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What's going on with Thunderbird?

This document is a log of the recent work the Thunderbird team has been doing to build a stand alone mail client based on Mozilla Mail. This is a project we are working on in our free time, so be patient if we aren't able to respond quickly to comments and requests. This page is not intended to be the document describing our goals, but more of a daily journal about what we are working on. Older journal items can be found on the Old Change Log.

September 7th

  1. The version string has been bumped to 0.8 to help test out the new extension manager changes. Any extensions that aren't listed on update.mozilla.org as being compatible with 0.8 will get disabled upon first launch.
  2. For those of you who use Thunderbird in environments that require HTTP auth proxy support. Thunderbird will now prompt you for your proxy username/password when it renders an HTML message with remote http parts! Thank you Vlad for implementing this heavily requested bug fix.
  3. Minor RSS improvements to better handle aggregate feeds like planet.mozilla.org and feedhouse.
  4. Regression Fix: Forwarding inline attachments fails to include the message headers. Editing a draft fails to display the draft contents.
  5. Added UI for emptying Local Folders Trash. A big help for Global Inbox users. (Tools / Account Settings / Local Folders)
  6. The default biff interval for checking for new RSS feeds has been increased to reduce server load.
  7. When migrating eudora mailboxes, map the eduroa mime type tag: <x-rich> to text/enriched instead of text/html.
  8. Hook up check for new messages for movemail users on Linux.

August 23rd

  1. Offline users can now access their global offline settings from Tools / Options / Advanced / Offline and Connection Settings.
  2. If you try to close the RSS subscriptions dialog while we are still subscribing to a feed, you get a prompt confirming your decision, letting you know that dismissing the dialog in the middle of a subscription will abort the subscription.
  3. The quick search bar drop down marker on OS X is no longer getting verticall stretched.
  4. The quick search text box on OS X no longer allows characters to spill past the end of the search bar.
  5. You can now choose the RSS account in the advanced search dialog.
  6. When migrating Eudora and Outlook profiles to Thunderbird, we now handle folders that have a '/' character in their name.
  7. When forwarding HTML messages as inline, we weren't including the header information for the forwarded message.
  8. Master password is now off by default. If you want to encrypt your saved passwords you have to go to Tools / Options / Advanced / Saved Passwords / Master Password... and enable it.
  9. The migration wizard for OS X and Unix no longer show migration sources that don't exist like Outlook and Outlook Exprss.
  10. Fixed a regression in last week's build where quick search for message body text was not working for POP3 accounts.
  11. You can now check for new RSS feeds every x minutes.
  12. You can now export address book data again. This was a regression in earlier 0.8 test builds.

August 13th

  1. RSS Support --> Thunderbird now includes an RSS reader! Go through the Account Wizard to set up an RSS account (right now you can only create one). Right click on the account and choose "Manage Subscriptions..." to add RSS feeds. Or you can drag and drop RSS feed urls from your favorite browser onto the RSS account in the folder pane and we'll automatically subscribe you to the feed!
  2. Remote images are now blocked by default in Thunderbird to protect your privacy. Your personal address book is used as a trusted list. If the sender is in your PAB, we will show the remote images. Tools / Options / Advanced / Privacy for more details.
  3. Master Password support for Thunderbird. Tools / Options / Advanced / Saved Passwords and click on the Manage Master Password button. This brings up a dialog full of master password features. Now, if you set a master password, the "View saved passwords" option in Thunderbird won't work unless you enter your master password.
  4. Proxy Connection settings are now in a dialog like Firefox reached from the advanced options panel.
  5. For new users with a new profile, the spell checker works out of the box with the English dictionary instead of showing "Download More" in the dialog. This fixes a regression found in 0.7.x
  6. Various offline settings were not getting saved from the offline settings dialog
  7. Mail views and the new quick search box now play nice together. Fixes jmontana's popular complaint.
  8. Fixed a crash when print previewing a message that had blocked remote images.
  9. Added RSS acccount panel UI and feed properties UI for showing just the article summary/description for feeds that support it instead of loading the actual website in Thunderbird. This setting does not effect articles that were previously downloaded. Only new articles. And it only works if the feed actually has a description.
  10. Various internationalization improvements for RSS feeds including mime encoding the subject so it looks correct in the message list pane. And properly decoding the feed article with the right charset so the bodies look right. Unfortunately a lot of I18N sites list the wrong charset so some feeds may still look broken but it isn't our fault!
  11. Online IMAP users can now choose "Message Bodies" in the quick search bar and we'll do online body searches against the IMAP server.
  12. We now have an undetermined progressmeter for Windows and linux which moves a progress chunk across the progress bar. This is particularly useful for showing undetermined progress such as when we are connecting to your mail server and we don't know what we are downloading yet.
  13. We've tried to do some work to address the "clean install" requirement when upgading builds using the Windows installer. The windows installer now trys to delete several known "stale" files when you install over an existing 0.6 build.
  14. Lots of improvements for folks imorting settings from Eudora incuding the famous bug where HTML eudora messages come over as plain text.
  15. Fix for a crash when doing multiple body searches from the advanced search dialog.

