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OT: Thunderbird Newsreader

I am posting this here because I know others use this newsreader. I find it to be very problematic. It has all sorts of issues as a newsreader with any number of problems. It can't remember my username or password for my server. I checked and the suggestion is to blow away the password file and start over. I haven't done that yet because I would have to reenter all my email passwords.

But that just starts the list of problems. The program gets into all sorts of strange modes. Sometimes it won't show me messages that have already been downloaded for viewing offline. Other times it shows messages as unread when I know I have read them, even entire threads become marked as unread. The program seems to eat memory and can cause other programs to not work until it decides to release the memory. It will even crash for no clear reason.

Sometimes restarting the program will resolve the problems. Other times it seems like it has screwed up a file and the problem requires getting online and downloading things again.

Are these problems at all common? I guess not so many people do the download and read offline thing anymore. lol

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Rick
Reply to
rickman
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I use Agent for newsgroups, but I have noticed a recent weirdness in Tbird, when composing an email.

Sometimes a word will have its last few letters red, as the mis-spelling flag. For example, "battery" might have "ttery" red. One can fix it by deleting "ba" and retyping.

Even stranger, one can copy the whole word "battery" and paste it somewhere else on the page, and that instantly fixes the original!

The somehow misspelled words seem to mess up the text when the mail is actually sent; "blue battery" becomes "bluebattery".

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John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom timing and laser controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer 
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
Reply to
John Larkin

I thought you were switching to Linux?

Scraped from your header: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:12.0) Gecko/20120428 Thunderbird/12.0.1

The current version of Thunderbird is 17.0.4. You're at least 5 releases behind. Please update and try again. Help -> About -> Watch it download -> Restart Tbird.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558
Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

I've used Thunderbird for years. I used to use it as a newsreader, but the sorting algorithm requires the entire news group header file to fit in memory, and if it doesn't, it just about kills the program and the whole computer. I went to knode, which works wonderfully.

I still use Thunderbird for all email, it works fine for that.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

I do that, but I download to a local nntp server, transport latency goes up, but interactive latency is way down.

--
?? 100% natural 

--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: news@netfront.net ---
Reply to
Jasen Betts

Funny, when I use T-bird to check it says my copy is up to date! I guess this is yet another bug?

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

I have a number of open source programs and some are good, some are not so good. I find Mozilla to have marginal support and T-bird is right up there with it.

I click on the release notes link and the page I get has some links for "try t-bird". I click the first one, "Check" and it is a dead link...

When I try to find solutions to problems or even to see if my problem has been reported I find the only tool available is hard to use and prone to duplication of error reports. When I find an error report I don't find a lot of assistance and sometimes people clearly consider users to be a burden. The attitude often seems to be we should all be developers.

All in all, I would not recommend T-bird to a friend who is looking for a mail or newsreader tool. But I'll try downloading the current copy and see if my troubles go away.

Thanks for the reply and the effort in finding that my copy is old.

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

It's the one glove that fits all problem. Instead get a real newsreader, like Agent, and a real E-mail program, like Eudora. ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Reply to
Jim Thompson

Sigh. I'm not involved in open source development and therefore only have the view from outside. I don't know why your version refuses to recognize that it's out of date. However, I can offer a clue: What seems to be happening is that the recent rush to release new versions is nothing more than dumping untested and often useless features into the distribution version, so that the Mozilla can drop development and let the user community take over while it concentrates on improving stability, also known as bug fixing. I don't know if this is for real, but that's my current impression.

I would for email. I've been using it myself since I dumped Eudora when Qualcomm finally pulled the plug in about 2006. I also install it on my customers machines. My only real complaints are the recent feature bloat, the semi-functional spam filter, and badly tested add-ons and plug-ins. You can easily do worse, but it will be difficult to find a better email client.

However, for Usenet news, I use Forte Agent 5.00/32.1171. It's two generations older than the current release. I tried the 6.0 version, didn't like it, and stayed with 5.0. I haven't tried 7.0 yet.

You might want to backup your current email and news files before proceeding. There are apps that help. I use MozBackup:

You might also try: "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird\thunderbird.exe" -safe-mode and see if the problems evaporate. If they do, start removing or disabling Add-ons. Also try "Files -> Compact Folders" in case you have a corrupted mail store.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558
Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Eudora lives on... so simple to use that "support" is not needed.

6.00 is the best place to stick, for now... 7.0 is mostly cosmetic. I keep prodding them to add body filtering, but to no avail.

...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Reply to
Jim Thompson

Eurdora OSE 1.0 is based on ancient Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0.4 and is stuck at version 1.0 as of about 2008. Many of the current add-ons don't work. Basically, OSE 1.0 is the Penelope add-on: It simulates the Eudora user interface, but doesn't work with current versions of Thunderbird.

I have one customer that uses it. I've tried to get her to change, but she refuses. So, I get to untrash her mail store about once per year and deal with IMAP4 bugs, many of which were fixed in later versions of Thunderbird.

Are you sure that you really want to recommend Eudora OSE 1.0 ?

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558
Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Eudora OSE isn't Eudora... it's crap.

I have Eudora Pro v7.1.0.9 (Paid :-)

There's a true Eudora List if you're interested. ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Reply to
Jim Thompson

I don't use T-bird for email. I've used Eudora for many, many years. I think my original copy was on floppy. I am very endeared to it in fact, but I have been thinking about replacing that. It has a few bugs that obviously won't be fixed. I don't know if I am missing features, not sure I'm too worried about that exactly, but there is a fine line between lacking features and having bugs. I mean sometimes the lack of a feature is not much different from a bug. For example, I recently changed my screen resolution in windows (or magnification setting, whatever it is called) to enlarge fonts a bit and the font in email actually is *smaller* somehow.

This was the original reason for trying T-bird. It was supposed to be the upgrade path for Eudora users. lol

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

The upgrade path worked for me. I went from Eudora to Thunderbird when Qualcomm stopped official development about 7 years ago. Thunderbird imported all my mailboxes and address books from Eudora just fine.

Did you try the latest version yet?

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558
Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

There's a Eudora (original crispy flavor :) newsgroup:

comp.mail.eudora.ms-windows

You can find where to download the last _real_ Eudora (v7.1.0.9), and get a registration code.

Eudora is still the cat's meow for E-mailing. ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Reply to
Jim Thompson

I use TBird on a couple of Windows boxes, no obvious problems.

Reply to
Gib Bogle

If it apparently cannot remember your server username and password then most likely your server is overloaded and *very* slow to respond. I see the username/password prompt only when the newsserver is dead in the water or extremely (and I mean extremely) sluggish to respond.

What version are you running and on what OS and patch level?

These days with continuous fast broadband I would hazard a guess almost noone uses the download and read offline any more. It may well be that your instability problems stem from untested unused legacy code that has not kept pace with the modern trend to be always online.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown
Reply to
Martin Brown

I have that version. It has a few bugs that I would love to have fixed. Otherwise I am happy with it. :)

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

The actual problem is that tbird doesn't remember the username/password. When prompted for it and I check to remember them, it always errors out. When I found this mentioned in the bug reports, they said it is a corrupt password registry and the fix is to delete it and start over.

12.0.1 which I thought was current because it tells me so. Vista SP2.

I have downloaded the current version and will install it when I get a chance. I'll want to make sure stuff it backed up first.

Thanks for helping.

What? What legacy code? Oh, you mean the online/offline switch? Yes, switches can be very hard to code.

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

It isn't the switch so much as the path seldom if ever travelled.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown
Reply to
Martin Brown

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