The Download Blog

Postbox's latest update builds on the add-on functionality that was introduced in the previous beta, supporting Thunderbird's calendar plug-in Lightning, among others, and also comes with an announcement that the days of Postbox-for-free are coming to a end.

Postbox beta 14 for Windows and Mac has its own build of Lightning, which should allow users to communicate with both local and networked calendars. While Lightning works perfectly for me in Thunderbird, it wasn't able to talk to CNET's Microsoft Exchange server in Postbox. The Provider for Google Calendar plug-in, which gives users bi-directional Google Calendar access, works fine in Postbox--albeit with a slight hiccup when first loading the calendar.

Postbox gets it's own version of Lightning in beta 14, but it's still a bit buggy.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Postbox now natively supports Gmail-style conversation threading and e-mail message counts. So if you've got a collapsed thread, where you can only see one message, there will now be a number next to it telling you how many unread messages are in the thread. Unfortunately, when I clicked on the first message, even if it had already been marked as read, it automatically marked all the unread messages in the thread as read, too.

There's a new Contacts sidebar, although the old Address Book is still available by hitting CTRL+2 or going through the Tools menu. The new Web services option, also available from the Tools menu or the Advanced Settings tab under Options, gives you more granular control over which Web services you're logged into through Postbox. This is useful if Postbox isn't your main Twitter manager, so you can keep your API count from exploding and preventing tweet updates.

Postbox Inc. also announced that they're expecting to take the program to a premium-only status in early September, when the program graduates from beta development. A single-user license will cost $39.95, with a family pack option consisting of licenses for five people living at the same address costing an additional $19.95. A lifetime upgrades option can be bought for another $24.95. These prices are currently discounted for a beta sale good until August 31, at $29.95, $9.95, and $19.95 respectively.

Postbox isn't the only Mozilla-based software to charge for downloading, but the list of programs that do isn't exactly long. Rafael Ebron, spokesman for Mozilla Messaging, pointed out that some of them include TuneUpTwitFactory.

The full list of Postbox extensions is available here, and release notes for Postbox beta 14 are available here.

Google Calendar has quickly become one of my favorite online tools. I can schedule meetings quickly and it integrates seamlessly into my workflow. It's a great service.

But I want more from it.

That's why I've been sifting through Mozilla's Firefox extension database trying to find some add-ons that take Google Calendar to the next level. Whether they enhance its usability or just improve its effectiveness, there are a handful of extensions that work quite well.

Google Calendar extensions

Better GCal After I installed Better GCal, I was extremely impressed by what it offered. From a new skin to little extras like week numbers and collapsible headers, it makes Google Calendar just a little better. The extension not only made me more organized, but the calendar became far more readable.

Better GCal has a great skin to try out.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

GCal Popup GCal Popup is a really neat idea. Instead of forcing you to open a new tab to add an event to your Google Calendar, you'll only need to open the extension and it will display your Google Calendar over your current Web page. Input the event you want to add to your calendar and once you're done, you can close the extension and go back to work.

GCal Popup is designed to make it convenient to add events to your Calendar and it succeeds. But beware that it's an "experimental" extension, so it might cause some instability issues. That said, I haven't experienced any such problems.

GCal Popup makes it easy to add events to your calendar.

(Credit: GCal Popup)

Last February, I described losing half my iPhone contacts after an iTunes sync. Even though I tried the Filadex Web-based contact manager, I don't like the fact that the information is stored unencrypted on Web servers.

More importantly, my iPhone always has my most up-to-date telephone and address contact list, while Gmail knows more about my e-mail correspondents than the iPhone does, and Google Calendar is my primary scheduler. Just to complicate matters, I spend most of my workdays (and some weekends, unfortunately) in Outlook.

I need to export my Google Calendar and Gmail addresses to Outlook and my iPhone, and move my iPhone telephone numbers and physical addresses to Gmail and Outlook. Simple, right? Well, it turned out to be not too difficult or time-consuming, although the result was a bit messy.

Sync Google Calendar with calendars in Outlook and the iPhone
Who knew Google Calendar and Outlook could play so nice? The aptly named Google Calendar Sync does the trick with just a few clicks and a minimum of thumb-twiddling. The program works with Outlook 2003 and 2007 on XP and Vista PCs, though it doesn't support 64-bit XP, according to Google.

After you download and install the program, you enter your Google ID and password and choose one of three options: sync from and to Google Calendar and Outlook; sync from Google Calendar to Outlook; or sync from Outlook to Google Calendar. The default sync time is 120 minutes, and the minimum setting is 10 minutes; there's no mention of a maximum setting. The sync begins after you click Save.

Choose two-way or one-way sync between Outlook and Google Calendar in the Google Calendar Sync utility.

(Credit: Google)

Up-and-down arrows on the Google Calendar icon in the notification area indicate a sync in progress; hover over it to see the percent complete or the time of the last sync.

