Junk filter improvements in Thunderbird weekly build + new Win32 installer

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Junk filter improvements in Thunderbird weekly build + new Win32 installer

March 14, 2004

Scott MacGregor (lead engineer of Mozilla Thunderbird) has recently announced the availability of the 2004-03-12 weekly build with lots of new cool improvements. These improvements include an improved Junk Mail Algorithm, improved IDLE command for IMAP, new smilies (emoticons), and several UI improvements and sundry bugfixes. Another interesting development is the availability of a Win32 installer for Thunderbird.

Improvements and patches to the Junk Mail algorithm allow it to produce the same message scores as SpamBayes (another Bayesian spam filter - so good it is often used as a benchmark). What does this mumbo-jumbo mean? It means Thunderbird is now better at classifying your email as spam (or not) correctly. Scott highly recommends anyone trying out the new junk mail filter to first clear out the training file and retrain it. For that purpose, a new button for clearing the training data has been added (bug 237151) for convenience (previously, we had to delete the training.dat file manually).

Thunderbird's new Reset Training Data UI

Thunderbird’s new IDLE support for IMAP (bug 141369) also sees many improvements and bugfixes. Simply put, IDLE is a command that allows IMAP email servers to transmit updates to the client in real time. This saves the client from having to continuously poll the server to achieve the effect of new mail appearing immediately. All in all, an exceptionally useful command that saves Thunderbird the work of polling IMAP servers continuously.

New emoticons (bug 237045) are also included in this build, and the artwork comes from Stephen Horlander of the Pinstripe theme fame. Very nice, compared to the old ones which were terribly dated (I had emoticons turned off because I didn’t like them).

The new Win32 installer is an early attempt at rolling out the Mozilla Thunderbird installer targetted for the 0.6 milestone release (as stated in the Mozilla Thunderbird roadmap). I tried it out and it was fully functional, but there are several nitty gritty issues to be sorted out.

Running the installer presents you with this screen:

A little messed up, but this is an early test build after all. Scott is mostly leveraging off the work put into Firefox’s Win32 installer. You next get to choose a standard or custom install.

Thunderbird installer screenshot - choose standard or custom install

Selecting custom allows you to add additional extensions - at this moment, Scott has only bundled in the Offline extension. Plans are in store to bundle other extensions as well, including the DOM Inspector.

Unfortunately (at least to me), the installer silently places shortcut icons on the desktop, in the start menu, and in the quick launch bar. The installer should have asked first. (I see someone else has already whined about this) I think with sufficient well-founded feedback, the Thunderbird team will come around to getting that feature into the installer.

Get the Thunderbird 2004-03-12 build or the test Win32 installer build to try out these new improvements and changes.

Posted by Chu Yeow at March 14, 2004 SGT |

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| Category: Mozilla

14 Comments & TrackBacks ()

Hey, just wanted to say THANKS for your awesome posts about Mozilla (Fx and TB) development.
I’ve been a mozilla user since pre M2 (1998?)
and find your blog the best resource to-date.

The screenshots of what new are awesome, and allow me to evaluate what I want to try out, and what not.

Thanks, and keep up the good work.

Posted by: jed on March 14, 2004 2am

So, when the stable release of Thunderbird comes out I’ll have to backup my profile, uninstall my current version, destroy the profiles and start from scratch (restoring the profiles)?

Posted by: Stephan Segraves on March 14, 2004 4am

Neues vom Thunderbird
Nein, der Name bleibt gleich. Es wird keinen Thunderfox geben. Dafür haben sich die Entwickler auf das tatsächliche Entwickeln von Programmcode beschränkt. Und es gibt einige interessante Verbesserungen.

Posted by: sinus(@) - Szientometrie definiert Van Raan on March 14, 2004 6am

Stephan: Nope I think you misunderstood that bit I wrote on clearing out the training data. You only have to clear out the training data for the junk mail filter (it’s a Bayesian filter), so that you can take full advantage of the new algorithm. Your profiles, on the other hand, can remain unmolested and you don’t have to backup and restore them.

Posted by: Cheah Chu Yeow on March 14, 2004 2pm

Un meilleur filtre bayésien pour Thunderbird
Redemption in a blog présente les récentes améliorations de Mozilla Thunderbird, le client mail autonome de Mozilla. Le prochain millésime de Thunderbird promet d’être très intéressant, au point, peut-&ec…

Posted by: BlogZiNet on March 14, 2004 4pm

Jed: Thanks much for the kind words. I wish I could do more (contribute patches, write an extension), but at the moment I can only try to get my blog readers to get past that first step of trying a Mozilla product.

Soon I shall be free!

Posted by: Cheah Chu Yeow on March 14, 2004 4pm

Nuevas funcionalidades del Mozilla Thunderbird son reveladas
Se anuncian nuevas funcionalidades. Se pueden probar y todo.

Posted by: minid.net on March 15, 2004 5pm

Improved Spam filters in Thunderbird (nightly build)
It looks like in their nightly builds they’ve improved the spam filter to a new method that works much better, very impressive. What that means is, you should be looking forward to the next release of Mozilla Thunderbird, because it…

Posted by: Dark Reflexions on March 15, 2004 10pm

Is there a good forum that captures the in-progress work of the TB dev team? I’ve tried searching mozillazine but was less than impressed with the results.

Specifically, I wanted to suggest a context menu option to turn HTML graphics on/off. This way, the general setting could be off, but turned on on a per message basis once the email had been vetted.

Maybe its just time for me to dig in and learn XUL… :)

Posted by: Brian Mars on March 16, 2004 5am

Brian: Not any that I know of besides MozillaZine. If you want to make a suggestion, you can post in the MozillaZine Thunderbird Features forum, try to see if there is sufficient support for it, then submit a bug report. Try to get votes for it as well (you have mine if you make a bug report, or find an existing one - I also would like a feature like that).

Posted by: Cheah Chu Yeow on March 16, 2004 8am

Hello,
I recently reinstalled WinXP and prior to the installation i backed up my TB messages, contacts, etc with TB EZ backup, trial version. Now i cannot seem to import my backed up mailboxes, i got the address books but the settings and mailboxes did not come over.

Any suggestions

Don

Posted by: Don on April 27, 2004 5am

[…] Yup I switched to Apple Mail from Thunderbird a few months back, primary reason being back then I was barely able to run my developer applications on 512MB of RAM (Apple Mail runs lighter than Thunderbird, unfortunately). It’s comforting to find that there is an IMAP-IDLE plugin for Apple Mail (Thunderbird got its IDLE support way back in 2004.) […]

Posted by: redemption in a blog - IMAP-IDLE plugin for Apple Mail on February 25, 2007 2am

[…] I haven’t been following Thunderbird development like I used to so I was presently surprised to see how far Thunderbird has come when I tried a beta of Thunderbird 2 a while back (of course, Thunderbird 2 has been released for over a week, but I’m still clearing a backlog of blog drafts). […]

Posted by: redemption in a blog - Thunderbird 2.0 and Gmail integration on April 29, 2007 3pm

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