Mozilla Thunderbird 24 Is Ready To Squawk

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mozilla Thunderbird 24 Is Ready To Squawk

Besides Firefox 24 being shipped, Mozilla is also ready to ship Thunderbird 24, a major update at long last to their open-source e-mail client...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTQ2Mzg

[sykobee]

I seriously hope that this release fixes some of the performance issues in previous versions.

[wargames]

I thought Thunderbird was going to be discontinued...

[Cyborg16]

No Maildir++ support? That's the main reason I don't use Thunderbird.

[powdigsig]

HashCash and spamproof emails with Thunderbird and Penny Post

HashCash and spamproof emails with Thunderbird and Penny Post is the main use I have with Thunderbird. Stamping my e-mail to prevent spam, or rather to prove mathematically that my email is not spam.

I hope Penny Post is compatible with Thunderbird 24.0

[Axlin]

I thought Thunderbird was going to be discontinued...

Nobody ever said it was going to be discontinued. Instead, its development focus shifted away from adding new features and toward stabilization. But then a bunch of blogs and misinformed tech news sites posted a bunch of sensational nonsense about how Thunderbird was going to go extinct.

[Kivada]

I thought Thunderbird was going to be discontinued...

Not at all. Unlike most devs, the Mozilla guys realized that that it was a FINISHED PRODUCT and thus didn't need to be under constant re-re-redevelopment for no good reason and as such only needs maintenance updates.

If only more devs could realize when their product is finished.

[aceman]

Exactly. Development of small features ongoing, e.g. new IM protocols, new events when to run filters, compose window design refinement, MIME/message decoding improvements (which by itself is a big task, but maybe not that visible to the user), addressbook rewrite. Also a version of Maildir is already implemented, it just isn't enabled by default as it needs some more polishing yet. There is effort to sort out whether it will be possible to allow mbox folders larger than 4GB. Even if it happens to never be supported, there are already bug fixes landed to better handle the current 4GB limit in some cases.
Of course, there is the constant flow of platform improvements (performance+back-end features) from the Gecko core (shared with Firefox and Firefox OS) coming in.

But as said by others, the team is mostly focused on bug fixing and stability improvements and fixes of performance in bulk use cases (e.g. selecting thousands of messages and working on them). Also better checking of input values from the user to improve robustness and avoid problems (e.g. location of the data folder, proper mail server hostname/IP checking). I hope the performance issues mentioned in this thread are filed as bugs in bugzilla.mozilla.org. Even in TB24 there already should be improved speed in the filter editor, removed excessive CPU usage while Preferences dialog is open and excessive CPU usage when dragging a lot of messages.

[AllanJude]

Glad to see this update, I'd been stuck using beta 18/20 for a long time because the release 17 version put your signature about the message provided from the command line, which is how I send invoices from our billing system.

[expectATIon]

Integration with Gnome3 popup banners seems to be broken

Integration with Gnome3 popup banners seems to be broken