The program converted my relatively simple Google Calendar to Outlook 2007 with surprising accuracy. In fact, the two calendars appeared and acted very much alike. Keep in mind, I didn't transfer any tricky repeating appointments, invitations, or time-zone changes. But for my meager calendar needs, the sync was fast and comprehensive.

To sync your Google Calendar and Gmail contacts with an iPhone, simply use the phone to create a Google Sync account. Instructions for OS version 2.2 and 3.0 are on the Google Mobile Help site.

Unfortunately, Google Sync is limited in the fields it supports and doesn't let you exclude entries or deal with duplicates. These and other of the program's limitations are described on the Google Sync Help page.

Move your iPhone contacts to Gmail and Outlook, or vice-versa
Use iTunes to export your iPhone contacts to Outlook--and Gmail, if you choose not to go the Google Sync route described above. Plug your iPhone into your PC, choose the device in iTunes' left pane, and select the Info tab. Pick either Outlook or Google Contacts in the "Sync contacts from" drop-down menu. (Yahoo Address Book and Windows Address Book are the other options.) For Outlook, you can choose which groups to sync. For Gmail, you enter your user ID and password.

Your only sync options are to merge or replace the entries iTunes identifies as duplicates, and to choose between two entries pegged as conflicts. The resulting sync was full of double entries, but I would much rather deal with manually merging the dupes than losing the information either entry contains.

iTunes' sync with Google Contacts provides few options for dealing with duplicate entries.

(Credit: Apple)

I'll probably spend another hour or so cleaning up the extra entries created by the contact sync, but that's much less time than I'd spend trying to replace the info.

ScheduleOnce, the service that helps multiple users find the best time to have a meeting, has new(ish) tool that lets users access its service without leaving the Google Calendar interface.

Using it requires installing a small add-on that currently works only in Firefox and IE with IE7Pro installed. Users then get a new ScehduleOnce menu in the left side of Calendar, either through Google Apps, or in the public version of Google Calendar. The control widget lets them see a list of meetings they have scheduled, along with the option to create a new one as if they were doing so back on ScheduleOnce.

What's really interesting about this add-on is that as of this week, it could no longer require the download to work. On Tuesday Google opened up a new API for developers to create sidebar gadgets in Calendar. A widget that makes use of this could let users keep track of tentative meetings they've set up, however any scheduling may still require going back to ScheduleOnce's site.

(Credit: ScheduleOnce)

Google Apps have all grown up.

No longer must Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Talk carry the beta tag of shame; they are all now full-fledged members of the Google family of products. Google has been hinting this was coming over the past few months, but is finally ready to make the official announcement along with the news that Fairchild Semiconductor has decided to embrace Google's suite of Web-based office productivity applications.

In truth, it's hard to tell exactly what technical advancements may have prompted the decision to lift the products out of beta. Matt Glotzbach, product management director for Google Enterprise, said the removal of the beta status means that those products have all reached unspecified internal metrics in terms of reliability and usability.

But Google does not have a company standard for determining when a beta project has become a more fully formed product: Gmail was in beta for five years. And paying enterprise customers will still be provided with a 99.9 percent service-level agreement now that the products are out of beta. That's the same level of service Google agreed to provide while they were in beta.

Still, Google thinks there are a number of CIOs that will find Google Apps easier to sell to their bosses if it's not formally known as a "beta" product. "It's something that does send the wrong message," Glotzbach said, referring to the historical definition of the word beta as a not-ready-for-prime-time piece of software. Google is working on developing more formal company-wide standards for how to label products with the beta tag, he said.

In the meantime, Google has added a couple of more enterprise-quality features to Gmail, allowing executives to give their assistants permission to manage their mail and corporations to set e-mail retention policies for their workers, a key feature needed by highly scrutinized companies such as Intel.

Considering that it's based on Mozilla Thunderbird, it was a bit of a surprise that add-ons weren't available for Postbox when it debuted. That's now been remedied in Postbox beta 13 for Windows and Mac. Given Postbox's emphasis on social-networking technology and Mozilla's own success with add-ons, this move puts the e-mail client in an excellent position to attract more users.

The latest Postbox introduces add-ons to its users.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

A Webware 100 winner, the list of supported extensions isn't long at the moment, and notably it doesn't include Thunderbird's calendaring tool Lightning. Since Postbox doesn't have its own supported calendar, this could prove to be a deal breaker for some. However, the list does include several plug-ins that Thunderbird users should be familiar with, including ReminderFox, QuickText, and MinimizeToTray. MozBackup and Zindus are listed as "coming soon." There's new support for localized dictionaries from Mozilla, too.

Users who wish to install Postbox add-ons while running Firefox can either save the XPI file to their desktop and then install it manually, or drag-and-drop it into Postbox's open Add-ons window.

