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digitalmars.D - Thunderbird ain't perfect, either

reply Walter Bright <newshound digitalmars.com> writes:
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.
Mar 29 2006
next sibling parent reply Carlos Santander <csantander619 gmail.com> writes:
Walter Bright escribió:

 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.


All you have to do is backup your local profile folder.


 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.


I didn't have that problem when I left OE long ago.


 3) Search is essentially useless, still have to use X1.
 


:S
I'm lost here. I happen to like Thunderbird's search, and I don't know what X1
is.


 So far I've only used Tbird for an hour or so.



-- 
Carlos Santander Bernal
Mar 29 2006
parent Charles <noone nowhere.com> writes:
 I'm lost here. I happen to like Thunderbird's search, and I don't know
 what X1 is.


http://www.x1.com/

Its like a google desktop search - Ive heard good things about it. 
Yahoo desktop search ( http://desktop.yahoo.com/ )  uses the X1 engine.

OT : I have a subscription to yahoo music , and i was searching for 'the 
  clash' but had typed 'teh clash' , and it came up with 0 results, i 
thought how indicative of yahoo's search :S.  I canceled the service.

OOT: I just realized thunderbird highlights misspellings as you type, 
pretty cool!

Charlie



Carlos Santander wrote:

 Walter Bright escribió:

 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.


 
 All you have to do is backup your local profile folder.
 

 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.


 
 I didn't have that problem when I left OE long ago.
 

 3) Search is essentially useless, still have to use X1.


 
 :S
 I'm lost here. I happen to like Thunderbird's search, and I don't know 
 what X1 is.
 

 So far I've only used Tbird for an hour or so.
Mar 29 2006
prev sibling next sibling parent reply John Demme <me teqdruid.com> writes:
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
Mar 29 2006
parent reply "Jarrett Billingsley" <kb3ctd2 yahoo.com> writes:
"John Demme" <me teqdruid.com> wrote in message 
news:e0eoj7$oac$1 digitaldaemon.com...

 Given, this isn't too convenient, but
 it is a lot more flexible.


I think about this a lot in the Windows vs. *nix debate:

Windows / MS software: convenient, but inflexible
*nix: Inconvenient, but flexible

Is there anything that's both?
Mar 29 2006
next sibling parent John Demme <me teqdruid.com> writes:
Jarrett Billingsley wrote:


 "John Demme" <me teqdruid.com> wrote in message
 news:e0eoj7$oac$1 digitaldaemon.com...

 Given, this isn't too convenient, but
 it is a lot more flexible.


 
 I think about this a lot in the Windows vs. *nix debate:
 
 Windows / MS software: convenient, but inflexible
 *nix: Inconvenient, but flexible
 
 Is there anything that's both?


Ehh... Kinda.

Some of the newer Linux distributions are pretty convenient, but they make
it a bit harder to do things that the authors didn't think of.  It's a
trade off, but everything is still as possible with them as with any Linux
distribution.

Personally, I find Windows' inflexibilty to be very inconvenient ;)

~John Demme
Mar 29 2006
prev sibling parent reply Dave <Dave_member pathlink.com> writes:
In article <e0f60h$13p2$1 digitaldaemon.com>, Jarrett Billingsley says...

"John Demme" <me teqdruid.com> wrote in message 
news:e0eoj7$oac$1 digitaldaemon.com...

 Given, this isn't too convenient, but
 it is a lot more flexible.


I think about this a lot in the Windows vs. *nix debate:

Windows / MS software: convenient, but inflexible
*nix: Inconvenient, but flexible

Is there anything that's both? 


D

<g>
Mar 29 2006
parent reply "Jarrett Billingsley" <kb3ctd2 yahoo.com> writes:
"Dave" <Dave_member pathlink.com> wrote in message 
news:e0f8j0$15d9$1 digitaldaemon.com...