July 23rd

  1. Profile Migration Wizards for new users. We can now migrate settings and data from the Mozilla Suite, Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora (Win & Mac), Netscape 4.x and Netscape 7.x. Launch without a profile and the migration wizard will show you a list of available migration sources (the apps I just listed) that you have accounts for on your machine. I could really use help testing this stuff.
  2. There is now a new remote image blocker feature in Thunderbird. Turn on remote image blocking (Tools / Options / Advanced). The next time you click on a message that has remote content you should see a remote image toolbar in the message pane informing you that this msg contained remote images which Thunderbird blocked in order to protect you privacy. Clicking on the button in this toolbar reloads the message with the remote images. Eventually this will get turned on by default.
  3. The quick search box in the main mail window has gotten a face list. It now contains a drop down box allowing you to pick the search criteria you want for your quick search. You can also choose the Find in Message item from the drop down which will highlight your search term in the selected message.
  4. Fix for a nasty crasher in the advanced address book search dialog when you try to perform multiple searches within the same search dialog.
  5. When opening up a folder, don't scan it for junk mail if the user has not actually marked something as junk (or not junk). This makes the first use case much smoother since we no longer download all of the message bodies for the folder for someone who just migrated to Thunderbird.
  6. Add Get New Mail For All Accounts functionality to Thunderbird! Back by popular demand. The get new mail button now has a drop down like the Mozilla Suite for supporting Get New Mail for all accounts vs. a particular account. This one is for you fishbert.
  7. Bug fixes and improvements to the Global Inbox feature for POP users including problems with multiple POP3 servers all trying to use the global inbox at the same time at startup.

June 11

Here's a summary of what's new in 0.7 so far:

