Thunderbird ain't perfect, either

[Unknown W. Brackets]

There are a few XUL reference sites.  Just search for that on Google. It 
helps to understand the W3C document object model, which Mozilla more or 
less follows in HTML and in XUL, and to be willing to sink a little bit 
of time mucking around.  Most of it is pretty darn simple.

There's a bunch of jar files in your chrome folder under 
Firefox/Mozilla/Thunderbird.  Unzip them and look at them.  They're 
interesting.  Grep is your friend.

Funny enough, Thunderbird isn't - imho - terribly terribly robust.  I 
mean, when you empty a folder, it uses JavaScript to select all the 
messages and pretends you hit delete.  I just find that silly.  But it's 
still better than Outlook.

There are a lot of things Firefox and Thunderbird do not need; but 
that's also what extensions are for.  You can add a cron, add a 
scheduled task (Windows; or write a light service to do it for you), or 
what have you... but if you want a menu option, you can do that too.

It's called making (closer to) everyone happy, so long as they're 
willing to work.  You need this when your software product deals with 
end-users.  You can't tell them they don't want what they want, it just 
does not work... unless your goal is to have only a certain subset of 
power users.

I've always disliked IMAP, because I prefer to use multiple email 
accounts and I don't want them separate, nor do I want them (or have the 
ability, in some cases, to have them) forwarded to each other.  I have 
all my email organized in a few separate folders, as well as in an 
Archived Messages folder.  Thunderbird would force me to have separate 
folder structures for each account, mirroring the IMAP folders.  Bleh.

Unfortunately, this happens now in all my folders, even my Inbox, which 
is actually my smallest folder.  It has nothing to do with me not 
organizing or archiving my messages.  I had a nice discussion with 
someone from mozillazine.org's support about it, and the decision was 
that compacting took it from every day to every week, and so it was the 
solution.  I thought I had it gone at one point, but it still happens.

And, really, I honestly hate that Thunderbird moves my spam and other 
things in a multi-step process.  I don't like seeing it jump in and out 
of folders, or etc.  Often I have to click a folder to have them go 
away, so I never know if I really have new mail.  Incidentally, it's 
when it does this that I get the crash; part of why I dislike it.

-[Unknown]


> Unknown W. Brackets wrote:
>> 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 guess there is somewhere a good pocket-reference kind of site where 
> the nuts and bolts of Thunderbird XUL hacking is covered -- without 
> swamping the reader in masses of trivia?
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Not needed. That's why it ain't there. On *nix one would put the command 
> in a file and have cron run it, say, every week. On Windows, I guess the 
> easiest would be to put it in a file, and create a desktop icon to it. 
> -- For something this simple, it's just superfluous to develop some 
> fancy backup scheme, especially when the power users wouldn't use it 
> anyway.
> 
>> 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.
> 
> I keep all my mail on the ISP server. That way I can read them anywhere 
> I go.
> 
> But if one has the files on the hard disk, then one can even use Windows 
> own search in File Explorer. If the file turns out to be in HTML or 
> whatever, then just look at the date and subject and then find it in 
> Thunderbird for pleasant viewing with layout and all. Piece of cake.
> 
> On *nix, what I constantly find is folks do not regulary create their 
> own commands! That is, whenever one finds himself writing the same 
> command line more than once, just copy the command line in a file, and 
> save it in $HOME/bin as "myMailSearch" or whatever. (Oh yes, and then, 
> from next session on, you only have to type "myM" <Tab> to get the 
> command!!!)
> 
> That's actually how most of the standard programs/commands in *nix have 
> come to exist. First one just makes a command as above. Later, when 
> bored, one can insert $1 etc in it to facilitate giving simple arguments 
> to the command. Some other month one might expand its functionality a 
> little. And a year later one writes the whole thing in D. The entire 
> existence of a Command Shell is for this _sole_ purpose. They wanted 
> this to be as easy as ever possible. And it sure is. Talk about 
> productivity, truly trivial customization, and usage efficiency.
> 
>> Anyway, just to warn you, the major problem I've had with it is that
>> as your mailboxes grow, sometimes it doesn't work as well as you'd
>> like.  I've had to manually compact folders and restart Thunderbird
>> on many occasions.  It's rather annoying.  Luckily this doesn't
>> affect newsgroups.
> 
> Split read mail in categories. (Work, D, Projects, Family, etc) and 
> either every six months move stuff to them, or if you prefer, always 
> having read a mail. Makes searching a lot faster. Or do it (lazy) like I 
> do, every six months just move the more than 18 month old messages to 
> OldMail.
> 
> (Funny how people have become passive. I guess this is because everyone 
> uses M$ stuff, where you simply can't (with any reasonable effort 
> anyway) do anything not expressly designed into the app. Then once folks 
> start using *nix, or OSS on Windows, where one can do pretty much 
> anything, and with ease, folks just sit on their butt complaining.)
> 
> You can actually have Thunderbird automatically move new (or even only 
> the already read) mail into various folders, every time you open 
> Thunderbird. This way your default inbox stays small, and the auto 
> categorising works fast. (Ah, never try to make the categories perfect! 
> Just stuff that _obviously_ belongs to some category (like mail from 
> Georg, unknown senders, stuff containing "D", mail in HTML format, 
> etc.), since it's no problem with the less obvious ones when you read them.