Mozilla Thunderbird

Just upgraded from Thunderbird 2.x series on Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 LTS to Thunderbird 3.1.7 on Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 LTS i386.

The following are the improvements:

Indexing for fast searches

T-Bird 3.1 indexes all the mails and so searches are fast. It searches through all my accounts containing over 100,000 mails and 4GB of mails in under 5 secs. It does it  by indexing all the mails locally and storing the index locally. So no need to search on the server at all, just searching the global index file which is 1 GB for me is enough. T-Bird 2.x took more than 5 minutes for the same search.

Favorite folders to monitor important folder

I’ve got numerous email accounts. In T-Bird 2.x, it was a hassle checking all the sub folders in the different accounts that are important to me. In T-Bird 3.1, I just make the important folder “Favorite” by right clicking on them and marking “Favorite Folder” and voila, those folders alone appear in the “Favorite Folders” view and T-Bird shows the unread mail counts in all those folders.

Archive mails to year based folders

T-Bird 3.1 also has a new archive option that archives mails into year based sub-folders. So when I “archive” a mail, it gets archived into the current year in the “Archives” folder. So that mail will be in “Archives/2011″ sub-folder. T-Bird 2.x had no such feature, I manually had to move/copy the mails as necessary.

Tabs are here

T-Bird 3.1 has tabs, just like browsers like firefox, chrome etc. So when I need to reference several mails all through the day, I just open the important mails in the several tabs and I can tab through them with “Ctrl+Tab” just like in most browsers.

Smart attachment missing alerts

T-Bird also warns if we use the word “attach” in the subject or body of a mail, but don’t attach a file to that mail before sending. It saved many a blushes for me.

There are many more features that are useful like multiple identities for sending mails, addressbook with LDAP support and so on. We’ll cover those topics later.