March 7, 2004

• Thunderbird

  The browser I use is Mozilla. I also use the integrated mail program.

  The Mozilla people are working to divorce the browser from the mail program. The new mail program, written from scratch, is named Thunderbird.

  Thunderbird is much like the integrated mail program. It looks the same and has many of the same features. But it is incomplete. It isn't up to version 1.0 yet, so it doesn't come with an installer or setup program and it doesn't automatically inherit settings from your existing mail program. You can set it up as your default mail program, though.

  The intelligent Spam filtering is in place and seems to work well. That is, you teach it what kind of messages are Spam by marking Spam messages as such, and the program figures out some kind of rules from your choices of messages. I have it place messages it classifies as Spam in a folder called Junk, which I review regularly. If the program mistakenly labels something as Spam that I don't want it to, I want it to learn the difference. It will learn, too. Just telling it that it was wrong about the message being Spam gets it to change its rules. Pretty soon it stops making mistakes.

  HTML mail is dangerous. There are a number of exploits that can be done using HTML in email. But Thunderbird has an option to render only simple HTML. That means it will ignore all but a few very simple and safe HTML features. Sanitized HTML is available at last.

  It was an obvious step, just like the option to not permit JavaScript in email messages. There are places for JavaScript and advanced features of HTML, but not in email.

  I had no problems with the mail functions of the program. Everything worked flawlessly.

  I'm not going to start using Thunderbird just yet, though. I'm going to wait for version 1.0, the first production version, when the program can transfer all of my settings and import my accumulated mail files and address books.

  I shouldn't have long to wait. They are almost there now.

  • 16:32
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