  1. Talkback is incorporated into the builds for all 3 platforms. Talkback is a tool that generates crash report data which helps us measure the stability of the product and figure out where crashes are happening.
  2. Thunderbird 0.7 bits use the new Extension Manager developed for Firefox. When installing a theme or extension, it must be written to the new EM APIs that Ben Goodger has document for Firefox or it will not install.
  3. Static builds for all platforms. Yielding a smaller disk size and a really nice performance win across the board. OS X bits also use pre-binding now giving yet another big performance boost.
  4. Windows installer uses 7-zip compression for a new download size of only 5.9MB (5.7 without talkback)! Woo Hoo!
  5. Multiple Identity UI for creating multiple identities for a given account.
  6. New inline vCard UI
  7. New profile manager including new profile manager UI.
  8. Signature gets styled in the compose window with the same styles used when you view a signature in the message window.
  9. Color quoting for message qutoes.
  10. OS X fix for Thunderbird locking up when coming out of sleep mode.
  11. OS X: if no Thunderbird windows are open and you click on the system dock icon, we re-open the main mail window.
  12. LDAP fix for users using LDAP version 2 servers. In 0.6 you could not access these servers without manually changing some preferences. Now if we don't detect version 3, we gracefully fall back and use version 2.
  13. The download more option in the spell checker dialog now takes you to a web page with various localized dictionaries.
  14. Junk mail fix where sometimes the junk mail filter would mark a message as junk but fail to move it to the Junk folder.
  15. Minor improvements to the junk mail algorithm.
  16. If you do a custom windows install with the windows installer you now see a screen which asks you if you want desktop/start bar/quick launch icons for the installation.
  17. Sorting is now supported in the news subscribe dialog.
  18. Opening a vCard attachment now opens the vCard internally in our addresss book UI instead of launching an external application.
  19. In the offline settings panel, some of the settings were not being saved (like the one for compacting a folder if it saves X KB"
  20. DOM Inspector is no longer part of the windows installer. It is still part of the full .zip build
  21. On Windows, Thunderbird properly handles mailto url clicks (from a browser or another app) that contain raw unencoded spaces.
  22. Continued IMAP improvements and bug fixes including a potential hang when reading imap over SSL.
  23. All of the 1.7 final bug fixes that weren't in 1.7 RC1 (which 0.6 was based on)

May 31st

  1. Add Themes and Extensions to the Tools dialog as part of the integration with the new extension manager.
  2. Offline Settings --> KB value notstored for 'Compact folders if size is over..."
  3. LDAP v3 - fallback to v2 if v3 connect doesn't work with
  4. Certain mal-formed mime messages that were marked as junk aren't getting moved to the junk mail folder.
  5. SMTP: send dialog flashing during big attachment sending if you have a fast connection
  6. Window menu should conform to Apple Human Interface Guidelines
  7. Move Search Messages and search Addresses under Edit / Find to make more room on the tools menu for themes and extensions.
  8. Make the windows installer use 7-bit compression to reduce the size of ThunderbirdSetup.exe
  9. Integrate talkback support into the windows and linux builds (trunk and branch).
  10. Manage Certificates and Manage Security Devices popup panels are too narrow (mostly with new profile)
  11. Implement sorting in the subscribe dialog for news.
  12. Incorrect import from Outlook Express if a message line is very long (> ~513-1024 characters)
  13. On OS X, if the app went into sleep mode (and you were using an IDLE connection), the app hung when the computer woke up.

May 25th

  1. Attachments menu persists even when INBOX is selected instead of a message.
  2. When the user double clicks a vCard attachment we should handle it internally instead of kicking out to the operating system. We do this by opening a vcard stream listener and then bringing up the address book card UI for the vcard.
  3. New profile manager UI.
  4. Don't show vCards as external attachments. Fixes the problem the previous patch introduced when displaying attachments as NOT inline.
  5. Redesign inline vCard look and feel.
  6. Try to address some of the mapi regressions caused by Bug #157566 where mapi makes a copy of the attachment before returning to the calling application.
  7. Don't package DOM inspector in the windows installer. Footprint win. It is still in the full ZIP version.
  8. Handle mailto urls that come from the windows OS which contain unencoded spaces.
  9. Labels and mail status is cleared when moving mails between folders using IMAP servers that don't support custom keywords.
  10. File toolbar button does not work until Thunderbird is restarted
  11. enable blind send by default, since we warn the user
  12. Make Ctrl+click on thread icon augment entire thread
  13. Pref for whether newsgroups use "Size" or "Lines"

May 2nd

Thunderbird 0.6 is released!

May 1st

  1. Linux GTK2/XFT bits now have the official branding. Thanks to Kevin for generating the xpm's and to MozJF for helping me test the changes.
  2. New Mail notification for OS X. We now change the icon in the system dock to indicate new mail. When you quit we now remove our badge overlay, reverting to the original dock icon.
  3. Linux GTK2/XFT builds should now come with the mozilla-xremote-client.
  4. Fixed a regression with POP3 users filters where you could not have the filter mark a message as junk.

