Thunderbird ain't perfect, either

[John Demme]

Walter Bright wrote:

> 
> The bad:
> 
> 1) No way to backup/restore the data. It's about as bad as O.E. here.
> C'mon, Tbird developers, how hard can this be? I want a simple way to
> back up EVERYTHING to a CD or another drive, and then restore it.
> 2) Buggy import from O.E. messages - it sometimes inexplicably gets the
> dates all screwed up, resulting in messages having been received in year
> 2101, or year 1965.
> 3) Search is essentially useless, still have to use X1.
> 
> So far I've only used Tbird for an hour or so.

Thunderbird stores EVERYTHING in plaintext files and such, as you said, so
this solves problems 1 and 3... When you want to backup, just copy the
entire directory somewhere... It allows you to do your backup however you
want.

As for searching-- it'd be nice if the builtin search was nicer, but since
everything's in plaintext, one can just grep through the files. 
Alternatively, there are probably tools out there to build keyword indexes
from plaintext files in a directory.  Given, this isn't too convenient, but
it is a lot more flexible.

As for problem 2-- yeah... That's true.  I've had the most success moving
email via an third party-- imap.  I set up an IMAP server, connect OE to it
and move all the email onto the IMAP server (where I usually keep it.) 
It's pretty trivial to move the email from the IMAP server into
Thunderbird's local account if you want to do that.

Hacks tend to work pretty well with modular software.

~John Demme