Neowin Interview : David Bienvenu, Thunderbird Developer

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You might have noticed that this week Thunderbird hit 1.0. Thunderbird is the Mozilla Organisation's open source email client.

We've talked to David Bienvenu, one of the developers of Thunderbird. David talks about the challenges of 1.0, and Thunderbird's future in general.

Notable features that 1.0 introduced include virtual folders, RSS integration, improved junk mail handling and better search ability.

View: Neowin Interview with David Bienvenu | Thunderbird 1.0 is Go!

Download: Thunderbird

B]Features:[/B]

· The best PC performance: Choose between a silent running mode or the best graphics performance settings and the wizard automatically adjusts all performance metrics (clocks, voltages, fan speeds, bus speeds, etc.) to get the best options for the hardware in the system.
· Improved dynamic overclocking: Provides on-the-fly overclocking and BIOS configuration within an easy-to-use Windows interface that is streamlined and simplified for better user understanding.
· Benchmarking wizard: See how your PC configuration stacks up against synthetic benchmarks before and after adjusting system parameters.
· Saved system profiles: Save, import, and export custom overclocking or BIOS profiles. Assign profiles to favorite programs for automatic application. A safety "watchdog" checks temperature and steps system down if failure could occur.
· GPU overclocking: Overclocking of GeForce FX and GeForce 6 Series GPUs is supported in concert with system overclocking, temperature monitoring, and system profiles.
· System troubleshooting: An automated reporting tool captures all needed information to help you determine when problems may be happening to the system, and helps you troubleshoot.
· Improved system monitoring: Temperatures, voltages, and bus speeds are now available as an “always-on-top” window with a transparency option so that it is visible at all times.
· Voltage and bus speed monitoring: Track actual motherboard voltages, GPU clocks, bus speeds, and CPU core speed to ensure safe and correct settings.
· Temperature and fan speed monitoring: Real-time monitoring of CPU, GPU and system temperatures helps prevent hardware damage. nTune supports dual-CPU and SLI multi-GPU systems.
· Dynamically adjustable voltages and fan speeds: Adjust motherboard voltage levels without a reboot, as well as dynamically control fan speeds.
· Dynamically adjustable memory timings: Change critical memory timings without rebooting and without entering the BIOS.

(2 replies) #1 Jugalator on 09 Dec 2004 - 16:34

It's overall a nicely packaged product IMHO, I was mostly just a bit unpleasantly surprised by two things:

1. That they hadn't fixed the problem arising from not having to separate column settings for the RSS and the mail views. Since your RSS streams gets categorized and tidy, you don't really want the "author" column since a blog or some news are usually always from the same source -- the blog/news author. But when you remove it in the RSS view, it's also removed in mails, which is pretty bad of course

2. That they still use the skin that doesn't really conform to the Firefox style Winstripe for Windows users. From what I've heard, it *do* use Pinstripe if you're on a Mac, which is the same as Firefox for Mac use. Instead we get the pre-0.9 skin based on Qute. This isn't as big deal as it would've been if Qute would've looked bad though, which I don't think it do.

Anyway, really like that it now supports grouped sorting like Outlook 2003, and that program's three column layout view. The two things I liked most with Outlook 2003.

It's not really comparable to Outlook though since that's more like a groupware program, and Thunderbird is more comparable to Outlook Express. Oh and it doesn't hurt that it has an adaptive antispam filter built-in that actually works well for me.

#1.1 Mr magoo on 09 Dec 2004 - 16:43

Some fair points - i hope David and Scott read all of the comments here and take some of the feedback into future versions of the product

#1.2 tapo on 09 Dec 2004 - 17:00

Yeah, Thunderbird uses Pinstripe when you're on a Mac, and it hasn't used Qute since 0.6-0.8, can't really remember. I wonder if it is taking them a long time to get Winstripe for Thunderbird finished, or if they just want to stick with Qute.

(3 replies) #2 tapo on 09 Dec 2004 - 16:45

Thunderbird 1.0 is nice, I'd give it a try if anyone reading this thread hasn't tried it yet. However, it isn't as awesome as Firefox is, and does nothing groundbreaking when it comes to email. The junk mail filter is absolutely awesome, the best I've ever seen. But I still don't like the way Thunderbird deals with multiple accounts, putting them in a seperate inboxes, with a hack that *kinda* works, and puts them in a "global inbox".

If you're on Windows, it's worth a shot if not just for the Junk mail filter. On Mac OS X, it's ackward but it's still good. Not much over Mail.app though. On Linux, Evolution 2.0 is absolutely awesome, so try that instead if you're running GNOME as a desktop environment.

#2.1 supernova_00 on 09 Dec 2004 - 16:48

I think the groundbreaking thing that Thunderbird does is the adpative junkmail filters.

the hack? the global mailbox works perfect for me with 5 different accounts. and its not hard to setup, when createing another account just select to download the mails into the gloabal folders. whats hard about that?

#2.2 tapo on 09 Dec 2004 - 16:56

Haha, we just replied to eachother's posts at the exact same time.

There have been adaptive junk mail filters before, like the one in Mail.app that work just as well as Thunderbird's.

When I was referring to "Global Inbox" as a hack, I meant it. Modifying my existing account to use a global inbox was a pain, and it only checks that account for new messages, not downloading them. To do that, I need to hit get mail. Mail.app just seems to do this a lot better. Maybe Thunderbird beats the competition on Windows, but I don't check my email in Windows all that often. Regardless, Thunderbird is still my primary email client, and has been since 0.7 or so.

