Thunderbird Gets Instant Messaging Capabilities

When you look at the most recent releases of the Thunderbird email client, you'd be hard pressed to find major new features that the developers have added to the program. If everything goes along as planned, this is soon going to change as Mozilla plans to integrate instant messaging capabilities into Thunderbird 13. That's three major versions from the current stable version Thunderbird 10, or roughly 14 weeks from today.
The goal of the project is to bring instant messaging communications into the email client. The developers plan to unify all contact information in one single place, enable the searching of emails and instant messages using the search feature, and keep track of links "between related emails and IM conversations".
An experimental version of Thunderbird has been released that is already supporting Facebook Chat, Google Talk, Twitter and Internet Relay Chat. The integration is not final yet, both feature and design wise but the core functionality is already usable in the latest test build.
If you are interested in trying out the test build, download it from Bugzilla where it has been posted near the end of the thread. Keep in mind though that you should not install this in a productive environment.
Adding instant messaging capabilities to Thunderbird is a controversial move. Mozilla always saw Thunderbird as a messaging client, and this would extend the client's capabilities significantly in this regard. A deep integration of email and chat options, with a single contact database in the back-end, could provide users with new communication options. One would be to switch from sending an email to chat if the user is listed as available in one of the supported chat services.
Some users on the other hand may see the integration as clutter. It is not clear how the feature will be rolled out in a stable version of the email client. If it is fully optional, it should not be overly problematic.
What's your take on the instant messaging integration in Thunderbird? Good move, or a waste of resources? (via Sören Hentzschel)
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You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?
I think its thunderbird
It is Mozilla Thunderbird.
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If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.
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Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…
Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.
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Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers
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Thank you
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I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!
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It’s Worked for me, too
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Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
Thank you again. M
This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.
Thanks.
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