Anyway. Thunderbird 1.0.5 is out! I'm hoping that the bugs I've discovered are due to my fiddling around earlier this week with nightly installs - a fresh install should provide some answers. When I hit the download page, the favicon was no longer the Thunderbird icon but a favicon of a little brown bird (sparrow-like) with an unrecognizable greenish background. I could have been hallucinating, but I did take a screenshot. And then unfortunately closed the PSD by mistake before saving it. Oh well... it would have been funny. *canned laughter*

I've linked to them before, but this is just classic! Behold the beauty of the jeanpant...

Pushing the senses: R.E.M. and Feeder in Hyde Park this saturday! Some crappy zoomless Casio photos will follow. Yee-aaa!
UPDATE [18/07]: Photos are flickr'ed!

And that my dear readers, is every tedious bit of minutia filling my uneventful life.

So my point is, if you e-mailed me recently and are still waiting for a reply, chances are that I either haven't replied because:
(a) I've been vegging around this flat with flu (join the line) for the past few days and couldn't be arsed, or
(b) your e-mail somehow disappeared and I ask kindly that you resend it. :)

UPDATE [23/12]: I'm a twat when it comes to writing filter rules, and all the e-mails I thought I'd lost were just misplaced. Some related linkage: Mozilla's Lightning to strike Outlook? More here.

Sweet! - a new Collective Soul album, the first in over four years.

• Integrated calendar - see the Lightning Project at MozillaWiki
• Search for and remove duplicate e-mails UPDATE: There are Extensions available.
• Integration with popular virus scanners List of (in)compatible antivirus programs
• When dragging an e-mail from one mailbox folder into another in the folder list, and the destination mailbox is a hidden subfolder that appears when the parent folder expands on mouseover, it should contract again when the mail has been dragged, ie. when the mouse button is released. Currently the parent folder remains expanded.
• Tree mail folders mimic the way they are open/closed in Windows Explorer. ie. single-clicking on the NAME of a contracted mail folder will expand it, repeating this on a different folder will expand the new folder and contract the previous one. Clicking on the PLUS icon of any folder will expand it until closed again. Double-clicking on the name or plus icon of a mail folder should have no effect! It's confusing that these items (plus icon and name) act differently.
• Do not add "--" to the beginning of a signature by default. UPDATE: Read about the Signature Separator at Dan's Mail Format Site. I think I'd still prefer the option to remove it. No, I will conform. All hail the signature seperator!
• Typing a single alphanumeric character when in a mail folder, will jump to the first Sender beginning with that character, when the list is sorted by Sender name
• Support for long subjects (wrappable over multiple lines) when viewing message in preview pane and in message window.
• Automatic Filtering and removal/filtering of Junk Mail (Junk Mail Controls) of new e-mail.
  UPDATE: See Thunderbird : FAQs : Filters. Therefore: An option to create "global filters" that will operate on all your accounts
• Ability to select and then Copy/Paste the Sender's details (name and/or e-mail address) in Headers bar. This is the only place in which the Sender name is displayed and right-clicking the Sender link only provides the option to copy the e-mail address.
• Potential bug? After receiving new mail, and having read all of the new mail, the "new mail" icon in the system tray does not disappear? Mousing over it sometimes removes it, but other times it will stay there until Thunderbird is closed. This issue appears to be resolved.
• A lot of the features I'm looking for in Thunderbird is a direct result from having been using Eudora consistently for a long time. A good feature in Eudora is the ability to select part of an e-mail, and then when you hit "Reply", only that selected part is quoted. This could be annoying for some, I know it caught me out once or twice - so a related preference would be good too.
• Right-clicking on an RSS feed folder and selecting "Properties" should allow you to either view the feed URL, or additionally edit it. Currently the only way to view the address of the feed is to go to "Manage Subscriptions", select (search for!! ) the feed from the long, unordered list and click on "Edit".
• Clicking the STOP button while checking for new e-mail actually does something.
• Total number of messages being downloaded is displayed while downloading. Also, sometimes the percentage of e-mail downloaded exceeds 100%. Bug? This appears to have been resolved.
• Potential bug: pressing "j" when an e-mail is selected, will move that message to another folder (not sure which though) UPDATE: "J" is the shortcut key for flagging an e-mail as "Junk"!
• Potential bug: RSS "Manage Subscriptions" window limits the number of feeds that are displayed and therefore editable. This window was redesigned and now works much better.
• Option to "Insert > Characters and Symbols.." into Message Subject when composing new e-mail
• When searching for messages in the Sent folder, "Sender" should read "Recipient" and the same applies to the "Subject Or Sender" filter.
• Option to disable "The sender of this message has asked to be notified when you read this message..." prompts when opening new messages. There's now a comprehensive "Return Recipients" option in Options under the 'Composition' tab.
• Option to search Address Book using "Other" field

Thunderbird resources:

• MozillaZine Thunderbird FAQ
• Thunderbird Help Support Pages

The Mozilla Foundation announced yesterday the immediate availability of a new preview release of its next generation web browser: Mozilla Firefox - previously Firebird, previously Phoenix. You can also read more on the rebranding process (which I think is looking excellent) by the artists involved: Steve Garrity, Jon Hicks and Daniel Burka.

Mozilla Firefox 0.8 represents the bleeding edge of Internet technology and raises the bar for ease of use, performance, robustness and standards compliance. Less than 3 minutes to download over a broadband connection, Firefox can be yours in no time at all. Firefox starts up and runs much faster than Mozilla because of its significantly optimized code...

I'm going to love the new AutoDownload feature - Automatically download files to your Desktop or another location without windows popping up asking you where to save, etc. It also includes a new installer for Windows users - previously you had to manually extract the zip to a system folder.

And if that doesn't convince you to give it a try: Reasons to switch to the Mozilla Firefox browser.

Also released: Thunderbird 0.5, the e-mail and newsgroup client for 2004 and beyond.

UPDATE: The button at the top of this post is a PNG with alpha transparency, which does not render correctly in - you guessed it - Internet Explorer. Microsoft have had almost 8 years to fully implement the PNG specification yet haven't. How sad. Then again, it's taken them 6 months to release a patch for the most vulnerable security hole ever discovered in Windows.

UPDATE: 13 Reasons To Use Firefox Over IE