thunderbird review

[totient]

I've been using Thunderbird for a couple of weeks now, and I mostly like it a lot. Themes are great, extensions are great, integrated spam filtering is great (and it's good filtering, too). It's fast and stable and has a rich feature set. Switching over was easy. But there are a few minor annoyances:

• There's no single-step way to empty your spam mailbox. You can select all and delete, or you can delete-all-spam and then empty the trash. I want a button on the toolbar that empties the spam folder. Why isn't there already an extension for this?
• Sorting on a new field undoes the existing sort. So sorts on binary fields like read/unread show messages within the groupings in whatever order the messages happen to be in that mailbox, which might be rather random if I've been moving mail between mailboxes. You can move all your mail to another mailbox, sort in the secondary order, and move it back, but that's beyond cumbersome.
• There's no compose-in-main-window. OK, that one would take more than an extension to fix, but I miss it.

I keep having to remind myself that even though I could write an extension to fix them, I Should Not Take On New Projects Right Now.

Comments

[johnromkey.livejournal.com]

I'm glad that you mostly like it.

You're right, it would be really nice to have a one step way to empty the spam mailbox, and the sorting thing is kind of annoying.

My biggest complaint is that there's no manual filtering. You can't select a set of messages and then run filters on them... so I end up double buffering email; I move read mail to a special mailbox which I then apply my filters to. I like to read all my email from my Inbox and not generally have it filtered to its final destination until after I've read it and dealt with it. I guess it's the dealing with it part that's really the problem.

Ah, and I also wish that under MacOS it had better OS integration. You can use services menu items with it, and it's completely unaware of the system address book, which is frustrating. This is true of all the Mozilla foundation software, though.

[palmwiz.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me that a big part of why I like Thunderbird is that I took the time while switching over to set up my mailboxes in a sensible way instead of the scattershot way I was using them in Eudora. This meant rewriting my filters, too (and it would have even if I'd done the cleanup without switching over). If I hadn't been willing to invest the time into a cleanup that I was psyched about doing anyway, I might, like johnromkey, have been annoyed at the necessity to rewrite my filters.

[palmwiz.livejournal.com]

OK, there is in fact a delete all spam button extension, in the "Buttons" extension. Yay!