April 30th

  1. Thanks to some late night heroics from jmontana, OS X builds now change the icon in the system dock when new mail arrives! OS X users please grab the build again and give it a whirl to check this out.
  2. We took a crash fix for some folks that were seeing a crash when importing an Outlook address book on Windows.
  3. LDAP directory searches from the address book were not showing any results.
  4. Creating a new LDAP directory was incorrectly causing the protocol version to get set to v2 instead of version 3.

April 28th

  1. The windows uninstaller no longer gives you a message saying it could not remove all of the files in the install directory.
  2. OS X build now has new mail notification! Thanks to jmontana's work, you can configure OS X to animate the system dock icon when you have new mail. (Options / General / Mail Notifications). We hope to add another option for changing the system tray icon to have a mail indicator in the near future too.
  3. Modified how MAPI works to make us work with WinZip's "Zip and Email File" menu item. To test, have Winzip installed. Right click on a file and select "Zip and Email File |filename|" then send the message. I could also use help makng sure this did not regress sending a document from MSOffice products like Word and Excel.
  4. Implement SPA (aka NTLM MSN) authentication for IMAP (it was already implemented for POP and SMTP in 0.5). Need testing help here.
  5. Fix for empty trash not actually emptying your trash.
  6. Make local folder message searches faster

April 26th

  1. The new junk mail controls have landed for all platforms and not just the windows builds.
  2. 0.6 now has support for per server filters for News groups. This means a set of filters that can apply to all the groups on a news server. *Need testing help*
  3. The windows installer now adds a new context menu item if Thunderbird is in your Windows XP Start Menu called "Thunderbird Options". Clicking that menu item brings up the Thunderbird Options dialog. *Need testing help*
  4. In HTML mail compose, there were weird cases where the HTML formatting toolbar would flicker with a really large height. This flicker has been fixed.
  5. A small theme update from Arvid includes a more generic throbber instead of his personal logo.
  6. The URL when clicking the throbber now takes you to the Thunderbird products page instead of the engineering projects page.
  7. The Recipients column in the thread pane (i.e. when viewing Sent messages) now shows a comma delimited list of recipients instead of just the first recipient.
  8. Fix for an LDAP connection leak.
  9. No cursor (focus) present in the 'add email account' wizard for a new profile has been fixed. (Need testing help for those that saw this problem before),

April 20th

  1. I'm excited to announce our new branding artwork for Thunderbird! Many thanks to Jon Hicks, Steven Garrity and the rest of the visual identity team for developing the new brand identity for Thunderbird! Please note that the same trademark restrictions that apply to the new Firefox branding artwork also applies to the Thunderbird artwork! The branch windows nightly build currently has the new artwork. Soon to get turned on for OS X and GTK2 branch builds.
  2. The about dialog got a bit of a face lift to better integrate the new artwork
  3. We currently show just the display name for message recipients matching people you already know in your addressbook (ala mail.app and Outlook). Mousing over the friendly display name shows a tooltip with the email address. the addresss context menu also shows the email address. For those of you (I'm sure there will be :)) that don't like this, you can easily turn it off: Tools / Options / Advanced / General Settings.
  4. When starting up a new profile, don't assume the user's resolution is 800x600, giving us a very small 3-pane window on first launch for high resolution screens. Instead, take a look at the current resolution and try to pick a sane initial width and height.
  5. The UA for the branch build is version 0.6a (just a reminder)
  6. Pinstripe for OS X has several bug improvements including the return of status indicators in the message list pane (for replied, forwarded, and mark as deleted). (Thanks Kevin!)
  7. You can now Open attachments from the mail compose window. (double click the attachment or right click on the attachment and select Open). This is an easy way to double check the contents of your attachments before you send your message.