Other changes include fetching profile pictures from your address books in Postbox, Mac OS X, Twitter, and Facebook for the Inspector Pane. Settings can be imported from Mail.app. Multiple attachments can be dragged to your desktop. Along with a large number of stability and usability fixes, the security improvements made to Firefox 3.0.10 have also been folded in. Full release notes can be read here.

If you've been playing around with the Postbox e-mail client for Windows and Mac, beta 11 has been unleashed upon the world.

Unlike March's beta 10, though, this update includes more performance issue fixes than anything else. Still, it's probably a good idea to upgrade.

Most notably, memory and CPU usage have decreased. Postbox claims that indexing is three times faster in this version, compared to beta 10, and that indexing uses about 75 percent to 80 percent less memory than before. I don't have statistics to do my own comparison of beta 10 to beta 11, but I did notice empirical improvements in performance.

AOL Mail account support has been added, and a bug in importing data from Outlook Express has been fixed. There's also support for usernames with special characters, and you can now add a contact to your address book with one click from the contact panel.

Beyond those changes, the full list is made up mostly of fixing annoyances such as LDAP and IMAP connections hanging.

Postbox had problems accepting a change in my network password from the last time I used it, when I had to re-enter it four times before the program remembered it. This probably has to do with how the program talks to the Exchange server, but it was irritating nonetheless. Thunderbird, on which Postbox is based, required my new network password to be entered only once.

Postbox is a finalist for 2009's Webware 100, awarded by CNET.

The open-source and cross-platform e-mail client Postbox rolls out another beta and has been quickly adding muscle to its abilities.

Postbox beta 10 introduces an HTML signature-creator in the Compose window.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Based on Mozilla Thunderbird and currently available for Windows and Mac, Postbox beta 10--the third update since I checked out the program for in the beginning of February--introduces several small changes worth noting.

Since then, Postbox has seen Hotmail support, Flickr integration in the Compose window, and a host of bug-fixes including two Firefox security updates. In the most recent version, users get the ability to create and edit HTML signatures from the Compose Sidebar's Signature panel and improved calendar attachment detection.

There's also a fix for the spell checker, which had been marking contractions as misspelled words, and a new feature that prevents a message from being marked as read until it's been viewed in the preview pane for a specific minimum time.

One feature that I've just noticed is that the Message pane lets you highlight text, which you can then drag into the search bar. Once you release it, Postbox will open up a search results page in your browser for the highlighted term.

These features continue to improve on the Postbox experience. Without support for extensions and the Thunderbird calendar extension Lightning, though, and keeping in mind Postbox's social-networking friendliness, it'd be interesting to see baked-in support for a Web-based calendar as an alternative to this major and missing feature.

There aren't a lot of Microsoft Outlook competitors out there, but Mozilla's open-source Thunderbird is one of the best. Postbox for Windows and Mac, and built on Thunderbird code the way that Flock is based on Firefox, is a new face on the e-mail field.

Postbox looks like Thunderbird, but offers a lot of Web 2.0 features.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Still in beta, Postbox takes desktop e-mail hard toward Web 2.0, with fast links to upload contacts to Facebook and pictures to Picasa. Click on an e-mail, and the preview pane not only shows the text, but extracts all links, images, other attachments, and contacts into a sidebar for easy management. Postbox is also obsessed with tabs, which are coming in Thunderbird 3.0 but not to this degree--at least not from what we've seen. Postbox can also upload to Twitter, FriendFeed, MySpace, del.icio.us, and Google.

When Postbox starts, you can import e-mail, contacts, and other messaging data from Thunderbird, Outlook, Google, and Yahoo. Once you get going, Postbox's tabs can be used to filter out the text of a message and focus on only attachments, images, links, or contacts. Messages themselves can also be opened in new tabs, cutting down on the excessive clutter that Web mail eliminated ages ago.

An excellent remix of a Thunderbird feature is Topics. An expansion of Thunderbird's Labels that automatically searches across folders for messages tagged with the same Topic, Postbox's is undeniably what its progenitor's should have been. Thunderbird's Labels can be configured to behave the same way, but it's not done without extra effort.

The Compose Sidebar pulls contacts, links, images, and attachments into a separate pane.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Postbox doesn't feature all of Thunderbird's abilities. The biggest one missing is that add-ons have been killed. So while Thunderbird 2.0 can be given calendaring via the Lightning plug-in, and Thunderbird 3.0 will integrate Lightning natively, Postbox only has a To-Do list. Depending on what you're using your e-mail for, this may be a major drawback, or much ado about nothing.

Social-networking junkies who are looking for a desktop solution should take a good look at Postbox, or at least keep an eye on its progress. Support for Flickr is hopefully coming, and I'm interested in seeing how Postbox reacts once Thunderbird 3 finally leaves beta later this year, but Postbox is proof that alternative desktop e-mail clients are far from dead.