 D

 <g>


Well how about that!  :)
Mar 29 2006
parent clayasaurus <clayasaurus gmail.com> writes:
Jarrett Billingsley wrote:

 "Dave" <Dave_member pathlink.com> wrote in message 
 news:e0f8j0$15d9$1 digitaldaemon.com...

 D

 <g>


 
 Well how about that!  :) 
 
 


D - Convenient and flexible.
Mar 29 2006
prev sibling next sibling parent reply Unknown W. Brackets <Unknown_member pathlink.com> writes:
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 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.
Mar 29 2006
parent reply Georg Wrede <georg.wrede nospam.org> writes:
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.
Mar 31 2006
parent "Unknown W. Brackets" <unknown simplemachines.org> writes:
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.
Mar 31 2006
prev sibling next sibling parent Tom <ihate spam.com> writes:
Thunderbird is very nice, I use it but I have to admit it lacks a bunch 
of features. Search is horrific as well as filter definitions (you can't 
get "(filtercondition1 && filtercondition2) || filtercondition3", 
instead you choose between && or || for every conditions). I've used 
another mail client that has plenty more features and works well (I 
don't like it as it doesn't improve a bit even though its version number 
increased in a +1 basis over the last five years: that would be Qualcomm 
Eudora. It worth the try but after a long time using it I've chosen 
Thunderbird anyway.

--
Tom;

Walter Bright escribió:

 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.
Mar 29 2006
prev sibling next sibling parent reply Roberto Mariottini <Roberto_member pathlink.com> writes:
In article <e0emae$mfq$1 digitaldaemon.com>, Walter Bright says...
[...]

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.


You simply zip and copy your profile folder. I'm doing this at every computer
move from Netscape 6, and it works.


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.


I think it can read the "Received:" tag instead of the "Date:" tag, or some
other "more reliable" tag.


3) Search is essentially useless, still have to use X1.


I'm not an expert, but I've fount what I needed with the search too as is today.

Maybe you'll find something better as an extension:
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/?application=thunderbird

Moreover, you can write your extension yourself, see "How to Write an Extension"
here:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/specs/extensions.html

Ciao

---
http://www.mariottini.net/roberto/
Mar 30 2006
parent reply Walter Bright <newshound digitalmars.com> writes:
Roberto Mariottini wrote:

 In article <e0emae$mfq$1 digitaldaemon.com>, Walter Bright says...
 [...]

 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.


 
 You simply zip and copy your profile folder. I'm doing this at every computer
 move from Netscape 6, and it works.


Ok, I wrote a .bat file to do that now. But it still should be on the 
menu, as in Quicken. Being about to schedule backups to happen 
automatically would be even better. Microsoft Fax has a nice feature, 
you can have it automatically save an extra copy of incoming faxes to a 
separate directory. It's a very thoughtful and convenient feature, too 
bad it's the only program I've ever seen that did something like that.



 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.


 
 I think it can read the "Received:" tag instead of the "Date:" tag, or some
 other "more reliable" tag.


It happened to about 12 messages out of 6000, not a big deal since I 
only need to do the import once.



 3) Search is essentially useless, still have to use X1.


 
 I'm not an expert, but I've fount what I needed with the search too as is
today.


I already have X1, and fortunately it specifically supports Tbird. When 
you've got 6000 messages, you start needing a better search engine. I 
don't like the toolbar search freebies as they seem to be sending back 
search info to the toolbar vendor company. Sorry, I'll have none of 
that, I'd rather pay a few bucks for X1.


 Maybe you'll find something better as an extension:
 https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/?application=thunderbird
 
 Moreover, you can write your extension yourself, see "How to Write an
Extension"
 here:
 http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/specs/extensions.html


I've got my hands full writing extensions to D <g>. But it's nice to 
know I can if I need to.