April 5th

  1. Pinstripe has landed for the OSX builds! Thank you Kevin and Stephen for making this happen!
  2. Fixed a regression with the new set junk status filters where any filter that set a label on a incoming message also caused the message to get marked as junk.
  3. Fixed a regresion with the new set junk status filters where the filter action would randomly change state between "Junk" and "Not Junk" every time you restarted the app.
  4. Regression fix: Opening a forwarded message attachment was just re-opening the original message in a stand alone window instead of opening the forwarded part.
  5. There is now UI for turning of IMAP IDLE support under the account settings / server / advanced dialog.
  6. When installed with the DOM inspector, DOM inspector now recognizes / sees windows that were created befor it was opened.
  7. Linux builds can now be built with the DOM inspector extension. Thanks to Alexander Sack for making this happen.
  8. Fixed some problems with the junk mail icon not changing its look when hovering over it or pushing down on it.
  9. Added a new menu item under File / Open Saved Message that allows you to open .eml files from your desktop. Thanks to Robert Accettura for working on this patch. Moved the old "Open Messsage" menu item (which is used for opening a message into a stand alone message window) over to the Messages menu where it belongs.
  10. Dragging attachments from a message window to the compose window caused the attachment to get added with the name "Attached Message Part" instead of the actual attachment name. Also made the attachmen box in the compose window smarter about showing the correct content type icon next to the attachment name.
  11. Ctrl-K now moves focus into the quick search bar in the main mail window.

March 26th

  1. New HTML Compose Options dialog for configuring default HTML fonts and colors. Tools / Options / Compose / HTML Options.
  2. David Bienvenu has enchanced mail filter actions to allow you to have a filter mark a message as Junk / Not Junk.
  3. The Win32 Installer build now has a DOM Inspector component if you do an optional install. There are still some DOM inspector issues to work out such as it not recognizing windows created before you open the DOM Inspector. And the Edit / Preferences menu item does not let you set DOM inspector prefs yet. But the inspector is functional for those of you who need it.
  4. The offline component of the Win32 installer should now work and get installed properly.
  5. Robert Accettura contributed a patch to add Add to Address Book and Compose MailTo menu items to the context menu for a mailto url inside a mail message.
  6. Eliminate the thread pane column horizontal jiggling when changing the sort order or the sort column for the windows theme.
  7. Eliminate the toolbar horizontal jiggling when the junk icon toggles between 'Junk' and 'Not Junk'. Thanks to Stefan Borggraefe for the patch.
  8. As with all current Win32 automated nightlies, this build contains patches for the new junk mail controls.
  9. A new credits dialog can be found under Help / About / Credits. Artwork and credits are provisionary and not finished yet.
  10. jshin has added UI under Tools / Options / Fonts & Languages for replying using a default encoding.
  11. Christian Eyrich contributed a patch where MSN authentication was not supported for SMTP/POP3.

March 12th

  1. Updated Junk Mail Algorithm Improvements. Fixes several math errors in the new algorithm that were in previous test builds. . It is now producing the same message scores as spam bayes when both are fed the same input tokens so we believe the algorithm is now calculating scores correctly. Further tuning/gains will come from improving the tokenizer. **Please keep in mind, if you start using this build and training with it, then you go back to a nightly or an old build that does not have this patch in it, you will get mixed results with the performance of the filter** (This code is present in Win32 hand made bits from me only)
  2. To get the best benefit from the new junk filter, I highly recommend you retrain, clearing out your training file. To that end, I have added UI in the junk controls / adaptive filter dialog to make it easy to reset your training data. You can use this instead of deleting training.dat by hand. Verbage in this dialog for this option will hopefully be improved.
  3. Fixed some serious accounting issues when a user deletes training.dat and retrains against messages that have already been classified which would lead to extremely poor performance for the junk controls.
  4. Many improvements and bug fixes for Thunderbird's support of the IDLE command for IMAP. (Thanks David!)
  5. We now have a new set of emoticons (smileys) thanks to the pinstripe authors for donating these to us.
  6. If we fail to copy your sent message to your sent folder, we now bring up a dialog asking you if you would like us to try again. This happens a lot if the connection to the sent folder has timed out.
  7. F8 can now be used to toggle the message pane open and closed
  8. Regression fix: we no longer have the grey line underneath the menu bar
  9. Regression fix: the options and send progress dialogs are now coming up with the proper width and not getting truncated like they were in the 3/5 build
  10. Regression fix: changing the priority on an outgoing message no longer effects the priority of the next message you try to send.
  11. Honor the general.useragent.override pref if someone sets it.
  12. Better support for user custom sounds for new mail notifications in the Options / General Settings dialog.
  13. Automated OSX nightlies are now getting pushed to the latest-trunk dir
  14. Automated Linux nightlies should be coming online soon.

