Microsoft Entourage Engineer Recommends Mozilla Thunderbird for IMAP

Thursday February 19th, 2004

Ludvig A. Norin writes: "Omar Shahine is one of Microsoft's mail guys. In this blog entry, he discuss IMAP support in Entourage (which he and Mike Fullerton and Steve Friesen designed), Outlook and other clients. He rates Thunderbird 'B+', saying, 'Thunderbird is an almost perfect IMAP client for Windows. If you use IMAP, this is the product for you.' I've been using the Mozilla-based mail implementations with IMAP, since... well, forever, and couldn't agree more in what he says." The post contains a few mistakes, such as stating that Thunderbird supports the IDLE command when it does not (bug 141369).

#1 Nice

by thelem

Thursday February 19th, 2004 4:45 PM

Has anyone seen any other microsoft developers recommending mozilla products (on microsoft websites)?

#7 Re: Nice

by mcavigelli

Sunday February 22nd, 2004 11:57 AM

Some of their employees have blogs at http://blogs.msdn.com/ and post occasionally also about Mozilla products. So you could specify your search on google for that page: http://www.google.ch/search?q=site:blogs.msdn.com+mozilla

#2 Wrong link

by marcoos

Friday February 20th, 2004 12:20 AM

The link to Omar's site is wrong, it links to MozillaZine. :)

#4 Re: Wrong link

by marcoos

Friday February 20th, 2004 10:51 AM

Seems fixed now.

#5 Re: Re: Wrong link

by AlexBishop

Saturday February 21st, 2004 11:04 PM

It is. Thanks.

Caused by having a <a href-"..."> instead of <a href="...">.

Alex

#3 Reply

by Malc

Friday February 20th, 2004 12:22 AM

Thunderbird also has problems with folders deleted by other clients and folders with lots of messages (it couldn't open a folder with 243,000 messages, but Outlook XP could). But generally I find it fast and very usable, although not as good as Outlook 2003 when it comes to caching.

#6 server connections

by Tar

Sunday February 22nd, 2004 4:07 AM

Mozilla makes new TCP connection for every new folder you view, over high latency (200+ ms) link it's quite painful to use.

OE doesn't exhibit such annoyance.

Most related might be bug 92072 - Courier-IMAP: Number of IMAP connections open is not limited.

#8 Re: server connections

by bienvenu

Friday March 5th, 2004 8:06 AM

You can limit the number of connections Mozilla will cache, in the advanced imap server prefs settings, so it's under your control. Currently, we limit the minimum number of connections to 2, so we'll be able to have a connection open for the inbox biff, but I'll probably relax that so that if you really only want one connection made, you can do that.

#9 IMAP Idle support checked in

by bienvenu

Friday March 5th, 2004 8:12 AM

I've checked in support for the IMAP Idle command, http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141369 - it can be disabled on a per-server basis by setting the server pref "use_idle" to false. This will be in tomorrow's nightly trunk builds. Please let me know if there are any problems.