So far, Tbird seems good enough, and I won't be going back to O.E. Tbird 
    also seems to handle html and attachments better, but it lacks in 
the "crispness" of response department. The latter is often a fault of 
not having a good multithreaded design. It's a minor nit, though.
Mar 30 2006
parent Georg Wrede <georg.wrede nospam.org> writes:
Walter Bright wrote:

 Roberto Mariottini wrote:
 

 Moreover, you can write your extension yourself, see "How to Write
 an Extension" here: 
 http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/specs/extensions.html


 
 I've got my hands full writing extensions to D <g>. But it's nice to
 know I can if I need to.
 
 So far, Tbird seems good enough, and I won't be going back to O.E.


Congrats!


 Tbird also seems to handle html and attachments better, but it lacks
 in the "crispness" of response department.


How true. That's why I still use Microsoft Office for in-office stuff. 
It just feels crisper. But all serious work I do on Linux.
Mar 31 2006
prev sibling next sibling parent reply Stewart Gordon <smjg_1998 yahoo.com> writes:
Walter Bright wrote:

 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:


<snip>

 4) Spell checker. Gotta pay extra for a 3rd party spell checker for O.E.


Good idea.  Are you going to start spellchecking your web pages as well?


 5) Seems to get the unread message count right. O.E. always gets this 
 wrong.


Interesting.  I've been using Mozilla (or SeaMonkey as it's now called) 
for a few years, and found that it doesn't always get the unread message 
count right either, though at least it does some sensible things like 
(usually) auto-marking messages on ignored threads as read.

I'm surprised you stopped there in listing OE's bugs.  Here are just 
some of the annoying bugs I found:

http://www.epinions.com/content_67328904836


 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.


<snip>

I'm surprised.  SeaMonkey stores all profile data in a folder by itself. 
  Copying this folder certainly strikes me as a simple way.

Stewart.

-- 
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCS/M d- s:-  C++  a->--- UB  P+ L E  W++  N+++ o K-  w++  O? M V? PS- 
PE- Y? PGP- t- 5? X? R b DI? D G e++>++++ h-- r-- !y
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

My e-mail is valid but not my primary mailbox.  Please keep replies on 
the 'group where everyone may benefit.
Mar 30 2006
parent reply Walter Bright <newshound digitalmars.com> writes:
Stewart Gordon wrote:

 Walter Bright wrote:

 4) Spell checker. Gotta pay extra for a 3rd party spell checker for O.E.


 Good idea.  Are you going to start spellchecking your web pages as well?


LOL. I don't have a standalone spellchecker.


 5) Seems to get the unread message count right. O.E. always gets this 
 wrong.


 
 Interesting.  I've been using Mozilla (or SeaMonkey as it's now called) 
 for a few years, and found that it doesn't always get the unread message 
 count right either, though at least it does some sensible things like 
 (usually) auto-marking messages on ignored threads as read.
 
 I'm surprised you stopped there in listing OE's bugs.  Here are just 
 some of the annoying bugs I found:
 
 http://www.epinions.com/content_67328904836


I don't read news like the author does, so these problems never affected me.
Mar 30 2006
parent Stewart Gordon <smjg_1998 yahoo.com> writes:
Walter Bright wrote:

 Stewart Gordon wrote:

 Walter Bright wrote:

 4) Spell checker. Gotta pay extra for a 3rd party spell checker for O.E.


 Good idea.  Are you going to start spellchecking your web pages as well?


 
 LOL. I don't have a standalone spellchecker.


I wonder if anyone's written a spellchecker in D yet....

<snip>

 I'm surprised you stopped there in listing OE's bugs.  Here are just 
 some of the annoying bugs I found:

 http://www.epinions.com/content_67328904836


 
 I don't read news like the author does, so these problems never affected 
 me.


I wouldn't be surprised that people's different routines in reading 
newsgroups affect how many of the bugs show up.  But I'd expect most 
people who have used OE to have been bitten by at least one of the bugs 
I listed in that review.

Stewart.