March 5th

  • Win32 build supports the IDLE command for IMAP. This means the server pushes information to us (such as when you have new mail) instead of the client polling the server periodically. This only works if your IMAP server supports the IDLE command. Thanks to David Bienvenu for implementing this. It just got checked in today so Linux and OSX builds should see it tomorrow.
  • Regression Fix for spaces not working right in HTML compose.
  • Pasting data from a Open Office Spreadsheet no longer pastes some random HTML garbabe before the actual spreadsheet data into HTML compose.
  • Marking a junk message as NOT junk now reloads the message with unsanitized HTML so you can see it in its original form.
  • Fix a regression where emptying trash wasn't really removing the messages in the 2/24 builds.
  • The hand made Win32 build still has the experimental junk controls patch in it. Still working on some bug fixes that need to make their way into this patch.
  • The filter dialog now properly sizes its initial width based on the size of your font instead of a fixed width. For those of us that use a larger font, this makes the window show less clipping.

February 24th

  • Regression Fix: spaces not showing up in HTML compose
  • Regression Fix: filter and search dialog not showing a default row of search criteria
  • Regression Fix: build crashes on exit
  • Regression Fix: spell checker spins in an infinite loop
  • Regression Fix: issues with wide and vertical layouts not remembering the message pane splitter position.

February 20th

New things:

  • The Windows build in this directory, contains the new experimental junk control algorithms.
  • The Linux build is an experimental XFT/GTK build contributed by asac which contains a bunch of packaging logic to mimic what the Windows build does. i.e. leaving out a bunch of libraries and dlls that thunderbird does not use. Repackage just the chrome needed by thunderbird into qute.jar and mail.jar, etc. Looks like we shaved almost 1.5MBs off of the download size with this change. Looking for folks to test this build out and see if we left out any missing chrome by accident. Way to go astac for doing this!!
  • Fix to make the message pane / thread pane splitter in the Classic view not jump up and down when you view certain messages.
  • Thunderbird now prompts you when you go back online and you have unsent messages in your unsent folder.
  • Thunderbird was leaking LDAP connections to the LDAP serer when you sent a message and you use LDAP auto complete. We now close our server connections when the compose window goes away.
  • Support for LDAP v3
  • Limit the theme file picker to just show .jar files. Limit the extensions file picker to just show .xpi files. Thanks to Robert Accettura for the fixes.
  • Improved View source behavior including ability to copy and paste and use Find in page from a view source window.
  • Don't fire new mail notification for pop3 messages that are deleted or marked read by mail filters.
  • Account Settings panel now has folder browse buttons for picking local folder paths for news, imap and local folder paths.
  • message & thread pane context menu items to run junk controls on selected messages.

February

Thunderbird 0.5 is released.

November 25th

I've been spending a lot of time with Arvid, incorporating more new artwork. None of this has been checked in yet, but I'm extremely excited about what he has put together. It will be a part of the upcoming 0.4 release.

November 24th

Give Thunderbird and Moz Firebird different creator types on OSX so they don't step on each other when it comes to the OS dispatching urls. When editing a vCard, hide address book fields which are not supported by vCard so the user does not enter fields which we won't remember. Ignore return receipt requests if we identified the message as junk in order to protect the user's privacy.

