Mozilla Thunderbird 3.1.6

Rated 50/50 by jowtron at Sep 22, 2009

New smart folders are great, and so is the search everywhere feature, but the UI does need to be slickend up a bit more.

Rated 40/50 by skapig at Sep 23, 2009

Nice performance increase in Beta 4, although it disregarded my existing layout. Since Beta 3, it tends to not exit gracefully. It gets caught in a loop and maxes out the CPU until it is forced to terminate.

Rated 30/50 by LakotaElf at Nov 25, 2009

Everytime this comes out with a new version either I cannot get use to it, or I do not like it. I have not decided. I installed this and it took forever to respond, I had nothing but problems with it trying to configure it and when I uninstalled it after getting disgusted with it, it took forever to uninstall to the point I did not think it was going to for a while. I use window 7. Mozilla makes good stuff, but I hardly can say this is ready for big time yet. It needs work, so beware of it, it is a RC which is basically BETA so it is to be expected that error's etc will happen. If your not wiling to fuss with this then do not install it, it is not ready for regular use in my estimation, it still needs work.

Rated 40/50 by mjm01010101 at Dec 2, 2009

I guess the UI change is different and neat-o. I question what took so incredibly long just for the changes I am seeing. I personally have less and less need for a program like this as newsgroups and e-mail management become less crucial to have locally stored....

Rated 50/50 by some guy at Dec 3, 2009

my default mail client both in windows and Linux low resource non bloat and works great with Gmail

Rated 50/50 by DaComboMan at Dec 8, 2009

Thumbs up Mozilla team! Search speed and options in Thunderbird3 are more than excellent. Gives life to email once again! Thank you!

Rated 30/50 by netean at Dec 8, 2009

It's not amazing, it's not awful. Tbird 3 is a hard thing to review, there's been lots of improvements over v2. Tabs - big improvment, setup of email accounts is actually very good indeed. UI has had some polish and it all works well. I had some weird issue that after adding my 2 accounts Tbird worked fine, I logged off my machine and the next day it failed to fetch email, just sat there "checking" and wouldn't shut down properly - that might just be my computer though (this was also v3 RC3) Thunderbird is a solid if somewhat bland email client. It's doesn't offer anything significant over any of the 1000s of other email clients. It works well, does what it's supposed to and looks ok. But there is no WOW. It's not as polished as Postbox, nor as enjoyable to use, it's not as featureful as Spicebird, but a little more polished (both based on Thunderbird code) Overall Thunderbird 3 is the email equivalent of a potato, bland, a bit boring but useful to have around. my only question is whether they've missed the boat a little, with no big WOW features and the steady march towards cloud computing, do we really need a desktop email client any more? Maybe, but do we need that to be Thunderbird?

Rated 50/50 by NunjaBusiness at Dec 9, 2009

Excellent. As to Lightning, forget it. The following extension puts your Google calendar on a tab - superior to Lightning! http://clarkbw.net/blog/...dar-in-thunderbird-tabs/

Rated 40/50 by mytake4this at Dec 9, 2009

This is a very good email client, however for Windows, the Windows Live Mail client I find to be a tad better. For Mac, there again, the Mail.app which comes with Mac is simply better. Have no idea what happened to the Lightning Calendar, as it was suppose to be part of the mail app, just like Windows Live Mail has calendar within the program -- oh well. T-Bird is in fact very good, so if one is looking for a portable app. I say give T-Bird a try.

Rated 40/50 by skapig at Dec 9, 2009

@God Dammit! Yeah, it would probably be nice if there was a manual junk mail delete menu item, but a rating of 1 for this is absurd. What you missed entirely is that in your junk mail config there is an option to automatically delete junk messages older than a specified number of days.

Rated 40/50 by dreamz at Dec 9, 2009

Please update the screenshot and the url for the homepage, which is: http://www.mozillamessaging.com

Rated 40/50 by Znoo at Dec 10, 2009

I'll give it four stars. It's a great mail program but Thunderbird lacks a builin calendar. Luckily the latest nightly build of Lightning works on Thunderbird 3 and it seems to work fine with Goggle Calendar.