-- 
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCS/M d- s:-  C++  a->--- UB  P+ L E  W++  N+++ o K-  w++  O? M V? PS- 
PE- Y? PGP- t- 5? X? R b DI? D G e++>++++ h-- r-- !y
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

My e-mail is valid but not my primary mailbox.  Please keep replies on 
the 'group where everyone may benefit.
Mar 31 2006
prev sibling next sibling parent reply Bruno Medeiros <daiphoenixNO SPAMlycos.com> writes:
Walter Bright wrote:

 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.


What exactly is wrong with TB search? Seems fine to be. The only caveat, 
which you might not have noticed yet, is that in "Search Messages", when 
in online mode you only have the "subject" and "from" source field 
options. It is only in offline mode that one has access to other fields, 
like "body", "date", etc.  :/
Was that the problem or something else, like better boolean expressions?

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - CS/E student
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D
Mar 30 2006
parent reply Walter Bright <newshound digitalmars.com> writes:
Bruno Medeiros wrote:

 Walter Bright wrote:

 3) Search is essentially useless, still have to use X1.


 What exactly is wrong with TB search? Seems fine to be. The only caveat, 
 which you might not have noticed yet, is that in "Search Messages", when 
 in online mode you only have the "subject" and "from" source field 
 options. It is only in offline mode that one has access to other fields, 
 like "body", "date", etc.  :/
 Was that the problem or something else, like better boolean expressions?


The best thing I can say is "try X1 and you'll see". But I'll give it a try:

Tbird:
1) Tbird search is buried 3 menu levels down.
2) Lots of clicking to poke through messages looking for the right one 
if you've got a lot of matches.
3) Looks like O.E.'s klunky search user interface was used as a model.

X1:
1) Although I can restrict the search to specific fields, by default it 
searches every field.
2) Uses a two pane system, the left is the list of matching messages, 
the right is the message body of the highlighted matching message.
3) The term searched for is highlighted in the message view pane.

When you've got a lot of hits, like 20 to 100 or more, X1's features 
make it much, much faster to sort through them for the one you need.
Mar 30 2006
parent reply Miles <_______ _______.____> writes:
Walter Bright wrote:

 1) Tbird search is buried 3 menu levels down.


I always used Shift-F to get on it. I think that there should have been
a toolbar button, though.


 2) Lots of clicking to poke through messages looking for the right one
 if you've got a lot of matches.


Did you know that you can create search folders based on your search
query and navigate on them using the default interface like any other
folder? This is a killer feature for me.
Mar 30 2006
parent kris <foo bar.com> writes:
Miles wrote:

 Walter Bright wrote:
 

1) Tbird search is buried 3 menu levels down.


 
 
 I always used Shift-F to get on it. I think that there should have been
 a toolbar button, though.
 
 

2) Lots of clicking to poke through messages looking for the right one
if you've got a lot of matches.


 
 
 Did you know that you can create search folders based on your search
 query and navigate on them using the default interface like any other
 folder? This is a killer feature for me.



Just tried that ... darned nice feature :)

BTW; right-clicking on a folder exposes the Search command also.
Mar 30 2006
prev sibling parent reply Miles <_______ _______.____> writes:
Walter Bright wrote:

 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.


A long time ago, I remember reading something about this, either on
bugzilla or on IRC. The rationale is that this is not something that
should be handled by Mozilla (now Thunderbird), but instead, by your
operating system. It doesn't make sense if you use 20 different programs
to backup your data from every one separatelly.

Like pointed out, just copy your whole profile directory and you are
set. No need to worry with registry keys.


 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.


Since OE mailbox is a closed format, I think that there is little that
can be done.


 3) Search is essentially useless, still have to use X1.


The embedded search box and search folders are pretty much useful enough
to me.
Mar 30 2006
parent reply Walter Bright <newshound digitalmars.com> writes:
Miles wrote:

 Walter Bright wrote:

 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.


 
 A long time ago, I remember reading something about this, either on
 bugzilla or on IRC. The rationale is that this is not something that
 should be handled by Mozilla (now Thunderbird), but instead, by your
 operating system. It doesn't make sense if you use 20 different programs
 to backup your data from every one separatelly.