November 20th

Port bienvenu's seamonkey fix to use status instead of select to update imap folder accounts. This fixes some performance issues in the GUI when performing biff. Darin Fisher landed xremote changes to allow browser urls from thunderbird to properly get dispatched to your default browser on linux!

November 19th

A new weekly build is now available on all platforms.

November 18th

Re-wrote Thunderbird's integration with the windows operating system by changing how we register ourselves in the windows registry. You can now register thunderbir as a default news client, default mail client or both.

November 13th

Started working on a feature where thunderbird can be configured to mark a message as read only after you have viewed it for a specified number of seconds instead of marking it as read right away (Bug #75866). The progress meter now shows up in the main mail window and after a few bug fixes it also shows progress when downloading and viewing messages. Still to do: the progressmeter does not seem to want to spin in "undetermined" mode.

Added copy, cut, paste toolbar buttons to mail compose. Waiting on artwork before turning this on.

November 12th

xmlextras is now a default build requirement for Mozilla Thunderbird. I hope by having this extension as part of the base package, that extension writers will be able to write some creative RSS feed extensions for Thunderbird. You can now build the DOM Inspector as part of a thunderbird build by adding "inspector" to the list of extensions in .mozconfig. I hope this helps em-power theme authors for thunderbird. I hope to have an actual installable dom inspector extension available in time for the nexte milestone release.

Created a new thread pane column which indicates attachment status. This will allow us to reduce the overloading of indicators we place on the current envelope icon in the thread pane. You can now sort by messages with attachments as well.

November 10th

A new weekly build is now available based on the current trunk for all three platforms.

November 7th

Don Crandall and I (mostly Don!) landed changes for OSX to add a windows menu item to make it easier to manage open thunderbird windows on the Mac. We also landed a proper hidden window on OSX. This makes the app functional when you close all open windows and are left with just the "hidden window" menu bar.

October 29th

More work on copy and pasting images from the windows clipboard. There are so many edge cases and different formats for the image in the clipboard, it is taking a lot of time. Added support for 4 bit and 1-bit (greyscale) images to this code. Tracked down alignment problems some mozillazine testers helped identify with screen shots of a certain size which caused the images to get corrupted when pasted. Put out a couple new windows builds to try to help get testing coverage on the copy and paste stuff. Fixed a regression where ldap prefs were broken in the recent thunderbird builds.

October 24th

I've been diligently spending the last couple days trying to add the ability to paste screen shot images on the windows clipboard into mail compose windows (Bug #47838). I have something up and running for this finally and it will be in the next Thunderbird weekly build for users to try out.

October 21st

French versions of Thunderbird 0.3 are now available. Thanks to Jerome Schell for contributing these builds!

October 20th

Bug #214764 --> 'Click here to download rest of message' feature does not work for POP is now fixed in Thunderbird! Auto proxy URLs (.pac files) now work in Thunderbird. Port Bug #68345 --> Don't show Mail Start Page before Account Central loads. Port Bug #221472 --> Move current attach items to submenu of File.

October 12th

Took an initial cut at Thunderbird 0.3 Release Notes.

October 9th

0.4 Trunk: Ported the vcard UI landing to Thunderbird (Bug #221319). You can now create a vcard from the account manager and attach it to outgoing mail messages. Note: If javascript is disabled in the message pane, you cannot add the vcard to the address book nor expand the vcard in the message pane. Both of these actions need javascript to be enabled in the message pane.

October 8th

Pushed a new release candidate for Thunderbird 0.3 which includes a security fix and a fix for problems opening attachments on windows where the open button was disabled.

Finally figured out what was causing the Open With radio button on the helper app dialog to be disabled and to not show the appropriate default application! (Bug #221451). This was a problem with attachments encoded as application/octet-stream. Taking this fix on the Thunderbird 0.3 branch.