Rated 30/50 by nilst2006 at Jan 20, 2010

It sure has been improved, and eat a lot of resources - at least on my a few years old computer. Will stay with latest version 2.xxxxxx something. (Sad to see that all latest Mozilla apps; Firefox and Thunderbird, eat too much of the systemresources...a very bad sign. Guess i have to find some alternatives to them as well....

Rated 40/50 by RMerlin at Jan 20, 2010

Homepage is obsolete BTW - the current one is http://www.mozillamessaging.com/ After being pretty much on life support for a long time, TB is slowly starting to turn into a very feature-complete product. Still a few quirks in it however, but 3.0 was a major improvement over 2.0.

Rated 40/50 by stylemessiah at Jan 22, 2010

Always good to see dev on this, but still prefer to use PostBox http://www.postbox-inc.com/ Yes its a paid product, but it is developed well and developed beyond the mozilla thunderbird base code

Rated 50/50 by cool_guy at Feb 4, 2010

This is an excellent email client. It seems to have good filtering techniques and in general it just does the job for me. I can either show or hide content with a click of a button as one would expect from a professional mail client. I haven't checked resource usage as I have 3GB of RAM on an Intel Dual Core and in my case it is more than enough however I do have sympathy for the users with less powerful systems and I understand their complaints. I firmly believe developers should pay attention to these systems. To these users I would suggest you try some of the other open source clients (many of them are written in GTK I think). Simply search for open source email client and you will get a lot of results such as 5 good open source email clients etc.

Rated 10/50 by schwaber at Feb 7, 2010

Compared with v.2.0.0.27, absolutely nothing. It churns my stomach to see what they have done to the world's previously best email client. Everything: (1) it is a resource hog and doesn't work properly; and (2) going to tabbed browsing without providing any control for the tabs (or add ons to do that) kicks lack of user functionality in programming up to notches previously unknown, It worked ok for a week or so, then it stopped loading the full screen -- I can see the underlying window through parts of the T'bird window; the only way to clear this is to switch to another window and then switch back to T'bird; this is probably related to the amount of resources it saps (task manager shows that when it is doing something, or trying to do something (it freezes frequently), its resource consumption is 98%+. As noted, frequently when trying to open an email (the mail itself, not an attachment) it just freezes and has to be closed and reopened. Finally, the Tabbed reading sucks. I've used T'bird since v.1; every time I am done with an email, when I go to close the email I accidentally close the entire program because I click the upper right corner "x" box (the older versions opened each email in a separate window). All they need to do is offer an add on or menu function to protect from closing the program while a tab is open, just like in Firefox. Also, because of the tabs, I can no longer close an email with the escape key, I have to move off the keyboard and use the mouse to close the tab, then reposition my hand on the keyboard. I am scouring the internet to find a place where I can download a version 2.x again. Sorry, but you guys blew it with this one.

Rated 40/50 by Stingray57 at Feb 8, 2010

The latest version of Thunderbird is much faster- processing seems to be faster, as well as the searches. I've been using Thunderbird for the last couple of years. Thunderbird needs tighter integration with calendar, tasks and reminders. And now that there's a XOBNI clone for Thunderbird; I don't look at changing for quite some time. I've everything I need... http://www.lehsys.com/20...-mozilla-thunderbird-v3/

Rated 30/50 by allenrj at Feb 8, 2010

"Installed without problems" More detailed layout and seems easier to modify. Started getting duplicates on some of my e-mails but not all. Didnot seem to be contained to particular sources. Have not used enough to learn all the features. I had been told that there is a method of an appointment reminder but have not found the add-on or feature yet.

Rated 50/50 by Haole at Feb 9, 2010

"Fantastic!" Love having tabs and now having lightning with calendar that much better. None so far.