Sure it makes sense. There are two kinds of backups - backup your whole 
system, and backup individual data sets. Backing up my mail fits about 
right on 1 CD, handy for archiving. So I definitely want to do it 
separately. Backing up my whole system requires buying another disk 
drive, as there's no reasonable way to back up 100 gigs on DVDs or CDs.


 Like pointed out, just copy your whole profile directory and you are
 set. No need to worry with registry keys.


That's fine for programmers like you and I. It isn't so fine for people 
who aren't power users - it doesn't help that the profile directory is 
stored many levels deep, inside a *hidden* directory, and a directory 
with a tty noise name. There's a lot to be said for a 1-click backup 
from the menu like Quicken's.
Mar 30 2006
next sibling parent reply Paolo Invernizzi <arathorn NOSPAM_fastwebnet.it> writes:
Walter Bright wrote:


 That's fine for programmers like you and I. It isn't so fine for people 
 who aren't power users - it doesn't help that the profile directory is 
 stored many levels deep, inside a *hidden* directory, and a directory 
 with a tty noise name. There's a lot to be said for a 1-click backup 
 from the menu like Quicken's.


That's true.

You can also start thunderbird with the '-p' switch, and startup the 
'profile manager'. When you create a new profile you can specify the 
directory for the profile. It works in that way for Firefox too.

I've defaulted all the profiles in a something like 
'd:/home/arathorn/var/thunderbird', 'd:/home/arathorn/var/firefox', and 
so on...

Some time ago I was able also to use the same profile directory from 
Windows, FreeBSD and OS X, so you can have all your messages, check 
mail, newsgroups and whatever OS you are using!

---
Paolo
Mar 30 2006
parent kris <foo bar.com> writes:
Paolo Invernizzi wrote:

 Walter Bright wrote:
 

 That's fine for programmers like you and I. It isn't so fine for 
 people who aren't power users - it doesn't help that the profile 
 directory is stored many levels deep, inside a *hidden* directory, and 
 a directory with a tty noise name. There's a lot to be said for a 
 1-click backup from the menu like Quicken's.


 
 
 That's true.
 
 You can also start thunderbird with the '-p' switch, and startup the 
 'profile manager'. When you create a new profile you can specify the 
 directory for the profile. It works in that way for Firefox too.
 
 I've defaulted all the profiles in a something like 
 'd:/home/arathorn/var/thunderbird', 'd:/home/arathorn/var/firefox', and 
 so on...
 
 Some time ago I was able also to use the same profile directory from 
 Windows, FreeBSD and OS X, so you can have all your messages, check 
 mail, newsgroups and whatever OS you are using!
 
 ---
 Paolo



Thanks for the tip, Paolo ~ that will come in handy
Mar 30 2006
prev sibling next sibling parent lanael <lanael_member pathlink.com> writes:
In article <e0hpll$gbd$1 digitaldaemon.com>, Walter Bright says...

I use PocoMail for years and I love it... even if it's not free.
If you want to check it : www.pocomail.com
( err.. no, I'm not paid by PocoSystems :) )
Mar 31 2006
prev sibling parent Tydr Schnubbis <fake address.dude> writes:
Walter Bright wrote:

 Like pointed out, just copy your whole profile directory and you are
 set. No need to worry with registry keys.


 
 That's fine for programmers like you and I. It isn't so fine for people 
 who aren't power users - it doesn't help that the profile directory is 
 stored many levels deep, inside a *hidden* directory, and a directory 
 with a tty noise name. There's a lot to be said for a 1-click backup 
 from the menu like Quicken's.


Why hasn't anyone mentioned MozBackup yet?

http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/

It can make backups for any of the mozilla programs. You just select 
which profile to backup, what to include, and where to put the file. The 
backup files seems to be just ordinary zip files.
Apr 04 2006