Thunderbird 2.0 turns 2

On April 18, 2007 Mozilla Thunderbird 2 was released. Two years later Thunderbird 3 is still in development with an unknown projected release date (and certainly not the End of 2008 as had been planed in January 2008). Beta 3 is currently scheduled for May 5, 2009.

New Name and We Have Moved

This is the last of the blog name changes, we promise. We started with The Guru’s Thunderbird Blog then went to El Guru’s Thunderbird Blog. Both names were a bit long and plus having the name ‘Thunderbird’ in the domain could have been issue with Mozilla. We wanted a name that was catchy and would be easy to remember. So we are proud to announce the new blog name is The Email Mafia. We also have moved off of WordPress and are now sharing the same platform as El Guru’s Blog. Make note of our new address: emailmafia.net.

InfoLister

Note: Republishing from The FF Extension Guru’s Blog

One of the neat features of Thunderbird is the ability to customize the client with Extensions, Themes and Plug-Ins. But sometimes there are problems a theme does something funky to your browser. Or may be an extension goes haywire and gets corrupted. There are so many possibilities of what could be the problem. If you have a lot of extensions installed, it is hassle to list them all.

Whenever anyone posts on Go Firefox! a more advanced problem they are having the first thing I recommend they do is install the InfoLister extension. In a matter of seconds the extensions generates a report with loads of information:

* The build/version of Thunderbird and your OS
* Complete list and a total number of extensions (including enabled & disabled)
* Listing of all the themes installed and which one is currently in use
* Simplified listing (compared to about:plugins) of the all installed plug-ins

With this information it is very easy for me to see if the user is running an outdated extensions, a problematic theme, a troublesome (Yahoo!) or missing plug-in. Below is the results when I run InfoLister on this profile…

Last updated: Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:53:03 GMT

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1b4pre) Gecko/20090406 Shredder/3.0b3pre

Extensions (enabled: 8, disabled: 0):

• Buttons! 0.5.3.2
• ChromEdit Plus 2.7.2
• FoxyTunes 3.0.4
• InfoLister 0.10
• Nightly Tester Tools 2.0.2
• Signature Switch 1.6.2
• Update Channel Selector 1.0.3
• URL Link 2.02.2

Themes (1):

• Thunderbird (default) 2.0 [selected]

Plugins (12):

• Adobe Acrobat
• Google Update
• iTunes Application Detector
• Java(TM) Platform SE 6 U12
• Java(TM) Platform SE 6 U13
• QuickTime Plug-in 7.6
• RealNetworks Rhapsody Player Engine
• RealPlayer Version Plugin
• RealPlayer(tm) G2 LiveConnect-Enabled Plug-In (32-bit)
• Shockwave Flash
• Shockwave for Director
• Windows Presentation Foundation

InfoLister

Thunderbird Recap: April 5th

Thunderbird related news from the April 6th Mozilla Project Weekly Status meeting:

Thunderbird 2.0.0.22

• NO REPORT

TBird 3.0b3 (Shredder) – Status: In Progress

• 3.0b3 work continues

Signature Switch Part 2

Back in the beginning of March, I wrote about the Signature Switch add-on in the TBird Signatures|Signature Switch post. It wasn’t until I went to post about this wonderful extension in Thunderbird Help, that I realized I didn’t include any screen-shots. So, here are some screen shots (click images for full-size view):

Switch between your list of signatures via the Signature button on the compose window

Signature Switch Options

Set/Edit Signature

Thunderbird Release Recap: April Week 1

Just Released

• NONE

Schedule this Coming Week

• NONE

Future Release

• Thunderbird 2.0.0.22 - TBA
• Thunderbird 3 Beta 3 – May 5th Tentative

Thunderbird Synopsis: March 30th

Thunderbird related news from the March 30th Mozilla Project Weekly Status meeting:

Thunderbird 2.0.0.22

• NO REPORT

TBird 3.0b3 (Shredder) – Status: In Progress

• 3.0b3 schedule updated slightly; work continues

Thunderbird Release Recap: March Week 4

Just Released

• NONE

Schedule this Coming Week

• NONE

Future Release

• Thunderbird 2.0.0.22 - TBA
• Thunderbird 3 Beta 4/Release Candidate  1 - TBA

Thunderbird 3 Beta 3 Schedule

From the MozillaWiki:

Proposed Freezes ( All dates use time of 23:59 Pacific )

• Slushy String freeze date: 2009-04-24 (Friday)
• Slushy Code Freeze date: 2009-04-26 (Sunday)
• Firm String / Code freeze date: 2009-04-28 (Tuesday)
• l10n-mozilla-1.9.1 freeze date: 2009-04-30 (Thursday)
• Target Build Ship date: 2009-05-05 (Tuesday)

Not sure what’s after this if is going to be a Beta 4 or may be if we are lucky Release Candidate 1!

Thunderbird Synopsis: March 23rd

Thunderbird related news from the March 23rd Mozilla Project Weekly Status meeting:

Thunderbird 2.0.0.21

• Shipped last week
• Pages on mozillamessaging.com

TBird 3.0b3 (Shredder) – Status: In Progress

• Tb 3.0b3 schedule is up; minor modifications in the next day or two are expected.
• As an experimental attempt to reduce crash landings/feature misses at the end of the cycle, we’ve broken the remaining time up into 5 weekly milestones.