Thursday, January 13, 2005

Thoughts on Thunderbird

Apple's Mail program is my default e-mail program on the Mac, but on the PC I've been using Thunderbird, the open source e-mail client released by the Mozilla Foundation. In general, I'm liking it, but I've got a few complaints:

1. The ability to read RSS Feeds in Thunderbird is cool, but flawed. Adding feeds isn't intuitive (you need to create a new account, specifically for "News and RSS" before you can subscribe to anything) and all feeds need to be added manually; there's no integration between Firebird's "Live Bookmarks" and Thunderbird's reader.

2. Thunderbird won't let you set different pane views for different accounts -- i.e. I want preview on for RSS feeds, but not for messages.

3. It sometimes crashes when I try and assign a priority to an e-mail -- this usually happens when I'm trying to assign the same priority to multiple e-mails, and one has an attachment.

Aside from these mostly-minor quibbles, Thunderbird's met my expectations. It supports message filters, can handle junk mail, and runs equally well on my Windows machines and Macs.

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