SeaMonkey and Firefox/Thunderbird share more than I thought.

Some of you may be aware of my webpage that compares the differences between Mozilla Suite versus Firefox and Thunderbird. With the impending release of SeaMonkey 1.0, I decided to create an equivalent page comparing SeaMonkey against Firefox and Thunderbird. Because SeaMonkey uses the Mozilla 1.8 codebase, I figured the list of differences would shrink; but I was surprised by how much it shrank. This is specifically because one product may have a user interface for a feature, while the other doesn’t.

For instance:
Scam detection: In Thunderbird, you can go to Tools -> Options -> Privacy -> Email Scams, and check mark the box. There’s no menu for it in SeaMonkey, but all you need to do is enter about:config in the browser location bar, and search for the pref mail.phishing.detection.enabled. Double-click on it, to toggle between on (true) and off (false).

Anti-Virus support: In Thunderbird, you can go to Tools -> Options -> Privacy -> Anti-Virus, and check mark the box. Again, there’s no menu for it in SeaMonkey, but all you need to do is enter about:config in the browser location bar, and add the Boolean pref mailnews.downloadToTempFile. Setting the value to true enables the feature, while setting it to false disables it. (The default is false.)

Marking Junk as read: In SeaMonkey, go to Tools -> Junk Mail Controls, and for each account, you’ll see a check box for “Mark messages determined to be Junk as read”. The check box isn’t in Thunderbird, but the feature is there. Go to Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> General, and click on “Config Editor” (finally, a user-friendly term for aboutconfig). Search for a pref called mail.server.default.markAsReadOnSpam. Copy the name of that pref, and clear the config search field. By looking at your other preference settings, you should be able to determine the server number of the account you want to set the preference for. Once you’ve done that, add an edited version of the Boolean preference you copied, replacing “default” with the server and number of the account you are editing. (eg. mail.server.server2.markAsReadOnSpam ) (Restarting Thunderbird is required)

It’s Alive!!

news.mozilla.org has now been switched over to Giganews.
Just a quick reminder: The article sequence numbers won’t match between the old news server at AOL and the Giganews server. This means that you will have a wrong count of which messages are read. (Most likely, all messages will be marked as read, as well as many new ones after that.) It would be best to re-subscribe to your current netscape.public.mozilla.* newsgroups.

Luckily, newsgroups that don’t have a counterpart on the netscape.public.mozilla* hierarchy didn’t have to wait. This means the user support newsgroups are up and running. For the first time ever, there are user support forums on a server actually called “mozilla.org“. -)

For more info, read the News Migration FAQ or my Unofficial New Mozilla News Server Information Centre.