Thunderbird ain't perfect, either

[Unknown W. Brackets]

I have to admit, I have had my problems with Thunderbird as well.

That said, it's all open source and I've done quite a lot of hacking when I want
something changed.  XUL isn't hard to learn, and I really thing that's a big
benfit over Outlook/similar - for simple changes.

I make backups often.  I've also had to restore them.  It's tar cW %profile_dir%
| bzip2 -7 > backup.tar.bz2, plain and simple.  But, I agree; a built in backup
feature really would be nice.  It probably wouldn't be too hard to write an
extension to make one.

I imported my messages from Outlook 2003.  Had to strangle it a bit, but got it
to work sufficiently.  The Received dates are all wrong, but I use the Date
column instead and it seems to be fine.  I'm not sure how that compares with
Outlook Express.

There are two methods of search; the quick one at the top right, and the other
from Tools.  I find the quick one is mostly all I need for common searches.  I
don't recall Outlook having much better search functionality.

Anyway, just to warn you, the major problem I've had with it is that as your
mailboxes grow, sometimes it doesn't work as well as you'd like.  I've had to
manually compact folders and restart Thunderbird on many occasions.  It's rather
annoying.  Luckily this doesn't affect newsgroups.

Still, I prefer it to Outlook by far... and I prefer Outlook to Outlook Express
by a similar margin.

-[Unknown]

In article <e0emae$mfq$1 at digitaldaemon.com>, Walter Bright says...
>
>So, having been hosed by O.E. at least 4 times whenever I either 
>upgraded the OS or had to reinstall it, I decided to bite the bullet and 
>install Thunderbird. There's good, there's bad:
>
>The good:
>
>1) It's free.
>2) It's look and feel is familiar, little new to learn here.
>3) The message database is in plaintext. I am very uneasy having 
>critical data to my business in a secret, undocumented format. What if 
>those files get corrupted? What if Microsoft end-of-lifed support for 
>it? Poof!
>4) Spell checker. Gotta pay extra for a 3rd party spell checker for O.E.
>5) Seems to get the unread message count right. O.E. always gets this wrong.
>
>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.