[OT] Mozilla Thunderbird

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Justin Johansson" <noreply at jj.com> wrote in message 
news:ied4th$2vns$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Just wondering how others rate Thunderbird as a decent newsreader.
>
> My experience with Thunderbird is that it is not of a standard of 
> distinction that one would hope for in 2010 coming 2011.
>
> For one thing, and perhaps this is a newsgroup server problem, but I doubt 
> it, my Thunderbird client shows a number of D NG topics as being unread 
> though the folder tree item for d.D shows all items as read.
>
> Aside from that issue, my experience with Thunderbird is that it is not 
> particularly innovative in drawing my attention to the high-traffic topics 
> apart from telling me that one-or-more responses are unread (as opposed to 
> popular topics for example).
>
> Overall I think Thunderbird is a bit lame as a newsreader for this day and 
> age, and, though it owes me nothing and I paid nothing for it, I do wonder 
> what others think of their NG experience using Mozilla Thunderbird.
>

FWIW: I tried Thunderbird breifly a few years ago. It seemed to get the job 
done, but there were a number of little annoyances that left me going back 
to Outlook Express. Let's see if I can remember some of them...(and again, 
like I said, "little annoyances", so obviously these aren't super-major 
issues or anything):

- When using "view messages in plain-text" (which I always use), it still 
converts *this* into bold (and removes the asterisks), /this/ into italic 
(and removes the slashes), and _this_ into underline (and removes the 
underscores). This really, really bugged me, but unfortunately there didn't 
seem to be a way to turn it off - despite the fact that it was supposedly 
"plain-text" mode.

- Many UI elements seemed to be rather big-n-chunky. Almost like a GTK app, 
although not quite as bad.

- There was a lot of invisi-text on my light-on-dark system. I seem to 
recall that it *was* possible to fix this, but it required manually hacking 
some obscure configuration files.

- I seem to have a vague recollection that the UI became unresponsive while 
it was downloading emails, but I may very well be completely wrong about 
that. I think there was *something* weird about when it downloaded emails...

I think there were some other little annoyances along similar lines, but I 
can't remember what they were. Granted, Outlook Express certainly has it's 
little annoyances too (a few people's NG messages show up as blank messages 
with the actual text in a text-file attachment, auto-quoting when replying 
doesn't always happen, and what I'm assuming are long GC collection cycles, 
and a few other things), but I found OE's annoyances to overall be somewhat 
less annoying than Thunderbird's.