Andy McKay

Nov 02, 2007

Thunderbird


With all the news about David Ascher and Thunderbird, I switched back to Thunderbird the other day. But a day of it and I switched back to OS X's Mail.app. In essence there was nothing that it gave me over Mail.app, or nothing I could spot.

  • After being used to the Mac I found the large number of preference screens all over the place confusing, took me a while to find anything. I remember neons ago Thunderbird was far more polished than Outlook Express. Now it feels out of date.
  • Most of the extensions weren't that useful, extensions are Thunderbird's weapon and they were hard to do much useful.
  • I got a large number of spinning Mac discs of hell, due to I believe SSL incompatabilities with my server. I did later find an extension to solve this, that didn't work.
  • The RSS feed was nice and I do like that reader, but realised that I like reading that in a browser anyway.
  • The LDAP lookup of my address book did work well and was nice. But Mail.app does that and feels more polished to me.

Saying all this, Thunderbird is still the best non-Mac client there is and I look forward to what the new changes will bring. Except maybe for gmail. Or mutt.