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Mozilla Mail This is the email program included with the Mozilla browser

Version 1.6 

April 18, 2004. I did not want to use the junk mail feature so I turned it off with Tools -> Junk mail controls. However, even after turning off the junk mail controls, when viewing a message the program still displays a warning that the message is considered junk. The exact message is "Mozilla thinks this message is junk mail". 

Version 1.5

December 30, 2003.  I very much want to like and use this program. However, I don't use it for one main reason. I want my email program to startup and put me in my inbox automatically. From there I want to be able to browse my messages and chose when or if to download new ones. It doesn't seem like too much to ask of an email program but Mozilla Mail can not do this.

It can't be configured to go right into your inbox first thing, automatically when you click on its icon on the Windows desktop. Instead, you get a window like that shown here on the right, where reading your messages is one of the menu options. 

It also defaults to downloading new mail when click on the "read messages" option. To fudge around this, I have been going offline, telling it read my mail and then telling it I don't want to go online. All told, it's too much work to get the program to function the way I want to. 

--It takes too long to start up (so too did version 1.4). 

--It can't display the email address that a message was sent to in the top part of the screen. I get email to many different addresses and they all forward to one single inbox. It would be nice to tell which of my many email addresses was used by the sender. 

--I normally read my email in off-line mode. If I reply to a message while in off-line mode, I'd like to be able to send it without having to manually switch to on-line mode first. Netscape Messenger 4.x can do this. Mozilla mail can not. It forces me to "Send Later". This leads to yet another gripe.  

After clicking on "Send Later" you have to go into on-line mode to actually send the message that was composed in off-line mode. When you do go into on-line mode, Mozilla Mail sends the pending message and doesn't tell you! Stealth operation is bad. Again, Netscape Messenger v4.x always asked you if you wanted to send the unsent messages. Polite and straightforward. 

--When displaying the date of messages in the top window pane, it only shows the time for messages from today. Ask for the date, get the time. 

--On an 800x600 display when composing a new message, the TO field take up 4 lines and can't be compressed down to one. This wastes a lot of screen real estate. 

--Spell checking is under options. It should be under Tools. 

Version 1.4

Netscape Messenger v4.x had a drop down list box of folders which I thought was just fine. Mozilla Mail does not. 

Now to switch folders, there are two choices and both are poor.

You can leave a pane visible on left hand side all the time as shown here. This reduces the screen real estate available to display information about the messages and most of the time you don't need to see it.

If you hide this mailbox listing window pane, then the fact that it even exists is not at all obvious. There is no menu command to make it visible. There should be one under View -> Show/Hide. The only indication it exists is a hard to find blue line.

This caused me a problem when a non-technical person asked for help finding a previously sent message. I had to walk them over the phone on how to resize the window with the mouse to make this pane visible. 

A drop-down list box of the mailboxes would have been a much better UI choice. It takes up very little screen real estate and makes it obvious all the time that there are other available mailboxes. 

FYI: Since I really wanted to like Mozilla mail, I went to the www.mozilla.org web site looking for a way to provide end user feedback. There is none. They care about bugs, but not user opinions. Designing software in a vacuum, without user feedback, is a recipe for failure. January 8, 2004.  
Update: Someone emailed me to say that bugs and features for Mozilla are both tracked at bugzilla.mozilla.org. If true, this is far from obvious as the Bugzilla page only talks about bugs, nothing about enhancement requests let alone plain old feedback. May 12, 2004.