Look what is appearing on the Mozilla ftp site today: The release candidate 1 of the upcoming mail client Thunderbird 2. Developers claim that it has zero bugs at the moment. That is probably the main reason they announced community test day which is actually today. So, if you want to take part and test the release candidate and provide feedback to the Mozilla developers download it right now from the official Mozilla ftp site. It should be noted that Thunderbird is still only a release candidate and you should take extra precaution before you use it.

It seems that the big three, that is Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, always have to compete against each other. When someone introduces a new feature the others are surely going to announce a similar feature that is just a tad better than the feature of the other company. We are witnessing the race for Email storage at the moment. Microsoft has a storage limit of 2 Gigabytes for their users while Google has currently a limit of 2,8 Gigabytes. Yahoo decided to accept the challenge and give the others something to choke on, they announced today that they will offer unlimited Email storage to all of its users in the near future.

Pando is a free online service that utilizes p2p technology to share large encrypted files by email and instant messenger. The sender selects files and folders that he wants to share. Those files are immediately uploaded to the Pando server where they are stored in encrypted form. The recipient receives an email that contains a small attachment which starts the download process when executed. Data will be send from the Pando server and other users who are currently online.

A friend of mine is still using Outlook at home and I was wondering why he did not switch to a more secure email client such as Thunderbird. His response was that Thunderbird was missing a calendar and that this was a feature that he needed. I could not deny that there was no calendar in Thunderbird – until I found the Thunderbird extension Lightning. Lightning which is still in development adds calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks..) to Thunderbird.

Spammers tend to use more advanced spam methods to avoid the dreaded spam filters that become better and better. I would like to present some examples from my personal mail folder and analyze the latest image spam trends. Many spam filters concentrate their efforts on blacklists and the text that the mail contains. Spam that is not caught immediately will be caught in the future if the user marks that mail as spam. Language and keyword filters and whitelists do their part and reduce spam and false positives.

I took a quick look at the Gspace extension for Firefox in 2005 and it happened so much that I thought it was a good idea to take another look at it. Gmail gives its users lots of space, currently about 2.8 gigabytes of it which is of course to much for most mail accounts and this is where the Gspace extension for Firefox steps in. It basically makes it possible to use gmail storage in a way to store files online which seems a lot securer in my opinion than using a file hoster. The interface looks similar to most ftp clients out there, it should not be a problem getting used to gspace quickly.

We had some reports coming in about some outages of the gmail – that is google mail – web interface which meant that some users could not access their mail accounts for several hours which seems to be a big problem for at least some of those users. In the time where customers for instance demand a fast, almost immediate, reaction to their emails it could become a matter of survival to receive and react to the mail.

There have been two drastic changes to Googles Gmail service in the last week. The first will probably make most users happy, gmail is not available to everyone. That is right, no more begging for invites, just visit the gmail site and signup for an account if you need one.

Birthday Reminder is a sweet little add-on for Mozilla Thunderbird which does exactly what the name implies: It reminds you of upcoming birthdays of users that are in your address bock in Thunderbird. It is relatively easy to add new birthdays to the address bock which then get automatically picked up by the Birthday Reminder extension

I experienced some troubles installing files on my system and discovered that my partition with Windows was having only 50 megabytes of free space. This was astonishing because it is a 10 gigabyte partition with only Windows and some tools that occupy no more than 3 gigabytes. A quick check revealed that the mail folders from Thunderbird would occupy more than 3 gigabytes of space in the application data folder on the partition.

I had a situation recently where I had to extract about forty emails with attachments in Thunderbird. Doing this manually wastes so much time and I was looking for a way to extract all the attachments automatically. Thankfully genbeta posted a reference to the Thunderbird Attachment Extractor extension which does exactly what I was looking for.

It sometimes happens that I delete a mail by accident because it does look like spam or a message that I do not longer need. Thunderbird does not display that message anymore if it is completely deleted from the mail client. Unknown to many Thunderbird does not delete the messages but flags them only which means it is relatively easy to recover corrupted or deleted mails. This method only works if you have not compressed the mail folders because compressing removes deleted messages from the mail files.

Recently some news emerged on the internet that some gmail users lost some or even all of their mails that have been in that account. There is no obvious way to backup the mail that exists in your gmail account. You could probably forward the important mail to another account but this solution is not really that practicable.

Thunderbird changed the way quotes are handled. If you have been using a different email program before you may found the way Thunderbird handles quotes irritating. Take a look at the screenshots below and you know what I mean. The first shows the general way most email programs handle quotes. The second shows the way Thunderbird handles quotes usually.

I don’t keep Thunderbird, my email client, open all the time and don’t like to visit websites of webmail accounts as well. It is a pain in the *** to visit gmail, hotmail or yahoo mail to see if there is new mail in the inbox. I was using the gmail firefox extension to get a notification if new mail did arrive.

The current version of Thunderbird 1.5.0.8 has a major bug that causes some mail that is downloaded from the server to disappear. Thundebird displays the number of new mails that is in a folder but if you click in that folder the new mail that should be there is not. The first time I have read about this message was on the mozillazine forum where a user named soulek described the problem that he encountered after upgrading to Thunderbird 1.5.0.8.

The email client Thunderbird does not necessarily retrieve messages from all of your mail accounts at startup. By default the first mail account will be checked on startup and all mail accounts will be checked every ten minutes. The following user.js tweak changes this behavior in the way that Thunderbird retrieves mail from all accounts at startup as well.

You might want to import already received mails into your gmail account, one reason could be that you want to make the complete switch to gmail and never use the old email client again. There is unfortunately no import function to do that in gmail, at least none that I was able to find in my gmail account.

I’ve written a great deal about firefox and tons of extensions that have been developed for it but I’ve never done the same for thunderbird, the email client that is based on mozilla. I started using thunderbird about a week ago and imported all my emails from opera to it and I love this tool. It is fast, I can sort everything the way I like it and the spam mail recognition is awesome even without third party tools.

This topic has been covered before in my blog but I tend to take a look at older interesting topics from time to time and update them to reflect the changes that happened to the concept in the time between. One-Use-Emails, also known as Disposable Email Addresses and Throwaway Emails are really helpful when you do not want to give someone your real email address because you fear that they would abuse this information and probably sell the address to make a quick bug.