Mozilla Shifting Thunderbird Development From Innovation To Support... – 343 days old

[ZemaTalon]

...at least in-house:

Reports of the death of Mozilla's Thunderbird may have been greatly exaggerated. But the e-mail program is no longer on the company's priority list.
Responding to news items that his company was dumping Thunderbird, JB Piacentino, managing director of Thunderbird, tried to clarify the future of the software in a Mozilla blog.
Thunderbird users can look forward to upgrades down the road, with versions 14, 15, 16, and 17 on the horizon.
Mozilla also plans to support the application at least until the second half of 2013, according to Piacentino, and is trying to determine how to support it beyond next year. The company will still devote paid staffers to handle the support of Thunderbird, though they may only spend part of their time working on the project.

But beyond support, Mozilla is shifting the hardcore development of Thunderbird from itself to the community.
"To be more specific, Mozilla will no longer focus on developing innovations for Thunderbird but will keep it safe and stable," Piacentino explained. "Mozilla will also provide all the infrastructure required for new, community-developed features to be integrated in upcoming Thunderbird releases."

From CNET.

I don't know if anyone else here uses TB, I think I've been using it since the betas.

[Grogan]

It used to be OK, but the user interface is too stupid. I can't give that rubbish to any of my customers. In fact I'm not installing Firefox anymore either, unless the person is already using it.

The mozilla people have truly lost their marbles.

[ZemaTalon]

It's been like a familiar old shoe for many years but I have had my share of frustrations with it in more recent releases for sure. What are you using for a Linux email client these days Gro?

[Grogan]

I have been using Sylpheed for over 10 years for mail. I like how it strips out all the html junk and displays my mail as plain text with URLs if present. (If I need to see the original email I can save the message source). I HATE html or any other kind of rich text or scripting in email.

This mail client can be set up for serious usage. Sensible user interface with good filter rule controls for sorting mail, good controls of line wrapping (important for mailing lists who would give you shit if you sent emails Microsoft style) and mail is stored in PLAIN TEXT FILES (with base64 encoding of attachments). Yes, that's right, I can simply grep for information in stored mail without even opening Sylpheed if I have to.

[ZemaTalon]

I got Sylpheed installed, now just need to sort out importing my TB mail.

[Grogan]

Importing from other clients... that's where a lot of mail clients fail.

I'm stuck installing Windows Live Essentials on people's computers because it's the only shit assed thing that will import from Outlook Distress and Windows Mail (Vista). Unless people want to fork out money for Outlook, which is a monstrosity and quite cumbersome and awkward for most people to use.

Ironically, Sylpheed will import .dbx from Outlook Express. It's not a mail client I could give people though, for the very reasons that I like it. (Not suitable for others because they DO want graphical html email etc.)

For you, I think you just have to choose the "unix mbox" format when importing in Sylpheed. I think Thunderbird stores in mbox format.

[ZemaTalon]

I got one mailbox imported as an experiment. That's quite different. It's pretty clean, and well laid out. I like how it properly displays the headers, I haven't seen that since I used to use Eudora.

[Grogan]

Being light weight helps... I like programs that are finished opening before I can even move my mouse away from the launcher I just clicked. Snap.

If you want to see the full headers, go to the View menu and do "All Headers" (It's a toggle). ctrl-h for keyboard shortcut, even, just like Pine.