There do seem to be some questionable UI pieces. I don't like the look of the reply/reply all buttons. They're especially bad if using the 3 pane (veritical view with message pane).
The tabs are pretty sweet though. I like having everything open in the same window vs a bunch of separate email windows.
> The new attachment reminder looks for the word attachment (and other words like file types) in the body of your message and reminds you to add an attachment before hitting send.
I'm embarrassed to admit that this will help me considerably.
I just performed the same search I spent 10 minutes on a couple days ago to see if the new search would have worked better under those circumstances, and I was able to narrow it down and find the missing message in under 2 minutes.
If you're seeing a lot of email traffic, you need to move the indexing to an actual external search engine and write your own 'search' plugin; both Lucene and Sphinx would rape native TB search in performance. And the index can be shared across a team as well, say, in a sales force.
Thunderbird, Firefox and Emacs. Seriously, the three pieces of software my life would be meaningless without. Greasemonkey and Lisp are the crack cocaine of software, that is, if crack allowed you to realize an innate higher potential in yourself.
I have never scripted it myself, but I have paid someone else to do it and my thunderbird add-ons account for at least 20% of my income. If you're doing a lot of marketing and lead generation, you owe it to yourself to tame this beast to your advantage. Specially for one-person shops, you can bypass the whole CRM shenanigans with a well kept TB strategy. Good luck!
Looks like it tries to download every email in Gmail and index it locally. God. My maillist subscription just made my HDD explode. Didn't IMAP provide some sort of search function already?
I quite like the iPhone's compromise: it stores and indexes the most recent 50 or so messages, and when searching provides a "Continue search on server" button. Thunderbird (or others) could have a larger store of recent messages, but this would avoid downloading thousands of mailing list emails.
This seems like a good time to mention my favourite add-on, Nostalgy (update for 3.0): http://alain.frisch.fr/soft_mozilla.html . It makes keyboard control easy. From the description: 'Save time and get back the productivity you were used to with mutt/pine/eudora!'.
Nostalgy is a very good extension. But since I can archive mail in TB3 using the key A, then I think that nostalgy is not that necessary, which means that TB3 is much better than TB2 :-)
First impressions were "oh, this isn't so bad," but then I started using it. It feels very janky, the interface is a bit disfunctional (going to File > New Folder gave absolutely no visual feedback as to where it put it, and if you have the filters window open and make a new folder you have to close and reopen the filters window for it to notice the new folder). The one thing I saw that I liked was the "Reply to Mailing list" button, but that just didn't work, at all. The To: recipient was the person who wrote the email, not the list. Also, I couldn't figure out how to open a new tab.
E for Effort I suppose, but it's seeming less and less relevant, and if major releases are this buggy I can see why.
I like Mail, but I switched from Mail to Thunderbird a while back because, quite frankly, Mail's IMAP support stinks. It is just not very robust. Moderately sized mailboxes lose sync with the server, causing duplicate messages and related issues.
Second problem: iCal sucks for corporate scheduling. Setting up attendees, and viewing free-busy time is ridiculously complicated. Anyone who has used Outlook/Entourage laughs at iCal. Lightning/Sunbird, however, is wonderful. Fully supports CalDAV and the Free/Busy extensions.
I manage about two dozen Macs here and have had this issue repeatedly against a Zimbra backend. I have a few users on Thunderbird 3.0 betas, and those problems just disappeared. Once Lightning 1.0 comes out, I will be forcing everyone to switch to Thunderbird/Lightning on both Mac and Windows.
The Zindus extension for Thunderbird syncs Gmail Contacts and the Zimbra Global Address List to Thunderbird. Lacking this, LDAP search works great against Zimbra.
The resulting solution: Zimbra / Thunderbird / Lightning / Zindus is, as far as I'm concerned, an Outlook/Exchange killer for small to medium sized companies.
I downloaded it and tried it, and unfortunately it has the same two problems that I hate about version 2:
1) There is no option to say "reply using the same 'from' address that the mail was sent to." This means that you either have to set up an "identity" for every possible e-mail address you use, or you have to reveal your "main" identity to anyone who sends you an e-mail (and possibly confuse them in the process).
2) If you get new mail and read it on your iPhone or any other computer while thunderbird is open, then the status icon/indicator will get permanently stuck in "new mail" mode and you have to restart the app to get it to disappear.
> 2) ... the status icon/indicator will get permanently stuck in "new mail" mode and you have to restart the app to get it to disappear.
Rarely seen similar behavior in TB2 (no upgrade yet). Goes away when I hit 'get mail'. (Forcing it to check the server, and notice the mail is read. I do IMAP exclusively.)
Re #2: Mine never goes away once the bug occurs, no matter what I do or click. If I have TB open for a month, the mail icon will be there for a month, even after deleting and recreating my account! This bug occurs with every computer I own. Also, the "Inbox" stays in bold (as if there were new messages) permanently until restart. It's been that way for years, and doesn't seem it will ever be fixed.
> There is no option to say "reply using the same 'from' address that the mail was sent to."
Huh? I've used Thunderbird 2 (on Windows) forever and I rely on this feature all the time, with multiple IMAP accounts and multiple email addresses for each of the accounts. It just works perfectly.
Do you just mean you've configured multiple email addresses into thunderbird and get to pick which one to use, or have you really found out how to do "reply using the same 'from' address that the mail was sent to." in thunderbird?
(I use a different email address for each webapp I sign up to but obviously don't want to have to add each one to thunderbird, so this feature would be awesome)
It only works if you set up an "identity" for every possible e-mail address that you use.