#2.3 Jstphish on 10 Dec 2004 - 00:30

I definitely think Thunderbird is groundbreaking for Windows users. There isn't another mail program that does live searches (that I know of) and has the ability to save them. I love that the developers seems to be taking the best ideas from all platforms and mail applications and are putting them into Thunderbird. I absolutely love it.

(1 reply) #3 supernova_00 on 09 Dec 2004 - 16:45

Thunderbird will likely continue to use Quote for the time being, Thunderbird is a separte program from Firefox (hence the seperate theme...well kinda, but there was also no disagreement between the tb devs and the quote authors). Yes they are nicely integrated but that doesn't mean the theme has to be uniform. and another thing Thunderbird is going to be integrated into the Mozilla Suite as the mail client for the suite. This is expected to happen for the 1.8 release but might be pushed back for the 1.9 release depending on how fast the devs can work out the bugs that arise with the integrated of a completly new mail client into the suite.

The thunderbird junk mail controls are by far the best by far. It's adaptive filters for junkmail is superior to any other email programs. I haven't seen junkmail since I trained the junk mail settings the first two weeks of use over a year ago.

#3.1 tapo on 09 Dec 2004 - 16:50

QUOTE

The thunderbird junk mail controls are by far the best by far. It's adaptive filters for junkmail is superior to any other email programs. I haven't seen junkmail since I trained the junk mail settings the first two weeks of use over a year ago.

Yeah, same here. It catches every single junk mail it comes across, with almost no false-positives.

(3 replies) #4 dougkinzinger on 09 Dec 2004 - 16:49

It's better than Outlook Express, but not Outlook 2003.

--DK

#4.1 Jugalator on 09 Dec 2004 - 17:17

Well, that depends on what you want from it.

If you want groupware features and so on, it's not even comparable since Thunderbird doesn't aim for being such an application.

If you want an integrated RSS reader and some nice spam filtering without having to set up separate applications for that, Thunderdbird is better, since Outlook 2003 doesn't have that.

And so on...

Different apps for different needs.

#4.2 Magallanes on 09 Dec 2004 - 19:39

Outlook 2003 have a spam filters. Don't have rss but still you can install a "plugins" for it.

#4.3 Jugalator on 09 Dec 2004 - 22:26

Yes, but AFAIK it's not adaptive for the spam you get. I thought that was pretty noticeable as spam made to circumvent filters had an easier time getting around Outlook's filter than Thunderbird's which just adapted itself to the new kind of spam.

Oh and I wasn't really talking plugins; Thunderbird has plugins too that further extends functionality, if we're going to include those.

This one is a pretty darn good one.

#5 supernova_00 on 09 Dec 2004 - 17:10

Suggestion! Please also link to this great guide for Thunderbird in the main post
Getting Started with Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 by Daniel Wang

Last edited by 411 on 09 Dec 2004 - 17:23

#6 Mx² on 09 Dec 2004 - 17:40

Very sweet interview, Thunderbird is looking quite good.

#7 IceDogg on 09 Dec 2004 - 17:53

I have to agree, the junk mail filter works great. I was worried about getting false positives at first, but all you do is check the junk mail folder and make sure.. so far I've never had one. GREAT! work on the one Devs

(1 reply) #8 Dessimat0r on 09 Dec 2004 - 18:38

I get junk mail through the filter all the time. It works less and less over time.

#8.1 supernova_00 on 10 Dec 2004 - 03:53

you must not have turned the adaptive junk mail controls

Tools->Junk Mail Controls->Adaptive Filter-> Click 'Enable adapative junk mail detection'

then you have to mark mail that is junk as junk for the filter to learn what you want classified as spam email. right click on a mail->mark->as junk

#9 DjTeriyake on 09 Dec 2004 - 20:33

Calendar integration is one such example and the continued maturation of the Sunbird calendar client over the next year will help with that.

Whoops! I read that as masturbation the first time!

(2 replies) #10 Mr. Dee on 09 Dec 2004 - 21:34

Sorry, I'm happy with Outlook 2003, especially new layout. And I can download free extension available long time ago to read RSS Feeds in Outlook 2003.

Good Effort though, what interest me about the interview is the Enterprise market, they have 40 thousand seats deployed and are planning on adding features to go head with Outlook such as Calendaring. Should be an interesting year in 2005 for both it and Mozilla.

#10.1 Jugalator on 09 Dec 2004 - 22:29

Hmm, Tb offers the same kind of layout nowadays.
I.e. three vertical panes with large preview to right, message grouping, and so on...

Maybe you already knew that and meant something else though.

#10.2 Jstphish on 10 Dec 2004 - 00:37

Thunderbird has functions that Outlook doesn't such as it's search functionality, which is miles ahead of Outlook 2003's. What I can't wait for is Sunbird (Mozilla's calendar program).

(1 reply) #11 Billprozac on 09 Dec 2004 - 22:34

I wish someone would write a small web frontend for one of these email clients. I for one would like to be able to check my mail while I am at work and the current methods all have comething lacking. The only truely good way to do this is using VNC/remote desktop. Other programs like emule have had web interfaces for a while. Outlook has OWA, but only if you are running exchange. Come on guys, it can't be that hard, and that would be groundbreaking.

#11.1 Jstphish on 10 Dec 2004 - 00:38

That's why they invented IMAP. The only bad thing about IMAP is the lack of really powerful web frontends ... but they do get the job done.

#12 GreenMartian on 10 Dec 2004 - 00:07

You guys are forgetting something. Another feature of TB that I can't live without is its portability. I can login to both Windows and Linux, and get the same layout and even Inbox in both.

It's easy to be done. If you've used TB on Windows, just install one on linux, and edit its profile to point to the one in your fat32 (windows' profile).

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