thunderbird 0.9

In between naps this Thanksgiving weekend, I found some time to look over the latest (0.9) release of Mozilla Thunderbird, the stand-alone Mozilla mail client. There are some new features that are quite good, but overall I’m not impressed enough to consider switching over from PINE. I would dump Outlook in a second at work as a mail client, but the integrated calendar features (and their ubiquity at work) keep me using it.

The last release of Thunderbird I used for any length of time was 0.6; at the time I thought it a good, solid successor to Mozilla Mail. There have been some interesting additions since then, but there’s still a ways to go yet.

The addition with the most potential is definitely the integrated RSS newsfeed reader. Someone was using their little gray cells on the Thunderbird design team when they came up with this feature. It pulls up summaries of the articles, or the articles themselves, and organizes them like email messages. By treating blog entries like mail, it takes a step towards intertwingling your inbound data. Having one place to look at all your inbound data is a good thing; conceptually, blog entries that you subscribe to are identical to emailed newsletters.

Unfortunately, there is still a ways to go before. Adding feeds is manual and difficult, but that could be solved with a XUL extension. The biggest drawback is that the blog entries are still separated by feed, instead of mixed together into an inbox. This is a common weakness of many RSS readers - they parse the RSS document and represent them as individual entries, but really it’s a veneer on top of the XML file. Notification on each folder is nice, but a summary folder of all the new ones would be better. Following the email concept entirely would be best of all; once everything is mixed together, one would categorize and break it apart with the same tools, in the same manner, without reference to source. Unity of interface should be the goal.

I’ve been somewhat ambivalent about RSS; I use it to simplify my web browsing, and am glad that it’s becoming more widely available. But email’s still king for outbound notifications, and whomever intertwingles RSS with email first wins. Perhaps this is merely an extension to the law that ‘all software will expand to read email’?

Anyhow, I think Thunderbird has made some great strides with RSS integration, and I’m glad to see that they’re going in that direction. The next big problem remains MS Exchange integration, especially with the calendar. Now that Novell has released the source of Ximian Evolution Exchange Connector, I hope that we’ll see more open source projects like Thunderbird just work with Exchange. In the meantime, the biggest obstacle to converting Outlook users will remain calendaring. (Outlook Express users, however, should switch immediately.)

Still, Thunderbird is a good, solid graphical mail reader. I’m personally not yet convinced that local mail readers are the way to go, but if that’s how you work, Thunderbird is definitely worth a look. It’s not as absolutely compelling an application as Firefox- yet.

I’d keep my eye on it, though.