Please... I must see a person a week with this urban myth that opening an email is not safe. If you don't want the pane open Press F8 and close it, but do not let the misconception that security has anything to do with it be a consideration.

Thank you for the advise re F8! If it pleases you, I will amend what I said to something like "I prefer to open emails when and if I choose to and not have them open automatically."

 Now I am undecided about asking more questions here, and, having never used Tbird for my email, I do have more quandaries.  The interface is quite different from that of Seamonkey (and Thunderbird before that) for newsgroups.

Your choice, ask and get answers would be my choice, but I just ignore lots of things as well.

But please be specific, because I have never used sea monkey and I have not noticed anything all that different between Thunderbird V2 and now in the newsgroup interface.

Well, I will try not to editorialize.

I meant using Thunderbird for newgroups is not the same as using it for email (or so it seems as of day one, but then I have always used Eudora for email and want the same type of experience). I have used Netscape, Thunderbird, Firefox (actually, I don't recall whether that was ever a suite, but if it was, I also used IT for NGs), and, most recently, Seamonkey. I didn't want to use Seamonkey for both email and NGs because I see folks sending things to unintended places under such circumstances.

If you single click on an email in the list, then you have selected to open that email in the Message Pane.

If you double click on an email in the list, then you have selected to open that email in a new tab.

There is no difference between the two methods except that viewing via the Message Pane is quicker; uses less clicking and doesn't involve opening and closing a load of tabs. But sometimes it can be easier to read an email if it is more lengthy in a tab or you may want to view both and swap between them, so there is the option.

There is no safety issue in either of these two methods. In both cases, you have selected to open the email.

However, there is the instance of auto opening an email (displaying in the Message pane) when you delete an email because the focus is then placed on the next email. Perhaps this maybe something you would prefer not to occur. You can change this by using this addon:

https://addons.mozilla.org/de/thunderbird/addon/deselect-on-delete/

I think the F8 (IIRC] dealt with the last part.

I am now trying Eudora 8.0 beta 9 because Thunderbird is surprisingly alien, even though I have used it and other Mozilla offerings as news servers.

This Eudora (a joint project) is somewhat less alien, but it seems rather clumsy compared to previous versions of Eudora. I also don't like some of the changes. One thing I really liked about Eudora is that one could edit the subject line on the mail you received, and I did that a lot so that saved emails would sort in such a way that they were easy to find.

Anyway, thanks for the advice. Every little bit helps.

re: 'Thunderbird is surprisingly alien'

I've not used Eudora, so cannot compare notes, but I would not say Thunderbird was much different from other email clients except for the ability to modify the product.

If you have downloaded a recent version of Thunderbird, the Toolbars are not auto enabled, but there is a menu icon. I would advise that you enable all the toolbars as it makes Thunderbird easier to use and virtually all help refers to those toolbars. This will also make it more intuitive and user friendly.

'menu icon' > 'Options'

• select 'Mail Toolbar', Menu Bar, Quick Filter Bar and Status bar

re:' One thing I really liked about Eudora is that one could edit the subject line on the mail you received, and I did that a lot'

One problem with doing that is that it can mess up threading and if you later 'Reply' to the email then it will effect the recipients conversation thread as well. So, I would not say it was good practise, but if you are looking to do this as a means of organising emails then consider these addons..

• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/edit-email-subject/
• https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/header-tools-lite/

If you read the reviews you will get some idea of how it works. This facilitates changing the subject header for the purposes of organising emails, but does not change the actual subject header, so threading and conversation modes continue to work. Many people find it useful because...quote 'Now all those irritating changed (or absent!) subjects that screw up threads can be corrected! Très bien, merci!!!' unquote.

Another issue, which may or may not not effect you, is that emails can be considered as legal documents and any changes to a received email could invalidate this. So keeping the orginal header in tact would be advisable.

Eudora 8.0 beta 9 a Dead end project that qualcomm abandoned years ago, it culminated in the release of Eudora OSE a one off Thunderbird 3 with the penelope add-on. Thunderbird 3 was unstable, so much so that 3.1 was released out of band to get fixes to the community.

It is unsupported by either Qualcomm who created the monster or anyone else. No one from Qualcomm has been seen around since before Christmas 2009. So can download it, but there are significant issues with it not having 20 odd versions of security fixes and Zero support for anything. Find a bug Tough, it crashes, your on your own.

Editing message subject is done with an add-on.

Now your looking for a mail client and saying Thunderbird is alien so your using a less than secure version of Thunderbird on an operating system that will go out of support in about 2 weeks.

A so-called moderator being rude and obnoxious doesn't do much to promote Thunderbird. It would be much better, Matt, if you showed a little sensitivity to new users and to people with problems, rather than know-it-all arrogance.

Or maybe you should stop moderating.

Gene1940

This is a forum for assisting users with Thunderbird queries and not a chat forum for personal opinions on moderators or any user who offers assisance. Please keep comments elevant to the topic.