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Thunderbird 2.0 Beta 1

Thunderbird 2.0b1 is out, I updated a few days ago. I really love the new tagging functionality. Being able to create your own tags makes organizing mail about 100X easier. The presets of 1.5 just weren’t enough. As far as the UI goes, I was initially not to fond of the earth tone coloring, but I think the new icons are starting to grow on me. There is also a new phishing detection (similar to Firefox). To test it, I looked in my spam folder for a few phishing emails to test the new filter against. So far so good.

The only downsides thus far is bayes spam filtering is not performing as good as it did on 1.5. I reset things, hopefully after a few days of learning it will resolve itself. Or perhaps it’s a lingering regression in 2.0. It is after all still in beta. The other is the new mail notification doesn’t seem to open mail if you click on it. I was hoping it would open email when clicked. Perhaps it’s just not obvious where to click. The appearance and effect seems to be much better now.

It’s hard to write even a mini-review of beta software, since it is just beta and things are incomplete or subject to change. I plan to write more on it closer to the 2.0 release. Despite it’s lower profile development (compared to Firefox), and more subtle changes) it’s really evolving. The changes made really do make it a much better experience.

7 replies on “Thunderbird 2.0 Beta 1”

As fas as I remember, Bayes spam filtering didn’t change between 1.5 and 2.0. The problem is that spam is changing : spammers are rewriting their mails to avoid detection, for instance by adding random text (quotes from Shakespeare etc ..). Or they would place the spam in an image, attached to a fairly normal mail. The Bayes spam filter can’t detect that.

I found a dataloss bug in 2.0 b1, so be careful and follow my advice.

I was reorganizing my emails from a folder based system to a tag based system, which included moving emails around quite a bit.

When moving more than a ceratain number of messages (or kB?) only a few of the selected emails would actually move, the rest would just disappear – unrecoverably! Deleting msf files would not fix the problem.

This seemed to be the case whatever way you chose to execute the move… drag-n-drop, context menu, etc.

However, copying messages works.

So, if you’re going to reorganize your emails in TB 2.0 (b1), copy them and delete the originals instead of moving, unless you want to loose loads of old emails!

The best advice I can give anyone is to pass up the urge to download and install Thunderbird 2.0.0.1 unless you want to potentially loose all your E-Mail Files. Beyond that you will not be able to access your profile as pertains to Thunderbird as it will be in a hidden directory which you may not be able to access with any tool you have. The install will also over write any Netscape 7.X or 8.0 files you may have on your machine.

Needs a lot of work!

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