Thunderbird Questions

I'm trying to run Thunderbird 0.8 on Suse 9.1 + Gnome 2.4. For the moment its just installed in a directory in my home directory. But for some reason I don't understand, I can only get it to run properly if I run thunderbird (which I guess is a script) and only if I set it to run in a terminal. Is this correct or am I doing something wrong? Also, is there any specific reason that anybody knows that Thunderbird won't let me create a filter from a message, its greyed out and if I manually create filters, they just don't work. I've used the same filters in the Win32 Thunderbird 0.8 Simon