knowing how campus IT departments tend to function (hint: completely decentralized, with each department & division doing whatever the heck it wants to do), this amazes me. Evidently Harvard U. has centralized, or is trying to centralize, on Thunderbird as the supported mail client of choice. They've even customized it to meet their needs, which is just totally cool. If this helps 1000s of students and faculty get used to Tbird, and by extension open source, then this is a very, very good thing indeed. (Check out all my postings on Thunderbird.) ...

If you use Firefox or Tbird, AND you have a USB flash drive (and really, doesn't everyone these days?), AND you want the ability to pop that flash drive into any ol' Windows machine & use your favorite web browser or email program, then you must must must must go investigate John Haller's brilliant Portable Firefox and Portable Thunderbird (as I said, Windows only at this time). Slashdot covered it, if you wanna find out more. Interestingly, mozillaZine is also reporting "Mozilla to Support U3 Standard for USB Devices". This appears to mean that Haller's project is going to be superceded, or perhaps used as the base, of an official project to allow users to run Firefox & Tbird on USB drives. Either way, it's very cool, and it just goes to show where the real innovation is occuring these days in the browser (& email) worlds (hint: not in Washington state). ...

mozillaZine is reporting in a story titled Associated Press Underwhelmed by Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 that the reviewer, Anick Jesdanun, was "disappointed by the need to train the junk mail filter". I'm sorry, but Tbird has the best junk mail filters of any email program out today, and I say that as a Kmail user. It sounds like this reviewer didn't understand how Tbird's filters work, or even the concept behind them (if you want to learn more, they're called Bayesian filters, and the original idea behind them was in Paul Graham's seminal essay, A Plan for Spam). ...

Google Desktop Search was released a while ago, but it was pretty MSFT-centric (and hell, it STILL only works on Windows) and only indexed Office, IE, & Outlook Express. A new version has been released that now supports Firefox & Thunderbird, as well as other file formats. Good! Now how about getting it to work on Linux - and Mac OS X? According to what I've been reading, Copernic Desktop Search is even better than Google's. It's been able to index Firefox files for a while; now they added support for Tbird. Excellent! It just really blows that it's also only for Windows. Grrrrr … Of course, maybe we Linux users shouldn't really care, since it appears that we have something called Beagle that does the same thing. In fact, it appears that SUSE 9.3, due "real soon now", will include Beagle along with iPod support and other goodies. Sweet! Take that, Google! ...

There's a new Firefox; now there's a new Tbird as well. 1.0.5 for both. What's the new Tbird got? Just like Firefox, no new features, just bug fixes & updates. If you use Tbird, you need to update for security's sake, so get on it! (Check out all of my posts on Thunderbird.) ...

In my capacity as a columnist for SecurityFocus, I've often discussed phishing (don't know what phishing is? Read this. Or this.). It's a real problem, and it's getting worse all the time. Firefox and Mozilla have taken a proactive approach to this criminality: the browsers warn you if the URL is problematic, or hidden (for instance, try clicking on this link: http://mozilla.org@example.com). Now Thunderbird has anti-phishing protection built in as well. Excellent. And be sure to check out the screenshot in the previous link. Very clear, very communicative. Again, excellent. Oh yeah - and what has MSFT done about this problem lately? Bueller? Bueller? ...

One thing that people tend to forget is that open source isn't just about Linux. Apple uses open source stuff in it's products - like it's kernel & web browser for instance - and even MSFT has released a couple of things as open source (and I'm not talking about their b.s. "shared source" license, which doesn't even deserve consideration). In addition, there's actually a lot of great open source software that runs on Windows. When I use XP, for instance, I don't use IE; I use Firefox. I don't use Outlook or Outlook Express; I use Thunderbird. I don't use Office; I use OpenOffice.org. ...

I haven't used Outlook in yrs, but there is a free (as in beer AND speech) program called Outport that enables you to easily export data out of Outlook and into something a lot better (not that finding a better program than Outlook is hard, mind you …). So, want to grab your emails, contacts, and meetings from Outlook and import them into Thunderbird, or Kontact, or Evolution? Head over to http://outport.sourceforge.net/ and get the program! (At this time it's a Windows-only program, which is OK, since Outlook is a Windows-only program.) Now, what I've found is that Mozilla Mail/Thunderbird is a great middleman. In other words, export from Outlook, import into Mozilla Mail/Tbird, export from Mozilla Mail, import into Evolution. You get the idea. It ain't hard. ...

One of the more interesting open source projects to arise out of Novell recently is Hula, a calendar & mail server. Several clients will be supported, including Evolution (duh), KMail, Thunderbird, and even Outlook (well, especially Outlook - they want this to compete a bit with Exchange). Works with ClamAV & SpamAssassin, which is cool. The screenshots look interesting, & I can already tell that this thing is gonna have a lot more aesthetic sense that anything from MSFT ever did. Oh, and installing this thing is really easy. Super duper easy. Don't believe me? Read the installation page. Now, Hula's not 100% ready for prime time totally & completely, but it's good enough to play with, and some people are using it to do real work, so it's close. To learn more, check out the User Guide. BTW, I especially like this statement on the FAQ: "How well does it scale? Insanely well." Well, heck, that's great! (Check out all of our posts on ...

Xandros sells its distro commercially, but it now offers a free download (Warning! This torrent leads to a 540 MB download via BitTorrent!) of the Open Circulation Edition as well. Included is Firefox, Thunderbird, and Skype for VOIP. Wanna find out more? Read the press release, or read the review at OS News: "Review of Xandros 3.0.1 OCE". OCE is good, but you don't get ALL the goodies unless you buy it. My advice? Try out OCE; if you want more, buy it. It's worth it if you want a simple to use version of Linux. ...

In case you haven't already heard, it's over for Mozilla as far as future development is concerned. Oh sure, the Mozilla Foundation is going to keep maintaining the 1.7 branch, but that's it. All future work is aimed at Firefox & Thunderbird. This was announced years ago, but it finally became final this week, and evidently some folks are (justifiably) p.o.'d at the Mozilla Foundation for not making things clearer, sooner. (Of course, volunteers can still keep Mozilla going, and it looks like folks are trying to do just that. More news as it develops.) ...

Lightning: the codename for a project that is going to integrate Mozilla's calendar & to-do lists into Thunderbird. Hmmmmm … email + calendar + address book + tasks … sound like any other software you've ever heard of? First initial "O", second initial "utlook"? Well well well … and free, and open source, and standards-based to boot! Sweet! Wanna see screenshots of the project's app? Why, just head over to First screenshots of Lightning!. Thank me later. This is one to keep an eye on. (Check out all of my posts on Lightning.) ...

Mozilla has given us a browser (Mozilla AND Firefox) and an email program (Mozilla Mail and Thunderbird). One of the projects now being worked on by Mozilla is a calendar/to-do app. It comes in two sizes: as an extension for Firefox/Thunderbird/Mozilla called, cleverly enough, Calendar, and as a standalone app named Sunbird. Recently Sunbird/Calendar reached 0.2, which is pretty far from 1.0, but it's still usable, as long as you can live with the occasional weirdness. If you're interested in trying out Sunbird 0.2, you can get a download for Windows, Mac OS, & Linux. (If you're interested in trying out one of John Haller's creations, give Portable Sunbird, which allows you to run Sunbird from a USB flash drive, a try.) Here's my one piece of advice: two things need to be a key priorities as Sunbird marches towards 1.0: (1) shared calendaring, so that groups of folks can use the same calendar, and (2) the ability to sync the calendar with PDA devices like Palm. I can't push Sunbird ...