Today they finally released the German language Debian package for Mozilla Thunderbird v0.8 and I took the opportunity to upgrade. While I haven’t worked with the new version very much, yet, I am already very pleased with the new release – although the overall look and feel of the application didn’t change that much.
First the possibility of having a global inbox is a good idea. When I switched from Outlook Express to Mozilla Thunderbird earlier this year (you guess it: I was still on Windows then) the idea of having an own inbox for each pop3 account was a thing that I really hated. I have to admit that I really like the idea now as I use it to seperate my business and private mail. However many Outlook users might find it useful to configure Thunderbird to behave in a way they are familiar with.
Additionally the global inbox option makes it possible to direct emails from certain mailboxes to the inbox of another mailbox. This way I can direct emails from our company’s uplink provider, that arrive on a seperate mail account, directly to the inbox of my business mail account. As a result I can fold in the uplink info account and get some additional real screen estate back. Also I don’t have to monitor serveral accounts constantly.
Second I just found out, that they finally added an interface to the multiple identities feature. I don’t know if they added it only recently or if it’s availlable in v0.7 also, but that doesn’t seem to matter much. However, I’m now able to save additional screen estate. In earlier versions of Thunderbird I added additional accounts for each address I needed to send mail from. Now I just have my private account with additional identities for my mailing list addresses and my office account with additional identities for serveral different department’s addresses I need to use from time to time.
Third I see that they refined the search bar. That’s a good idea. I figured it out in no time, but less experienced users, we needed to provide support for, were quite surprised when we asked them how they liked the great message search features of Thunderbird.
Unfortunately I experienced one downside after the upgrade. The Enigmail extension’s Debian package hadn’t been upgraded to the new version of Thunderbird and so it was automatically uninstalled during the upgrade. Sorry to disappoint you, K., but I will install the correct version by hand later today (You guess it: This was a personal and private message for the person that launched the Projekt Secure Mail only recently).
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