October 7th

Thunderbird Branch (0.3): Took the patch in Bug #220611 which fixes decoding of binhex attachments on non mac platforms. Ported Brendan's late breaking security patch that went into Moz 1.5 into thunderbird 0.3. This would not have effected many thunderbird users anyway because JS is off by default. Take bienvenu's fix for pop3 fcc operations sometimes spinning the throbber and never completing (Bug #220012). Take bienvenu's fix for Bug #218656: Unthreading does not resort the view. Now that we have fixed up the padding for toolbars, the default toolbar set for the mail toolbar should not have 3 spacers between the button groups. Just one spacer will suffice (branch and trunk). Port Bug #143570 to the 0.3 branch: Allow assigning helper apps to mailnews attachments by extension. This fixes a common problem where opening mail attachments showed application/octet-stream in the helper app dialog instead of a content type based on the file extnsion. Take Bug #65827 on the branch which helps solve some of the helper app dialog issues with attachments listed as application/octet-stream. This patch helps us now show the real underlying content type (such as Acrobat PDF) in the helper app dialog; however, we still disable the open button and don't show the default application.

Thunderbird Trunk: Fixed a regression with the helper app dialog when opening attachments that caused the Open Button to not show a default application in it (Bug #). Ported Neil's fix for Bug #45524 to change the text under the attachment button in mail compose for web pages and files. Stephen Walker ported the fix for Bug #64030 which adds context menus to the address book panes. Take Stephen Walker's fix for Bug #220404: Card Summary Pane menu item should be under View, not View | Toolbars.

Re-style the address book toolbar to do the following: 1) restore the icon on top, text on bottom style that was regressed. 2) make text only and icons only mode work on the address book toolbar (both trunk and 0.3 branch).

October 6th

I was on vacation most of last week so there was not much Thunderbird specific activity. I am back now and looking forward to having a productive week.

September 23rd

Thunderbird Branch (0.3): Mozilla Thunderbird 0.3 RC1 has been released. This is our first build shipped from the newly created THUNDERBIRD_0_3_BRANCH and includes many trunk fixes that we ported back to the branch. See Bug #219336 for the list of trunk bugs we took in this candidate build. Took the POP fix for leave mail on server for X days that Bienvenu wrote for the trunk (Bug #107883).

Thunderbird Trunk (0.4a):On non mac platforms, the F2 key is now mapped to rename a folder (Bug #216209). Thanks to Stephen Walker for the patch. Add keyboard short cuts (J and Shift-J) for marking a message as junk or not junk (Bug #188934). Patch ported by Stephen Walker. On non mac platforms, hook up F7 to kick off the spell checker (Bug #216090). Thanks to Stephen Walker for the patch.

September 22nd

The official Thunderbird 0.3 branch has been created and is called, THUNDERBIRD_0_3_BRANCH. It was created from the MOZILLA_1_5_BRANCH. To check out the new 0.3 branch via CVS: 

cvs co -r THUNDERBIRD_0_3_BRANCH mozilla/client.mk
make -f client.mk pull_all

I am in the process of landing the patches from the Thunderbird 0.3 tracking bug onto the branch. Build contributors: you will not have to add these patches by hand anymore for the branch.

September 18th

Finally found the bogus style rules that were causing toolbar buttons to have so much extra padding around them.

September 17th

Checked in a fix for Bug #193317 which was causing news articles with background images to peg the CPU at 100%. Revert POP back to the more standard mail behavior of "don't leave mail on server". We only did this originally back when thunderbird was an experiment and folks just wanted to try it out. Now that we are a more mature application, it is time to go back to the expected behavior.

September 12th

I have a growing list of patches that are not part of the mozilla trunk that I'm bundling into my 0.3a builds. If you are building at home, you may be interested in applying these as well. Why are these not checked in? Because 0.3 is based on mozilla 1.5 final and it is too late to take many of these fixes. Thunderbird is a little more flexible in the risk we are willing to take on in our milestone builds so I'm adding these by hand.

  • Bug #219336: This is a tracking bug that tracks all of the trunk patches we are going to put into Thunderbird 0.3.