If you use e-mail the way that phildawes and I do - that is, using a catch-all for your domain and giving a different e-mail address to each organization - then you would have to set up an "identity" for every e-mail address you've ever used in your life. For me, that number is in the hundreds and I don't have a list of all the ones I've used.
If I'm wrong, however, then please give more details on where to find this feature!
"E for Effort I suppose, but it's seeming less and less relevant, and if major releases are this buggy I can see why."
This is my feeling too: I used a version (1.x? 2?) on OS X for a little while after switching, then started using Mail.app, which has its quirks and problems -- it used to slow when mailboxes got stuffed with thousands of messages -- but shows a level of polish Thunderbird doesn't.
Just curious - what's the appeal of non-web-based email? I'm forced to use Outlook at work, but I can't imagine having to install something to get my personal mail, and having to back up my personal mail. Do people do this mostly because they're concerned about their data privacy, or because it's easier to work when you don't have internet access, or what?
My wife's old yahoo account got hacked. Watching yahoo's nonexistent "customer service" "help" her convinced me there is a giant hidden danger to webmail--she essentially had no recourse, no way to reclaim the address, no way to recover old emails, no way to stop this person from getting new emails she might receive, and no way to stop them from impersonating her.
For geeks (and perhaps geek's spouses) owning your own domain and only contracting out the email hosting to Google is probably the way to go here. If it all goes wrong then you control the domain and what happens to emails sent to it.
Do you really not backup your mails? Do you consider them not important or do you glorify your provider? I highly recommend making your own backups for anything you consider worth saving.
Just because I have control, doesn't mean the data is safer.
It's the practical realization that Google is likely to have a more recent, redundant backup of my data than me. The amount of effort to ensure that P(losing my backup) < P(google losing a backup) isn't worth the effort except for a few very important pieces of data.
If you keep your mail on the server and download it using your client, then P(losing your backup & google losing the files) is much smaller than either one of those probabilities.
1) Offline copies: Either because I have no internet access or the webmail provider is down. For my company e-mail "Google is down" or "I can't get online" is just not a good enough excuse when such an easy solution exists. Even if you primarily use webmail I would highly suggest mirroring a local copy via IMAP if you're dealing with important stuff.
2) I like being able to segregate my mail into its own space. I maximize my mail client full screen and have other windows on my second display such as individual messages or notes, address book, calendar, etc. I find this to be more appealing than opening half a dozen browser windows and clicking through different sections of GMail.
3) Nothing beats the performance of a local store. My IMAP server keeps a full backup so any one client losing its local copy isn't a problem. Searches are instant in Apple Mail, I can bounce between different folders/messages with no penalty waiting for another GMail page to load.
4) No distractions. When I have to sit down and pound through lots of e-mail being in a browser makes me less productive.
I do it because I use Microsoft Exchange for personal mail. I like having my contacts, calendar, email, and to-dos sync automatically on each computer and on the iPhone. Plus I like how Outlook integrates a Calendar, Contacts, and Email together so it's easy to switch between them versus Gmail where I need to open a new window for calendar and contact management is a pain (though after exchange, gmail is hands down the best).
I use thunderbird because I have a lot of email accounts and I like to have them all in one central place. With thunderbird I can download all mail from gmail, yahoo, my isp mailbox and all other accounts on my local pc and manage them all from one place. That's the main reason. Then there is the fact that I can easily switch mail provider without loosing my mail.
gmail can download your mail from other accounts and send outgoing mail through back through the right server.
Have all your mail in one central place without being tied to a single box with a particular config. You can even use desktop clients on multiple computers via IMAP without any hassles.
SPEED! Man, I just installed and it downloads locally and indexes all your IMAP emails, (a few gigs of data in my case).
Then search in ALL of them is INSTANTANEOUS!
I wasn't using Gmail due to the non-functional search for word fraction. And my IMAP server's search took almost a minute sometimes (dovecot + extra indexing options). But this is... unbelievable.
I tried Gmail and other mail clients, but I've been in Thunderbird since 2007 now.
I love the speed.
I use it for work email.
I like the tagging.
I like the speed. I click and email opens. It doesn't matter how slow my connection is right now.
It's easy to backup to an external hard drive.
When my browser crashes, my email does not.
I like how the folders work.
The spam filter is awesome.
Buy mostly, it just feels like home to me. I don't know how to explain it, but I love being in Thunderbird, and I just can't operate without it now.
I've been using the CuteBird theme for a couple years which mimics the Apple mail client design. Now that I have upgraded to TB3 the theme is no longer compatible and the default theme, even with the improvements, just looks bad.
The nightly for the 1.0 branch is compatible, and fairly stable. I have been using it for months with TBird 3 pre-releases, and am using it in 3.0 right now.
I think there is a valid point hidden inside this flame-bait. GMail (and other web-based email clients) are making inroads against traditional desktop email clients. I used Thunderbird for a long time, but just found GMail's client much more intuitive and faster. The best part is that web apps are getting faster and faster as JS engines improve.
This isn't the case for desktop clients, at least from my experience. Bloat always sneak up on you. Sure, this happens on web apps too (e.g. Google Wave), but it doesn't feel as bad because we're used to web apps being "slow" (only to get faster the next year). For desktop clients, once you're bloated then you pretty much stay that way.
I loved Thunderbird and I was excited about Thunderbird 3, but really, I don't see a reason why I would want to leave GMail.
Of course, I'm not using "enterprise" email for work or anything. But even enterprise email will be web-based eventually.
